Time Immortal

“Dear Editor,” Palin wrote in 2002. “San Francisco judges forbidding our Pledge of Allegiance? They will take the phrase ‘under God‘ away from me when my cold, dead lips can no longer utter those words.”

Gotta like that conviction, eh?

After reading the text of Palin’s speech, I think it’s pretty clear that this could prove to be an interesting election after all…and something of a first. Well, obviously it’s a first, given that Palin stands a good chance of being the first woman to hold such a high office in America.

She’s Margaret Thatcher with five kids and a Klondike drawl.

But more than that, there’s something interesting emerging here, a trend of sorts. At least based on what we’ve seen so far, this could well be the first election in which a presidential candidate, in essence, ends up running against his opponent’s vice-presidential pick. The face-off that seems to be shaping up is not between John McCain and Barrack Hussein Obama, but between Sarah Palin and Obama.

Which is damned odd, to be sure. But also damned interesting.

Anyhow, the Anchoress has a roundup of reactions to Palin’s speech, which seems to have liberal-minded folks all in a panic…as well it should, given how sharp some of its observations were:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.

And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves.

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” [a position Obama held in Chicago, and which constitutes a large portion of his resumé — Ken] except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.

We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.

Also, I suddenly find that I like Dr. Phil McGraw a bit more, after his excellent smackdown of David Letterman’s poo-pooing of Bristol Palin.

Guest “Dr. Phil” on Wednesday night chastised David Letterman’s misunderstanding of teenage sexual behavior and parental influence after Letterman sarcastically complained that if a President McCain “drops dead…don’t you want your President to have had the presence of mind to have chatted to her teenaged kids for five minutes about birth control?” (Letterman delivered the same belittling joke the night before too.)

Referring to Letterman’s almost five-year-old son, daytime TV host Phil McGraw, aka “Dr. Phil,” informed Letterman:

Let me tell you something, new dad. If you are under the misapprehension that when Harry is 17 that you are going to have even a remote influence on what he decides in the back seat of a Chevy on a Saturday night — I don’t think old Dave’s going to be popping in his mind at that point. It’s not a 15-minute conversation. It’s a dialogue that you need to have starting when he’s about eight or nine.

Undeterred from his contempt for Sarah Palin, Letterman asked: “Then why didn’t they have the dialogue?” McGraw suggested: “Maybe they did. But when children get that age, at 17 — see, here’s the thing. The body’s grown but the brain is not.” Letterman soon sneered: “They don’t sell Trojans in Alaska? Come on,” prompting McGraw to point out: “Wasn’t Barack’s mother like 18 when he was born?” Indeed she was.

And over at his blog, Vox Day observes that the (liberal) media has no clue how the heck they should respond to Palin:

First, they were all taken completely by surprise when McCain made the most obvious and effective choice for vice-president. Second, they actually thought conservatives and the religious right would somehow be turned off by a pregnant girl marrying the father of her child and having the baby! Here’s a little secret for the irreligious Left: religious people not only believe that sin exists, they believe that everyone engages in it. True, it’s best to avoid sin, but the far more important thing is how you attempt to amend for your errant actions when you, like everyone else, fall short of perfection.

Now they’re all surprised that a woman whose nickname is “Barracuda”, who compares her kind of woman to a pitbull, who took on and beat the corrupt old boys of Republican politics in Alaska, should turn out to be an effective attack dog. Whoever could have imagined it?

This is why I don’t read much political commentary except as a guide to what the clueless parrots will be repeating. With a few exceptions, it’s almost completely useless.

This was shaping up to be a boring election, an unstimulating contest between Tweedledum and Tweedlenotsodum. Indeed, I’d barely been paying attention to it. Now, though, it’s a whole new ballgame.

And I am loving — loving — watching the supposed champions of women’s rights and tolerance (a.k.a. “the Left”) soil their trousers and abandon all pretense in response to McCain’s running mate. I mean, when people openly admit their intent to lie their asses off in order to take Palin down by any means necessary, and when people openly opine about how tearing a family apart is a small price to pay to avert “a disaster” (e.g. a Republican victory in the coming election), you know they are scared.

As in: pants thrice-soaked, fight-or-run-for-your-damned-life-flight scared. The Left has come unhinged over this. Un. HINGED.

What an unsurprising thing is this!

How convenient it would have been for liberals if, as predicted by many in the 1980s, AIDS had spread like wildfire among Western heterosexuals. But it didn’t.

It would also have been very convenient if the introduction of condoms had significantly reduced infection in African countries, so the practice of self-indulgent sexual “grazing” could have escaped moral judgment.

But alas for all those non-judgmental AIDS do-gooders: What has worked best and most rapidly to reduce HIV infection among both homosexuals and promiscuous Africans is partner reduction.

…

Following sustained public information campaigns, [Helen Epstein] notes, gay sex with multiple sex partners declined by 60% between 1984 and 1988 in San Francisco. New cases of AIDS plummeted from a peak of 2,400 in 1984 to fewer than 600 in 2000.

And then there’s Uganda, where Epstein’s postdoctoral work at the Uganda Cancer Institute sparked her interest in HIV/AIDS. Even though condom use rose throughout the ’90s all over Africa, the HIV rate also kept climbing — everywhere but Uganda, which had actually begun the decade with the highest rates of new HIV infection. As Fumento noted in his column, the proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plummeted in the 1990s from 21% to 6%.

When the data was crunched by AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin (as noted in a review of Epstein’s book in the June 23 issue of The Weekly Standard), this startling decline was not found to correspond to the increase in the use of condoms, but rather to the decrease in the proportion of casual sex with numerous partners.

For as much as post-Christian sexual morality is touted as somehow superior to the prudish ways of the West’s Christian past, time and again it seems to be the case that applying some good, old fashioned Christian sensibility to one’s sex life is still the best insurance against contracting all manner of STDs. Few people indeed have gotten sick and died from having remained faithful to one sexual partner for the duration of their adult life, especially when that partner has remained faithful to them as well.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!