Let Palin Be Palin - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Let Palin Be Palin
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LET PALIN BE PALIN
Re: Angelo M. Codevilla’s Trust Not Your Handlers:

Amen, Mr. Codevilla, amen! Damn, that was good!
Mike Showalter
Austin, Texas

It is a very good article. Thank you.

Is there any chance that the Governor will get your very good advice? I am sure it will help.

I have been in politics myself and I can see you get how it works.

It would be a catastrophe for the Americans and for all of us in Europe — and for the rest of the world, for that matter — if Sen. Obama wins the elections.

I am sorry to say, but it seems that some of the American people don’t understand how serious this election is. And we can’t do a thing about it. But you can. Sen. Obama and his gang will destroy the nation and us all. He is such a novice.

It is a blessing to get Governor Palin on the McCain ticket. She is so good and it feels good to see her and listen to her.

So please send your article to her, because it very important she is herself. Keep swinging.

Regards from Sweden,
Marianne Andersson

Angelo M. Codevilla has it exactly right: Sarah Palin just needs to be Sarah Palin, not another calculated phony “processed” by handlers.

A real human being has appeared on the national stage, a woman whose innate honesty and lack of arrogance resonates far more than the manufactured credentials of retro-socialist Barack Obama, clubhouse hack Joe Biden, and pseudo-maverick John McCain. A woman who’s been a surrogate punching bag for the odious assortment of “experts” whose livelihoods depend on maintaining the myth that “Joe Six Pack” Americans are inconsequential nitwits. Yet despite every cheap shot, every lie, and every attempt to humiliate Mrs. Palin, they can’t put her down.

She is the champion of every American who has borne the brunt of liberal, elitist scorn in powerless silence.
Arnold Ahlert
Boca Raton, Florida

Angelo Codevilla suggests that the official Republican brand is an amalgam of “weenie,” gutless, obsequious pansies who want to be respected and liked simultaneously but will gladly settle for the latter and “when God, please will it happen?” Unfortunately, he is correct. There are a few in each house of Congress who can truly boast of having a bit of political testosterone in their canteen, but not many; and they are pretty much marginalized by the “official” party. It seems that every election cycle, Conservatives complain [usually to small effect] that the “official” Republicans have perfidiously and pusillanimously abandoned the true religion, wasted time and credibility being nice and bi-partisan. I think the complaint has much merit. It has, as Mr. Codevilla writes, happened again, as evidenced by the bailout debacle and the miniaturization of Gov. Palin. It will continue to happen until….

Which is why I predicted to my last Political Science 104 class that in their lifetime (unhappily, not mine) they will witness the dissolution of a major political party. Hint: It won’t be the Democrats! Years ago, when I was a very young subaltern, a grizzled, hard-case1st Sergeant commented on what he perceived as a chronically bungling higher headquarters: “Sir, if they can’t run it, just shut it down.” Conservatives need, and will eventually demand a reliable place to go. The shutdown and recasting are coming.
J.C. Eaton
Chetek, Wisconsin

THE DOLLAR DEBAUCHED
Re: Lawrence A. Hunter’s Stop the Debauchery:

“Stop the Debauchery” by Lawrence A. Hunter is brilliant! I couldn’t agree more. Washington Irving also wrote of such debauchery in 1819 in his “Crayon Papers”:

[There occasionally arise] those calm, sunny seasons in the commercial world, which are known by the name of “times of unexampled prosperity” … Every now and then the world is visited by one of these delusive seasons, when “the credit system” … expands to full luxuriance, everybody trusts everybody; a bad debt is a thing unheard of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open; and men are tempted to dash forward boldly, from the facility of borrowing.

Promissory notes, interchanged between scheming individuals, are liberally discounted at the banks, which become so many mints to coin words into cash; and as the supply of words is inexhaustible, it may readily be supposed what a vast amount of promissory capital is soon in circulation. Every one now talks in thousands; nothing is heard but gigantic operations in trade; great purchases and sales of real property, and immense sums made at every transfer. All, to be sure, as yet exists in promise; but the believer in promises calculates the aggregate as solid capital, and falls back in amazement at the amount of public wealth, the “unexampled state of public prosperity.”

Now is the time for speculative and dreaming or designing men. They relate their dreams and projects to the ignorant and credulous, dazzle them with golden visions, and set them madding after shadows. The example of one stimulates another; speculation rises on speculation; bubble rises on bubble; every one helps with his breath to swell the windy superstructure, and admires and wonders at the magnitude of the inflation he has contributed to produce.

Speculation is the romance of trade, and casts contempt upon all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment. It elevates the merchant into a kind of knight-errant….The slow but sure gains of snug percentage become despicable in his eyes; no “operation” is thought worthy of attention that does not double or treble the investment. No business is worth following that does not promise an immediate fortune….

Could this delusion always last, the life of a merchant would indeed be a golden dream; but it is as short as it is brilliant. Let but a doubt enter, and the “season of unexampled prosperity” is at end. The coinage of words is suddenly curtailed; the promissory capital begins to vanish into smoke; a panic succeeds, and the whole superstructure, built upon credit and reared by speculation, crumbles to the ground, leaving scarce a wreck behind…

When a man of business, therefore, hears on every side rumors of fortunes suddenly acquired; when he finds banks liberal, and brokers busy; when he sees adventurers flush of paper capital, and full of scheme and enterprise; when he perceives a greater disposition to buy than to sell; when trade overflows its accustomed channels and deluges the country; when he hears of new regions of commercial adventure; of distant marts and distant mines, swallowing merchandise and disgorging gold; when he finds joint-stock companies of all kinds forming; railroads, canals, and locomotive engines, springing up on every side; when idlers suddenly become men of business, and dash into the game of commerce as they would into the hazards of the faro table; when he beholds the streets glittering with new equipages, palaces conjured up by the magic of speculation; tradesmen flushed with sudden success, and vying with each other in ostentatious expense; in a word, when he hears the whole community joining in the theme of “unexampled prosperity,” let him look upon the whole as a “weather-breeder,” and prepare for the impending storm.

Roger D. McKinney
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma

It doesn’t seem that long ago that the late Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-IL) made the observation that a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Well folks, forget the billion business, we’re now about to cross the trillion threshold in a few short years.

As much as I admire and respect George W. Bush, his propensity to believe that unlimited access to the U. S. Treasury as a solution to a calamity — be it 9/11, Katrina, or the current financial meltdown — seems almost boundless. As Mr. Hunter aptly points out, such reliance on ever more dollars results in the debauching of our currency and is self defeating in the long run. Our foreign creditors will be the final arbiters on that question.

The present crisis is the culmination of running fast and loose with credit over many years — aided and abetted by financial alchemy on Wall Street (derivatives anyone?). I thought Alan Greenspan was going to blow the whistle on excessive speculation with his observation of “Irrational Exuberance” when the dot com bubble was forming way back in 1996. But unfortunately he must have been persuaded that we were entering a new “financial paradigm” as he put it. From that point forward, he and his successor have also become aiders and abettors with easy money policies and interest rate manipulation. Greed and speculation have become ever more rampant as billions of ill-gotten gains have been siphoned off on one side of the ledger and millions of individuals, corporations and government entities are overburdened with debt on the other side of the ledger.

It seems to me that our government is desperately trying to see that there are as few losers as possible in this entire process. The winners, even some of the fraudsters, can keep their gains, while every effort is being made to bail out the losers. Market discipline has been severely undermined and moral hazard abounds. There’s simply no substitute for sound money. I wonder if it’s too late for someone like Paul Volcker to come along and straighten out the mess. It won’t be pleasant, especially since it seems our society has a low threshold for suffering financial pain.
J. Brick
Beaver Dam, Arizona

LET THEM IN, YOU RACIST
Re: Mark Tooley’s Do Immigration Concerns Equal Racism?:

Mark Tooley touched on a hot spot of this issue. Having “religious institutions” condone and support illegal behavior. As in most illogical arguments of this type, giving the most favorable label to the offending part of the issue is crucial.

While technically ambiguous, in this issue, the term immigration is used kindly. The majority of illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America have no intention of becoming an American or “immigrating” to this country. They are here for the jobs and money, a great portion of which they send “home.”

Their home country supports and encourages this behavior and is rewarded handsomely, as in the case of Mexico it brings in the second highest income amount behind their oil production.

The “church” cheering for this just uses the very people it purports to care about. Just what the illegal aliens need…more friends.

Often wondered if Canada were in economic woes and sent its people across the border. Thousands of Canadians, standing on corners of US city streets looking for work. Would the reaction to their presence bring out the rage of Americans? Would the church shout “racism?”

I look at it this way. I have doors on my house, and these doors have locks, for a reason. Should someone enter my home uninvited, I am not going to ask them what country they are from, they are in my home illegally.

Racism used for one’s own benefit is way beyond the original crime.
Len Labounty

KERRY’S GRAY LADY
Re: Jeffrey Lord’s In the Tank for President Kerry:

Very useful article by Mr. Lord describing the socialist dump that is the New York Times. How they promoted that lying phony war hero Kerry and celebrated months in advance his elevation to the presidency all through the electoral campaign! Now they are doing it for Barack and his bloviating gasbag Biden. An interesting tidbit on Biden was discovered by Ann Coulter — as a freshman Senator from his negligible state of Delaware he voted in 1973 (during the first oil embargo) against the Alaska pipeline in order “to save the caribou.” Since the construction of that pipeline (I worked for the company that built it) the caribou population increased six-fold! Imagine what the price of oil would have been without that pipeline. It is a great pity that Sarah Palin in her debate with that plagiarizing intellectual midget did not mention this important fact.
Marc Jeric
Las Vegas, Nevada

MADISON ROLLNG IN HIS GRAVE
Re: Quin Hillyer’s Maddening for Madisonians:

Great article by Quin Hillyer.

The Senate bailout bill is unconstitutional because the Constitution requires that all spending bills originate in the House of Representatives. This is not only a spending bill, it is the largest appropriation in recorded history.

Not content with ruining our foreign policy, destroying the Republican Party, turning over Congress to the Democrats, allowing millions of illegal aliens to invade our country; now our esteemed leader has decided to wreck the economy and our form of government before he leaves office. The crowning achievement: give the former head of Goldman Sachs a check for $0.7 Trillion to distribute to his Wall Street friends as he sees fit. Pay them several times what these assets are worth. Create a gigantic new bureaucracy to nationalize every toxic mortgage in America. Congratulations!

Well done.
Guadalupe Gonzalez
Loreto, Texas

LONG-RUN THINKING
Re: George Neumayr’s Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be:

George Neumayr’s article was just great! He has a way of identifying the truth behind the issues of the day.

When I first opened a brokerage account, the first thing they said was, “Don’t put any money in the stock market that you can’t afford to lose.” That’s why I think it is unwise for anyone to have their retirement savings in the stock market. Much better to have it in safe 5% insured accounts.

My parents taught me to pay cash for everything…. When I was younger, I didn’t have much, but what I had I didn’t owe to anybody. In the long run it has worked out well…
George Ferguson
Scottsdale, Arizona

NOT MY CHAMPION
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s Championing Obama:

Mr. Tyrrell, as always your little missives are right on target. The more I read about the Chosen One and his lovely (and very angry) wife, the more I feel disheartened at the future. The man has done nothing and yet they say he is “change and hope.” Reporters want to touch the hand that touched the hand of Obama. Chris Matthews (idiot) has a tingling up his leg. I on the other hand have nausea in the stomach. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Rezko, ACORN, community organizer. I actually went out and got drunk when he said upon winning the Democratic nomination for President that “history will remember this as the day the oceans rose” or something to that effect. That was it for me. Extreme liberalism and arrogance, what a combo! Looks like I’ll be doing a lot of drinking in the future. Sir, I always enjoy reading your material.
Ray Rieber

A POX UPON THEE FOR A KNAVE
Re: Dan Martin’s letter (under “Green is the New…Nonsense”) in Reader Mail’s In a Bad Place:

Mr. Dan Martin’s letter in response to William Tucker’s “The Greening of Thomas Friedman” almost prompted a furious letter of censure. Then I re-read it and realized the subtlety of the author. Maybe it was the allusion to a “five-year plan.” Maybe it was the Cabinet level department with the acronym “DONT” Mr. Martin isn’t Iowahawk, but he has a place at that table. Congratulations!
Craig A. Zimmerman
Nairobi, Kenya

NOVAK’S FIRST CAMPAIGN
Re: Robert D. Novak’s Our Founding Partisans:

I honestly can’t remember where I read it, but the author stated that the Jefferson-Adams contest was one of the dirtiest in U.S. history. My recollection was that Jefferson accused Adams of running a brothel, while Adams accused Jefferson of pedophilia.

We have this image of the Founding Fathers not as men, but as God-like figures. Especially Jefferson, who, for all his greatness was deeply flawed. He spent so much money on designing, building and furnishing Monticello, when he died he left his widow and daughters in enormous debt. That’s not to mention his dalliances with slaves, his theses on the intellectual inferiority of non-whites and his infatuation with the European aristocracy.

I would rather know Jefferson, warts and all, than to dwell in the myth of his perfection.
Melissa Roy
London, UK

Robert Novak’s work just keeps getting better and better. What a guy!

Lord bless,
Gregg Cunningham
The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform
Lake Forest, California

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