From big brother Hitchens:
I partly sympathize with all those who have been trying for a week to paint the former Miss Wasilla as a candidate from (fairly nearby, in Anchorage terms) Manchuria. However, as often as I have forwarded some alarming e-mail about her from a beavering comrade, I have afterward found myself having the sensation of putting my foot where the last stair ought to have been and wasn't. Was she in the Alaska Independence Party? Not really. Did she campaign for Pat Buchanan in 2000? The AP report from 1999 appears to be contradicted by her endorsement of Steve Forbes. (Not great, I agree, but not Buchanan, either.) The most appalling thing I have unearthed so far is the answer that she gave to a questionnaire when she ran for governor in 2006. All candidates were asked "Are you offended by the phrase 'Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?" Her response was:
Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers [it's] good enough for me, and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.
The very slight problem with this—because it would truly be awful if Gov. Palin didn't know that the pledge itself dates from only the late 19th century and that the unwonted insertion of the words "under God" was made in the mid-1950s—is that it is somehow funny. And it's also the sort of mistake that many people can imagine themselves making and thus forgive someone else for making.
I could well be wrong, but I think something similar is involved in the attempt to paint the Palin family as if it were Arkansas on ice or Tobacco Road with igloos and Inuit. Very well, she possibly has had her Troopergate and even trailer-park moments. But whom exactly did the Democrats drown in moist applause, for two nights running, in Denver? The most dysfunctional family ever to occupy not the vice-presidential mansion but the executive one. It's hard to imagine that there will be any more unwanted pregnancies or shotgun weddings when or if the Palins move to the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, whereas with the Clintons, the very thing that made all Bill's friends turn white and pee green was that they made him the president, and he still wouldn't stop. For me, it is astonishing that the Democrats have been babbling all week as if this point isn't just waiting—indeed begging—to be made in riposte to their "opposition research."
Here, the author of a book called "God is not Great: How religion poisons everything," whose preoccupation in all of his works is hardline anti-theism followed closely by anti-authoritarianism. Take notice that one of the most brazen men on the planet barely finds her religious views not worthy of any significant attention. More appropriate in his view is to expose the hypocrisy of Obama's DNC mouthpieces to belittle Gov Palin's experience, defend Obama's nearly equal experience, and then feign outrage when she compares mayoral experience to Obama's part-time job.
But Peter's endorsement is more clear:
Which just goes to show that ultra-feminists are not actually interested in promoting women because they're women. They pretend they are, but really their agenda is a campaign against marriage, in favour of abortion and for every other disastrous liberal and socialist cause that ever existed. In which case, they really can't go on pretending that their opponents are women-hating bigots.
Hitchens notes that the supposed feminist agenda is the celebration of womanhood for the sake of womanhood, yet that ideology collapses when exposed to the rigid beliefs that all must follow in order to be called "sister." This is what Peter's older brother would compare to Orwell's Ministry of Love (or Miniluv in Newspeak). Could anyone have predicted a month ago that the all-around conservative governor of Alaska would not only be McCain's running mate, but energizing the entire campaign and bringing the Hitchens brothers together? Somewhere, the moon is turning a shade of azure.
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