her speech was sneering and self-satisfying. it will be a huge hit with the gop base -and i expect mccain/palin to be up by 8-10 points in most polls by early next week. but drip, drip, drip - the flop sweat is there. look for it. be patient.

-- fair play for cuba committee

Hmmm...is it me or is it the fact that Obama's fan club is attacking her and Mack relentlessly mean they are full of flop sweat? A little bit of history for the overly complacent, smug, snot-nosed crowd: as Dems act more snide and obnoxious, it has the opposite effect on most voters beyond the college campuses, the latte counters and the urban centers where Obama has garnered his cult following. As a CNN commentator pointed out, George Bush didn't win in 2000 or 2004 because of the type of base Obama or Gore or Kerry had...he won among all the small towns Obama's fans love to label as hick and bitter and backward and antediluvian. Sarah Palin has shored up that winning base for Mack bigtime...the media and the liberal blogs unwittingly have sealed Obama's fate in just a few days...if they had shut their mouths, maybe Ms. Palin would have hoisted herself on her own petard and proven that she is just a right wing whacko...that didn't happen. Since they didn't, they have blowback to deal with, and most Repubs are itching for a fight...McCain had an uneasy relationship with the Republican base, but the press' and liberal bloggers' attacks only managed to galvanize an otherwise dispirited Repub core...liberals laugh at her proclamations and slams against Obama, but remember how much everyone thought Reagan (god help us) was a joke, as well as Dan Quayle...they both went on to winning tickets...we very well may have seen the exact day when the Obama campaign was done in.

Sarah Palin is a liar

Say it with me kids, over and over. Sarah Palin got up on stage tonight and looked straight into the camera and lied. Several times. She didn't embellish, or exaggerate, or use hyperbole. She lied. And we cannot let get away with it.

She is a liar.

-- Number Six

I guess that means that Obama is also in the same boat...many times over...

It's all a numbers game. I'm sure he speech was fine. If I sat in a room for three days strait with a team of highly skilled speech writers, and went on stage with that speech to a self selected audience waiting to cheer me on if my pants didn't fall down, I think I could have given as good a speech.

Here's the thing, people cared about Obama's speech, they tuned in and watched it live. That puts people into an emotionally invested place with regard to Obama. I doubt Palin got the same Neilsen ratings.

Pundants on both sides could have wrote their statements with regard to the speech the night before. They will uniformly say it was a great speech, and then go into their personal political statements.

The speech wasn't going to be a failure unless her pants fell down half way through it, and even then pundits on both sides would be calling it a human moment. There is a vested interested in the media in having this be a horse race, and it is in the sense that Secretariate running against a cart horse is a horse race. But that's what the media needs to sell ads, so they are going to do what they can to build up, and tear down all these candidates, and spin poll numbers to reflect something other than what they obviously say.

Actually, go a head and talk up the speech, removing the low bar for the debates can only help the Democrats.

Congratulations to Ms. Palin, on her excellant speech, now about susceeding from the Union...

Well said. It's interesting. You look at the Democratic convention - a crowd (of 80000+) at mile high (not to mention the overflowing convention center), and you saw thousands of faces, different ages and races, smiling, happy, excited. The speeches may have had red meat, but they weren't lying, nor were they hateful. They were pointing out facts. There may have been some snarkiness here and there, but not bile and hate.

Then you look at the Republican convention, empty seats all over, with white faces abound, and when the speakers say really shitty things about Obama, or community service - the reactions on people's faces are filled with such visceral hate, you can see it. You can see why a lot of those people support hunting and killing.

Since when is community service a bad thing? Should we teach out kids to speak this way? To lie when it suits us and to hate? Should we teach our kids that community service and higher education is something to be laughed at?

I saw on the Daily Show, when their team interviewed people at the RNC during Gustav one of the Republicans there said something to the effect of "I don't see why we should stop this because a few people are getting rained on to stop us from saying how bad Obama is." I'm not making this us.

also, this applauding of teenage pregnancy. "Oh, kids fuck, we know that - but when it's one of us that gets pregnant it's GREAT!" Some example.

It's sad. And these hypocrits can look in the mirror and call themselves Christian.

FYI - I think Biden's son said himself he was going to be deployed.

Over five days of mid-western exposure, Sarah Palin has pointed out no less than three times in her public addresses that her older son (Salty, Mooselip, Fungo, Artic Weasel . . . ah heck I can't remember which quirky name it is right now) enlisted on 9/11 last year and will be leaving next week for Iraq on 9/11. God speed him home safely. My issue is that she dances this baby out for public oohing and aaahing with the frequency of Farty McSnerd allusions de jour re: the years he spent in a 4 X 6 cage as a POW. Last night's speech was a daily double getting both in the same screed.

As a Vietnam era vet, I love and support our men and women serving in our military and I certainly respect the sacrifice and heroism of Farty McSnerd, too, but this isn't the VFW hall, we aren't in a July 4th parade, etc. What happened to humility? Do you think that those others imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton trot that out every time two or more gather together? The RNC made a point of singling them out on Day Two (officially it was day one)I seriously doubt these guys are using that experience as an ice breaker or even when pressed about it do they willingly share it. Of course, those surviving heroes aren't trying to pander for public office either. No those equally heroic individuals are like so many VETs of a quieter, more to themselves nature. Humility!

The coincidence of Gov. Palin's son's enlistment date and departure date for Iraq and the events of 9/11/01 strike me as contrived and even manipulative especially in their context. It may have been Mooselip's idea as "kinda cool" at the time or it may have been just something quite innocent and coincidental. Nevertheless, the more times that oily haired hocky Mom trots this anecdote out, the more I feel like the time I sat in a polite stupor as my neighbor showed me the 6,846 slides taken while visiting the home of Brian Plummer in London who caught the world's largest Norway rat -- 2.4 pounds.

I have a friend at work whose son enlisted on October 12th; it wasn't because he loved Columbus. Is that any less significant for his father, mother or the young man who enlisted? I am confident the parents and loved ones of many of those serving associate a particular date with a certain ambiguity of love, pride, fear, and anxiety. I also doubt they use it to introduce themselves to strangers.

9-11 conjures a spectrum of responses. A few months after 9/11/01 I read about how people actually went to court to change the date of birth of their child to something besides September 11th. There is a couple in our HOA that changed their anniversary date to the 12th for the same reason. My church is part of an Interfaith Council Memorial that started on 9/12/01 and continued every 9/11 since. And I wouldn't be surprised if some people have simply absorbed it as just another day in the year.

The point is please don't trivialize such an emotionally laden date, don't use it to adorn your political acceptance nor to deflect any criticism like John has done more frequently this campaign.