2nd nominee for the “ChimbaChumba Twisted Pundit Golden Gong Award”
2nd nominee for “ChimbaChumba Twisted Pundit Golden Gong Award”
On our 29 August blog, we said this:
“As I type, McCain shortens to $2.66 on Betfair as Palin closes her speech - the punters love her. 2 minutes later McCain is $2.58!!! Twenty minutes later McCain/Palin sceptics step in, and McCain drifts back to $2.62. One thing you can bet on without risk - the Palin selection will torture the pundits who were rooting for Obama - watch them twist and turn looking for a way to bag Palin“.
Our first nominee was found 30 minutes later (Dee Dee from Vanity Fair) - a copy of Dee Dee’s comments is posted lower on this page.
Thanks to William Safire from “The Weekly Standard” for identifying our 2nd nominee - Hanna Rosin of Slate! The following is an extract from Safire’s article, which includes Hanna’s egregious remarks in bold below, earning Hanna the 2nd nomination for the “ChimbaChumba Twisted Pundit Golden Gong Award” .
Safire: A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing–but well-received–presentation the following evening.
The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.
By the end of the week, after Palin’s tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren’t being narrow-minded enough. Thus, Hanna Rosin–who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, and has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times–lamented in a piece for Slate: “So cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin’s wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison.”
… what in the world can she be thinking when she refers to “Sarah Palin’s wreck of a home life”? The only “domestic irregularities” (to use Ms. Rosin’s loaded term) she cites are “two difficult pregnancies–Palin’s with a Down syndrome baby and now her unmarried teenage daughter’s.” The second of these is a situation that the young woman and her family seem to be dealing with appropriately by their own lights. “Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family,” the Palins said. But what is “irregular” about bringing to term a Down syndrome child? Is Rosin suggesting–without having the courage to say so–that Mrs. Palin should have aborted the baby? Is it upsetting to her to have a prominent woman choose not to do so?
1st nominee for the ChimbaChumba Twisted Pundit Golden Gong Award (29 August)
It took about 30 minutes to get an excellent 1st nominee - from Vanity Fair, that renowned oracle Dee Dee Myers who says - “But is she ready to be commander-in-chief? Unlike Barack Obama, whom McCain has so emphatically condemned as not-ready, Palin hasn’t run for or served in the Senate. Nor has she run for president, which would have required her to think through and take positions on critical issues from the war in Iraq to the war on terror, from Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the Russian incursion into Georgia, from the emerging power of China to the march of globalization“. She hasn’t served in the Senate - most new Presidents are Governors (Dee Dee even suggests just “running for the Senate is important…go figure). But why Dee Dee earns our 1st nominatiuon is the ludicrous comment that she hasn’t run for President!! Why say this? Because that way Dee Dee avoids shooting Obama with the same “inexperience bullet”! Obama has Commander-in-Chief experience because he has run for President! Therefore, everyone who runs to be Prez has the right stuff to be Commander-in-Chief. Lets not complicate matters stemming from the point Sarah picks up a little “experience” Dee Dee values so much by running for VEEP. Congrats to Dee Dee - a very worthy nominee
