Rope-a-Dope

One of the presidential campaigns looks to be on the ropes. Any guesses whose?

Normally I don't pay much attention to the Hollywood-celebrity-cum-political-pundit crowd. If I want to hear what they have to say, I'll buy a movie ticket, and they can do their job and entertain me. I pay their salary, after all.

But since they're crawling out of the woodwork on the left at such an alarming rate that I see them everywhere I turn - like so many cockroaches - I figured I'd give a listen to at least one from the right. After all, they're so scarce, they need the love.

So here it is. Dennis Miller said it best:

"I don't know what it is about Sarah Palin, but she is in Obama's melon in a big way."

No kidding. The once-articulate (and don't forget "bright" and "clean," according to his running mate) former community organizer, serial campaigner and "present" voter has been fumbling and bumbling and hemming and hawing and pausing and scrambling like ... well, like Joe Biden trying to cover his "Stand up, Chuck!" gaffe.

The Obama camp has no idea what to do about Palin. Apparently, they clearly saw that, finally, we were getting a candidate for high office who is of the people, by the people and for the people. And that resonated with the people. All along, Obama's been chirping about "hope" and "change." Along comes Palin. She radiates hope, and she's brought change. Hard, fast and uncomfortable change.

And Obama doesn't know what to do, other than cry, "Gimme back my slogan!" like a petulant child who won't share his toys.

So the spin machine started, at a dizzying pace. There have been so many smears on Palin that I can't keep up with them. "Trooper-gate?" Come on, at least be original. (That one has "disgruntled former employee" written all over it, by the way. Except he's not a former employee, he's still got his job.) The "bridge to nowhere" flap? Much ado about nothing. I'll even give the Dems that one. She still fought earmarks, and she's still done wonders for the people of Alaska.

And they, her constituents, love her. That's the real litmus test. What do the people of Illinois say about Obama?

Chirp chirp ... chirp chirp ...

As for the other attacks, the "it's not her baby," "lipstick on a pig," "bikini-clad gun-toter," etc., I won't dignify them with discussion.

Neither would she, which is why she's been kept away from the press. Let the crap die down, let some semblance of civility return to the discourse (if that's even a remote possibility these days), and she'll talk to the propaganda machine's puppets. But the left hooted that this was just another example of her inexperience, that she had to be coached.

Of course, they're not talking about the fact that the wizened old vet, Joe Biden, is being coached for his debate with her. (Given his recent public comments, though, that's probably a really good idea.)

She did do the interview with Charlie Gibson, who was as disrespectful as I've seen a journalist be. (God, how I miss Tim Russert.) Really, his body language, his demeanor, his style of questioning - would he have seriously perched his little reading glasses halfway down his patrician nose and looked down it at John McCain?

McCain would have smiled at him and said, "My friend, let me help you adjust your glasses," then popped Charlie in the forehead hard enough to put him on his pompous backside.

It was disrespectful. And not to play the gender card, but I don't think Chuckles would have acted that way toward a male candidate.

I thought she held her own, especially given that ABC rolled out a clearly biased interviewer with an obvious agenda, who was out to get her. Well, he didn't. She wasn't flawless, but she did fine, especially against an adversarial interviewer.

Of course, the left doesn't think that way. But I've traded a lot of e-mails and message board posts and had several conversations about this. And early on, I observed this truth, and stated it for the record:

Those predisposed to believe she'd do poorly, believe she did poorly. Those predisposed to believe she'd do well, believe she did well.

And that truth has been upheld by every discussion, verbal or electronic, that I've had or seen since.

By the way, nobody's talking anymore about how Obama did with O'Reilly. Maybe that's what's got the Obama camp's knickers in such a twist - their guy takes on Bill O'Reilly, which is supposed to be big news, but once again gets upstaged by the upstart from Alaska.

What's next? Blaming the McCain campaign for Hurricane Ike, because it caused Obama to cancel his Saturday Night Live appearance?

No, the day after 9/11, Obama said, "Okay, the gloves are off now." And launched an attack ad - or, should I say, yet another attack ad, because since the conventions I have not seen one ad talking about Obama himself - going after McCain. I shuddered before I watched it. I thought, "Oh, no, given how vicious and nasty these people have been thus far, I can't imagine what they'll say about McCain now that "the gloves are off." So what did they lead with?

"John McCain doesn't even know how to use a computer."

Seriously - is that your best shot? The political equivalent of "nanny, nanny, boo-boo?"

What a mismatch. War hero McCain doesn't even have to get into the fray. Obama's getting pummeled by the second string, a "hockey mom and first-term governor of one of the least-populated states in the country who before that was mayor of a town of 9,000," as the mantra goes.

Yep, the Obama campaign's on the ropes. It has become ugly.

And there's no putting lipstick on that pig.

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I leave you with these words from fellow blogger Greg Gutfeld, who succinctly explains the anti-Palin sentiment from the left:

"According to many in the media, we truly have discovered someone worse than Hitler — and it's Sarah Palin.

Head to any left-wing blog or even CNN for that matter and you'll find the zaniest of conspiracies -- froth that even a dude with rabies would find unseemly.

So how can one person create so much bile among folks who claim to be the most tolerant in the universe? I mean, liberals are the good people: They're open-minded, caring and of course, fair.

But somehow, a Republican lady in her 40s is exempt from this treatment. Perhaps, she truly is the devil in a dress, a ghoul that eats children and pollutes the planet and possibly beats Barack Obama, the patron saint of every customer buying wheat germ in bulk at GNC.

But I know the real reason why every single elitist media type is terrified of her. They've never met her. And by 'her,' I don't mean Sarah Palin. I mean 'her,' an actual normal woman with a bunch of kids, an average husband and no desire to watch 'The L Word.'

She's scary to these folks the way Wal-Mart is scary to them: Both are alien to someone who blogs about their chakras. They won't go there, because they've never been there.

To them, hating Sarah Palin is a symptom of larger bigotry against the rest of us, the normal. If they saw her at a party, they would wonder how she got in. She's the anti-Obama, the anti-New York Times, the anti-everything that Tim Robbins loves, which is why I love her — and you should too."