RE:Palin

The culture wars continue

I'm plucking a few sentences from this National Post piece by Father Raymond J. De Souza. “ There is of course her gender -- the first female governor of Alaska. Then there is -- how to put this delicately? -- the fact that she is rather more attractive than your standard haggard timeserver, whether male or female. It is widely remarked that she is a former beauty queen. True enough, but she is not beautiful in that slightly creepy, prettified John Edwards way; she is rather the pretty girl in school who remained that way twenty-five years and five children later. g She is something genuinely new. Unlike Senator McCain (22 years in the Senate) and Senator Biden (36 years in the Senate), she is not someone who has risen in politics by sheer longevity. Unlike Senator Obama, who accommodated himself to the seedy ethnoreligious politics of Chicago's South Side in search of political preferment, she challenged her own corrupt party machine to advance. And unlike Senator Clinton-- who, with her husband, never quite exits the stage -- she achieved early success by defeating the old bulls who ran her state, not by marrying the hottest ticket in Arkansas. g In the combustible world of American abortion politics, there are very finely calculated degrees of difference. For example, while both Obama and Biden are pro-choice, their positions are not the same. Obama is in favour of federal funding for abortion and permitting partial-birth abortion. Biden is against both. As the most extreme pro-abortion candidate for president ever, Obama voted against the "born alive" act in Illinois, which mandates medical care for babies that survive attempted abortions. Even Hillary Clinton, along with Joseph Biden, supported the federal "born alive" act. In fact, the latter passed unanimously. The Palin selection indicates that the McCain campaign wishes to sharpen this contrast. ”