The reason I was not impressed by Palin’s debate performance is simple.  It’s not that she was bad.  She was okay.  She read her talking points fine.  She was not a great deal less substantive than Biden, who certainly stumbled more.

I think what it is is the fact that I’ve simply lost all faith in Palin’s ability.  Her debate performance didn’t change my mind, and apparently didn’t change anybody else’s either.

So now the McCain team is going on the attack, because there is very little else they can do with only four weeks left.  I don’t blame them.  This is probably the only move they can make at this point.  But I wish they wouldn’t.

When this election finally turned out to be an Obama v McCain election, I was pretty excited.  The Obama/Clinton battle had been fierce, ugly, and I thought the Clinton’s played dirtier.  In fact, I remember saying to myself that the Democratic contest would surely be uglier than the final contest between Obama and McCain, as I could not imagine McCain taking the low road.  Ever.

I guess I was wrong.  Watching McCain lately is painful.  He sneers, jeers, rolls his eyes, makes sardonic comments about his rival.  Sucker punch after sucker punch.  It’s politics, sure, but it’s not what I expected out of John McCain.  And Palin is more attack dog than leader.  The debate, with her folksy charm and her colloquialisms does not shore up my faith in her.  On the contrary it simply reaffirms my belief that McCain has stabbed us national security types in the back in order to get a larger piece of the female vote.

Well surely, McCain, you could have found a more qualified, knowledgeable (and dare I say intelligent?) candidate to run alongside?  As it stands, I feel abandoned by the candidate I thought would exercise strong judgment in his quest to keep America safe, strong, and competitive.

I need to state, right away, that I respect Senator Joseph Biden. He’s a good man, who, unfortunately, made licentious mistakes earlier in his career, especially on questions of serial plagiarism. Yet, if the Obama/Biden ticket wins in November, frankly, the Delaware Senator’s more qualified to serve in the Oval Office than is Barack Obama.

That said, Senator Biden got pwned by Alaska Govenor Sarah Palin in tonight’s debate at Washington University, in St. Louis.

I mean, let’s face it, things were going along routinely, with each candidate holding their own on taxes and domestic policy, until (alleged) moderator Gwen Ifill shifted topics to foreign policy. Biden went off on how Barack Obama’s on the same page as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, blah, blah … and then, Ifill turned to Governor Palin, asking for her response on Iraq, to which the Alaska Governor replied, directing her answer to Senator Biden:

Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq and that is not what our troops need to hear today, that’s for sure. And it’s not what our nation needs to be able to count on. You guys opposed the surge. The surge worked…

Wham!

I kept noticing, throughout the debate, the big smiles Senator Biden kept flashing - helpless smiles indicating that he was getting hammered!

There was a point, moreover, earlier in the debate, where I think Governor Palin set concrete parameters: Senator Biden was trying to set the record straight on Barack Obama’s record on regulatory policy, where he says:

Gwen, the governor did not answer the question about deregulation, did not answer the question of defending John McCain about not going along with the deregulation, letting Wall Street run wild.

But check out Sarah Palin in response, and with EMPHASIS:

I’m still on the tax thing because I want to correct you on that again … I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I’m going to talk straight to the American people and let themmy track record also.

Wham!

Beyond this, I think the debate was pretty much thrust and parry.

Senator Biden knows what he’s talking about. But throughout I was wondering if he actually prepped for this: I mean, really, it was Governor Palin who delivered the memorable lines. I especially thought the “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” line, delivered late in the debate, when Biden was riffing about the middle class, was killer:

Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future.

These are the exact moments that hit home with Main Street Americans.

Governor Palin made no gaffes. She was in command of the facts and was careful to redirect the debate to talking points comfortable to her experience.

But most of all, Senator Biden seemed on defense through most of the night. At first, it seemed, Governor Palin was nervous … on edge even. But as she got going, her comfort level heightened dramatically, and toward the end she was relishing her rejoinders - I mean nothing - nothing - was out of her league! Iraq? Iran? Show me what you got!

The Baltimore Sun nails it:

It was an unabashedly, one might even say relentlessly folksy and down-home Palin that greeted Americans Thursday night, with phrases like “Doggone it,” ”You guys,” ”Darn right” and, one she must have been saving ’til the end, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” You became “ya,” change was “comin’” and a class of third-graders even got a “shout-out” from the Alaska governor.

You can bet Barack Obama was biting his knuckles, stressing in his campaign’s inability to put McCain/Palin away.

I’ll have more over the next few days … but I can say now: Expect a decent Palin bounce in the polls. The Alaska Governor exceeded expectations by miles. I mean, c’mon, even Markos Moultisas’ initial evaluation (subject to immediate revision) suggested Palin won. Further, even RawMuslesGlutes was restrained, conceding, “Palin didn’t collapse … ” (and that’s considering RMG’s “Trig-trutherism”!).

Governor Palin captured the essence of complete authenticity in the debate, especially at the conclusion, where she noted:

We have to fight for our freedoms, also, economic and our national security freedoms.

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

These are the bedrock values to which middle Americans can relate. We’ll see if she gets a bump, but at the end of the day, Sarah Palin demonstrated that she’s ready to step in as chief executive in an emergency. The McCain campaign did themselves proud in their work preparing Governor Palin for her key moment of the presidential debates.

She exceeded expectations, and the American people saw it, live, large, and down home, baby!

The Palin interviews have been nearly unbearable to watch–and, ironically not so much because she doesn’t have the answers, but because of how she mishandles her ignorance.  The thing is, I could answer any of those questions better than her.  I mean, I could cite at least ten or twenty publications I read regularly, and even if I didn’t read any, I could at least pick a few out of a hat.  How hard is it to say “The New York Times” or to name a local Alaskan paper?

But for the Supreme Court question, she should have owned her lack of knowledge.  It’s a somewhat abstract question to begin with, and she could easily have said something similar to one of Michelle Malkin’s readers comments:

Here’s how I wish the Palin-Couric exchange would’ve went:

Couric: Can you name any other Supreme Court decisions you disagree with?

Palin: Off the top of my head, no. Roe v. Wade is clearly the one that stands out above the rest. But the average American out there isn’t worried about whether I can rattle off a bunch of Supreme Court decisions. They are worried about making their mortgage payments, keeping their jobs and sending their kids to college. They trust the Supreme Court to make those decisions. What they want from a President and Vice President is someone who will appoint Federal judges who fairly interpret the Constitution and adjudicate accordingly.

Now, was that so hard?

(more…)

The debate over evolution has been going on ever since the concept was first devised by Darwin–even Darwin struggled with the idea of evolution, because it challenged his belief in God, and he was a deeply faithful man. Indeed, one of the reasons Darwin didn’t publish his Origin of Species was because of its contradiction with Christian beliefs.

Now, many years later, the debate still rages. (more…)