Now this is interesting.

Remember what I said?

I wouldn’t put too much store by this bit of mischief making from lefty hack Nicholas Watt at the UK Guardian

It would appear that the reasons go deeper than Thatcher’s frail health. Her allies believe that Palin is a frivolous figure who is unworthy of an audience with the Iron Lady. This is what one ally tells me:
“Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.”

Well, one lady was so aggrieved she wrote to the Thatcher Foundation.

Gateway Pundit has the reply.

A taster

Read the rest here. A classic put down of a lefty hack – a textbook example of how to (metaphorically, of course) slide a rapier into a mountebank’s kidneys with elegance and finesse ….

I wouldn’t put too much store by this bit of mischief making from lefty hack Nicholas Watt at the UK Guardian

It would appear that the reasons go deeper than Thatcher’s frail health. Her allies believe that Palin is a frivolous figure who is unworthy of an audience with the Iron Lady. This is what one ally tells me:
“Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.”

Exhibit A: The Guardianistas have always loathed Thatcher so beware of an item which implies left wing praise for anything said in her name

Exhibit B: Their positions on US politics will always reflect the latest brain numbing outpourings of liberal/left WaPo hack E. J. Dionne

Exhibit C: Ergo their attitude towards Palin will mirror those of Daily Kos mountebank Markos Moulitsas – in other words imagine trying to get any sense from an earwig on speed

Exhibit D: Note that the anonymous “source” is alleged to be an “ally” of Thatcher – journalese for a friend of the cousin of the man who services her dentist’s lawnmower

Exhibit E:No professional staffer of Lady Thatcher’s would employ the word “nuts” but you will frequently hear it at Guardian get togethers while the coke is being pushed along the glass table top

Exhibit F:Lady Thatcher is so frail she might not be able to receive any visitor with whom she is unfamiliar therefore the cunning Mr Watt can always perform his nudge nudge wink wink routine and claim he knows the real reason and by the way he happens to know that Buckingham Palace is up for sale and would you like to buy, discount for cash…

Then, of course, we might ask which ally sent this invitation to Palin a few months ago?

In other words this little Guardian anecdote is probably about as truthful as Weiner’s first press conference.

Alex Spillius must have “do a monthly hit piece on Sarah Palin” written into his UK Daily Telegraph contract

Supporters of Sarah Palin have attempted to edit the Wikipedia page on Paul Revere, the War of Independence hero, after glaring historical errors the White House hopeful made during her tour to Boston last week.

Indeed he implies that it might have even been one of her aides who tried to tamper with Wikipedia.

The oddest thing about this piece, though, is not the fact that Spillius fell into the Palin Trap by relying on Longfellow rather than doing a bit of research (actually he probably didn’t even go to his poetry book, just took his usual cue from the US media) but his characterisation of the bus tour. You would never guess that even CNN was admitting that Palin scored a home run with this project or that the latest poll was putting her as joint front runner for the GOP nomination. Spillius paints it as a feeble attempt scuppered by her own “ignorance”

Do you know what annoys me the most? Not that this guy writes a hit piece on Palin’s “gaffe” which backfires on him.

Can a leopard change it’s spots?

Can a weasel change it’s teeth?

Of course not.

It’s the fact that he gets paid large dollops of gelt for doing it.

Pass the sick bag, Alice….

Top American conservative blogger Ryan Streeter, quoting Peter Wehner and Kimberley Strassel, demands that Sarah Palin immediately announce that she will not be entering the primary race for the GOP nomination. She must do this, he says, so that an electable conservative can take on and beat Obama in 2012.

The election is only 17 months away and the polls are clear, according to Streeter. 37% of Republicans and GOP leaning independents go negative on Palin.

These 37% are not inside-the-beltway types but drawn from the voting populace across the country. And surely they get their Palin not through some lamestream media outlet, but most likely through Fox News and many of the same web sites as Palin’s supporters.

Jonathan Jones reaches a similar conclusion for his UK readers.

These people clearly have an inside track into the minds of US voters. They are also telling us that polls taken in the summer of the year before a presidential election are a foolproof predictor of the final outcome.

They are the experts, very close to the brightest and best of the political, academic and media elite, so they must be right.

After all, see what was happening in June 2007.

The 26 polls taken in May and June show yet a different picture. Giuliani still leads, but with only 26 percent; McCain, with 17 percent, is barely ahead of Thompson, at 15 percent, and trails Thompson in polls taken since Memorial Day. Romney stays at 10 percent
……………………………………………….
Democrats are more confident this year, with some reason. Polls show that voters prefer a generic Democrat to a generic Republican by solid margins. And Democrats seem pretty settled in their preferences for candidates. Hillary Clinton averaged 34 percent in December-January polls, 36 percent in February, 34 percent in April and 35 percent in May-June.
Barack Obama, at 18 percent in December-January, rose to 23 percent in February-March, then flatlined — 25 percent in April, 24 percent in May-June. John Edwards was at 12 percent in December-January, 13 percent in February-March, 16 percent in April and 13 percent in May-June.

Whoops……

An odd thing is happening in the UK media and I doubt it’s anything to do with Killer Cucumbers. After nearly three years of dismissing Sarah Palin as airhead homophobic racist religious bigot with a brain the size of a pea and the political savvy of a semi literate ant she is suddenly being treated as a human being with a claim to be considered as a serious operator in the lead up to the 2012 election.

Websites like The UK Spectator Coffee House and ConservativeHomeUSA (run by former Bush staffer Ryan Streeter and thought to be financed by UK multi millionaire Lord Ashcroft) are no longer equating her with Britney Spears.

But the proverbial biscuit must be taken by the flagship of the liberal left, The Guardian, where Richard Adams manages to write a full length article on her sans snark or snigger – indeed it could well have come from the pen of Dan Riehl or Robert Stacy McCain who, though not Palinistas, have always treated her with respect and defended her against weasels and mountebanks.

With the bus tour and hagiographical documentary, I think at this point we can assume Palin is going to run for the Republican nomination, unless tourists at Gettysburg start pelting her with tomatoes (unlikely) or her bus runs over a cute kitten named Mr Mittens live on Fox News (improbable).
I’ve said it before: Palin would be crazy not to run for the Republican nomination. Just look at the rest of the field. Since evangelicals’ sweetheart Mike Huckabee declined to run, the path is clear for Palin on the Tea Party/Christian wing. The three identikit Republican ex-governors running – Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman – squabble among themselves and split the centre-moderate-establishment vote. Palin crushes them all in South Carolina, the traditional Republican bellwether. Game over?
That scenario was sketched out for me by a Virginia Republican who is tepidly backing Romney – “Because there’s no one else.” He, like a lot of Republicans, is still waiting for a knight on a white horse to sweep into the race, Rick Perry of Texas being the most common name given to the knight, although Jeb Bush is also wistfully mentioned. The trouble is, time is running out and knights are in short supply.

Who the hell cares what a bunch of pansy Brits think (as one C4P reader once wrote about a post I did centuries ago on Palin and the UK media)

My thoughts exactly when reading US comments on our own election last year.

But our UK hacks never waste shoe-leather on researching the American political scene themselves. They take their cue from their US counterparts in New York and Washington and the gossip at Tina Brown’s media elite bunfights – and the message coming out from the salons is it’s time to treat Sarah Palin seriously.

Welcome to the club, guys, better late than never, as Wyatt Earp said to the Clanton brothers at the OK Corral….

Your President has come and gone. His State visit is over. Naturally the UK media went out of its way to be positive because
1. In 2008 they took their cue from your MSM and accepted the myth without expending any effort on shoe leather so it would be embarrassing to ‘fess up
2. He is a left wing politician and therefore our media and academic elite keep any criticism muted
3. Generally, like you Americans, though we find foreigners a little odd, we are polite to them

State visits are peculiar creatures because, unlike the day to day give, take and insult of raw international politics they are also heavy with symbolism – flags, banquets, parades and visits to the host nation’s icons.

When I was a callow youth I sneered at symbols as empty gewgaws designed to hypnotise the ignorant, like the cheap coloured beads offered to primitive tribal chieftains in the 19th century for a thousand square miles of arid landscape packed with enough mineral wealth to create a hundred western millionaires.

But as I grew through the stages of life and began to learn from experience rather than through text books I realised that symbols were emotional shorthand for a common cultural inheritance that stretches back to ancestors long unknown. It made me also realise that we as individuals can only be short term leaseholders of that inheritance which we must inevitably pass on to generations yet unborn.

So we treat them with respect.

And we treat the symbols of our friends with respect.

And before we venture into a friendly foreign land we do a little homework on those symbols – especially if we hold an office in our own country with its own symbolic constellation. Indeed most leaders of nations have diplomatic advisers and heads of protocol waiting on hand to guide them through what can be a an intimidating maze of expectations.

President Obama failed that test when he attended the banquet given in his honour by our Queen. He stumbled over the toast, did not even attempt to pretend he wasn’t using a cue card and had to be instructed in good manners by his hostess

Earlier that day he visited Westminster Abbey where England’s kings and queens have always been crowned and where, just a few weeks ago, millions throughout the world had witnessed the strange mixture of solemnity and joy that characterised the royal wedding. Here also lies the tomb of The Unknown Warrior, the First World War soldier who represents the sacrifice of all those other British service men and women who have no known resting place and on whose grave was placed Kate Middleton’s wedding posy after the pomp and ceremony of her marriage.

Mrs Obama, who had changed her outfit to a purple dress and blue coat, said: “It’s a pleasure to be here again”, to which her husband added: “She gets to come to all the fun places”, then “so nice to see you, how are you?”

He was there to lay a wreath on the Unknown Warrior’s grave. It is not a fun place. It is a place of dark and brooding majesty, a place where hard men are proud to shed tears of respect and remembrance for those who gave their blood and bone so that we may live outside war and terror.

He was then asked to sign the Abbey’s Visitors Book, a simple but meaningful act of symbolic recognition. He had to seek advice for the date and then got the year wrong.

But maybe the 2008 gaffe is understandable seeing that he already appears to be in full campaign mode. Perhaps he felt that Congressman Clyburn would be more impressed by a visit to a multi ethnic school in South London rather than meeting up with the brightest and best of Britain’s young scientists. After all we are contantly being told that Obama has a towering intellect – so what can he learn from a handful of test tube shakers….

Excused as “slips” these blunders appear to be manifestations of his real world view. That traditions and symbols and threads towards the past are the cobwebbed residue of meaningless images irrelevant to the vision of a socially engineered reconstruction of society where there is a place for everyone and everyone is in their place and woe betide any village Hampden who refuses to conform.

As for protocol – I guess the only protocol needed for any young politician on the make in Chicago at the turn of the century was to find the most suitable part of Mayor Daley’s posterior to kiss in order to get further up the ladder.

A sad day for both our lands.

In her icy lair she waits while perplexed scribblers try to convince themselves that beside a distant northern lake there is no shadow roaming free beyond the parameters of their prescribed calculus and ingrained ritualistic incantations.

But it is only pretence because in reality they are ever glancing over their shoulders for although they publicly voice disdain they are privately nervous of someone who refuses to engage within the rules of their vaunted choreography

That is why in several of the pieces that emerged in the aftershock of Huckabee’s withdrawal the name of Sarah Palin was either left out or allowed but a cursory nod. Of course they might merely have been falling in line behind the grand panjandrum of prognostication George Will who returned from his visit to the Delphic Oracle and proclaimed that in 2012 the GOP nominee lacing up armour to enter the lists against Obama would either be Daniels or Pawlenty.

Time was, of course, when George’s diktat would have been enough to seal the deal. Pundits and their media masters controlled the slip road to the information highway and the most that any ordinary Jane or Joe could do was to splutter over their morning cornflakes and shout abuse at the cat in order to let off steam.

But now the GWs of the world are left preaching to an empty chapel as the world and his wife are surfing along the information highway themselves.

Poor George – how frustrating it must be to have your once booming voice reduced to a constricted squeak.

With all the other candidates and pseudo candidates there is blather about exploratory committees, raising money, hiring consultants and strategists, testing the waters in Iowa, fluttering their eyelids at an assortment of governors, politicians and celebrities and, above all, dancing to the musical pipes of the self proclaimed kings and queens of the media.

The result? Allahpundit goes orgasmic.

But, if she chooses to enter the GOP race, it is possible that Sarah Palin could decide to dance to her own tune.

Exploratory committee? A prayer, chat with Todd and the family and a couple of spiders who live in the Palin garage = job done!

Raising money? As one Hot Air comment pitched it

If Palin enters the fray, everything changes. Romney might be able to generate truckloads of money, but Palin can make it rain from the sky on demand.

Consultants/strategists? Here’s Matthew Continetti

Palin’s entry would completely scramble the presidential campaign. She’s quite simply the most famous Republican woman in the world, with shrewd instincts, charisma, passionate supporters, and no fear

Why would someone like that need a consultant? Why would anybody with an ounce of savvy need a consultant?

A consultant is a person who borrows your watch and then charges you to tell you what time it is

Iowa? Once every four years thousands of “consultants/strategists” parachute into Iowa alongside legions of media hacks and their support staff. For several weeks this international assortment of scribblers and voiceovers pretends to take an interest in ethanol subsidies and the Waterloo Black Hawks. Once the caucuses are over they all rush back to their big city apartments and forget about Iowa until the year of the next Olympics – including the candidates who have been pimping themselves to Iowans for several months.

But in Iowa, just as there is in every state, below the first and second tier of GOP apparatchiks who love to sound off to any out of state hack with a mike or a blackberry, there are probably more than a thousand lower level enthusiasts who will gladly crawl barelegged over fifty miles of broken glass to work for Palin.

As for endorsements, she is probably the only political figure in America who walks alone. If they come, then fine. But after the heavy lifting she did for so many candidates in 2010 the lack of reciprocity after the Gifford shooting was quite an eye opener. But then the mathematics of the GOP political equation became clearer. The Republican Party needs Sarah Palin. But perhaps she does not need the Republican Party.

Indeed, if she decides to stand she gave Sean Hannity a clue of how she might position herself towards the end of their recent interview. (10.00-10.55 in the clip)

When he asked her about her views on the current speculation of who might be throwing their hat into the ring she became rather dismissive of such antics so early on in the game. She used the phrase “both sides of the aisle”, talked of “fighting for Family, Faith and Freedom” and, the money quote, declared she was not a real fan of politicians.

This is trademark Palin. Though she wears the Republican label she really puts herself forward as being above party politics. This is how she won and governed in Alaska – and why she continued to be so unpopular with the official GOP establishment up there.

This is why the national GOP elite and their battalions of consultants, lobbyists and media drones loathe her as much as the liberal/left. Positioning oneself above the party disengages power from the cogwheel of the spoils system – the jobs for the boys, the waivers, the sweet government contracts, the backroom deals. The party structure feeds on this and for many it is the raison d’être for the whole mechanism of politics. She briefly broke that culture in Alaska and would do the same in Washington.

Quite a while ago, soon after the dust of 2008 had settled I wrote a comparison between Sarah Palin and the French leader Charles de Gaulle and I still stand by that.

As an Englishman I was always naturally suspicious of anything that de Gaulle did because I knew that he would never fail to place the interests of France above everything else. But I also admired him for it and yearned for the day when we might have such a leader (to my astonishment, in 1979 when the UK had sunk to its lowest depths, she came.)

De Gaulle was one of the most brilliant political operators in any modern democracy. But he achieved success by offering himself to the French people as an anti-politician, concerned only for the future of France.

De Gaulle was relatively unknown to the French people in 1940 but millions of them heard his broadcast from London at the moment of their deepest despair and in those few minutes he became the inspiration and hope for so many. Governor Palin walked onto the stage at the Republican Convention, electrified millions and stole their hearts forever with her grace, her honesty and her love of life sealing there and then a contract and covenant of support through fire and flood whatever may happen

I wrote that in March 2009 at a time when on both sides of the pond “those who know best” had her already shredded and dumped into the dustbin of history. But I had a sense that there were a lot of ordinary Americans who had sealed that contract and covenant – and I was right.

So now my American friends wait and wonder. The runes have been thrown but have yet to be read.

Who knows what the future holds….

Newt Gingrich on Sarah Palin January 2011

I think that she has got to slow down and be more careful and think through what she’s saying and how she’s saying it.

News item May 2011

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is considering a return to the Sunday shows this weekend to help undo the damage caused by his appearance last week.

What is that phrase from Luke 4.23?

……Physician, heal thyself…..