I havent seen a speech that good since Oliver North sent Brezhnev's B-team on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee scurrying for their hidey-holes at the mad climax of Iran-Contra! Not only is she a better speaker than Barak Obama (her teleprompter malfunctioned halfway through the speech and she kept right on going!) but she managed in her speech to deliver a fatal wound to Barak Obama. For a year and a half the stumbling and incompetent Hillary campaign was never able to ask the magic question,' Who is this dude and what the fork is a 'community organizer'? But we have to be charitable to Mrs. Clinton. She only was a candidate because her husband received oral sex from a young intern in the Oval Office and lied about it under oath to a Federal Judge making her a figure of pity and obligating him to put his political machine at her disposal. She was a person with precious few accomplishments of her own; a few tedious ghost-written books, no legislative record in her brief time in the Senate and what must be the most lengthy collection of boring, nasal and idiotic speeches in the history of rhetoric. In fact, Obama's only laudable accomplishment has been the removal of the pestiferous Clintons from the national limelight FOREVER! but when BO's teleprompter broke during a speech he was reduced to stumbling ums and ahs until the problem was fixed.
But last night the stakes were high. The media uproar preceding this speech was unprecedented. The mask of journalistic ethics and unbiased fairness were discarded as the New York Slimes and MSNBC launched courageous attacks on a pregnant 17 year old and attempted to use a four-month-old Downs Syndrome baby as a football. The foaming-at-the-mouth hysteria and the painting of Sarah Palin as some kind of neo-nazi primitive cartoon character raised the stakes to a make or break level. The entire election hung on this speech. But what this media hyper-flap did was cause this speech to be viewed by more people than viewed any other speech during this long and dreary campaign.
The opening act was Rudy Giuliani. Hizzoner gave the best speech I ever heard him give. It was pure Obama-bashing and it was highly effective. At one point he mentioned the term 'community organizer' and stopped and laughed. It was obvious that as mayor he dealt with the verminous cockroaches like Al Sharpton who was a much more effective 'community organizer' than Barak Obama (he's got the burned-down Korean stores to prove it!) and had little respect for the profession of community organization. Giuliani started it off. Just what are these Hope and Change Democrats proposing to do? Who is this empty suit whose pretty speechifying has caused him to become their leader? Rudy warmed up the crowd and got them in the mood but after he left the podium. A stillness fell over the hall.
Palin emerged to a roar like no other. Neither of the Clintons or even The Obamessiah got a standing O like that thanks to the brutal media assault that Palin and her family had endured in silence. She started by simply and eloquently introducing her family. Her son on his way to Iraq in a few days, her pregnant seventeen-year-old daughter and the boyfriend-fiance who never imagined that his brief encounter with Brookey would land him on the front page of the New York Slimes and front and center on camera with the whole nation watching, all the way down to little Trig, who was passed around from family member to family member during the speech, answering the Media's phony questions about what was going to happen to this poor little mite, apparently abandoned by his mother. At one point during the speech the camera cut to the youngest daughter licking her hand and using it to lovingly smooth Trig's hair down, a scene with enough poignant warmth to cancel out the effect of a thousand column inches in the New York Slimes.
But then she moved into the attack. She savaged Obama and savaged the Democrats with a smile and a cute little Elizabeth Montgomery tweak of her nose. She ripped that phony, useless community organizer to pieces. She made a cogent, lucid case why he is not qualified to be president. She attacked the Democrats and the punches landed one after the other. Her most telling point was on energy, the issue that is going to drive this election. Lines like "the difference between a mayor and a community organizer is that a mayor has responsibilities" raised the roof as the delegates in the hall went completely insane. Wishing her son Godspeed as he deploys to Iraq and lauding America's great victory was a back-handed slap to the defeatist idiot Obama and his treasonous running dogs. The Republican ticket now has a Hero from the Vietnam War and a mother who just sent her son off to combat. The democrats?
What will be Obama's response to this attack on his resume? Probably to try to ignore it. What else can he do? Its like Kerry with the SwiftBoats or Dukakis with Willie Horton; the central core of his Hope and Change crusade has been smashed. He has to start coming up with reasons why Giuliani and Palin are wrong! He has to advance some specific policies that will advance his agenda. We're Just Like You! isn't enough anymore and if that's all they have they are going to lose the election because they're not like us at all, Palin is. Vague references to 'alternative energy' aren't going to wash against a woman who was the driving force behind a $40 billion pipeline project to bring natural gas to American consumers. The empty rhetoric has been exposed and now the Dems face a team that contains TWO major national political figures, one a better speaker than Obama and the other a man who has shown that he is ready to use aggressive and imaginative attacks to win. The ball is in the Dem's court. Smash it back boys!