PrintAugust 17, 2009
We can't spare this woman: she fights
Moe Lane at Red State channels Abraham Lincoln in succinctly stating the value of Sarah Palin to the future of the Republic. His headline to a summary of Andy McCarthy's dissent to the NRO editorial slamming Palin's "death panel" comment is
I think McCarthy's dissent is excellent, too.
...Palin was right to argue her point aggressively. Largely because she did, a horrible provision is now out of this still horrible Obamacare proposal. To the contrary, if the argument had been made the way the editors counsel this morning, "end-of-life counseling" would still be in the bill. We might have impressed the Beltway with the high tone of our discourse and the suppleness of our reasoning, but we'd have lost the public.
The entire Republican establishment has lost a large section of the public for some time now. The elected officials did it by refusing to limit spending. The pundit class has done it by has largely showing themselves to be both obsessed with style over substance and forever ceding the shape of the debate to the Democrats and the mainstream media. That's like playing Charlie Brown to Lucy, as it is proven that whenever it looks like conservatives have a winning argument, the Democrats and the media declare that attack off limits, unfair, racist, old news, etc., etc., etc., For an NRO editorial to dismiss the only politician who fights on despite taking hits because her highly effective arguments lack nuance is simply ridiculous. To score a debate that has brought out thousands of demonstrators all around the nation like they were members of the Potomac High School debate club makes the NRO editorial board look every bit as jejune as Barack Obama.
