Bocephus Republicans

Ah, the rugged individualist.

You mean the ones who use power from the Tennessee Valley Authority (government), drives their mostly safe big rigs (government) on the lonely highways (government), chatting with the kids via Internet (goverment), phoning mom safe at home on Social Security (government) and Medicare (government), taking her wonder drugs (basic research government), eating mostly safe foods (government), as he drives across mostly safe bridges (government), breathing in the mostly clean air (governement), hauling his cargo of non-lead covered toys (government) secure in the knowledge that he don't need no damn government telling him what to do, 'cause he's a rugged individualist kinda guy?

Well, maybe after watching the video I "get" the appeal of the _image_ of Sarah Palin that has been put forward by the GOP.

I recall that the important "get" from GWB's 2000 campaign was that he was the candidate I'd most enjoy having a beer with.

David J. White,

You should read some different books, then, or talk to different people, or drink some different beer, because your ideas are weak -- both Sarah Palin and Bocephus have more substance than you. Sorry to be snarky, but you've reaped what you've sown. Just wanted to show you that a country-boy not only can survive but can talk back to wiseguys like you. Have a nice day.

Strange coincidence that I cited ole Hank Jr's manifesto from pre-Morning in America Gipperdom in a thead on Gutave and the twilight of the Crescent City two days ago. My take was that the likes of Michael Ledeen could offer up a public policy of malign neglect for the Gulf coast that amounted to "apre' Iraq, le deluge" and the roughnecks and shrimpers of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi would still be there just as they were in the days of the Pirate Lafitte and Old Hickory and before that when that part of the continent was the other glint in Marse Tomcat's eye besides Sally Hemings.

The fact is Jim Webb nailed it in his 2004 masterpiece "Born Fighting: How the Scots Irish Shaped America" (indeed he entirely captures the blogmasters sentiment in this offering. Skim the parts about one of his dad's brothers started his own TV repair shop in St. Joe. Mo., not with the help of a vo-tech school or a book, but by breaking down a 1950's set pictute cathode ray tube and all and bring his own intellect to bear on the problem. (I realize Mssrs. Bottoms and White don't appreciate that country people, especially the Southern kind possess such things. There may be a few of the Paris and Britney generation that would be lost if the grid and the gas pumps went down for good, but I'd wager that folks like those where Palin comes from and the ones that live in houseboats and trailers up and down the bayous would be able to eke out a living with sheer elbow grease and country know how long after Bottoms and White were dining on crudite de Penguin Classics.

Lastly, Biden may be an enthusiastic hathcet man will likely garner some votes along the tribal loyalty axis from Upper Darby to Lackawanna-Luzenre, but don't throw water in my face and tell me its raining. If he's a "Bada*%", Linday Graham and Joe Lieberman are the second coming of Sgt. York and Chesty Puller. From that rooster like thatch emanating from the plugged whiteman's corn rows circa Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill to his asinine comments about "shoving his rosary beads down" Tom Delay's throat, the man is the stangest paradox of popinjay and goon. Compared Jim Webb who probably still can rip off 100 pushups and 20 pullups in his sixties, not to mention fighting all the way to the finals at Annapolis his senior year until coming up short against Ollie North who even then was a dirty fighter, Biden is as physically soft as Dick Cheney. Not to mention that Webb still carries shrapnel in his body from the bush in Vietnam, with a decidely un-Kerry like disposition of a highland moccasin that commands respect.

The media story was that Webb refused the VP slot, but my gut is that's because Obama wouldn't give him a Cheney like portfolio on Defense and Foreigh Policy, not to mention the likely dark machinations of MBNA and the "democracy comes out of the barrel of a gun" lobby. Maybe Obama's ego couldn't handle it either. Too bad, because Webb will go down as the closest thing America has produced to Andy Jackson since George C. Patton. Biden, by comparison, not even Aaron Burr who actually fought a duel rather than trying to confiscate everybody else's guns. Gary Hart had more substance, and George McGovern more toughness.

I leave with an anecdote about Senator Plugs from a former colleague from Wilmington who had worked as a summer staffer during college. It was towards the end of the session and after a hard week, that the Senator, feeling magnamimous, called my colleague and another young male staffer back into his quarters to chat. When he asked them if they were interested in careers in politics and they, in typical, slightly starstruck, adolsscent fashion, shrugged their shoulders, he fired a the following question in response "Do you know what it takes most of all to make it in politics?" The staffers were utterly mystified, at which point Biden takes his index finger and audibly taps on this capped choppers and blurts out "Really Good Teeth!" I'm sure Saracuda, and Putin, are quaking in their boots.

..but because she sees in Palin the kind of character that she admires, and that women like her -- "country girls," as she puts it -- prize. IOW, folks sense that Sarah Palin can skin a buck and run a trot line, and they love it.

I like to fish as much as the next guy in East Texas, and I wish I could get my wife into it, too. That said, WHAT? I mean, WHAT IN THE SAMHILL ARE YOU SAYING? Why should we respect ANYONE who'd vote for a politician on that basis? Especially after the disaster we all know as George W. Bush?

This isn't any sort of serious conservatism. It's yahooism at its lowest level.

I realize you're expressing some skepticism of this latest shot of GOP Sarahtonin, but, Rod, let's put a little bit of skeptical criticism to the reverse snobbery that's backing Palin. The unstated assumption behind a lot of it is that if can't skin your own moose, deer or javelina carcass, you're not a real American. This is exactly kind of thing you need to criticize.

Aren't guitars used to sing the blues too?
Y'know like that hapless Vista PC on the latest "Hello I'm a Mac" tracks:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgRTWd9BohA (add http://)
in fact the latest Microsoft ad with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld (currently getting panned on Madison Avenue) could be the corporate-welfare-collectivist metaphor par excellence for the GOP's military-industrial complex. We may rue the day paying for either of the BIG TWO to play for promises of progress in some mythical "future" (tyranny of relativism doesn't get worse than gambling present certainty for some future incremental progress) since probability tells us increments can go up AND DOWN, forwards OR BACKWARDS

IOW, folks sense that Sarah Palin can skin a buck and run a trot line, and they love it.

Even if she can do this - what does it have to do with whether or not she is a good choice to be Vice President?

Hank Williams III >>> Hank Williams Jr.

Perhaps this is what that slogan at the RNC really meant: "Country [music] First"

I love that Hank Williams Jr. song.

I get it that lots of folks look at Sarah Palin and say "she's one of us" and are swooning. Cool. But when I look at Barack Obama, I think, "he's one of me." That small group of prep-school Ivy League-educated "articulate" black folks who've been accused, at various times in our lives, of being "too black" or "not black enough." Who've crossed that line from all-white to all-black environments and back again over and over, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not so comfortably. Who've traveled a lot and speak a foreign language or two. Obama graduated from Columbia the same year I entered. When I see Barack I see my family and every other "elitist" black person I know with a similar background.

Nevertheless, that's NOT enough of a reason for me to vote for him. The identity politics of this campaign season has my head spinning. On both sides of the spectrum. Weren't black folks criticized during the loooong campaign season for voting for Obama over Hillary because he was black?

The choice of Palin was obviously a grab for the disaffected Hillary voters. I see the choosing of her as similar to the way I viewed the choice of Clarence Thomas (whom I admire by the way) to take the place of Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Just get another black guy. Just get a woman. At this point in the campaign, it doesn't seem like that bothers too many people. It's just taken as a given that many white women will automatically vote for their fellow white, "Vagina American." Sorry to be crass but such is the politics of it.

Palin's support of Alaskan secession (can you imagine the cries of treason if Obama were a member of some secession party) and her condemnation of birth control aside, she is a very attractive candidate. There's a lot I like about her. But her good qualities don't cancel out the fact that a vote for McCain is a vote for endless war. I don't see anything crunchy about voting for Palin. I may yet vote for McCain, but if I do Sarah Palin will not have had anything to do with my decision.

I wonder what percentage of American women have ever really "skinned a buck." I'm guessing less than one percent. Among my hunting friends, that's men's work. Or more often, a butcher's job. The number of people who even live rural lives, as opposed to just having a big exurban spread and a bunch of outdoor toys, is small. And the rural poor depend on cheap processed food vastly more than on sustenance hunting.

Rod, I had been under the impression that the whole point of "crunchy con" was that you had realized the stupidity of these fantasies, when you got tired of being mocked by corporate-consumer-cons for your traditionalism. You have to realize that your type of traditionalism is not common nor inherited but takes great commitment and effort. It puts you far outside the mainstream and, as you have intuited, aligns you with people who are mostly liberal.

Why people like you - and I know some others, traditionalist Catholic friends, who have gone this route - need to mock your liberal allies in health and sustainability, in order to curry acceptance from the self-styled "plain folks," is beyond me.

I have one guess though: my reading of Palin is that she's a classic small-town bully/opportunist. People like she and Todd rule small towns from middle-school on, and in the same manner as when they started. Nerdy types still crave their approval.

@ Karen Brown

Yeah, but you gotta get to 1600 Penn. Ave. NW DC first. Jim Webb has both skill sets, and in fact quotes Bocephus's redneck manifesto quite approvingly in his own masterpiece "Born Fighting: How the Scots Irish Shaped America." Obama, who can't hold a candle to Webb as a wordsmith not to mention the plagiarizer Biden, ain't got it. And don't forget that every Annapolis grad. pretty much has an engineering minor whatever their major concentration is. Webb is the only Democrat who could have beaten McCain.

@ Cannonoe claim that Palin and her husband are typical "small town bully", it's possible. But equally so is the possibility of some emotional baggage of your own being projected on the Palin's. I guess to take on Frank Murkowski, Don Young and Ted Stevens (who threatened to punch Howard Baker in the face when the latter was Senate Majority Leader for messin' with his pork), even in their declining years, required some ruthless courage. It's not like she was to the manor born like Dubya or Dan Quayle whose family were the Bushes of Indiana. Her parents were freaking school teachers and her husband is part Eskimo, not that they don't have their jock culture too I suppose. But it's outta line in my opinion to ad hominem Mr. Dreher as "a nerd" when he's responding to the same charisma that Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Ronald Reagan and even Lincoln possessed, which is that of the genuine common person with no inherited advantages nor fancy degrees rising on their God given ability. Snobs like Richard Hofstader and his third rate 21st century acolytes can call it anti-intellectualism all they want, but the hate, fear and jealousy are so transparent. E tu Peggy Noonan?
I'm as uneasy with her Big Oil coziness as anybody who shares the values of Wendell Berry and those that animate this website. And no doubt there is much to be loathed in "The good Lord giveth, and the department of Natural Resources taketh away" mentality of certain rural folk. The late Senator Ralph Yarborough's memoir of seeing the brilliant reddish underplumage of three passenger pigeons radiating in the early sun of a frosty East Texas morning as a young boy have stuck with me powerfully. But I don't see how a couple that would give birth to a Downs Child in this day and age when over 75% of them are eugenicized as Hitler (who did it to the Holy Father's uncle) and Sanger always wanted, can be said to not care about people or be out only for herself. There was no political profit in that act as there are plenty of so called "mainstream conservatives" in the Republican establishment who are horrified by such retrograde sentimentality, taking Mr. Justice Holmes's stance on forced sterilization that "three generations of idiots is enough." Former Senator Lowell Weicker learned something of this dirty little secret of the sensible center as a father of a son with Downs. That qualifies her as a Crunchy Con in my book, and it will be the nerds turned bullies of Saturday Night Live (will they bring Tina Fey back as Palin? can Yardley PA/UVA do Fargoese?) and the rest who will show their true colors when its time to cut throats. Question is, do you crave their approval?

@ Bd rucker: I don't recall anybody jumping on blacks for voting for a black candidate except maybe Bill Clinton when he chewed out Jim Clyburn over the phone on the eve of the SC primary after he realized that his wife's once 60-40 lead among black voters had been turned upside down. And I agree with you that a vote for McCain is a vote for a harrowing high noon showdown with Putin and his nukes that will make October 1962 look positvely Edwardian. Thus I will not be pulling the lever for either ticket come November

Last I checked, we don't need an engineer as a VP either. Unless you plan on having them construct or design something. So I'm not quite sure why you think that skill is particularly necessary.

I'm not talking about what it takes to get there. That, apparently, requires being a combination of Jed Clampbett, Rambo, Elmer Gantry, and 'Lonesome Rhodes' (Great movies, btw.). Equal parts of bluster, BS, and 'just folks charm'.

I'm talking about what it takes to do the job.

@ Bd rucker: I don't recall anybody jumping on blacks for voting for a black candidate except maybe Bill Clinton when he chewed out Jim Clyburn over the phone on the eve of the SC primary after he realized that his wife's once 60-40 lead among black voters had been turned upside down.

I was referring to the comments of everyday people, not the media. On the other two (conservative) forums I hang out on that was a common line. "Black people are so racist; they're just voting for Obama because he's black."

And you know what? They are partly right. Pretty much every black person I know (except my husband and myself) with whom I've spoken about the subject is voting for Obama and they will tell you that they want to see the first black president.

Of course these are folks who always votge Democrat, and they will vote for a white Democrat over a black Republican any day so it's not all about race. Unlike those white Democrats in WV especially polled last spring who said they'd rather go with the Republicans than vote for a black man.

@ Karen Brown: You keep changing your argument, but then snobbery and hate do tend to muddy the crytalline logical waters purportedly revered by materialist liberals. Hofstader had the same log in his eye.

I never once claimed being an engineer constitutes a "qualification" for being Vice President in and of itself, that was your forensic sleight of hand. Though I should add that Herbert Hoover, a Stanford trained mining engineer, did by acclamation an outstanding job as European relief director in WWI Belgium. And before you counter with the predictable left wing riposte on Hoover=Depression, why don't you digest Amity Shlaes's of the Financial Times densely empirical tome on that sorry chapter of financial history and associated left wing FDR hagriography, "The Forgotten Man", and then get back to me. My point is that Hoover had hard analytical gifts, but also "soft power" (Nye) abilities to work with "diverse" populations, "empathize", and the sundry things you need to command respect from people who hate you for your Christian faith and therefore hawk you like "The Great Speckled Bird". And Hoover was an exceedingly devout Quaker farm boy from the hick burg of West Branch, Iowa to boot.

I would also add the late Roberto Guizito, greatest CEO in history of Coca Cola who stated in an interview I read how his undergraduate degree in civil engineering at Yale (typically endearing engineering minutae on water flow rates through a pipe, plumbers are after all blue collar engineers) served him well in making his company's stock one of Warren Buffet's perennial favorites. So no he didn't "build anything", but I would argue that his "candlepower" (my granny's term for "book smarts") that made it possible for him to excel in a field of undergraduate study most people hit the wall on, was not mutually exclusive and in fact may have enhanced his skills set needed to play survival chess with the sharks of Wall Streeet and the corporate shakedown artists and diversity racketeers from Jackson to Sharpton. Geopolitics without guns, so to speak.

My abridged counterpoint is that you never knocked down my argument that Sarah Palin has so far acquitted herself as a smart, capable if not gifted individual who is being mocked and slandered in terms of her intelligence and abilities because she is an unapologetic pro life Christian mom from a small town without a fancy degree or at least 25 years in the finishing school of the Democratic Senate Cloakroom. She also cares about something greater than herself as witnessed by her youngest little boy being on this Earth.

But I will concede that it's a Jeff Foxworthy versus Jerry Seinfeld nation, Cavalier versus Roundhead redu. And I confess that, despite his sins and failings, Andy Griffith's character in "Face in the Crowd" was still more appealing to me than the smug pride afflicted Walter Matthau and Particia Neal liberal cutouts.

@ Ricardo: Doesn't Bill Clinton already have the rights to that nom de plume in perpetuity?

I mentioned Bottoms and White in response to their intimations of hypocrisy and the of impugning the reading habits of folks celebrated in Hank's song.

Actually, the only specific person whose reading habits I intended to impugn was George W. Bush, and I was responding to (and agreeing with) the comment that we've already gone the route of electing the candidate with whom more people say they would feel comfortable having a beer, and look where that got us.

Yeah Virg, the software is working real well. :+)

BTW, what exactly is that "bamboo train" you work on?

@ Casey Roman:

Sorry for the multiple posts, would take 'em down if I could. I guess I don't need Foxworthy's clues to taxonomize myself because sarcasm always takes me awhile.