Good cartoon, but should have been pigs rather than wolves.

I think Sarah would be a great choice. Hope to see her on the ticket. Go girl

The fact that so many institutions are vicious towards her tells you how fearful they are of her.I knew this was coming as soon as McCain picked her.

As soon as Conan O'Brien uttered a Palin joke I decided "no more Tonight Show".

Wonder if that is one reason they are no longer #1?

Robert,

There aren't too many things that you are in total disagreement about. In a number of areas we are on the same playing field, if not in the same zone.

But on Palin we couldn't be further apart. The McCain team made an incredible mistake including her.

You are a fabulous writer and are very effective at crafting well thought out articles. She should hire you to help position her. But she won't because her ego won't allow her to understand the infinite number of shortcomings.

She is a polarizing figure who split the party. A good politician doesn't have to worry about being mired in debt derived from fighting lawsuits. They are taken care of.

She quit because her ego won't allow her to stay on the sidelines. Her ego won't allow her to truly reload. This woman can't stand the idea of disappearing from the public eye.

Anyway, we'll agree to disagree on this one.

Jack, I'm going to have to disagree with you, too. I'm no RINO, and I do not support RINOs.

In Palin, we have a person that scares the manure out of the Left. Sarah Palin is one of the people, not an elitist.

Also, there is nothing wrong with the University of Idaho. I attended the school on Student Exchange in the late 70s. It was a rich experience I am very happy to have had.

I think a lot of this has to do with status anxiety.

There are a lot of people in America today who drank the academic kool-aid and spent a lot of money/incurred a lot of debt, getting advanced degrees in squishy-soft & unmarketable subjects. They are now working as untenured adjunct professors (if they are lucky) or a Barnes & Noble (if they are not). The idea that someone can succeed on as big a scale as SP *without* academic credentials is a huge psychological threat to these people.

I agree that she rubs the stereotypical feminist the wrong way, although I must say that I'm not really sure what the stereotypical feminist is these days. Women are so liberated in this country, thankfully, and increasingly men too, that feminists come in so many varieties the term really doesn't even say much about the person any more. To me that's good news.

I don't hate Palin, nor am I particularly impressed with her. As a feminist, I love seeing a woman like her just being herself and not necessarily playing the role of the Betty Friedan -70s feminist. It doesn't feel threatening to me. On the contrary, liberation is about being your true self and not letting others define you. Unfortunately, I don't think she came off as being astute and educated, which is what I was looking for. I wanted her to lose the folksy garbage too -barf. But again, hate is not what she made me feel. I really don’t think she was capable enough to be VP and that’s a shame.

I'm not as hard on politicians as most people. I think so many people, in the media or not, are so tough on politicians in ways that are not legitimate that I think it must frighten away many people who could actually do a good job. Who in their right mind would run for office and put themselves, their family, and their friends through that meat grinder?

Jack, Alice:

Thanks so much for your articulate comments.

I have no problem with those who believe that Sarah Palin is not suited for high office.

I did not believe that Obama was suited to the office of POTUS and I believe that my opinion has been more than justified.

My problem is with Palin haters.

When I did a image search for Governor Palin I was stunned by the volume of photoshopped pictures that “pornified” this good and decent woman. These vulgar, highly sexualized false-images were all cranked out by loving, tolerant liberals.

Truly disgusting.

And quite telling.

One may believe that she has a big ego—in contrast to Obama who is the picture of modesty—or that she's too folksy. Or that she lacks a sophisticated world-view.

Fine. Whatever.

But it's the outsize hatred that interests me and I believe that ultimately it flowers from a deep contempt for traditional American values.

And I agree that liberals are especially interested in the super academic types, perhaps to a fault. A person can be well educated and not come off as out of touch. I think Clinton did that well. He was very intelligent, well educated, and much better than Obama at making people feel comfortable, like he wasn't talking down to them. On the other hand, Palin, to me, went too far with the I'm-one-of-you stuff. One of me? I don't want me. I'm not smart enough to be the VP.

Obama, for whom I did not vote, despite the fact that I am a registered Dem., is a terrible leader in my opinion because he is a pedantic academic who 'teaches' instead of inspiring. Terrible. He doesn't meet people where they are in order to take them somewhere better. And I get the feeling he’s kind of surprised when people don’t want to follow him, because he is so very disconnected. That's my subjective take.

As an academic type, I have to weigh in here. I think the typical American operates from a false assumption that academic = good leader. People who are smart academically are usually the worst at operating anything more complicated than a coffeemaker, understanding technology, or dealing with people. Their strength is in sitting in a library by themselves, teasing out the subtleties of a problem--not in deciding, fixing, or leading. Obama's dithering on Afghanistan is a typically academic approach to a decision, and, as is also typical, there IS no decision.

In engineering school, we often say that the student with a high GPA will make a great professor, but the student with a C average usually ends up being a great engineer. That's why I never get too caught up in politicians' grades. Better a Sarah, who was determined to finish her degree and did what was necessary to earn it, than an Obama who seems to have floated effortlessly, (although it's interesting that we are not able to see HIS college records) right to a position in a prestigious university. Sarah knows how to get something concrete done and can talk to people on a level they understand. She connects with people, and that's a trait found in a good leader. Obama--there's no THERE there. In many ways, HE was the incompetent candidate and we are stuck with the consequences of what was an absolutely, astonishingly, massively stupid choice by many independent and Republican voters.

Sarah Palin may change the world, or at least her corner of it as Margaret Thatcher did. In Thatcher's case people in the UK all knew they were deteriorating into a bankrupt failed state, but weren't motivated enough to care. Thatcher changed that. Palin will have to articulate her clear vision once more and bypass those within the media that fear and hate her. The blogosphere is slowly putting paid to the MSM's stranglehold re global warming/climate change. It may well be Palin's key to the door.

If Palin were a pro-choice politician the Dems would claim her as one of their own. We're the party of strong women blah blah blah. But no women can ever rise to the top of the D party if they are pro-life.

To the media elites, Harvard = smart. The dumbest lawyer I worked with was the one that put in his calender that he was firing his secretary on Friday. The same calender his secretary checked each morning and thus found out a week ahead of time. And he was a Harvard Law grad.

He's still probably smarter than Obama though.

Dear Robert: One of the most eloquent of the Palin haters is your good friend and fellow pro-Israel conservative blogger, Debbie Schlussel.

Robert, you and Karen asked "What's to hate?" and then answered it: "She's imbued with classic American values".

We have a POTUS and his admin. that hates American values, would give us Marxist redistributive schemes, mixed in with the tactics of the Corleones, elitist Leftists who really do believe with all their hearts that America is to blame for all the world's woes, who live in a world of moral relativism where little is barred if it's stupid. They also love POWER and are running a kleptocratic oligarchy of whackos.

Palin represents the rest of us. She may not be perfect, but who is? Reagan was written off as a dunce. Yeah, he had warts too, but did anyone every feel he was out to be a traitor to the US? I feel that with Obama all the time, and much more so since he swept the investigation in the Senate about the Ft. Hood killings and moved the KSM trial to NYC.

The fact that Debbie Shlussel doesn't like her...so what? And Jack, she's a polarizing figure for a number of reasons. She refused to play the same games in the Alaska world of politics, and threatened the entrenched interests. She is among the first, but hopefully, only the leader of a wave of these embedded morons of both parties who have been far too long ensconced in power and reap all the graft and corruption from those positions. She refused to go along with her, so she's been reviled for that. She threatened the power structure.

But once McCain took her on...we know that the polarization took place because McCain's own stooges basically sabotaged her. Yes, she needs to learn more and be "seasoned", but she was reviled out-of-the-gate by the great intellectual Marxists...I mean, elites...who think they run our country.

So who did she polarize? The old school Republicans, the cronies, the ones that were (almost) as bad as the Dems? Who cares? She polarizes now because they FEAR her influence, so witness the sickening-but-hiliarious attempts to twist her book and the tour, such as the Newsweek hit piece and cover, the AP putting 11 attorneys on to her book to try to ferret out problems. this is almost unprecedented widespread attempt at political assassination.

So whos' really polarized by her?

Obama is...what...a uniter? Well, he is. More and more of my coworkers who voted for Obama are now fully admitting to me, and vocal about it, how they were fooled and wrong. Buyer's remorse. Some have said they have come to believe in conservatism (these were lifelong liberal Dems). Some would now vote for Palin, or at least want to read her book and see more of her. They realize that Palin was lied about and how corrupt the current regime is, and so want to make up their own minds with better evidence. They refuse to believe the MSM and the Obama admin lies about Palin.

Sorry for the length, but I don't know if Palin would be a great president or not, but the savagery and stupidity of the attacks on her have made me sick. I personally think she'd be excellent as President, but precisely because of what Robert wrote about her: American values.

I think Robert's point that the attacks on Palin really reveal more about her attackers is right on point.

The cruel teasing and angry attacking of Palin is uncalled for because she's never been a firebrand conservative like Rush is or Jesse Helms was, etc.

The attacks on her have never been about her policies or positions.

They are all about her family, her speaking style, and her background; all the kinds of prejudices the Left is supposed to be virulently against.

In other words, the Left and the news media broke all of its supposed own rules to attack someone different from them. The best defense of this behavior that I have heard is that: "well, she's a lightweight." That's really not an excuse.

This reminds me of my days at Columbia. The students at Columbia used to always talk about how bad prejudice and racism were, etc. etc. But almost all of them had NO PROBLEM publicly denigrating the football and basketball players.

The reasons for that trashing were the same reasons that the Left attacks Palin. Athletes who are burdened with the same courses, (sorry, no B.S. "jock majors" in the Ivies), and all the extra time needed to attend practice and still manage to graduate and do well in class make geeky intellectuals realize how little they can actually do. Pretty women with families and political moxie make most feminists and political intellectuals realize they really "ain't all that."

I really liked Ma-Cain and Pallin. My values are perhaps somewhat Conservative but I think I simply liked them as people. I was very sorry that they did not become President and Vice President. I guess America, and Western Civilization will just have to go into hiding for a few years until the sun shines again

SP does not suffer from the degree inflation and grade inflation that has been passed around academia for the last few decades. Naturally, this will be frowned upon by many of the central planners in the WH with advanced degrees from schools that may be relying more on past reputation than character. I think many will come to see her as honestly trying hard which may prove to be enough or may not. I hear in her new book she points to two mentors, Ronald Reagan and God. Talk about cornball! But with SP it may just be somewhat true. I suspect many voters may come to believe that Sarah will try her best which may give her considerable influence in an era where voters seem to be quite justified in being cynical about the professional political class.

I agree with Robert at the top of this page....Palin is a polarizing figure and IN MY OPINION the bad outweighs the good. I would not vote for her. Period, I just would not...and I have thought about it thoroughly.
I also thought she seemed kind of crazed and manic on OPRAH. the entire thing with LEVI, HE IS LOVED, HE IS INVITED was SO disingenuous. I don't think Palin is stupid, I just think she thinks WE are.