Nevada Pundit has the details.

Mighty nice of him, don’t ya think?

Suann Therese Maier over at First Things explains:

…I will vote for Sarah Palin because I don’t need the Democratic platform’s belated affirmation of motherhood. Thanks, but I already know that motherhood is good, several times over. Moreover, the party’s rediscovery of motherhood seems rather cynical in the current news cycle, while Democratic-friendly bloggers and media types bash Palin about her daughter’s pregnancy and her own busy schedule while bringing up children. How can a real sympathy for motherhood come from the same people who wrote a platform that hardens the party’s addiction to a phony right to kill the unborn?

I will vote for Sarah Palin because she has guts. We’ve never met, but I suspect I know something about her life, and so do a great many other women. I know what it means to have a son with Down syndrome. I know what it means to talk a good line about religious faith and then be asked to prove it. I know what it means to have a daughter pregnant and unmarried.

In fact, while we’re on the subject, I also know what it means to have two grandchildren born out of wedlock, a son struggling with alcohol, two grandchildren with serious disabilities, putting myself through graduate school while simultaneously caring for a husband and children and teaching full time—and a whole lot more. This is the stuff of real human love; this is the raw material of family life. And those who think that Palin’s beliefs and family struggles are funny or worth jeering at, simply reveal the venality of their own hearts.

I will vote for Sarah Palin because she is intelligent, tenacious and talented. Nobody made her rise easy, and no one is making it easy now. And—is it only moms who notice this?—unlike Senator Biden, she does seem to act consistently on her beliefs about the sanctity of life, at considerable personal cost.

I will vote for Sarah Palin because she doesn’t come from Washington or New York or Chicago or anywhere else the political and media aristoi like to hang out. In fact, I especially like the idea that the state she governs actually produces something—like some of the oil that powers the hair dryers and klieg lights at MSNBC.

I will vote for Sarah Palin because Roe v. Wade is bad law, and it needs to fall. I don’t doubt the intelligence and character of men like Doug Kmiec, the younger Bob Casey, and others who sympathize with the Obama campaign. But I do doubt their judgment. At the end of the day, the Democratic party in 2008 has conceded nothing to pro-life Democrats. The fact that Sen. Obama listens respectfully to pro-lifers without calling them reactionary dunces does not constitute progress. Results and behavior are what matter. On both those counts, the party has again failed to show any real sensitivity to pro-life concerns. In that light, high profile Catholics who support Obama are simply rationalizing their surrender on Roe.

Finally, I will vote for Sarah Palin, not because I’ve left the Democratic party of my youth and young adulthood, but because that party has left me. In fact, it no longer exists. And no amount of elegant speaking, exciting choreography, and moral alibis will bring it back.

That’s the real tragedy of this election.

A century or so ago, Theodore Roosevelt – one of McCain’s political icons – spoke against the “malefactors of great wealth”. He was referring to those monied interests who distorted the American political and economic system; back then it was captains of industry and finance who felt the wrath of a Republican who believed in business, but not in big business; who believed that government had a role, but must not be a master; who believed – ultimately – in the power and determination of the American people, individual and collective, to overcome all obstacles. John McCain is such a man, and Sarah Palin is such a woman – but added to the titans of industry and finance are the titans of government…people like Barack Obama and Joe Biden who use the money of government to distort the American political and economic system. Last night, the captains of industry, finance and government all felt the wrath of a Republican – and the righteous wrath of a Republican determined that the government of the United States shall be of, by and for the people.

Glued together by the liberal sacrament of abortion, confident of an innate superiority over their fellow Americans, the malefactors of Big Government seek the levers of power so that they can use the government’s money to shape and change our society into something they feel is best for us, because they know better than us. I, too, will vote for Sarah Palin – and, of course, John McCain – because in this entity, McCain/Palin, is the challenge to the status quo…the challenge to those who for too long have power and privilege are theirs by right of their superiority over the common man. John McCain and I have not agreed on all issues, but I am confident that when he is sworn in as President he will daily do battle against the establishment on my behalf…and right next to him will be Vice President Palin, learning the sorry ropes of Washington politics so that she, too, can in her turn know where to dig to get the filth out of politics.

It is a tragedy in this election there is no real Democratic party to contest the election with the Republican party. Once upon a time we had two parties imbued with a love of country – and a basic understanding of common human morality – who could fight like cats and dogs, but who also understood one another, respected each other and, ultimately, fought the good fight for the benefit of all Americans. Instead of a Democratic party, we’ve got Obama and his Democrats – elitist socialists who bear nothing but ill will for the America we know and love…people whom many Democrats will be unable to vote for because their allegedly Democratic platform is nothing but a blueprint for the triumph of the Culture of Death and the enslavement of the American people to an European-style welfare State.

It is, on the other hand, the triumph of this election that we have now got two tickets which clearly show the difference, and will allow the American people to make a clear choice – for me, the issue is not in doubt; we will win, in the end…because truth always overcomes lies, and true Americanism will always rise above the petty, leftist ideologies which periodically wash up, unwelcome, upon our shores.

It is hard to come up with a proper way to describe the vast gulf between McCain/Palin and Obama/Biden. Liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat – they just don’t indicate the real differences. Not in this race, not in 2008.

What we have in this campaign is a fundamental conflict of visions – the vision of those who see America as a means to an end, and those who see America as an end in herself. As in all conflicts, there are similarities and overlaps, but these tend to highlight the crucial differences. To take just one example – in education, both sides, naturally, claim to be in favor of excellent education, but McCain/Palin stands for excellent education at the service of the children and their parents, while Obama/Biden stands for an excellent education to prepare kids to follow the liberal line in a liberal-dominated world. We on our side don’t particularly care what the kids learn so long as they learn it – their side doesn’t care if the kids really learn anything so long as they conform to the worldview of the left. To us a kid turned into a literate communist is at least someone who can eventually read the truth about communism and come to reject it..to them, an illiterate kid is ok if he has absorbed liberal ideology and never thinks to question the liberal elite.

Down the list it goes – apparently similar goals, but goals which have a different, and conflicting meaning. Everyone wants the campaign in Iraq over – we want victory, they are perfectly ok with defeat. Everyone wants energy independence – we want to use all our resources, they only want to use resources pre-approved by environmentalists. Everyone wants high quality health care – we want to empower doctors and patients, they want to empower government. A crucial battle, which will decide what direction we go, and will have ramifications for decades to come.

Right now, all bets are off – anyone who is out there seriously predicting who will win (as differentiated from high spirited, partisan boosterism) is placing a bet more than conducting analysis. The variables are too great in this election, at this point, for anyone to decide with precision how it will come out. This works to McCain’s advantage as the narrative for 2008 was that the GOP was down and out while the Democrats were rising high – and further to McCain’s advantage is the apparent continuance in Obama of a sense of destiny and “its all wrapped up” hubris. I’ve yet to see out of Obama’s camp a realization of just how much of a game-changer Palin and the overall GOP convention have been. Hopefully, this fool’s paradise view will prevail in Obama’s camp until its too late to recover from it. The longer it takes them to grasp the fact that they will have to fight hard for each vote, the better for us.

As for me, I haven’t been this fired up since 1980 – my very jaded political palate is tasting something new in the wind, and it is clear that we’ve got the better people, with the better ideas, with the higher idealism, and with the greater raw courage. This might not be enough to win in 2008, but our time in the wilderness won’t extend any further than January 20th, 2009…and I’ve got a sense in the gut that what happens on that date will be just what we’re hoping for.

All conservatives on fire for Palin, all liberals nervously sipping their lattes about Palin….its a great day to be a GOPer.

Meanwhile, John McCain has the unenviable task of making a speech tonight in the same venue as Palin, and he’s not been the best orator we’ve ever seen. I hope he keeps it low key and conversational, because that is his best style – but that might be difficult to pull off from a podium. Be that as it may, in McCain/Palin we’ve got the ticket which can win and which can change the course of American government…and set the stage for the long-term exiling of the left from American power, hopefully long enough for it to burn itself out and fade away.

But lets not get too far ahead of ourselves – we’ve still got a long, uphill climb and the real fight begins tomorrow. So get ready – but also remember to have fun with this and remember that in the long run, we will win.

The news story:

At a rate of 54 percent, Catholic respondents believe McCain’s choice of Palin would help the Republican ticket, while 31 percent believe it would hurt the campaign. Seven percent believed it would not make a difference.

The Zogby Interactive online poll included 2,020 likely voters nationwide and claims a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.

So much for the Biden gambit – Obama picked the blowhard hack as a means of tricking Catholics into voting Obama. Didn’t work. Back to the drawing board, Obama.

Oh, and Rudy’s right – Biden should get that VP thing in writing. You think the Democrats won’t dump a loser? Ask Toricelli.

In a way Obama and his Democrats can’t stand – with victory:

General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, said declining violence in Baghdad raised the possibility that American combat troops could leave the capital by next summer.

Asked in an interview with the Financial Times whether it was feasible that US combat forces could leave Baghdad by July, he said: “Conditions permitting, yeah.”

His comments come as the US and Iraq hammer out the final details of a long-term security agreement that reportedly outlines a potential timeline for US combat troops to leave Iraqi cities by next summer, and the country by 2011.

“The number of attacks in Baghdad lately has been, gosh, I think it’s probably less than five [a day] on average, and that’s a city of seven million people,” said Gen Petraeus.

While declining to comment on the details of the security agreement, Gen Petraeus said US combat forces had already pulled back from cities in 13 of Iraq’s 18 provinces. The sight of US soldiers exiting Baghdad would be highly symbolic given the scale of violence that gripped the city in 2006 and 2007.

Is that unfair comment? No. Obama wanted the last US soldier out of Iraq on March 31st, which would have ensured defeat…and as Obama thought this was a good idea, he must think that US defeat is a good thing.

You wanted him, you got him, Democrats…are ya startin’ to feel like you’ve been ripped off?

You do realise just how entirely screwed you are, don’t you?

UPDATE, Matt Margolis: Robert Bluey calls Palin “The Right’s Next Ronald Reagan”

The next Vice President of the United States gives her acceptance speech tonight. What does she need to say to answer her critics and keep up the new energy in the GOP?

Will leftwing nastiness play a role in their defeat this November?

When listening to lefties, does anyone besides me get the mental impression of a slavering fanatic entirely unhinged from reality?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

And why is that? Victor Davis Hanson tells the tale:

…along comes someone (unlike Biden’s vastly inflated middle-class biography) who really is from the working class. She likes it—and finds snowmobiling, hunting, fishing and living in small-town America not as a wasteful use of carbon-emitting fuels, cruelty to animals, gratuitous depletion of our resources, or proof of parochial yokelism. Instead it is a life of action in an often harsh natural landscape, where physical strength is married to intelligence to bring us food, fuel, and progress.

Palin’s symbolism is the antithesis of the metrosexual wind- or body- surfing politican, and hair-plugged, neurotic TV pundit So at this time, right now, millions apparently like Palin’s atypical 19th-century profile. Again, it’s a pleasant change of pace from Harvard Law School, DC politics, “community organizing” and the can’t-do, ‘they raised the bar on me’ collective complaint.

If she can beat off the frothing Newsweek/MSNBC/New York Times inbred rabid wolves, and do it with the grace she has shown so far, she will fill a deep yearning among Americans for someone like her. A lot of Americans, if they watch reality shows, prefer truckers on ice or Bering Sea crab fishing to endless psychodramas of thirty-something suburban whiners.

So apparently they are eager to see a rare politican who is unapologetic about America’s past achievements (cf. Obama’s “tragic history” and need for more “oppression studies”), and who reminds us with pride that a muscular world of action, not community organizing, creates the bounty that others use and take for granted but so often sneer at the methods of its acquisition.

Right now, there are millions rooting for her in a way not true of Biden—and many who are criticizing her don’t have a clue why that it is so.

The left also hated – with a white-hot passion – Ronald Reagan. In 2004, when the great man passed away, the left tended to ignore its own savagery against Reagan. To hear some of them tell it, Ronald Reagan was the sort of conservative lefties wished were still around. Of course, the left needs more Ronald Reagan’s like it needs a hole in its head (or, more accurately, yet more holes in their head) – but the reality, for those of us who were adults in the 1980’s, was quite different. Reagan was also compared to Hitler; Reagan was called senile; a fool; a crazed cowboy (any of this starting to sound familiar?); a man who didn’t think about things before acting; a man who was just a tool of evil corporate interests; a religious fanatic; someone who actually hated gay people and other minorities; a hypocrite who spoke of traditional morality but who was divorced and re-married…on and on it went, no slander was too vile for the left to heap it upon Reagan. And, of course, Reagan didn’t give a damn what his critics thought of him and with a grace unequaled in American politics, he deftly dodged the brickbats of the left and went right on to his goal. And the people loved him. Why? Because he was one of us.

To be sure, by the time he became President he was a very wealthy man, but not as wealthy as people like Kerry, Rockefeller and Kennedy are today. But his wealth was incidental – and the result of hard work and personal risk taking. Reagan talked like us; had a life story similar to millions of middle class Americans; went to an unremarkable college where we performed unremarkably academically; worked his way up from the bottom…when I visited the Reagan ranch in 2007 and saw the way the Reagan’s lived away from the bright lights of Hollywood and politics, I saw a house that any middle class American would feel instantly at home in. While a lot of the GOP primary fight this year was argument over who was the most Reaganite, the fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin is Reaganite to the core, and without even having to make an effort at it. Like him, she’s one of us.

The left seems to sense this – sense, that is, that Palin is antithetical to them, able to beat them and – the worst sin of all – entirely unconcerned with what the left says or thinks. The left sees Sarah Palin and quakes with fear…knowing that even if they beat McCain in November, they’ll have Palin to deal with in 2012 and beyond, unless they can destroy her now, right out the gate and not making the mistake the left made with Reagan when they let him alone early on, sure that Reagan’s views would be rejected by the American people. And the worst nightmare, of course, is Palin helping McCain to victory, helping a re-energised GOP challenge the Democratic Congressional majority, becoming – in her turn – the GOP Presidential nominee…and right behind her, the younger Bobby Jindal to carry it forward. The left is reaching for complete victory and feels that they are sure to win in November…and Palin is a threat to that.

Too bad, lefties – not only will you not be able to destroy Governor Palin, but each nasty, vile, slanderous attack you launch just binds the GOP more tightly to her. Palin is the gravedigger of leftwing hopes, and one day Jindal will bury the casket of your dead ideas. You’re time is up, even if you manage to eke out a win in November.

UPDATE: Obama tries to use the abortion issue to respond to Palin being on the ticket…

Scott Ott of Scrappleface nails the contrast between the pro-life side and the pro-abortion side:

Obama Begs Palin: Don’t Punish Bristol with a Baby

As news broke of the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s eldest daughter, Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama pleaded with the GOP vice presidential candidate not to be too harsh with her daughter, who plans to marry the father of the child.

“Gov. Palin,” said Sen. Obama addressing himself to her personally, “you tried to teach your daughter about morals and values, but she made a mistake, and she shouldn’t be punished with a baby.”

As a goodwill gesture, Sen. Obama offered to pay for Bristol Palin’s abortion “at any time between now and the scheduled moment of birth.”

The fundamental divide is over the issue of life…in the end, there’s no other conflict in the United States.