Vin Suprynowicz

Published in Shotgun News

As this is written, Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain has recently named Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, and the bi-coastal socialist press is going after her like the final frenzied holdouts on some Japanese-occupied Pacific atoll, shrieking “Banzai!” as they level their bayonets and charge the machine guns in their loincloths.

None of this matches what the Democrats actually say, which is that the choice of the “inexperienced” Western governor is such a poor one that the election is now essentially over; John McCain might as well fold his tents and go home.

If that were true, the national big-city chorus of tax-hikers, gun-grabbers and surrender monkeys would currently be patting the little lady on the head and saying, “Oh, how cute.”

So what’s really going on?

I’ve already lost count of the ways the ululating harridans have attacked Alaska’s successful anti-corruption reformer. She can’t be president because she bore a child with Down’s Syndrome instead of aborting him. Because a woman with young children shouldn’t put them through the strain of a campaign for high office. (Would the Democrats apply that rule only to women?)

Her husband reportedly wants Alaska’s federal land turned over to the state (oh, the horror!) and had a DUI some decades back, before they were even married. (I don’t believe the Democrats actually used the phrase “drunken Indian” — the snowmobile champion and union steelworker Sarah Palin married, referred to by Alaskans as the “First Dude,” is one-quarter Yup’ik Eskimo. They also stopped short of actually say a woman still of child-bearing age can’t be president because she might be irritable during “that time of the month,” though they sure went right up to the line. My, how thin is their veneer of Political Correctness.)

Although her daughter plans to keep her baby and marry the father, we’re told Gov. Palin isn’t qualified to run for high office because her teen-age daughter is pregnant. (This from the DEMOCRATS, mind you, who see no problem making it our national policy to subsidize repeat unwed births with your and my tax dollars whether we approve or not.)

Why the desperation?

Because Vice President Sarah Palin would mean Americans could actually end up electing a woman president without tapping a manipulative, soulless, stay-married-just-to-stay-in-power socialist.

How DARE the Republicans threaten to do that? Only the “progressive” party is supposed to be allowed to put the first articulate woman in line for the White House! Why, it’s just like when the Republicans dared to put a CONSERVATIVE black man on the Supreme Court. It’s so WRONG!

Sarah Palin is a gun owner, a Westerner who seems to still understand the core American notions of Freedom and the Frontier, a woman who vetoed a half billion dollars in proposed state spending and “put the government of our state back on the side of the people.”

What these screeching attacks on Sarah Palin are really all about is not a pregnant daughter or a 20-year-old DUI. And the “no foreign policy experience” red herring would have barred Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as well as Barack Obama.

What this is really about is that she is the first everyday American in generations, the first person who is not an Ivy League attorney, not a career Washington insider, not vetted by the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations and the CIA and Ellen Goodman, a person who works her husband’s fishing boat in the summer and drives her own car to work and buys her own groceries, to be given a shot at leading this nation.

And that appears to have a certain element of the political power structure terrified.

Why do you suppose that is?

In a sample letter-to-the-editor which MoveOn.org urged members to forward to their local newspapers Sept. 4, the group lists among Gov. Palin’s “extreme” positions:

“Palin doesn’t believe that humans contribute to global warming. Soeaking about climate change, she said, ‘I’m not one though who would attirbute it to being man-made.”

Wow. You mean these tiny temperature shifts might be, like, cyclical? How “extreme.”

Environmental groups also complain that Gov. Palin opposed a measure that would have blocked development of the proposed Pebble gold mine, which they fear could endanger water purity in salmon-rich Bristol Bay. (Can they name any place anyone has ever wanted to site a mine that wasn’t “environmentally sensitive”?)

Gov. Palin expressed confidence that existing regulations will protect water quality. Alaska voters rejected the “water quality” measure this summer, 57-43, calling it a “mining shutdown” that could not just block the Pebble Mine but paralyze Alaskan mining in general.

Sarah Palin wants to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. She encourages logging, mining, drilling, and fishing. She plans to sue the U.S. government to stop listing the polar bear as endangered.

Democrats, running for office, get their pictures taken in an orange vest and cap, holding a shotgun after someone shows them which end is up. Sarah Palin, described by Newsweek as “a lifelong hunter and strong proponent of Second Amendment rights; a longtime member of the National Rifle Association,” told USA Today in 2006 “We hunt as much as we can, and I’m proud to say our freezer is full of wild game we harvested here in Alaska.” Her favorite food? “Moose stew after a day of snowmachining.”

Her father — famous for a bumper sticker which defined “Vegetarian” as an “old Indian word for a really bad hunter” — shot the grizzly bear whose pelt is now draped over the sofa in her office. Gov. Palin this summer lauded the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision upholding the right of Americans to own guns for self-defense, striking down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns.

“This decision is a victory for all Alaskans and individual Americans,” Gov. Palin said. “The right to own guns and use them responsibly is something I and many other Alaskans cherish. I applaud the Court for standing up for the Constitution and the right of Americans to keep and bear arms.”

Democratic nominee Barack Obama also claimed the court’s Heller decision confirmed his own position on this issue. But that wasn’t true.

My friend John Lott, Jr., author of “Freedomnomics” and a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, wrote in the Aug. 29 Washington Times “Despite all the Democratic claims to the contrary, Mr. Obama is undoubtedly the most anti-gun candidate ever nominated by a major party for president. … Mr. Obama personally voiced support for the D.C. ban. … In February … ABC News’ local Washington, D.C. anchor, Leon Harris, asked Mr. Obama: ‘One other issue that’s of great importance here in the district as well is gun control … but you support the D.C. handgun ban.’ Mr. Obama’s simple response: ‘Right.’ When Mr. Harris said ‘And you’ve said that it’s constitutional,’ Mr. Obama again says ‘right’ and is clearly seen on tape nodding his head ‘yes.’

“But this is not new,” Mr. Lott explains. “Mr. Obama has a long history of supporting city gun bans. The Associated Press described his 2004 vote on a gun control bill: ‘He also opposed letting people use a self-defense argument if charged with violating local handgun bans by using weapons in their homes. The bill was a reaction to a Chicago-area man who, after shooting an intruder, was charged with a handgun violation.’

A candidate questionnaire shows that Mr. Obama supported a ban on handguns in 1996, Mr. Lott reports. In 1998, “he backed a ban on the sale of all semiautomatic guns (a ban that would encompass the vast majority of guns sold in the U.S.) In 2004, he advocated banning gun sales within five miles of a school or park (essentially a ban on all guns sold in almost all the states). Possibly even more importantly, he served on the board of the Joyce Foundation, probably the largest private funder of anti-gun and pro-ban groups and research in the country.”

The Obama campaign “flatly denied” the 1996 statement supporting a ban on handguns, blaming it on a staffer from his state senate race who they said had incorrectly filled out the candidate questionnaire. “But the Politico obtained a copy of the statement and found Mr. Obama’s own handwritten notes on it indicating that he had personally checked and corrected answers,” Mr. Lott reports.

The Reuters News Service reports Barack Obama “Wants tighter background checks on gun buyers, making gun locks mandatory and holding parents criminally responsible for children who injure someone with a gun found at home. Supports reinstating assault-weapons ban. The National Rifle Association, a leading advocate of the right to bear arms, gives him a failing grade of F for his position on guns.”

Republican John McCain? “Opposes gun control, calling it ‘a proven failure in fighting crime,’” Reuters reports. “Opposes waiting periods to buy firearms. Has supported legislation requiring gun makers to include trigger locks with their products. Opposes reinstating assault-weapons ban. Has supported mandating background checks on gun buyers at gun shows. The National Rifle Association gives him an average grade of C for his position on guns but says he has a perfect voting record since 2007 and his grade may be revised.”

A politician like Gov. Sarah Palin can’t save American all by herself. That’s the underlying absurdity of this near-religious frenzy to pick a new Guy On A White Horse every eight years.

But an America that could elect Sarah Palin might still save itself.

That’s why the leftist fans of the police-nanny state are foaming at the mouth. Because they know their guy is just another tax-and-spend socialist; they know his already absurd claim to be the best and only available “agent of change” ran out when he tapped graying political plagiarist Joe Biden — and John McCain decided to roll the dice and go the other way.

Because, with Americans given a chance to vote for a corruption buster who lives gun rights and economic productivity and racial equality in her own life, the chances are now better than even that when gun-grabber Barack Obama awakens on Nov. 5, the song they’ll be playing is “We used to love him, but it’s all over now.”