The Drudge Retort

"Quoth the NYT's Patrick Healy via NY Mag:

"You know what I keep hearing privately from advisers to Hillary? They say, 'Why is it our job to blunt Palin's impact? Hillary is not on the ticket. Obama didn't choose her.' I don't think it's so much about resentment, it's an honest assessment that Hillary can only do so much in this regard. (And she doesn't want to be blamed if this vote doesn't go Obama's way.)

"This really doesn't strike me as a line that Hillary's people should be promoting. After all, she's the one who explained to her supporters in Denver that the campaign wasn't just about her, but about the big issues. If she really believes, as she proclaimed at the Pepsi Center, that 'nothing less than the fate of our nation and the future of our children hang in the balance,' then isn't that worth sticking out her neck for, even if it entails some personal political risk? Now wouldn't seem the time to make a passive-aggressive point because Obama didn't put her on the ticket."

At the Weekly Standard, Michael Weiss delights in the notion that the Dems are depressed:

"As bellwethers of liberal demoralization about this election go, I've not yet come across anything so clanging as the following comment from Hanna Rosin, responding to the phenomenon of Sarah Palin: 'One of my many depressed Obama-supporting friends suggests a tidy solution: Repeal the 19th Amendment.' . . .

"Yes, it's rather moonlight and self-pity in Democratic circles now that the prospect of an Obama administration may not be the certainty it seemed only weeks ago. 'There is a growing sense of doom among Democrats I have spoken to,' the Financial Times quotes a party fundraiser who formerly supported Hillary Clinton. 'People are going crazy, telling the campaign 'you've got to do something'.' . . .

"In his almost jaw-dropping inability to stand up to the revitalized McCain campaign (at least not without allowing it to dictate the rules of every engagement) Obama appears more and more like a hapless professor in a chaotic classroom, the kind who'd love to get to the lesson plan but is reduced to meekly asking everyone to 'settle down now.'"

My nominee for the most over-the-top anti-Palin piece (with a bonus for the most sexual references) is Salon's Cintra Wilson:

"Palin may have been a boost of political Viagra for the limp, bloodless GOP . . . But ideologically, she is their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread, revealing the ugliest underside of Republican ambitions . . .

"As a woman who does not believe what Palin believes, the thought of such an opportunistic anti-female in the White House -- in the Cheney chair, no less -- is akin to ideological brain rape. What this Republican blowup doll does with her own insides in accord with her own faith is her business. But, like the worst and most terrifying of religious extremists, she seems very comfortable with the idea of imposing her own views on everyone else . . .

"The choice of Palin represents what the Christian right is really saying to the women of America. The subtext: It's a Faustian bargain, girls. To elevate your sex to power and respectability, you must first give us the keys to your chastity belt."

Ahem.