Palin makes McCain a lot easier to vote for

I'm quite chuffed about John McCain choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. It shows an amount of imagination and nerve that comes as a refreshing surprise. So it's the old man who has the ability to think outside the box, and the young one who is trying to play it safe with the unimaginative choice of another Senator, and a particularly dull and annoying one at that, who is prone to making unforced foot-in-mouth errors. (Inline update: more.)

There has been so much about Palin in all the news outlets and blogs lately that I don't feel any need to write a lot about her here. Althouse has been posting up a storm (a vortex?) about Palin, and that would be a place to start.

Some of the media coverage has been just god-awful. Howard Kurtz's last two Reliable Sources shows have been devoted to Democrats bashing Palin. I was going to say something last week about CNN's Lola Ogunnaike falling for the fake gun-and-bikini shot, but even Gawker has that. So a few quick links:

Transcript of the Charlie Gibson interviews. Mark Levin has some excerpts with emphasis on the editing.

Charlie Martin's list of Palin rumors and smears.

That's like "bad Charlie and good Charlie." It's not hard to tell them apart.

Sarah Palin Sexism Watch.

Bill Whittle at NRO: "Sarah Palin has done more than unify and electrify the base. She’s done something I would not have thought possible, were it not happening in front of my nose: Sarah Palin has stolen Barack Obama’s glamour. She’s stolen his excitement, robbed his electricity, burgled his charisma, purloined his star power, and taken his Hope and Change mantra, woven it into a cold-weather fashion accessory, and wrapped it around her neck."

Today's hit piece in the NY Times: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes.

I see nothing wrong with a newly elected executive firing holdovers from the old regime. Things might have gone better for G.W. Bush if he had done a bit more of that kind of thing. I'm thinking of George Tenet and Norman Mineta in particular. "A new broom sweeps clean."

Some of the attacks are so vicious that I would not have believed them if I had not seen them with my own eyes. Don't let the kids see these. You don't want them learning this kind of language.

Heather Mallick: A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention.

Cintra Wilson: Pissed about Palin. "Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain't no woman."

Wendy Doniger: All Beliefs Welcome, Unless They are Forced on Others. "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

There's plenty more of this stuff. It's nasty to look at, but it's encouraging to see such consternation among the Democrats: it shows that they think they might lose.

Update: Confederate Yankee has the the real list of books banned from the Wasilla library. Total number of books removed from the library = 0. By the way: librarians "censor" their collections all the time. Books are acquired or not, and deaccessioned (disposed of, in regular English) as part of the normal course of business. Go check your local library and see if they still have a copy of the thoroughly discredited Arming America by Michael Bellesiles. Mine does, with more in the state system. I have donated books to the local library that have just gone missing, never been catalogued, never seen again. Were they censored? The bottom line is that if the librarian likes a book, it stays; if the librarian does not like it, it goes, or is never acquired to begin with. But nobody had better tell the librarian which books should stay or go! What librarians count on to preserve their hegemony over their little domains is obscurity. Most people just don't care. A librarian is a different kind of creature from an archivist, whose goal is to preserve everything. Librarians can't do that. In a small-town library, shelf space is precious, and decisions must be made as to which books stay and which books go. When a mayor appoints a librarian, the mayor has to hope that the person she has chosen will not decide to fill the shelves with Harlequin romances, and deaccession the Decline and Fall, even if no patrons check out the Decline and Fall from one decade to the next.

Another update: Eric S. Raymond: Heh — “Read My Lipstick”.

And another update: Plenty of Palin posts over at Sundries.