OH PRETTY WOMAN

Like many of you, I enjoy reading what the foreign press has to report on American news stories. Especially in light of the Presidential election.  It is a very refreshing change.  I found their comments interesting in light of what some our our press were saying about the Govenor of Alaska. 

Foreign Media Cover Alaska’s ‘Sharp-Shooting Mom’
Thursday, September 04, 2008
By Patrick Goodenough, International Editor CNSNEWS.com

CNSNews.com) – A week ago, most newspaper readers in Britain and Australia -- and in America, for that matter -- had never heard of Sarah Palin. Today, the Republican vice-presidential pick is a household name in those countries, as commentators line up for or against the choice of the energetic Alaska governor

Dominating themes in the coverage include Palin’s background, family and supposed “scandals” – including the pregnancy of her 17-year-old daughter – along with beauty pageants, fishing, hunting and tattoo rumors thrown in for good measure.
 
In class-conscious Britain, some pundits detected a level of snootiness in the left’s approach to Sen. John McCain’s running mate.
 
“Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Mrs. Palin is coming in for both barrels of Left-wing contempt: misogyny and snobbery,” columnist Janet Daley wrote in London’s Daily Telegraph.
 
“Where Lady Thatcher was dismissed as a ‘grocer’s daughter’ by people who called themselves egalitarian, Mrs. Palin is regarded as a small-town nobody by those who claim to represent ‘ordinary people,’” she said.

Pondering the negative reaction to Palin from some elements in the media, Toby Harnden, the Telegraph’s U.S. editor, identified “a certain cultural elitism,” and warned that snobbery about Palin could backfire in November.
 
“For every coastal American who thinks she’s a bit common for the Old Executive Office Building there’ll be a hundred in fly-over territory who believe she’s an ordinary real-life American who has her feet on the ground and, in many ways, isn’t that much different from them,” he argued.

Governor Sarah Palin holds a salmon caught
with her family in the Bristol Bay region. 
 
Criticism of Palin’s political and personal positions are also commonplace.
 
Although The Independent in an editorial said it “suspects that a Republican star has been born,” one of the left-leaning daily’s leading commentators, Johann Hari, launched a sardonic attack.

He took issue with Palin’s global warming skepticism and her opposition to listing polar bears as threatened, saying those stances were “part of a wider lack of scientific understanding: she thinks creationism is ‘a credible scientific theory’ too.”
 
Should McCain die in office, Hari said, “We get Dick Cheney with breasts as president.” (this has to be one of the most disturbing mental word pictures I have experienced in quite some time!!-JohnOh)
 
While declaring herself to be “in awe” of Palin’s achievements and energy, Daily Telegraph columnist Liz Hunt asked, “Just how good a ‘mom’ can she be, given the demands that are being made on her and the demands she is making of herself?”

Gov. Palin gained second place in the 1984 Miss Alaska contest
 
Hunt also wondered whether Bristol Palin had decided to have her baby and marry the father “at such a young age for reasons of political expediency and her mother’s soaring ambition.”

Conservative columnist Dominic Lawson, writing in The Independent, said Palin had “enraged elements of the sisterhood by becoming an active member of the anti-abortion group known as Feminists for Life. Indeed, her decision to continue her fifth pregnancy to term after a fetal diagnosis of Down Syndrome has, for some reason, offended them even more.”
 
(Lawson, the son of a former Conservative government minister, also has a child with Down Syndrome. Following an earlier miscarriage he and his wife refused prenatal testing before the birth of their daughter, Domenica, in 1995.)
 
‘Cultural sneering’
 
In Australia, meanwhile, an editorial in the national daily The Australian took aim at American media’s handling of Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

In their reporting on the issue, the paper said, “newspapers forgot their progressive embrace of different lifestyles and resorted to reactionary intolerance.”

An op-ed by the paper’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, called Palin “the most brilliant, bold, risky, dynamic-changing and consequential choice of vice-presidential running mate that John McCain could possibly have made.”

 
“The left-liberal media in the U.S. are in a panic. And their loyal Australian imitators are regurgitating a stream of derivative anti-Americanism and cultural sneering entirely imitative of their big brothers at The New York Times.”
 
Sheridan opined that liberal commentators want politically-active Christians to look “like Elmer Gantry: dreadful, corrupt hypocrites.”

Instead, “Palin is a happy conservative warrior who exudes vitality and a natural gratitude for all the wonders of life and all the wonders of America.”

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine said the “excoriation” Palin has faced since being named as McCain’s running mate “just goes to show that establishment feminists are only champions of women who subscribe to a narrow set of left-wing positions.”
 
“They despise conservative women more than any man, and civil wars are always the most vicious.”
 
Devine noted that questions were being asked – most prominently by feminist women – about the ability of a mother of five to manage a vice-presidential campaign while giving her children adequate attention.

“But these questions would not be asked of a man,” she said. “Palin is a woman who does seem to be able to do it all, yet feminists don't believe she should. So who is holding women back from the glass ceiling?”
 
“Despite all their contempt for, and dismissal of, Palin, the secular left deep down is worried sick that the McCain/Palin team may well be a winning combination,” argued Australian conservative commentator Bill Muehlenberg.

Two mutually exclusive worldviews are battling it out for the heart and soul of America. One values life, liberty, faith and family. One values statism, secularism and social engineering. These are incompatible worldviews. Thus the stakes are high, and the left is upset – big time.”
 
‘X-appeal
 
Back in Britain, the feisty tabloids are also having their say on Palin, while dedicating a lot of column inches to images of the photogenic governor and her family.
 
In an article headlined “Why Sarah has X-appeal,” the mass-circulation The Sun predicted that “the sharp-shooting mom from the wilds of Alaska won’t go down without a fight.”
 
Another tabloid, the Daily Mail, ended a feature on Palin Wednesday by declaring “for all the skeletons in her gun cabinet, don’t back against the mooseburger-munching frontierswoman bagging a place in history.”
 
“For as [Sen. Barack] Obama himself had to concede, hers is a remarkable story,” it added. “And Americans love nothing better than someone who proves the possibility of the American Dream.”
 
In the Daily Mirror, columnist Sue Carroll suggested a novel reason for McCain’s choice of a “deeply conservative, religious, fiercely anti-abortionist, staunch gun rights campaigner, life-long hunter and death penalty advocate” as his running mate.
 
“I’d have thought it was obvious,” she said. “To annoy the BBC.”
 
And, Carroll added, “at least Sarah Palin will be well placed to deal with Russia – she lives next door.”