Republicans : Howard Dean Clinton (pick one) :: Democrats : Sarah Palin

Fixed.

Almost no Republican (or Democrat, for that matter) remembers what Dean did while governor of Vermont.

The only thing I can even remotely remember about Dean is "YEEEEEHAAAAAAAWWWW!"

Hm. I don't hate Sarah Palin, but I largely don't like her candidacy on the basis of her unpreparedness and (to be blunt) her being so obviously a sop to the Christian right.

I think if I were still living in the US, I'd probably learn to hate her. Here, I never actually hear her talk, and I only read about her in blogs and the NYT (and in my Canadian paper). If I were in the US, I'd start hearing her on the radio or in ads, and I expect I'd start yelling angry things at the radio before too long.

Being an expat sometimes is much easier.

(But right now I have two elections to deal with. It could be better.)

It blows me away that she can parade her daughter's "decision" to have a child when she'd rather not give that choice to anyone else, for instance.

I keep hearing this thought, and it keeps bothering me.

If you start from the premise that "Doing X is Wrong and should be Illegal," why is is wrong to simultaneously praise an individual for deciding not to do X when they have the legal right to, and also to fight to make X illegal?

I don't agree that the X in this case (having an abortion) should be illegal, and I gather you don't either. And I have no problem with objecting to Palin on the grounds that she does. But given that she does, the rest doesn't seem at all hypocritical to me.

Hmm... true. But I think the fact that the issue is controversial is relevant. Even if you believe that abortion is murder, and believe that everyone should agree with you, it's still true that a lot of people don't. A lot of people in Bristol's shoes would have had an abortion, and that does make it noteworthy that, given the choice, she made THAT choice. From Palin's perspective, that reads as being praiseworthy and prideworthy that Bristol made the RIGHT choice on her own, even if you think she shouldn't have been ALLOWED to make the wrong choice.

If lots of people DID go onto Facebook and drive their neighbors' kids to suicide - if there were a strong culture of doing that, and national figures who advocated it, and some people thought you should learn how to pretend to be a cute boy on Facebook in school, and you knew it happened all the time - I think then you might very well feel more pride in your friends for not doing it in a culture that makes it seem okay.

To propose a different example: hypothetically, I think you might talk about how proud you are that your daughter didn't go out and get stinking drunk on her 21st birthday, for example. Lots of people do, and she didn't. And you might say even if you think it should be illegal for her to do it - for a few years last century it would have been.

Okay, I haven't heard or read Palin's actual statements on this subject, so I might be speakin ex recto here. If you care enough to point me at a source of her actual statement, I'll look, and retract what I say here if I'm actually wrong. (I did a very quick search myself just now but all I was finding was short quotes taken out of context.)

But I'm finding it improbable that Sarah Palin "felt it was appropriate for her underage daughter to decide whether or not to have an abortion" (emphasis mine). It seems much more likely that she felt it was appropriate for her daughter to decide not to have an abortion. She's proud of her daughter for making the right choice on her own - that doesn't mean in any way that she would have felt it was okay for Bristol to make the other choice.

"I'm glad you choose to obey the rules. If you didn't, you'd have to be punished." That's a perfectly valid and even common sentiment, I think.

Have you ever seen a TV drama where there's a protagonist pointing a gun at someone, ready to murder... and then they decide not to do it, drop the gun, do the right thing? I can't think of a specific example off hand, but it seems like a scene I've seen dozens of times. Usually there's an authority figure standing nearby, quietly saying "Don't do it. Give me the gun. Don't become a murderer," and waiting for the protagonist to make his choice. Does our happiness that he decides not to become a murderer imply that it would have been okay if he had decided to kill? Does it imply that we think murder shouldn't be a crime? I don't think so.

Act 60 is enough to remember. I lived in Vermont under Dean, I am very glad y'all decided not to try to foist him off on us as a choice for the US.

From what I've heard about how she governed in Wasilla and in Alaska at large, Sarah Palin sounds like she's a pretty big colon. :-)

And that was kinda what I was trying to say... it's more of a Dean-level dislike of someone who was unheard of, but clearly way too {liberal,conservative} to be a mainstream candidate. But someone who could be picked as a VP candidate to appeal to the wacko far-{left,right} base.

Though Dean (in my opinion) was way less liberal than people made him out to be at the time, back in '04.