Palin hits ground running! Ground shudders as End Times approach

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Here's a story to gladden the hearts of everyone who knows the End Times are just around the corner. Read more....

According to a poll conducted last week by CNN, everyone's favourite average small town Alaska hockey mom and Washington outsider (it says here) has nudged into the lead for....wait for it....the 2012 GOP nomination, with Mitt Romney hot on her heels and Some Other Candidate leaving a pre-meltdown Bobby Jindal carrying the wooden spoon. With a mere 1100-odd days remaining until the primary, this could prove to be a real nail biter.

But wait! What's this?

"So many things will happen between now and 2012 that this poll has no real predictive value," says (CNN Polling Director) Keating Holland.

So what can we glean from this startling revelation (no pun intended), apart from nothing of any political value?

We guess it's that even in these times of tightened belts and "Buddy, can you spare a mortgage bailout?", it's comforting to know that there's one demographic group that will never go short, those latter-day Isaiahs, the pollsters.

Meet the Angry Right, same as the Angry Left

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Back in October, during the final days of the US presidential race, The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal editor, James Taranto, who gets it right quite often, gave us the heads up on rise of the Angry Right, a phenomenon no less unwelcome than its rabidly incontinent left wing equivalent, for all its inevitability.... Read more...

For years this column has chronicled the follies and outrages of the Angry Left. If we are now seeing the emergence of an Angry Right, that is not a good sign for either the country or those on the conservative and Republican sides of the ideological and partisan divides.

Political hatred is not only wrong, it is counterproductive. As we observed in 2005, "one reason Democrats failed to unseat President Bush was that they were blinded by their hatred for him. This made them overconfident, as they mistook their emotions for facts."

Furthermore, expressions of hatred are unattractive to those who do not share the feeling--a category that presumably includes almost all of the independent and undecided voters who will end up deciding the election. For the Obama campaign and its allies in the media, then, the Angry Right's behavior is an opportunity: a chance to make the other side--including the McCain campaign itself--look like a bunch of scary wackos.

À propos of which, The Slinger was saddened, but not surprised, to come across this transparent example of barrel scraping.

The MSM may well have given Obama an armchair ride during the election campaign, but how many undecideds do our colleagues at Conservative Oasis expect to win over to their cause with nonsense like that?

Not to mention this foam-flecked diatribe from Alan Keyes, which went viral about 30 seconds after it was aired.

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On a personal note, it's good to be back after a two year career-enforced hiatus, and good to see how many of the old salts that we used to follow are still putting blinkered ideologues and political chancers alike through the wringer.