Soccer Dad

Like a, er, first time voter

Vin Suprynowicz

What they really mean when they say Sarah Palin is "unqualified" is that she's a regular person who knows what it is to work a regular job and shop at a grocery store, not some bought-and-paid-for ivory tower Washington lawyer in thrall to the Brookings Institution and The Washington Post and the Council on Foreign Relations who thinks National Socialism can still work; we just haven't given it a proper try.

Sarah Palin ridicules federal funding of fruit-fly research, and the other side says she's so stupid she doesn't understand the medical usefulness of fruit-fly research. But she didn't ridicule fruit-fly research. She ridiculed the federal funding of fruit-fly research, which is indeed not authorized by the Constitution -- not even close. Opposing a federal takeover of medical practice and research does not mean you reject the usefulness of medicine.

Andrew Malcolm

So rest assured the online vote at Slate has absolutely nothing to do with all this late-race, trumped-up, empty chatter over media bias in favor of the handsome, eloquent Democrat with the darling family running against the grumpy old pilot who can't use a BlackBerry or play tennis because his arms were allegedly broken so often and then shocked the media by picking as his running mate a Washington outsider, a non-Democrat female no less, who's so opposed to abortion she didn't get one herself.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who senses a certain amount of elitism in objections to Palin.