GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

Peggy Noonan, now delighted with Sarah Palin:

"The difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick" is pure American and goes straight into Bartlett's.

Yeah, maybe it'll go straight into Bartlett's. But if so, Bartlett's will certainly want to trace the quip to its origin -- and in the course of doing so, the researchers are likely to come across a very similar statement made a long time before Palin's speech:

"Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick."

Whose words are those?

The words of Reverend John Hagee, in his book What Every Man Wants in a Woman.

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Noonan is over the moon about Palin now -- ignore her glee, but please take part of column seriously, and very, very literally:

Which gets me to the most important element of the speech, and that is the startlingness of the content. It was not modern conservatism, or split the difference Conservative-ish-ism. It was not a conservatism that assumes the America of 2008 is very different from the America of 1980.

It was the old-time conservatism. Government is too big, Obama will "grow it", Congress spends too much and he'll spend "more." It was for low taxes, for small business, for the private sector, for less regulation, for governing with "a servant's heart"; it was pro-small town values, and implicitly but strongly pro-life.

... The things she spoke of were the beating heart of the old America. But as I watched I thought, I know where the people in that room are, I know their heart, for it is my heart.

Thank you, Peggy. Thank you for setting us straight.

Sarah Palin isn't the future. Sarah Palin is the past -- the past of Ronald Reagan and (primarily) Jerry Falwell and his ilk in their prime. Her fans get that instinctively, but the McCain people are selling her as the zeitgeist queen of the twenty-first century. They're off by nearly thirty years. Don't be fooled.

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Peggy Noonan remembers the Reagan years, but apparently it's too much to expect her to remember the last few months. She writes:

What [Palin] did in terms of the campaign itself was important. No one has ever really laid a glove on Obama before, not in this campaign and maybe not in his life.

Hunh? Really? Hillary Clinton? Bill Clinton? Maureen Dowd? McCain himself with the "celebrity" ads? Jeremiah Wright? Nobody? Nobody's laid a glove on Obama? Is she serious?

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(Apologies for light blogging today -- the day got away from me and then I had computer trouble....)