Sarah Barracuda

Lisa Schiffren has a great piece up at City Journal, analyzing the wildly successful Palin speech from Wednesday night and explaining the reasons it was so terrific.

And no, it was not shrill.

You know what they say about opinions; everybody's got one:

• Roger Simon says that Joe Biden will look like hackopathropus erectus next to Palin. (I would have said 'antediluvian apparatchik', for the alliterative effect, but that's me.)
• Katherine Miller at The Next Right has a comprehensive but concise overview of the speech.
• Ed Morrissey liked the speech.
• John Fund at the Wall Street Journal writes that Palin may be a "future Margaret Thatcher", which I suppose isn't as bad as people saying that Barack Obama is the second Abraham Lincoln. Considering that 600,000 Americans died in a civil war during the administration of the first Abraham Lincoln, I'd just as soon not be around for his second coming.
• The Washington Post looks to have pretty good coverage of the speech. I only read the first page, though.
• Oh, and the Boston Herald doesn't like the way Sarah Palin does her hair.

Update: Michael Tomasky gives a fair take from the left at the Guardian (!), and then faces cuticle-bursting rage from the commentariat. To quote one of the enlightened, "As for Palin, she is a bell weather [sic] for the mental state of America. If she helps win the Presidency for McCain, then America gets the trailor-trash [sic] hick veep it deserves. Its [sic] not as if its [sic] the first time America has had a really nasty, unpleasant, and intolerable woman in high office." Or married to someone in high office, I might add - there does seem to be a fair amount of projection being directed at Palin.

Wow. I'd say that was a pretty damn good speech.