Palin did a tremendous job last night: one of the best VP speeches I’ve ever seen. She’s the real deal.

Very quickly this morning, because I don’t have much time to write this –

I agree with Peggy Noonan’s column today in the WSJ. Palin is so good that the Democrats are going to bring out the nukes against her. Be prepared to fight, because Palin is a lot more than just the Governor of Alaska and John McCain’s choice for VP. I’ll elaborate on it later, but Sarah Palin is the antithesis of the liberal elite/coastal elite definition of feminism. Particularly because she’s so comfortable in her skin and so obviously competent without the need for therapy (as one of the livebloggers put it last night, she’s a “natural”) and because more than anything, she exudes confidence as the mother of five children and a Conservative NRA member, that can mean only one thing.

SHE MUST BE DESTROYED, BEFORE SHE STARTS A MOVEMENT.

[Update: If you'd like to get a foretaste of what the next 60-odd days are going to bring, think Lawrence Summers at Harvard, except amplified through a set of Marshall stacks, and aimed straight at Palin and everything she stands for as a woman. The reason? She's a healthy person, that means that in order to deconstruct her, they're going to try to make her look sick.]

Noonan nails it here, (scroll down past the apology for what she’s blowing way out of proportion trying to apologize for it) and that’s what Palin is going to face in the next few days. Noonan, I think, is saying it with a wince because she has her ear to the ground and knows what Palin represents to the Beltway/Boshwash set particularly. It’s going to be a full-on, full-tilt teardown coordinated from the center of the Culture Wars. John McCain has just reignited them, bigtime.

Sarah Palin is many, many things and I have another column on them coming later. But more than anything else she has the potential to serve as the strongest counterpoint to the currently dominant postmodern liberal culture that this country has seen in the past 30 years. She’s quite literally their antithesis on a number of levels and that means they’re going to hit her with everything they have and then some.

Get ready to fight, because she’s going to need our help.

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

She could become a transformative political presence.

So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.

And it’s going to be brutal. It’s already getting there.

There are only two questions.

1. Can she take it?

Will she be rattled? Can she sail through high seas? Can she roll with most punches and deliver some jabs herself?

2. And while she’s taking it, rolling with it and sailing through, can she put herself forward convincingly as serious enough, grounded enough, weighty enough that the American people can imagine her as vice president of the United States?

I suppose every candidate for vice president faces these questions to some degree, but because Palin is new, unknown, and a woman, it’s all much more so.