For what it's worth, and since everybody's weighing in on the subject, I thought I'd post my most recent opinion column concerning Sarah Palin for your consideration. I know that there's no shortage of verbiage on this subject today, but I'd be interested to know what some of you think.
Firstly, a hat-tip to Kos and Trapper John, who variously informed/reminded me of some of dear Sarah's "qualifications" in their front page posts as I was writing this. Invaluable assistance, and greatly appreciated.
Column is below...
NATIONAL JOKERS
By David B. Livingstone
North Star Writers' Group
Rumor had it that POW poster boy John McCain was angling for elective office, and that all the speeches, posturing, and public appearances over the last several months constituted his attempt at a campaign for the presidency. Evidently, this conventional wisdom was mistaken.
If the cranky and confused septagenerian senator from Arizona is running for anything, it would appear to be the previously-unknown post of National Punchline. With every addled public pronouncement and with every erratic move this Keystone Kops Kampaign makes, McCain ratchets up the absurdity level to new, dizzying heights, leaving thinking Americans rolling in the aisles at the notion of this crotchety Uncle Fester clone occupying the oval office.
The chortles came thick and fast when McCain couldn't remember how many houses he owned, what kind of car he drove, how many millions constituted "rich," or when he posited $50 an hour as the going rate for factory farm fieldhands. Pat Paulsen or Bob Newhart couldn't have done it better. But with his incomprehensible selection of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, McCain's theater of the absurd finally attains the laugh-out-loud character of a Monty Python sketch. Question: "What was John McCain thinking?" Answer: "He wasn't!" Har har har.
Short of choosing Alfred E. Neuman, Hanoi John couldn't have chosen a more hapless and hopeless person to serve as fellow also-ran. A quick rundown of candidate Palin's what-me-worry "credentials" certify her qualifications for the position:
--Mayor of a town of 7,000, then governor for one and a half years. Surely enough precious "experience" to allow her to hold her own in nationally-televised battles of wits and wisdom with Joe Biden.
--Has publicly pronounced as recently as July that she "doesn't know what the Vice President does." Sure to burnish her "Washington outsider" image, placing her on a par with change agent Obama. Sarah, dear? Your new office is in that big, white building on Pennsylvania avenue. Don't worry, the interns will tell you what to do when you get there.
--Began her "reformist" career as governor by bullying and harassing her former brother-in-law out of his job as Alaska state trooper, thereby displaying both her J. Edgar Hoover-esque incorruptibility AND her "family values" creds. A two-fer!
--Continues to advocate the teaching of "creationism" in the public schools, pronouncing that "we shouldn't be afraid of information." Presumably, Alaskan schoolchildren will study Adam and Eve 101 between sessions of Easter Bunny Arithmetic and Cinderella Social Studies, cementing the campaign's acceptance amongst the mouth-breathing flat-earthers who serve as its base.
And -- get this -- the apparent "rationale" for Palin's selection, as arrived at by the best and brightest political minds the Republican party has to offer, is that the presence of a GIRL on the ticket is sure to draw hordes of disaffected, Obama-hating former Hillary Clinton voters. All twenty-nine of them.
Thus John and Sarah's Excellent Misadventure begins, with its final destination being as an absurdist footnote to the beginning of the Obama/Biden administration in future history books. If this was conceived as a colossal national practical joke played upon the American electorate by bored "Saturday Night Live" staff writers, it'd be funny enough, but presented as a vision for the future posed by the national political party once led by Abraham Lincoln, it seems like Chaplinesque bathos. Picture John McCain as "the little tramp," doddering off into the sunset as the screen fades to black with his little circus dog Sarah trotting along at his side.
Whether this leaves you laughing or crying probably depends on which side of the American ideological divide you land on, but the Republican sense of humor has always been underrated. What else could explain candidates Harold Stassen and Bob Dole, or Veep picks Spiro "nattering nabobs" Agnew and Dan "Potatoe" Quayle, all of whom left left America asking "Can they be serious?" With McCain/Palin poised to serve as the Laurel & Hardy of the 2008 season, we finally have an answer: No, they can't.