After our momentous win Tuesday, everyone’s speculating on how our new president is going to build his cabinet. I’ve been watching Fox News in recent months, and listening to Sarah Palin on and off, so I’m betting Obama’s cabinet will be something like this:
Secretary of Defense: Bill Ayers
Secretary of State: Ayman Al-Zawahiri
Secretary of the Treasury: Raoul Castro
Secretary of Education: Jeremiah Wright
Attorney General: Tony Rezko
But seriously. If this lineup looks unlikely, we only have to thank the responsible "journalists" at Fox. And we can also thank the McCain campaign’s late efforts to convince us that Obama is somehow secretly anti-American.
What’s most pathetic to me about all the smears is that many of the people who promulgated them, whether on air or through the Internet, knew they were groundless to start with.
One truth becomes obvious: Our righties have a penchant for pretending to believe things they secretly know aren’t true. If it became politically expedient to believe that the sun rises in the west instead of the east, soon you’d have a documentary on Fox with clips of the sun coming up on the western horizon. And Palin would be spouting off at rallies as follows: "Our opponent will tell you the sun shines on New York every day before the other places in America. I kid you not. And he says it shines on France even before New York!"
Patriotic Americans would be expected to believe this and vote accordingly. And they wouldn’t believe it, not really, but they would pretend to, and some of them would actually go out and vote accordingly.
One of the inspiring things about this election--and there were many--was the relative electoral weakness of these "pretenders." Those who pretended to believe Fox and Palin and Co. were far from what was needed to put a president in the White House. Thankfully most Americans looked instead at their personal financial situation, at our diminished standing in the world, at the overwhelming evidence of climate change--they looked at all this and decided, this time around, to stop playing pretend.
Hopefully we’ve seen the end of the era of the "culture wars." I’m hoping even the GOP realizes this, and that Sarah Palin returns to the nutty marginality she deserves. Qualified to be vice-president? She isn’t qualified to be Governor of Alaska.
And sorry, Fox News: As with most of your other predictions, that Obama "dream cabinet" you cooked up probably isn’t going to happen.
(NB: Apologies to four of the "cabinet" figures named above: I certainly don’t think they deserve to be named in the same list with Al-Zawahiri. Whereas Barack Obama has proven the kind of man who can engage with different views, I think he’ll prove the kind of president who won’t hesitate to take out Al Qaeda leaders when the chance arises.)
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But check out my 2008 Election Limericks!