I'm the original concern troll. Except that I'm not actually a troll -- that's a misappelation, applied by a somewhat dimwitted (and depressingly large) subset of the dKos population that doesn't seem to actually know what a concern troll is.
(Quick lesson: you're not a concern troll if you're sincere. You might be a chicken little, you might be a panicky fool, you might be many things, but you're not a troll, and it's really fucking upsetting to see that word get hurled at anybody who ever actually expresses, um, you know: concern.)
Swennyway, my concernitude goes way, way back to the days of the Reagan administration, to the crucifixion of James Watt for the Unforgivable, Horrible, Very Bad Crime of not keeping up to date on the the latest list of words unacceptable among Earnest Leftists In College.
Watt, for those of you who don't know, was a total fucking nutbar, whom Reagan appointed to Secretary of the Interior. This placed administration of the nation's Parks and Natural Resources in the hands (and brain) of a guy who bragged that he could not imagine why anybody would ever want to go on a hike. Rather more frightening was that Watt was apparently of the sort of religious persuasion that believes God will be disappointed with us at the Rapture if we haven't used up all the good stuff he put here on Earth for our benefit.
Okay? Get the picture? James Watt was crazy, and his particular brand of crazy made him the worst imaginable human being to be in charge of the Interior department. Really.
So. Following what would be become standard operating procedure for much of the next 25 years, the Democratic Senate rolled over and approved the appointment of this fuckface to the Cabinet. WTF were they thinking? Who knows? They don't ever seem to be thinking of much, really, except how to stay all nice and palsy-walsy with the other Senators -- no matter how loathsome they might be -- and how to get invited for lunch at the White House.
"We" did finally manage to get rid of Watt, though. We got rid of him because somebody challenged his commitment to diversity, and he said (some of you more sensitive types might need to have someone replace some of the following letters with asterisks or dashes or whatever it is that you use to pretend you aren't reading what you're reading) that in fact his committee included, "A woman, a black, two Jews and a cripple."
Quick somebody load up the OMG/ONOZ guys.
So, the PC folks jumped and this, and to my considerable consternation they actually managed to drive the man from office. My consternation was rooted in two concerns. The first concern was that this sort of behavior would inevitably come back to bite us. Someday, you could be certain, somebody on our side would be driven from the public arena over some petty and irrelevant infraction. The second concern was that this was not a satisfactory resolution of Watt's appointment. Driving Watt from office over his insufficient sensitivity to the latest fads of decorum in public discourse meant that neither he nor Reagan nor the Democratic Senate nor the body politic ever had to confront the outrage that he had ever been appointed to begin with. It was necessary for the nation's political health that James Watt be driven from office because he was hell-bent on razing the nation from coast to coast in the name of hallelujah holy fucking jesus h christ, a personality defect that singularly disqualified him from the particular office to which Reagan nominated him.
And I have to say, my concerns seem to have been well-founded. From James Watt onward, we have seen both phenomena play out, and play worse, for 25 years: The appointees becoming more and more ludicrous until under W they reach a level of surrealism that would have daunted Magritte (Ce n'est pas un gouvernment); and the purges have become more and more hysterical and bitter, beginning with Jim Wright and running straight through the Clinton administration and into the bizarre accusations that the Death Party managed to stick on Al Gore in 2000.
So let me say this once again: I'm not a fucking troll, and God Damn you if you dare to call me one, because I'm fucking concerned about the fate of this nation, and indeed all of humanity, and my concern isn't some idle game I'm playing to see how much of a foam into which I can lather the body dKos.
So what the hell am I getting at? Here's what I'm getting at: Sarah Palin needs to go down, and she needs to go down hard. But she needs to go down, not because she's corrupt, and not because she subscribes to a nutcase brand of pseudochristian apocalyptic lunacy that James Watt would have found very compelling, and not because she's a wholly incompetent parent, and not because there's some 0.01% chance that she faked a pregnancy in order to cover up for her incompetent parenting, and not because she's a race-baiting hick who insults about 80% of the populace every time she opens her mouth, and not because her swimsuited pageantried rump was insufficiently firm for some people's tastes, and not because she's a horrible person who advocates shooting wolves from helicopters, and very especially, critically, importantly, not because she won't show us her personal, private medical records.
No.
Sarah Palin needs to go down for the simple reason that she is utterly unqualified to be either the Vice-President or President of the United States, and she would be just as utterly unqualified for that office if she were an honest episcopalian whose eldest children were honor students and whose retarded (troll me! I fucking dare you! Yeah! Me and James Watt, together at last!) infant was lavished with continual love and affection and the abundant, intense stimulation required by Down's Syndrome kids to reach their highest potentials and whose BFF was Inuit and whose pageant talent was cracking macadamias with her glutes and who limited her hunting to camera safaris and who even published her personal, private medical records, which are none of our damned business.
Sure, maybe it was a good thing to pile on early after the Republican Convention, just to take the bogus shine off this odious cellulitic lump on the inner thigh of American politics, but that should not have been, and should not be, the long-term tactic for dealing with Sarah Fucking Palin.
And yes, I'm fucking concerned that down the road we're going to lose more than one able candidate because "we" have suddenly elevated Medical History to a sanctified "right to know" status.