The Candidate and The Mayor of Simpleton

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So with Sarah Palin we are getting more of the same thing we had with Bush: a public servant who is anything but public. We elect these people and then they are handled half-to-death by those who are really running things behind the scenes. Bush hasn't made a truly public speaking engagement ever since the wars began. He has only appeared in extremely controlled situations where there hasn't been any sort of opposition to call him out on his policies. The only audience the Bush people have allowed to hear him speak are military groups, civilian defense contractors, or right-wing propaganda mills (otherwise known as “think tanks.” I hate that name for groups who do very little thinking). And forget about Dick Cheney; he hasn't come out from behind the curtain—if only to snarl—in so long we've almost forgotten about him completely. These are elected officials acting like despots.

And now we have Sarah Palin. She seems to be almost completely a figment of the conservative imagination: a loving mother, a maverick elected official unafraid to take on the powers that be (curious since “the powers that be” are the folks in her own party), morally steadfast, a proud defender of America, and—because we are in the TV age—hot. She is being treated by her handlers as if she were some Saudi princess who cannot have contact with anyone outside of her immediate family. In her two interviews with the twin morons of Hannity and Gibson she has yet to offer anything but the most puerile thoughts on the position she may soon fill.

I really appreciate that The Daily Show is absolutely the only news source that takes the piss out of what we are being presented as news, but Fox News is too terrifying in its scope and they don't give a shit about what the little TDS thinks of their maneuvering. Plenty of Americans seem all to willing to accept this completely mediocre woman as our next vice president. Why wouldn't they? They have already accepted far less in the case of the current White House resident.

I tried to watch the entire Fox “interview” on youtube but I guess my stomach isn't as strong as it used to be. I used to be able to drink cheap tequila right from the bottle but I couldn't get past Palin's moronic homilies on the wonders of our all volunteer army or how America cannot retreat from Iraq. Listening to her regurgitate what her handlers have shoved down her throat these past couple of weeks made me realize that I'd be afraid to have her substitute teach a seventh grade English class because of the damage she could do to their young minds. Yet McCain and company are serious about making her the vice president, and a quick glance at the actuarial tables points also to her likelihood of soon thereafter becoming president.

Who can say where this farce will end, a play that begins with Sean Hannity masquerading as a journalist and Sarah Palin pantomiming the role of vice president? Part of the reason that George W. Bush was ushered into office was the way the Right took the sworn testimony of Bill Clinton when the former president played about with the meaning of one word. They took Clinton's disingenuous self-defense and they manipulated it into an object of tremendous outrage. Bill Clinton was a liar and they had the proof. It didn't matter at all to them that what was at the heart of the Clinton perjury was completely fatuous and without the least bit of consequence to the American people. The lies of the Republicans in the Bush White House are well documented. These lies have led us into wars costing thousands of American lives and perhaps well over 100,000 civilian lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the monetary costs. Has it been hundreds or thousands of billions of dollars? Once you get that many zeros behind a number it really is too much for most human minds to fathom.

And now their lies have sprung to life in the form of Sarah Palin, their most creative untruth thus far. She is a woman who lies so comfortably that you wonder why she would bother to ever tell the truth (since the truth for them seems to be so painful). She will fit right in with her new owners. She is already paper trained and eager to learn.