Enough already! I thought the end of the election would bring an end to the incessant fascination with the least fascinating politician out there: Sarah Palin. Get over it, horny Republicans! She’s not that interesting.
I didn’t think she was all that interesting from the start. As far as young, photogenic, female Republicans go, Condoleezza Rice, you could argue, is more interesting, because she is fairly smart, and even though she is the most over-rated politician in the U.S. Or was the most over-rated politician in the U.S. until Sarah Palin came along. Wait. All right, maybe Condoleezza Rice really isn’t that interesting.
So you think Sarah Palin is so hot? Why? Come on. What special qualities does she have that make her unique and interesting? Interesting ideas about the economy? Interesting ideas about the arts? Interesting ideas about leadership? Interesting ideas about energy? Interesting ideas about a single bloody thing on the entire planet? I didn’t think so. Interesting personality? In what way?
So all there is, we admit, sigh, are the looks. She is a relatively hot 43-year-old hockey mom. Bravo. There is a clip on Youtube of her in a red bathing suit competing in a beauty pageant. This, evangelical Americans tell us, is an asset.
So what it comes down to, really, is that she has become “interesting” because she received so much media coverage that people became curious about this person who was receiving so much media coverage. In other words, she became a celebrity: someone who is well-known for being well-known.
So McCain made the biggest strategic blunder of any recent political campaign and she hurt his candidacy and hurt his credibility and completely annihilated his argument that only people with the proper experience should run for high office and she ran a smarmy campaign about “real” Americans who could be white or gun-owners or embittered, clinging to their religion of Opieism (that the real America is Andy of Mayberry’s homogenous rural Aunt Bea-America), afraid of them, afraid of change, and lost.
The million dollar question is– why is she still here! Why is she still in the news? Who cares about her views on anything? She is a proven loser, and a proven dingbat who never belonged on the world stage.
And that’s why I hope she stays there, in the spotlight, the darling of the pro-life evangelical right. If the Democrats are really, really lucky– if God really blesses them, as I think he will– Sarah Palin will be the Republican nominee for 2012. And the Dobsonites and the other “values voters” will be ecstatic, and maybe we will finally have an election about those so-called “values”, and just maybe a resounding message about small-minded bigotry will be delivered at last.
Incidentally, in Colorado, a pro-life ballot initiative– a real measure of just how “mainstream” these values voters are– failed with 73% of voters rejecting it. Astonishingly, the organizers plan to take the same strategy– redefining “personhood”– national.
On Values Voters – Colorado’s Pro-Life Amendment 48
Kind of a weird site on the Colorado initiative… [down]
The site suggests that this is a scientific debate, not a “political” debate, and that science absolutely “proves” that life begins at conception. Of course, science also “proves” that the world is billions of years old, the earth is warming, vaccines work, and man descended from monkeys, and I would guess that most of the supporters of the Amendment 48 might have a problem with that science… and probably have a problem with science, period.
In spite of Kristi Burton’s attempts to secularize the debate and disguise it’s religious origins, the song playing in the background of the first video contains the lines, “Let it be said of us/that our hearts belong to Jesus”.
What would probably help these initiatives more than anything else? If the Republican Party became pro-choice. That’s the only way you could even begin to persuade mainstream America that abortion is something other than a wedge issue to attract gullible evangelicals to support tax cuts for the rich and subsidies for corporations and deregulation of toxic industries.