Rant of the Week

Palin

I never ever dreamed that I would ever see a worse nomination for vice-president than Dan Quayle or Spiro Agnew -- never, ever, ever. 

Here's a list of recent Vice-Presidents:

Lyndon Johnson
Hubert Humphrey
Spiro Agnew
Gerald Ford
Walter Mondale
George Bush
Dan Quayle
Al Gore
Dick Cheney

All right.  There is Dick Cheney. 

I'm sure some conservatives feel that liberals are just picking on Dick Cheney.  They're right: we are.  Probably because he's white.  If he had been black and advocated torturing people, we'd probably cut him some slack.  Yes.

Cheney understood the federal government, having worked in various capacities for several Republican Administrations, unfortunately.  He understood how to get away with invading the wrong country, torture, violations of civil liberties.  Cheney understood better than Bush himself that when the sheriff breaks the law, nobody is going to arrest the sheriff, and if you did, you would appear in court and find out that sheriff's mom was judge.

Quayle was merely grossly incompetent, unprepared, petty and annoying, immature, and unsuited for office.  Other than that he was okay.

And then there is Sarah Palin.  Palin is right about one thing:  in a statement made before she was nominated she said that any woman who accuses her critics of sexism is doing a disservice to the cause of women's success in politics.  But the Republicans were off to the races with their hysterical accusations of media bias before any bias could even have expressed itself.  Thus the immortal Wolf Bitzer, perhaps the most sheep-like national reporter out there, practically sponged himself drooling over Palin's acceptance speech:  "she hit one out of the park".  And I am not a reporter: I am a guppy.

Why have so many people lost their minds so quickly.  Neither Palin's critics nor her defenders knew anything about her before making brash assertions.  The difference is, that the critics were correct --- nobody knows enough about this woman to nominate her to be the second in line to the most powerful office in the world.  And the more we are finding out about her, the more shockingly wrong she seems for the office.

The unseemly embrace of this woman by the entire panoply of right-wing commentators and the nattering nabobs of neo-conservatism, like Dobson and O'Reilly and Limbaugh, borders on the bizarre.  No, it is bizarre.  It's not like they have been touting this remarkable woman for years and she finally got the recognition she deserves.  It's not like they actually knew much about her.  It's more like a desperate mob having been tossed a lifeline.  An amazing lifeline.  Oh, the sweetest, most remarkable, most well-qualified and pure and magical lifeline of all: a hope of winning the election and making those big tax-breaks for the rich permanent and invading Iran and sparing all those Bush Administration officials any kind of investigation -- with teeth-- into the carnage they have wrecked upon the constitution.

Copyright © 2008  Bill Van Dyk  All rights reserved.