Sarah Palin. Jesus. Several of the bloggers I read on a regular basis have suggested we just ignore the gal. She’s a non-entity, and doesn’t deserve the press she’s getting, so don’t play to it. That seems to be the gist of the argument. Last night, however, I got a short email from MrJames, saying, “It surprises me that your coffeehouse blog has been so silent on the Sarah Palin issue(s). I would have guessed that you’d be all over that shit. What? Too much? Too easy?”
     To which, my answer is: Yes.
     I think the thing that galls me the most is that Sarah Palin seems to be so much more popular than Hillary Clinton. Now, I wasn’t much of a Clinton supporter, for a lot of reasons. I don’t care for the woman’s politics, she voted for the war in Iraq, and I just don’t like the idea of another Clinton in the White House. I don’t think any family, Bush, Kennedy, Clinton, whoever, should have a dynasty. This is America, and we don’t do things like that. We’ve had nothing but Bushes and Clintons in the White House almost since I can remember. Let’s do something different.
     Be that as it may, at least Clinton had some job experience. She’s been a senator for several years, has traveled the world, knows how to talk to other leaders, has an education, and, if that’s what we had to vote for, I would have voted for her happily, because at least she could have got the job done. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has even less experience than Obama, actually is a nutty fundie, as opposed to Obama just being rumored to be one (he’s a muslin, remember) and, so far as I can tell, appears to be getting by solely on her looks.
     She’s pretty. So she’s popular. It drives me nuts.
     Seriously. If I hear one more asshole call her a “MILF”, or my absolute favorite, a “GILF”, I’m gonna fuckin cut someone. So you wanna fuck her. That’s a great goddamn reason to vote for someone, almost as good as voting for some asshole because you feel like you could have a beer with him in the bar. Seriously, people. Get your heads out of your asses. I’m more qualified to run the goddamn government than she is. At least I have management experience!
     Let’s review. Sarah Palin:

• City Councilor for four years, and mayor for six years, of a town with a population of less than 10,000.
• Both her tenure on the council and in the mayorship were rife with abuses of power. Sure, she cut some taxes, but she left the town heavily in debt, and fired a bunch of people for the sole reason of supporting her opponent.
• She sat on the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission for less than a year, and then resigned with a drama-queen flurry of accusations, saying her fellow Republicans lacked ethics. To be fair, they probably did, but to say she stirred up a publicity storm that fell in her favor over the issue would be putting it somewhat mildly.
• She’s been governor of Alaska for a little less than two years. During that time, she’s supported drilling in ANWR, put a government plane for sale on eBay, where it did not sell (she’s insinuated it did). Instead, she ended up selling it to another buyer for less than what it cost. She claimed she stopped the “Bridge to Nowhere”, which is complete and utter bullshit. She fired a guy solely because the guy wouldn’t fire her ex-brother-in-law, and she’s still being investigated for abuse of power over that stunt.
• She supports teaching creationism in schools, is anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, supported a bill to deny government health benefits to same-sex partnerships, and is a global warming denier.

     Folks, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. (Insert your own Alaska puns here.) But she’s pretty, so she gets a pass on this shit?
     Well, I suppose that’s not strictly true, as the media has delicately and (very) quietly mentioned a couple of these points. Mostly, though, they’ve been standing around beaming while the rest of you all Photoshop Palin’s head onto models’ bikini-clad bodies and waxed poetic about the whole “sexy librarian” look. And. Um. You guys want to put her a heartbeat away from the presidency on all this. For fucksake, she only just left North America for the first time in 2007, to go to Kuwait and Germany. That’s it. That’s only one more country than I’ve ever been to!
     ETA: My website appears to hate the “Funny or Die” video format for some reason, so I won’t embed it, but you should go check out this video on Sarah Palin. Funny, and correct.
     R-ETA: And while I’m at it, go read this, too. Jefferson has a better point-by-point list than I do.

     (Sources: Sarah Palin’s Wiki page. Actually, go to the bottom, and look through the page’s sources.)

Playing the Popularity Game:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.