The Real Terrorist in Campaign '08

The "new" GOP giveth family and societal values with the one hand while doing everything they can during campaign season to tear them apart with the other. It's become far too sickening to stomach, and like the worst throwuppy virus, apparently we have now come to the part of the illness where the dry heaves make an appearance in the form of female, highlighted hair, high-heel jackbooted Sarah Palin.

John McCain, despite the fog of his apparent dotage, somehow got the memo mid-summer that the country was fed up to the gills with Republican shenanigans, and so he and his advisory band of GOP lobbyists and party hacks, in a desperate effort to continue Republican shenanigans, zeroed in on a candidate for vice president who could serve the campaign, after a little tweaking, as their own female (maybe the Hillary's will buy it) version of Joseph Goebbels. They found her all right. She'd just been waiting in the frozen north for her big moment. God said so. He said, "Sarah Palin."

And indeed they did find the perfect woman for the job--the one whose head was already empty enough to have sufficient room available for stuffing to the brim by neo-conservatives with Masters of the Universe talking points. The one whose beauty pageant looks and lithe figure, despite bearing five children she can't possibly have time to care for, would make Joe Sixpack go so immediately Ah-OOO-Gah that his ears would stop working. The one so naturally competitive and ambitious that she would say anything in front of anyone in order to keep her handlers happy and the spotlights pointed her direction.

At this moment, at this time in American history, her performance for the GOP has so far succeeded in making a mockery of all thinking women in politics, and for that matter all thinking women everywhere. That this fact escapes Ms. Palin is evidence of a shallow ability to reason critically. We already had a president like that. It didn't work out so well. And the alternative, that she should know she's being used and not care, would have far more frightening consequences should we find her in the Oval Office some day.

She is, right now, for the GOP, the hottie wind-up doll that is mum or absent during serious interviews with serious journalists but can be tightly wound and trotted out for propping up in front of a microphone at a campaign rally. There she can spew forth the very hatred that has already rent this nation asunder and prevented the serious problems that affect the nation's citizens and families from meeting up with their serious solutions.

To witness her stand before a GOP rally mic and accuse a well-vetted opposing candidate--a Harvard man no less--of being a homegrown terrorist, is to view Ms. Palin apparently acting out a live demonstration of her version of "country first." She spews her venom while her very own Downs syndrome baby is passed back and forth among family members sitting behind her like a ten-pound sack of potatoes, usually landing for care and feeding in the lap of a seven-year-old. I guess that is putting country first. It's just not a country I wish to live in.

Ms. Palin may have been originally hired to try to whip up a feminist frenzy. Failing that, she came in handy to whip up the "there's a terrorist among us you betcha" frenzy. But remove party from the argument for just a second and she still offends every hard-won sensibility it has taken me over half a century as a woman, wife, mother, and grandmother to accumulate.

"Country First" is only a campaign slogan, and apparently not a very good one unless one is only interested in identifying by the rally cries from the back of the Palin crowd, "Kill Obama, kill him!" those most mentally and emotionally feeble among us. Who's really inciting terror here? While Americans and America are in the deepest of trouble, the GOP is vying to get "GOP" added to Webster's Thesaurus under hypocrite.

That a President McCain could die in office and leave such a Christianista in charge of my country and the family I abandoned a career to care for, . . . that such a woman who shows up at campaign rallies at a time when only ideas will save us and detonates the destructive word bombs she wears strapped to her chest and clearly hard-wired to her heart . . . is a scenario too nightmarish to contemplate.

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***It should be noted that the Complicity Award for promoting this campaign of GOP terror goes to the mainstream media who appears to no longer be able to differentiate its collective hind end from a hole in the ground. The merriment of showing over and over and over in endless loop the rantings and ravings of a woman whose word bombs are the antithesis of everything she professes to stand for is a societal embarrassment from which it seems we may now never escape. God save us.