This Sarah Palin Thing is Really Galling Me.

You know, I really don't think that John McCain stands a snowball's chance in hell of winning the election in November. I believe that Barack Obama is history in the making and that McCain is a crusty old tax-slashin' conservative who tries not very convincingly to paint himself as some sort of moderate/maverick/thorn in the side of his own party. Yeah, he talks about the environment and the need to end bipartisan squabbling in Washinton, but by now he's backtracked on so many of his former stances like abortion and the religious right, and he voted almost every single time with worst president in the history of the universe, and anyway don't you get the feeling that, like any good conservative, McCain has a permanent hard-on for Ronald Reagan? Anyway, the point is: John McCain is like a moth in the face of an advancing storm, so why, especially after eight years of having the Antichrist in the vice president's office, is it so galling to me that McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate?

If you pay as much attention to the news as I do, then you too have noticed that Barack Obama is black. Moreover, his main adversary in the democratic primaries was a woman. One of these two was going to change history by becoming the first non-white male to win a major party's nomination. How does the Republican party react? By doing as they always do: pay lip service to progress. After all, it's the Democrats who were making the headlines while the Repubicans shuffled out a field of eight tired old men. They had to do something to pump some life into their campaign, right?

Apparently McCain and the Republicans think so little of the intelligence of the voting public that they thought they could choose this unknown governor from Alaska and that we'd mindlessly swallow the idea that she was the one they thought best qualified for the job. I mean, it's so obvious that, in the wake of the despicable Dick Cheney, in the face of all that's happening on the Democratic front, they came up with a list of potential women candidates and chose the most telegenic of them. Did they think a whole bunch of Hillary Clinton supporters would jump ship and swim toward any random female candidate? I think Clinton supporters are astute enough to do a little research and see that Palin is no substitute for Hillary.

Now, all this is not to say I don't think they should have chosen a woman. Sarah Palin may have a great smile, but I gotta believe there were better choices out there.

nwb