My own thoughts on Sarah Palin

I've been blasting this...creature for quite some time, now, and I've been using a bunch of other people's quotes to do so. So following this barb from Kathleen Parker, I'll toss in my own:

"If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself."

Say it, sistah.

All right. I am in no position to criticize women in this country for pulling for one of their own. I respect that. But Sarah Palin is simply a less-qualified version of Hillary Clinton who looks better in a bikini (sorry for the mental image). Clinton at least has all kinds of national ties, had a form of access to the oval office, and saw how the real political world works. And that wasn't enough to qualify her, either. Her record in the Senate proved that she might be a competent Senator, but when it comes to being the leader of a whole campaign organization, she surrounded herself with stool pigeons and shameless dirtbags. Palin has been shielded entirely from talking to anyone spontaneously.

If gender or race were the only consideration, I'd be voting for John McCain. I'm not. Competence has to count, too.

Palin doesn't have it.

She's actually an insult to feminism, in that while she earned her right to be the mayor of Wasilla, and she won the governor's post in Alaska, she was picked for qualities besides whatever inherent skills or abilities she might have.

And I remember what Molly Ivins said about Newt Gingrich in a Rolling Stone piece: nincompoopery has never been a bar to high political office. So just because she won at the local level, where the media attention (let's be honest) tends to not be as good or as critical, that doesn't mean the BS will pass the sniff test of Dave Letterman or anyone else at the national level.

Just look at McCain himself. He's gotten by with being a good guy to have a drink with for all of these years. People deferred to him because of his POW status, etc. while not looking too closely at his political record (Keating Five notwithstanding).

But now that Wall Street is in danger of melting faster than Sarah Palin's ice caps, people are starting to do more than just take a snapshot of McCain's voting record. It's a non-stop prison searchlight. And what people are finding out is that McCain basically obeys anyone who pays him a lot of money to get the government off their cases. Including the latest generation of robber barons.