Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Sometimes, you can judge a policy by the company it keeps. Who opposes Barack Obama’s expansion of the number of American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan? Progressive organizations like CodePink and United for Peace and Justice.

Who supports Obama’s decision to escalate? Right wingers like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin.

Don’t let D.C. Democratic leadership snowball you. The Afghanistan war escalation is anything but progressive.

Yes I know she is only running for Vice President, but lets face it McCain is old and she is devious.

I have been reading as much as I can about Sarah Palin and frankly I am scared that the McCain/Palin team might actually win this election.

The main thing that scares me is the way she presents herself, even when she is hunting for a way out of the wet paperbag during interviews, she comes across as that attractive woman everyone knows from work, the library or coffee shop that seems intelligent but slightly ditzy in a cute 1950′s young wife stereotype kind of way.

That kind of woman has a serious advantage in the normal male to female and female to female dynamic in that most people don’t look past the ditz to see the danger. Others discount her ability to make choices, plans and enemies. People often believe that women like her are harmless and can be controlled. This may seem sexist, but it is just a facet of our current social environment. Like racism and homophobia, sexism dies hard, particularly when people are not even aware they are doing it.

Sarah has somehow managed to convice her supporters (most of republican party and many Hillary supporters) that her tenure as Mayor was a success and that leaving a town of 5k to 7k people with a 20 million dollar public debt, no sewers but a great sports complex makes her fiscally conservative and trustworthy steward of public interest. Forget the fact that Wasilla, AK had no debt when she took office, their annual budget was about $3 million dollars less when she got there than when she left and that she had implemented a personal jihad against those that stood up to her.

They seem to willingly overlook the fact she has admitted, proudly I might add, that she demanded the written resignations of all the top officials when she took office “as a demonstration to my administration”. Since when to public officials in the United States take an oath of fealty to the incumbent?

There has been some controversy over whether she wanted to ban books from the Wasilla public library. Sarah claims that she was only having a “rhetorical discussion” with the head librarian and she would never support banning books. This is an amazingly strange “rhetorical discussion” to have with anyone, much less a librarian, particularly one from whom you have demanded a letter of resignation to show loyalty to your administration. It is also peculiar timing that this “rhetorical discussion” occurred during a time when the church she attends regularly was in the midst of a petition drive to ban books in the public library, the school and in local book shops. The church apparently is not willing, yet, to claim their petition was only a rhetorical one.

I could repeat all the rumours and conspiracy theories here, but I will leave that for others to do. I just want people to think clearly about this woman and her abilities to misdirect attention.

Another great example is the GOP machine and Sarah backers who keep claiming she is enormously popular in Alaska. Funny thing is most interviews I have found with “regular citizens” pretty much declaim her as one step above a feudal lordling with an axe to grind. Not what I would deem popular by even the broadest standard.

So please do us all a favor, read up on her, seperate the wheat from the chaff, then go out a buy a snake to handle while you pray that the witch known as Sarah Palin flies away on her broom.

Hi, I’m God. You probably have seen my show on QVC, where I sell Tupperware and collectible figurines. Most people don’t know that I also work part time as a political consultant, though.

In fact, I was hired a few months ago by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. She wanted some advice on a natural gas pipeline. I told her absolutely not to approve of it, that it was against my will.

But did Sarah Palin take my advice? Oh, no. She got up in front of the Wasilla Assemblies of God church and proclaimed that the natural gas pipeline is the will of God.

I think it’s time to set the record straight, which is why I made the following video podcast. People deserve to know the truth about Sarah Palin, I think.

Woo hoo! The more I look at Sarah Palin’s political record, the more it looks like a political fun house… or a mad house, maybe.

Now it turns out that Irish blogger Maman Poulet managed to catch Sarah Palin in a big fat lie that the mainstream media never even bothered to check out.

Sarah Palin said that she had lots of foreign policy experience because she had been to Ireland, Germany and Kuwait. Better revise that, GOP. It seems that Palin wasn’t being honest about the Ireland part.

Maman Poulet discovered that Sarah Palin’s supposed trip to Ireland consisted of a layover of an hour or two in a sequestered part of Ireland’s Shannon Airport when her plane on the way to Kuwait stopped for refueling. Does that count as visiting Ireland, and having foreign policy experience there? Sure, if you’re running for Vice President of the Wasilla High School Student Council.

It’s a shameless padding of Palin’s resume that indicates more about her lack of experience than about her qualifications to succeed John McCain and become President of the United States.

The Republicans say that Sarah Palin should be elected Governor because she has executive experience – although it’s in very small communities. Sarah Palin has had experience running a business, however. She was the partial owner of a car wash in Anchorage, Alaska. Together with her husband, she held 40 percent of the car wash’s ownership.

And how did Sarah Palin do with the executive experience of running a small business? Lousy. She ran the business into the ground because she couldn’t be bothered to keep up with paperwork. Sarah Palin failed to file legally required reports or to pay the state licensing fees for the business, and so the car wash was shut down.

In addition to the car wash, Sarah Palin was the owner and operator of a marketing consultancy with the odd name of Rouge Cou. Rouge Cou is a rough translation into French of the American phrase redneck. Actually, the French translation should have been Cou Rouge. Sarah Palin couldn’t even get that right, and the consulting business closed after it failed to get even one client.

With this record of executive failure, why should Sarah Palin be given the position of Vice President under the elderly and most-likely-to-die-in-office President in American history, John McCain?

Sarah Palin is no friend of small towns in America.

How many small town main streets across the USA have died when Wal-Mart parked its trucks on the outskirts of town and built a big box store, stealing all the customers that small business relied upon? Those big box stores can offer low, low prices because they sell stuff made in sweatshop factories in countries like China and India, and because they have powerful lobbyists working for them in Washington D.C.

Big box stores ruin small towns.

So, what did Sarah Palin do as mayor of the village of Wasilla? She welcomed the big box stores to set up shop on the edge of town. Practically rolled out the red carpet for them.

Wasilla resident Anne Kilkenny says of that when she was mayor, Sarah Palin, “turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots.”

If you want America to turn into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots, then Sarah Palin is your kind of politician. If not, then you need to take a stand now and join with those Americans working to make sure that Sarah Palin is never placed within a heartbeat of being President of the United States.