Sarah Palin, John McCain and the Preznit Race

A lot of bits have been spilt on untilled LCD screens covering McCain's choice of vice-presidential running mate. Most of it has been centred around babies or her experience, or whether she really has the potential to woo Hilary voters and PUMA-types.

There's been talk of how poor the vetting process seems to have been around her.

Apparently there's been talk of whether she should leave the ticket or not.

Okay, first of all, I don't think she's a great choice. She's a social conservative who seems to have the same sorts of big government authoritarian tendencies we've come to know and loathe over the last eight years in particular. I don't care much about her (grand)son or her daughter. Really. Couldn't give a flying obscene sexual reference. I am bothered by her apparent callous indifference to knowledge and science. She's red meat to the far lefties and a strong facepalm headshudder to the sinθ lefties, like me.

I don't think this supports either McCain's maverick image, as imaginary as it may be. Nor do I see it supporting John Kerry's McCain as prisoner of the right wing quote.

It does have a lot to do with the competence. McCain's team has started including more and more people and hangers on who have been responsible for his downfalls in the past or represent the basest form of party machinations. And yet the long-term power fatigue has started creep in here as a certain amount of incompetent arrogance has tainted a lot of the campaign. Has any other campaign in recent (or long term) memory had to distance the campaign message from the candidate message?

Taking on Obama he's hit him on experience. Yet McCain has no more executive experience than Obama. Palin does. Of course, we can look at the quality of her experience and she fails pretty heavily there against the other two.

McCain hit Obama on elitism charges over arugula, a charge that makes most of the Italian-American population of New Jersey elitist as well. The irony of a son and grandson of admirals married to a beer heiress calling the son of a goat herder elitist was actually lost on everyone.

Hitting Obama on not traveling to Iraq seems to have stung the Dem, but Palin's travel seems more limited than G.W. Bush's. I imagine a conversation when she returned from a pre-passport trip to Canada.

I: So, tell me about Canada.

SP: It's the little differences that make it strange. Like, they have moose, but they call them les moose. And they have Eskimos but they call them Inuit.

I: What do they call a plains state?

SP: I don't know. I didn't go to Saskatchewan.

How did McCain end up with a running mate that so effectively undercut his message? In a word, indifference.

It has more in common with a taunt than a choice.

It's been fun watching the right wing pundits reverse nearly every single little thing they've had to say for the last year about gender or experience. They turned on a dime and I got nine cents change. She's got foreign policy experience. Alaska is next to Russia. Hey, fuknutz, there are a dozen states with borders on Canada. 

It has more in common with a fuck you.

The right wing, the evangelicals, they can all go hang. At some point they'll all come out and say how great she is through gritted teeth. And they'll like it. They'll eat the cognitive dissonance and spout 180 degrees from yesterday and say it was always their position.

McCain is casually saying that if he plays dress up with an illegally imported chihuahua with a French passport, you'll still vote for me cause the other guy is black.