Liberal Sexism

This is the kind of nasty, extremely sexist post that gives all Liberals a bad name. Right now, I'm completely ashamed to be on the same side of the political fence as somebody who wrote this atrocity:

Boy this last 24 to 48 hours have not been very kind to poor Sarah Palin. . . Then you send out a bitter, and clearly insincere tweet (and follow upFacebook post), in which you thank the troops for killing Osama Bin Laden while denying any credit to the Commander in Chief, which once again identifies you as a hateful, immature attention whore, and which receives richly deserved  condemnation from all over the blogosphere. And just when you believed that things could NOT get any worse, somebody posts a picture of you on the Internet with food stains (At least we hope they're food stains!) ALL over your expensive outfit. Okay I don't want to start any unnecessary rumors, but exactly what was on the menu at that Vanity Fair after party? 

This just makes me want to vomit all over that inexpensive blog. People who have been around my site for a while know that I have been consistently critical of Sarah Palin and have expressed my criticism in very harsh terms. However, calling a person a whore and making ridiculously stupid suggestions about stains on her outfit is simply not right. This is sexism, and I don't give a rat's behind where it comes from. It's just so sad that wherever you turn, you find some sexist shit like this. 

I am very disgusted right now.

Sarah Palin Advances Feminist Goals

Don't worry, gentle reader, I haven't suddenly gone insane and decided to agree with Sarah Palin's claims that she is a true feminist. The politics she promotes is profoundly hateful towards women, repressive, and patriarchal. At best, her feeble attempts to sell herself as a feminist icon are  risible. At worst, they are deeply offensive.

However, when I heard about one of her recent speeches in Louisville, KY, here is what I thought. Palin is popular with the most conservative, rabidly patriarchal segment of our population. Women who attend her speeches have been brainwashed since birth with a pseudo-Christian propaganda of female subjection. Finding a husband to please and obey, popping out babies, cooking, cleaning, going to Church, relinquishing control over their bodies, their sexuality, their professional and spiritual realization - that's the dreary life path shared by Sarah Palin's female listeners.

So I imagine them sitting there, wiped out by a life of drudgery, of endless repetitive household chores, of feeling like they have achieved nothing comparable to the important things done by their husbands, never having a real voice, never being able to travel, to be financially independent, to have a life of their own. And then there is Sarah Palin speaking to them from the podium. Delivering, of course, all the expected ultra-patriarchal cliches. But still, what her listeners see in front of them is a well-dressed, well-groomed, very rich woman who has a very active public life, a very successful career, who definitely has her own voice (albeit a very shrill one), who so obviously would have never been content with a life limited to cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, whose husband is obviously a lot weaker than she is and who needs her a lot more than she needs him.

All this has got to register on some level with Palin's female audiences. They have to start experiencing a vague realization that they have been cheated out of many important things by the environment where they grew up. That they, too, could have had a life. Maybe after seeing Sarah Palin a few times, they will secretly start wishing that their daughters choose Palin's way of independence instead of their mothers' way of subjection and drudgery.

Palinisms

This hilarious collection of immortal statements by our resident political clown #1 just came out. As Jacob Weisberg, the author, states in the introduction, it's more difficult to create a book of Palinisms than a collection of Bushisms. While Bush sounded hilarious because of concrete grammar and factual mistakes, Palin simply sounds incoherent most of the time. Still, the author of Palinisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin managed to bring a semblance of order into the chaos of Palin's written and oral expression and presented his readers with a great collection of Palin's most ridiculous statements.

In this day and age, to be a successful politician, you have to be an entertainer and a relatable character first and foremost. Gone are the times when we expected our leaders to be well-versed in history, geography, foreign relations, constitutional law, and boring stuff like that. Today, people vote for whomever they would like to invite for a beer, no matter how many silly things that person can spew per minute. Of course, economically and politically this approach to selecting our leaders leads us into one disaster after another. But the upside is that we will never be bored while politicians like Sarah Palin are around.

In this book, you will find your favorite "Palinisms", as well as some that might have escaped your notice. The sources from which these Palinisms have been gathered are Palin's public speeches, newspaper and TV interviews (including the most famous ones), and Palin's hilarious autobiography Going Rogue: An American Life. I never read the autobiography but the quotes from it that Weisberg offers in Palinisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin are priceless.

Here are a few Palinisms to brighten up your day. Or make it sadder if you are given to philosophical reflections about the future of this country.

If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?" (Going Rogue).

I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals—right next to the mashed potatoes. (Going Rogue).

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people. (ABC interview with Charles Gibson, September 11, 200)

I can do my part in doing things like working really, really hard to get a natural gas pipeline. Pray about that also. I think God's will has to be done, in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that. (Speaking at the Wasilla Assemblies of God church, Wasilla, Alaska, June 8, 2008)

I can do my job there, in developing our natural resources, and doing things like getting the roads paved, making sure our troopers have their cop cars and their uniforms and their guns, and making sure our public schools are funded. But really, all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's hearts isn't right with God. (Speaking at the Wasilla Assemblies of God church, Wasilla, Alaska, June 8, 2008.)

The last one is kind of scary rather than funny. But in a way, aren't they all scary as hell?

Will Palin Quit the Race?

Based on Sarah Palin's track record, people are predicting that she will start a her 2012 presidential bid with a splash but will fizzle out midway:

Palin is an attention monger, selling herself as a big runner with a splashy magazine layout in a premier running magazine. Yet given the chance to actually, you know, run, she couldn't even finish a measly 5K run. Is there a better anecdote to illustrate the essence of Sarah? So watch, she'll make noise about running for president in 2012, but when push comes to shove, she doesn't have the work ethic to actually campaign. She'll bask in the attention, sell lots of books, and get $100K per speech. But the second it becomes hard work, she'll call it quits.

Do you think this is what will happen? I mean, if she's just out for money and fame, then we could all stop worrying, right? If she's doing all she's been doing just to fatten up her bank account with no desire to achieve actual political power, that's a huge relief.

Sarah Palin and Conspiracy Theorists

If you read anything I have written about Sarah Palin, you might have noticed that I dislike her profoundly.* I think it's a disgrace that somebody so unapologetically stupid could have become a governor and a vice-presidential candidate.** However, after taking the time to familiarize myself with the blogs and articles of conspiracy theorists dedicated to "revealing the true parentage" of Palin's youngest child, I have come to feel a deep compassion for this poor woman.

Until today, I had no idea that there were so many of these completely loony people who are scarily sexist. They engage in endless scrutiny of some obscure photos of undetermined origins, studying baby Trig's ears (I kid you not) and trying to figure out how many Trigs are in existence. Since multiple Trigs need to exist to support the insane versions of events proposed by the conspiracy theorists, they keep coming up with ever new versions of Trig. One of the most ingenious versions came up with 3 different Trigs: one who's dead, one who's Bristol's baby born before the baby she acknowledged having, and the baby Palin's husband had by his mistress (whose existence, like the existence of Trigs #2 and 3, has never been proven).

The conspiracy theorists treat Palin and her daughter Bristol with so much venom that everything I have ever written about Palin sounds like a compliment. They don't, however, have a bad word to say about Palin's husband Todd. In their version, "the high-heeled spawn of Satan"*** (a direct quote from one of the conspiracy theorists' websites), which are Palin and Bristol, conspired to fake Palin's last pregnancy for unidentified reasons.

These conspiracy theorists explain their determination to "reveal the truth" about Palin by claiming that she is unfit as a politician and a danger to society. I wholeheartedly agree that she is both. But so was Bush. So are most of Republican politicians (have you read my posts on the Texan Republicans' platform?). According to many people, Clinton definitely was all those things as well. But have we heard any suggestions that these men's children were not theirs? Seeing as 1 in 10 men are unknowingly raising somebody else's child, it is a lot more likely that many of our male politicians would be more fruitful subjects for this kind of research.

As I mentioned before, anything that has to do with Palin's motherhood is irrelevant to her qualifications as a politician. Just like anything that has to do with Bush's or Obama's fatherhood. The argument that politicians often put their parenting on the agenda in a political discussion means simply that they are trying to distract us from what they are actually doing as politicians. We should not allow them to involve us in these games. This is politics, not a soap opera. I know that it's easier to bash Palin as a bad mother or a fake mother or admire her as a good mother than to analyze what her presence on the political scene means for the future of this country.

All these discussions about the origins of the baby are actually very useful to Palin. Those who promote these conspiracy narratives are doing her (and by extension the crazed Evangelicals who support her) a huge favor. By transforming her into a soap opera (or a reality TV) character, they make any discussion of her politics irrelevant. Who cares about boring stuff like political platforms, ideology, elections, etc. when this huge drama about a baby (or two, or three babies) is going on?

Let's stop discussing how Palin is doing as a wife and a mother and finally take a look at what the hell she is doing as a politician.

* See here, here, here, here, here, and in many other posts. Just enter "Palin" in the search box if you are curious.

** I consider it just as much of a disgrace that somebody as unapologetically stupid as George W. Bush could have become a governor and a two-term president. Palin and Bush are equally stupid, they are both an equally sad joke as politicians, and my dislike for them has nothing to do with their gender.

*** I'm not going to link to these people's blogs because I don't want to give them extra hits. You can find them easily enough yourself, if you really want to.

More on the Tea Party Hypocrisy

People don’t want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they’ll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue—a highly intellectual virtue—out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.

                                                                                                                  - Ayn Rand.

The most recent scandal surrounding the increasingly bizarre Sarah Palin is a perfect showcase for yet another instance of egregious hypocrisy on the part of the new breed of Libertarians she represents. This weirdo comes to the California STATE University and charges $100,000 for one of her anti-government spending speeches. I mean, we all know that she is completely brainless but this is too much even for her.

I want to offer yet another quote from Ayn Rand that describes the utterly incompetent Palin perfectly:

What we are now asked to worship, what had once been dressed as God or king, is the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent. This is the new ideal, the goal to aim at, the purpose to live for, and all men are to be rewarded according to how close they approach it. This is the age of the common man, they tell us—a title which any man may claim to the extent of such distinction as he has managed not to achieve. He will rise to a rank of nobility by means of the effort he has failed to make, he will be honored for such virtue as he has not displayed, and he will be paid for the goods which he did not produce. But we—we, who must atone for the guilt of ability—we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward. Since we have the most to contribute, we will have the least to say. Since we have the better capacity to think, we will not be permitted a thought of our own. Since we have the judgment to act, we will not be permitted an action of our choice. We will work under directives and controls, issued by those who are incapable of working. They will dispose of our energy, because they have none to offer, and of our product, because they can’t produce.

Palin, who is so incompetent that she couldn't even complete her term as governor, now mooches off of the talented students of Cal State, believing that her pleasure should be their only reward. Then, she accuses the students of revealing the truth. What would the founder of Objectivism say about this? Here goes:

A lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie—the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on.

 Any more questions on whether the Tea Party has anything to do with Libertarianism (except being its exact opposite)?

Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin

Contrary to the popular stereotypes that all Jews are super smart, I have to confess that there are sad exceptions among us in terms of intelligence:

Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin is an independent group of academic, religious and political leaders, dedicated to promoting consideration of Gov. Sarah Palin’s political positions in the wider American Jewish community. We find Ms. Palin’s policy positions on Israel, Iran, national security, fiscal responsibility, energy, and social policy – as well as her record on these issues as governor of Alaska and candidate for Vice President of the United States – to be serious, substantive and politically mainstream. Though not at present a candidate for any political office, Gov. Palin’s track record in public office has been exemplary.

I wonder what their take is on Palin's statements that the US is a Christian nation.

I think I'll stick with hoping that this is some kind of Evangelical propaganda.

Libertarians Are Just Christian Fundamentalists in Disguise

Some of my readers wrote in to tell me that I have been unfair to Rand Paul in one of my recent posts. They say that it is wrong to equate him with insane religious fundamentalists simply because he used images from Sarah Palin's interviews in his campaign.

So I decided to give the guy a chance. Who knows, I thought, maybe he is an actual follower of Ayn Rand? Maybe he does, in fact, espouse Libertarian ideas. Of course, this optimism on my part suffered a mortal blow in the first 10 seconds of googling Rand Paul's name. I immediately discovered that one of his biggest supporters is the fundamentalist, hateful, and disgusting organization called Concerned Women for America. Just read the following statement these scary people make about themselves and tell me how would Ayn Rand react to this:

We are the nation's largest public policy women's organization with a rich 28-year history of helping our members across the country bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy. We help people focus on six core issues, which we have determined need Biblical principles most and where we can have the greatest impact.

And of course, Ms. Rand would have found their position on abortion to be particularly repellent:

The group also opposes abortion in all cases, unless it is to save the life of the mother. Health exemptions are considered "immoral" and not supported. It also opposes emergency contraception, including after cases of rape, asserting that ECP is actually an abortifacient. CWA asserts that most forms of birth control—and all forms of hormonal birth control—are actually abortifacients, triggering chemical abortions.

After all this, how can anybody seriously claim that today's Libertarians of Rand Paul's ilk have anything in common with the original movement created by Ayn Rand? The founder of objectivism would certainly be horrified at the very idea of being associated with this group of insane Bible-thumpers who see women as baby-generating machines with no will or desires of their own. Not only was Ayn Rand fiercely proabortion, she also actively despised Christianity.

I knew from the start that the Tea Party movement was nothing other than yet another bid for power on the part of the fanatical Evangelicals. What is sad, though, is that there are still people who refuse to see them for what they are and keep hoping that this movement has something to do with objectivism.

Rand Paul and Sarah Palin

In spite of his unfortunate name and sad appearance, I was willing to give a chance to Rand Paul. I thought it might have been possible that he wasn't completely stupid and actually had some kind of a political message. All that was before I saw this ad where he boasts that Sarah Palin supports his ideas. Any legitimate politician with half a brain would be appalled by the support of this stupid clown. Sadly, Rand Paul seems to think that the support of this winkly and giggly disgrace of a human being is somehow flattering to him.

Here is the ad:



Why is it that the second you decide to give the Libertarians a chance they come out with something so embarrassing?

Sarah Palin's Mental Issues: Review of Heilemann's and Halperin's "Game Change," Cont'd

The most curious part of Heilemann's and Halperin's Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime is the authors' discussion of Sarah Palin's tenuous mental state during her vice-presidential campaign. It turns out that her mental instability, moodiness, her propensity to go into fits of depression, and her descent into near-catatonic states were widely discussed in the McCain camp. Since the elections, we have had many opportunities to see for ourselves that Palin is, indeed, very unstable. Her rambling announcement that she was leaving her job as a governor, her scary speeches to the Tea Party movement demonstrate that her mental health issues have not been dealt with since the elections.

Heilemann and Halperin offer several possibilities to explain Palin's mental health issues. Post-partum depression and worry about her son who was being shipped to Iraq are some of the explanations these authors offer. I think, however, that Palin's experiences during the campaign itself offer a much better explanation. Game Change describes with a great poignancy how Palin was sitting there, completely lost and overwhelmed, surrounded by stacks of index cards and crowds of people who were trying to cram the most basic facts of world history and politics into her head. McCain's aides attempted to make her memorize in the space of a few short weeks the amount of information that it normally takes people many years of high-school, college, and adult reading and news-watching to absorb. If there was ever cruel and unusual punishment, this is definitely it.

Those who have been reading my blog for a while, know that I'm no fan of Palin (to put it very, very mildly.) However, it is really disgusting to find out how she was treated by the McCain camp. They used her, abused her, and threw her out. Today, Palin has joined a quasi-libertarian Tea Party movement. A real Libertarian would say of her plight that if she wants to be a governor and even a vice-president without knowing about World Wars I and II, about the Spanish Civil War, and about the reasons why there are North Korea and South Korea (examples from Game Change), she deserves everything she gets as a result. I am not a Libertarian, though. For this reason, reading about this poor individual, sitting there all lost, trying to absorb all this knowledge that is completely beyond her intellectual capacities, makes me feel very compassionate towards her.

A true Libertarian would say that it's her responsibility to have the requisite knowledge that would allow her to perform her job adequately. For me, however, Palin's woeful intellectual limitations are not only her personal failure. We are all to blame for creating and maintaining a system where a person graduates from high school, then college, then gets a responsible governmental position, all the while not having even the most basic knowledge about the world.

A Woman's Place: Palin and Beck

Everybody who is familiar with my blog knows that I'm not a huge fan of Sarah Palin, to put it very very mildly. I have criticized her here, here, here, here, and in many other places. You can disagree with her politics, hate her way of presenting herself, dislike her penchant for expressing opinions about things she does not understand. But it is absolutely wrong to demean her because of her gender.


Glenn Beck, a disgusting parody of a human being, recently came out with the following statement on Palin that he, in his mind-numbing idiocy, probably considers funny. This was in response to whether he would consider a Palin-Beck presidential ticket in 2012: "I was just thinking, what, I'm going to take a back seat to a chick? Go shoot a bear, make some stew, I'm hungry in here. . . I’m just saying, Beck-Palin, I’ll consider. But Palin-Beck -- can you imagine what an administration with the two of us would be like? She'd be yapping or something, I'd say, 'I'm sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I'm not in the kitchen.' I mean, you'd have to live up to the evil conservative stereotypes, you'd have no choice but to do so." How is it possible that somebody capable of being so vile and obnoxious is even being listened to? Why do we allow such disgusting individuals to make money out of polluting our airwaves? What's wrong with us that somebody so miserable can even joke about running for president?

P.S. And of course, the second I wrote this, Google AdSense put an advertisement for Palin's new book on my blog. There is just no winning with this woman. :-(

Crazy

The obviously mentally unstable Elizabeth Hasselbeck is the reason why I stopped watching The View a long time ago. This recent interview with her published by US Magazine shows that she has not seeked any help for her mental issues since then:

"If something happened and I was pregnant again ... I don’t know how that would happen, because I'm clearly avoiding my husband," former NFL quarterback Tim Hasselbeck.
Not getting intimate is tough. "He's so cute," Hasselbeck, 32, said. "This is the problem ... he's very cute."
Asked if she's ever heard of birth control, Hasselbeck replied, "Yeah, I have. It takes a while to kick in once you start one. But in the meantime, I just find him incredibly attractive. So, it's not like I'm that disciplined, so right now, my strategy is dressing in a way that will not get me pregnant."
How does she dress so that she doesn't get pregnant? "Nothing too cute," she said. "I'm trying to wear nothing too revealing."
 
Whether she is being honest or is doing her cutesy-dumb-blonde thing in order to advance her career is unimportant.What matters is the frequency with which brainless-bimbo-type women (or the ones who pretend to be this way) are thrust upon us everywhere we turn by the media. Being a dumb, illiterate, giggly, winky, inarticulate fool can bring you fame and fortune very fast, as we all have seen in Sarah Palin's example. Given Palin's incredible rise to prominence, it is no wonder that Hasselbeck is going around flaunting her stupidity as well.

Idiocy Rules

The reason why brainless, giggly, ignorant people like Sarah Palin are so dangerous is that their total lack of intelligence prevents them from upholding any moral norms whatsoever. As political opponents such people are truly lethal. Their one-track minds allow them to say or do anything because the ends for them always justify the means. Since this clown came out with her lies about President Obama's healthcare plan, many people have been gullible enough to believe her disgusting prevarication. Normal, kind and compassionate people who believed Palin are simply not cynical enough to even imagine that everything she says about the plan (and anything else, for that matter) is a baseless invention of her sorry excuse for a brain.

President Obama has now been forced to explain his healthcare reform plans on the pages of the New York Times. A huge part of his op-ed piece is dedicated to dispelling the idiotic myths that disgusting losers of Palin's ilk have been spreading around in order to scare people: "This is what reform is about. If you don’t have health insurance, you will finally have quality, affordable options once we pass reform. If you have health insurance, we will make sure that no insurance company or government bureaucrat gets between you and the care you need. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. You will not be waiting in any lines. This is not about putting the government in charge of your health insurance. I don’t believe anyone should be in charge of your health care decisions but you and your doctor — not government bureaucrats, not insurance companies." Isn't it sad that Palin, who has been inept both as a Vice-Presidential candidate and a Governor, should have this much power to make people scared and the President nearly apologetic just by spewing forth some insane stupidity?

Obama tries very hard to bring the scared victims of Palin's cynicism back to seeing reason: "In the coming weeks, the cynics and the naysayers will continue to exploit fear and concerns for political gain. But for all the scare tactics out there, what’s truly scary — truly risky — is the prospect of doing nothing. If we maintain the status quo, we will continue to see 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day. Premiums will continue to skyrocket. Our deficit will continue to grow. And insurance companies will continue to profit by discriminating against sick people. That is not a future I want for my children, or for yours. And that is not a future I want for the United States of America. In the end, this isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives and livelihoods."

The sad reality, however, is that for immoral cynics like Palin it 's about politics. She wants power, she wants to be important, she wants to think that politically she hasn't been a total flop. So she will continue lying, prevaricating, cheating, faking, etc. This empty shell of a human being has nothing but her greed and resentment to guide her. Just as we finally got rid of George W., we have to be saddled with a female version of his cynical, immoral, greedy stupidity.

I'm sure that many of my readers will remark that this is a very angry post. I am angry, people. I've been trying for a while to figure out what Obama's helathcare plan is about, what's good about it and what's bad. But Palin and her radio talk-show clowns have hijacked the discussion. All we can hear now are some ridiculous accusations on one side and some feeble attempts to fend them off on the other side. There is screaming and howling, which have left no space for a reasonable, well-informed discussion. This, of course, was Palin's goal from the start. She and her friends feel uncomfortable in discussions where people use three-syllable words and construct sentences complete with the subject, the verb and the object.

The question remains: will the cult of ignorance that culminated with Bush's election and Palin's nomination now rob us of a chance to have the healthcare reform we so deperately need?

Palin on Healthcare

Palin keeps wanting to have opinions about things she is too stupid to understand. The latest topic to attract her attention is President Obama's ne healthcare plan. The plan is complex, it requires reading, thinking, analyzing. But who needs all that if you can ascribe some horrible intentions to the President and then berate him for that?

Here is what Palin wrote about the healthcare plan: "And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." Of course, what she describes here is beyond evil. One has to be a total Nazi to support the extermination of those who are deemed "unproductive".

The only problem with Palin's critique is that she should have addressed it to Hitler rather than to Obama. It is evident to anybody with half a brain that nothing in the President's politics or record suggests that he is a follower of fascism. He has been accused of many things but an accusation of this magnitude should be substantiated.

The healthcare plan is very important to all of us. It should be scrutinized and subjected to the most rigorous analysis possible. What Palin offers us, however, can't be called analysis. It's just a pretext she uses to proffer some entirely unfounded and bizarre accusations. She wants to use the natural feelings of compassion for the elderly, the terminally ill, and the disabled that every normal person has in order to manipulate us into hating Obama. She obviously feels that it's perfectly OK to use these people to achieve her political goals.

Only to image that at some point somebody so unscrupulous and unintelligent as Palin actually had a chance to become the Vice-President of the United States. The thought literally makes me cringe.

She Just Won't Go Away!

We thought when Palin resigned after giving an incredibly weird and rambling speech she would just go away. At least for a while. At least until the memory of her extremely strange resignation (let alone her disastrous vice-presidential campaign) would fade. Not so. Now the unfortunate ex-governor of Alaska presents herself as an expert on the new energy plan. She feels she has so much to say on this subject that she even published an article in The Washington Post. The article is just as rambling and poorly organized as her resignation speech. It's the kind of a piece that you have to read and re-read and then re-read all over again in order to dig out the point she is trying to make from under the endless verbiage.

Just consider the following sentence: "Many states have abundant coal, whose technology is continuously making it into a cleaner energy source." Whose technology? The coal's? Then what does "it" refer to? Also the coal? Then again, cleaner than what? Which states have this clean coal? What kind of technology are we discussing? What is the word "continuously" doing here? No clarification from Palin. And not a single fact presented to support anything.

Obama's energy plan, she says, is very dangerous. Why? (Besides the fact that anything Obama does is inherently bad, dangerous, and ugly, of course). "Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs" says Palin. The people who will lose jobs under this plan will be provided with new employment. How can that be bad? Because the plan doesn't create new jobs, Palin claims. Well, this was never the plan's goal. It's a plan to cap emissions, it can't be expected to cure all of the world's evils. And since when does a Republican care about people losing jobs, anyways?

Now let's look at the next statement: "We have an important choice to make. Do we want to control our energy supply and its environmental impact? Or, do we want to outsource it to China, Russia and Saudi Arabia? Make no mistake: President Obama's plan will result in the latter." Sounds bad, doesn't it? Of course, nobody wants to outsource to other countries. The only problem: there is no evidence of how Obama's plan will do that. The cap and trade plan is aimed at reducing the emissions created by burning fossil fuel. The idea behind the plan is simply to burn less fuel. Not less domestic as opposed to imported fuel. But simply: less fuel. I must be stupid but I fail to understand how this plan will result in America losing control over anything. My only consolation is that Sarah Palin, the author of the statement, has no idea either. She never stops to explain how she arrived at her daring conclusion. Well, she isn't Sarah Palin for nothing.

Here is the conclusion to the article: "Can America produce more of its own energy through strategic investments that protect the environment, revive our economy and secure our nation? Yes, we can. Just not with Barack Obama's energy cap-and-tax plan." OK, the readers might think. Now we are getting to it. Obama's plan is bad but now Palin will give us the alternative, a plan of her own that will achieve all of these good things (protecting the environment, reviving the economy and "securing the nation", whatever that is). But wait, these are actually the last words of the article. After I read them, I kept sitting there, staring stupidly at the web-page. There must be a continuation to the article, I thought. You are saying that all these things can be done, just not with Obama's plan. Isn't this the point where you tell us what the alternative is?

I imagined what would happen if Sarah Palin were to walk into my apartment right now and observe me blogging. "The way you blog is silly and inefficient," she would say. "There is a way to blog faster, better, and more productively. I know how to do it." And then she would just walk out without ever revealing her new and improved blogging strategy to me.

I wonder why more people don't write articles for The Washington Post? It seems so easy. Here are some ideas for future articles:

1. The way heart surgeons operate on patients is wrong. I know a better, cheaper, healthier way to operate. End of article.

2. Writers are stupid. I know how to write more engaging, stylistically beautiful, and artistically valuable novels. End of article.

3. Teachers are all idiots. I know how to tach kids better and faster. End of article.

See how easy it is to become an expert on almost anything? Just tell people how stupid they are and that you know a better way. Remember, no proof of this better way will ever be required from you.

Is Palin a Bad Mother?

In the recent flurry of discussions about Sarah Palin, the arguments often concentrate on whether she is a good mother. She is a good mother because she raises her children while having a career. She is a bad mother because she took an airplane after going into labor. She is a good mother because she chose not to abort a Down's syndrome child. She is a bad mother because she chose not to abort a Down's syndrome child. She is a good mother because she supported her pregnant teenage daughter. She is a bad mother because she has a pregnant teenage daughter. And so on, and so forth. My only question is: who cares?

A person's parenting skills (or whether they are faithful to their spouses, as happened in Sanford's case) should not, in my opinion, be a part of the discussion on whether they are qualified to do their job. One can be an amazing parent and a horrible politician. One can be a cheating spouse and a wonderful governor (president, senator, professor, auto mechanic, etc.).

It's true that Palin kept trotting her family out for political reasons. But her family or whether she even has a family are not relevant to what she was like in her job or what she would have been like as a Vice-President. Whatever she did, we should not be buying into this silly idea that being a nice person and a good parent (spose, child, sibling) in and of itself qualifies anybody for any kind of a job.

As people might have guessed from my previous posts, I'm no fan of Sarah Palin. I'm happy she resigned and hopeful that we will never see her again on the political scene. But saying that she was a bad choice for a Vice-President because she is a bad mother is not a valid argument. Who cares about her personality, her family, and her hobbies? Her political agenda is all that matters.

The Nation's Paul Wachter recently published a great article on Sanford titled "Mr. Sanford's Wild Ride." Instead of harping on Sanford's affair, this journalist presents his readers with a brilliant resume of the governor's political views. It was incredibly refreshing to finally read about what Sanford is like in his capacity as a politician, instead of as a lover, a father, or a husband. I believe it's time for all of us to stop focusing so much on the politicians' personal lives and start looking more carefully at their political decisions and voting records.

Palin: Class and Gender

In the aftermath of Palin's resignation, we've been hearing all kinds of explanations for why she became a target of so much scorn and derision. The version that gets floated around quite a bit has been summarized by Ross Douthat in his article "Palin and Her Enemies": the anti-Palin sentiments "had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class." Is that true? Do we dislike Palin for being a female politician and not graduating from an Ivy League school? Do our inherent snobbism and chauvinism make us ridicule her and hate her?

My answer is no. The reasons for my dislike of her are exactly the same that made me feel horrified every time I remembered that George W. was the president of the United States. These two people - Palin and Bush Jr. - represent different genders and very different social backgrounds. What they have in common transcends gender and class boundaries. For me, they symbolize a very scary trend in our political, cultural, and social life: the cult of ignorance. The idea that a public figure, a politician has to be, first and foremost, a nice person you'd like to have a beer with has led us right into 2 Bush administrations. We will be reaping the results for decades to come, possibly even longer.

It's terrifying that somebody would come to a job interview (for any position but especially so for the job of a Vice-President of a huge country) and believe that it's ok to offer winks, giggles, and a barrage of platitudes instead of facts. It's scary that the opposing candidate would be vilified for being too smart and having too much knowledge. And didn't this happen both during the McCain/Palin and the first Bush campaign? Remember how the Conservatives criticized Al Gore for being too intellectual?

Douthat and Co would, of course, suggest that my dislike of Palin is motivated - at least in part - by my Ivy League education. But they would be wrong. I went to the same school as George W., which didn't prevent me from believing that he was the worst thing that could have happened to the American politics. As to despising everybody who didn't go to an Ivy League school, that's also rubbish. I proudly attended my first two graduation ceremonies from a less known university. That school gave me a real education and for that I will always be thankful. I didn't, however, attend my Yale graduation ceremony this year. In spite of its fame, the university didn't offer me the kind of intellectual and professional advancement I'd been hoping to get.

In the conclusion to his article, Douthat says: "Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true." I agree that it's a beautiful ideal that anybody should be able to become a President. Shouldn't we, however, add that anybody should be able to occupy any public or political position after studying and working a lot? And also after they demonstrate that they are qualified for the job? Surely, "the old American aphorism" doesn't suggest that we elect people to these important position without even considering their qualifications? Does "anyone" mean that it would be ok at some point to elect as president somebody who knows nothing whatsoever and can hardly read, just because they are a nice person? Or to prove that the aphorism is working?

Sarah Palin symbolizes the cult of ignorance carried to the extreme. The idea that somebody so unprepared would even be considered for the job is terrifying. People who support her don't stop to consider that if they demonstrated the same level of incompetence in their job interviews (whatever their profession is), they would not be able to make a living.

Palin Resigned!

Sarah Palin resigned! This is great news. I can't say how terrified I was of her as a vice-presidential candidate. The idea that some people would even consider her for the office was painful.

Paul Solomon reports: "In a rambling and emotional address, Palin said: "The problem today is apathy. We're fisherman. Only dead fish go with the flow."In deciding not to "go with the flow," Palin said she didn't want to be a lame duck, and she said she can affect change from "out of government." She later corrected her remarks to "outside the governor's office."" So we can see she is as weird as usual. Or maybe even weirder.

The reasons why she resigned are unclear. I suspect there must be some scandal brewing that she is trying to avoid. Later in the speech, she said: "I'll work very hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government and strong national security for our country and support our troops and energy independence, and for those who will protect freedom and equality and life," she said, her voice shaking as the emotion overtook her. "I'll work hard for and campaign for those who are proud to be Americans, and who are inspired by my ideals....And I don't care what party you're in or no party at all, inside of Alaska or outside of Alaska". This is the person we could have had as a Vice-President. I hope she is out of politics for good.

P.S. PeterN wrote a great post on why Palin is so scary to anybody with an ounce of reason: "What is important is that Sarah Palin will no longer be a threat to entire political system and culture in general. Now, I understand that is something of an overstatement, but the ideas that she championed, and most of all her mindset, emphasizing ignorance, are the opposite of what ought to be put forth as ideals in America. Frankly, the concepts themselves should be anathema altogether. Ignorance as a virtue is to wish for a return to the past, where things were harder, people died faster, and life was just not what it is today." This is exactly how I felt about her nomination and her presence on the political scene.

Palin's Feminist Supporters

Yes, it turns out there are "feminists" who support Sarah Palin. Which makes as much sense as if the Civil Rights movement drew its inspiration from the image of Uncle Tom. There are even questions about whether they have inflitrated the leadership of NOW (National Organization for Women).

I can't even begin to describe the horror my friends and I experienced when first presented with this eyelash-batting, winking, giggly, profoundly patriarchal excuse for a female politician. Now every chauvinist in the country had the perfect justification for why women have no place in politics.

When the Republicans tried to sell her as some kind of a conservative embodiment of feminism, I just laughed. After her disgusting anti-choice speeches, her insistence on abstinence-only sex ed, and her blatant use of her own daughter for political advancement, who would believe it? Turns out some "feminists" would.

How anybody can be anti-choice and still call themselves a feminist is beyond me. If you believe that a woman's body belongs to the state and can be policed and legislated as if it were some kind of a reproductive machine, just be honest about it and don't call yourself a feminist. How anybody can look at Palin and not cringe with shame that somebody this silly, ignorant and pathetic would even be in politics, is incomprehensible.

The discussion of whether the leadership of NOW has been hijacked by Palin supporters is irrelevant to me. If there is even one Palin supporter in NOW, then it's not an organization that can represent me or do anything for me.