My Dos Centavos

I was on the road for quite a while, and on vacation, and thus stayed off the computer so I could reboot my brain. However I did watch some of the conventions and the speeches, though not all. Missed Hillary, loved Bill, found Obama inspirational in a Kennedy-esque way. Found in Sarah Palin an emphasis on being just one of us as opposed to being one of them.

Whoa! Stop the VCR. One of us? Well yeah, and that is what makes her choice by McCain nothing short of brilliant. She's just like a whole lot of American citizens who don't see themselves in any of the candidates. Why vote for some Washington insider when you can vote for someone who's more like you? It's the American Dream writ large, and it's tailor-made for a Hollywood production, especially if McCain/Palin win. Pitbull in Lipstick or The Hockey Mom and the White House anyone? Bet Disney gets the nod to produce.

Progressives who fail to stop and think about what they are saying will muddy up the waters by attacking her for reasons that have nothing to do with her actual qualifications, and responding to inane attacks by the McCain camp demanding deference (of all things), and jumping at every opportunity to declare comments by the Obama camp as sexist or personal attacks, when they aren't. That's a strategy that will help McCain in the end. Don't feed the trolls folks.

I got sent a link to this blog, which features, among other posts, a link to Mudflats, an Alaskan blog. Mudflats carries a post by State Rep. Les Gara (D), who discusses Troopergate and more. There is also a post about the anti-Palin rally in Anchorage, among many others. More on that later.

The Women Against Sarah Palin blog, and yeah I know the acronym is WASP, carries a lot of feedback from women about Ms. Palin and why she isn't qualified. Over at The Washington Post is a post about this, which includes a respone by an MClare posted at 6:31 PM on September 14. MClare and all her peers at WASP state the case I would make against Sarah Palin's qualifications. She hasn't any, or what she has just won't cut it.

King Richard is more qualified than she is as an executive. Chicago is as big or bigger than her state in terms of population, and he has been at it a whole lot longer. Eighteen months isn't all that long, unless your Blago. Daley is also a master manipulator who gets what he wants. Good qualifications when you are dickering with 535 representatives of the country's populace. She, on the other hand, displayed her capability to parrot whatever it was that the McCain camp force-fed her before the Gibson interview. That interview looked more like an opportunity to see who could be more condescending, but she loses for not being able to talk past her rehearsed lines. However she couldn't help but stay on message, so points for that.

Good parroting techniques won't help her with Putin or his minions, let alone any other tough-minded and equally tough-talking, world leader. If McCain needed a woman on his ticket he would have done better with Condi Rice. I may not care much for her, but she would be a match and a half for Biden and that debate would have been worth the price of admission. Palin is not Condi, and Biden needs to mop the floor with her based on her lack of knowledge and insight. If he does his job it will be sad to see, but necessary.

I don't know how this will all play out, but fair warning: if McCain/Palin win this one then look for an early announcement on 2012.