You can’t make shit like this up.
If I had written last week that John McCain would pick a moose hunting former member of the Alaskan Independence party whose unmarried teenage daughter is five months pregnant as his choice for vice president my friends would have thought I was using way too much LSD.
But here we are – for whatever reason – with Sarah Palin, the former Mayor of Wasila (pop. 6700 give or take a few) and governor of Alaska for the past 20 months as the potential leader of the free world. The Republicans insist she has the experience to do the job (if Dick Cheney’s performance is the benchmark, maybe they are right). John McCain, in a one-on -one interview with Brian Williams insisted she was ready, citing her experience as the chief executive of the second largest state in the nation, city mayor, hockey mom and member of the PTA. Maybe he was just too stunned for words, but Williams let McCain roll right over him with that one. (Note to Williams, you might have wanted to point out that Alaska is the largest state, but it has the second smallest population (about 600,000) of any state in the nation. Twenty-Two American cities, including Milwaukee and and El Paso have bigger populations.) He might have at least asked her if she ran the PTA raffle or something.
Personally, I think the Palin pick was the brain child of some right wing Karl Rove wanna-be who figured out that they needed to make the election about something else besides the Bush record on the economy and the war in Iraq. By getting all those evangelical anti-abortion voters all frothed up, maybe they could pull out another win in Ohio. If I had to guess (and why not) I’d say that McCain got pissed off by all the pressure from the religious right over his interest in picking Joe Lieberman, and decided to let them have their way, knowing he was going to feed her to the wolves.
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