Palin-tology

Spiderfox has been stewing over the Sarah Palin affair the entire week. But rules are rules and I couldn’t say or do anything about it until, much to my great relief, some guy in a coffee shop watching CNN said loud enough for me to hear, “Help. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.” Technically, he wasn’t asking me for help, or even speaking to me for that matter, or even asking for help in any real sense, but my superpowers were activated nonetheless, and I started a rant that ended kind of badly when the coffee shop owner discretely asked me to leave and I stopped with a dangling modifier and slinked out, foxlike, leaving wet fur sprayed across his table tops.

I hate to waste a good rant so here’s a summary:

The fact that Sarah Palin is a mother and the mother of a pregnant teen and the mother of a Down’s syndrome baby is not the problem or even the issue or even anybody’s business. Nobody ever asks whether a man can handle the responsibility of political office just because he’s got a family. Why on earth are these kinds of attacks coming from the supposedly more liberal “left” side of the political “spectrum” (and I use that word fully aware of its meaninglessness)? I am sick to death of hearing women, of all genders, arguing about whether Sarah Palin is a good mother. As if that should matter to anyone but her own kids. The only thing that matters in this national discussion is whether Sarah Palin would be a good vice president and potential president in the perhaps not so unlikely event of a John McCain, ahem, premature departure.

And that brings me to the next point, which is Why on earth would anyone think she would make a good vice president? This is the area where the “lefties” should be aiming their attacks. Begin with the experience issue: She was the mayor of a small town in Alaska, not a senator from a large urban city. She’s been governor for almost two years. She doesn’t even have any stated opinions on foreign policy or immigration. Imagine what would happen if McCain dropped dead and Sarah Palin was left in the Oval Office facing issues like, um, er, say, Iraq or Russia. I’m sure Palin could outshoot Putin, but does she have any say concrete ideas about Georgia?

Then move on to the following distressing facts:

• Palin tried to get books banned from the Wasilla library and then tried to get the librarian there fired when the librarian opposed the book banning.
• She wants creationism taught alongside evolution in public schools. (Hello? Anyone ever heard of radio carbon dating?)
• Palin supports aerial shooting of bears and wolves even though Alaskans voted twice to ban the practice.
• She believes that global warming is not man made, which I guess would make it the fault of God or maybe women. Probably women.
• Palin opposes protections for salmon from mining contamination.
• She sued the U.S. government to stop listing polar bears as endangered. I think most five year olds know that polar bears are in fact endangered whether anyone officially declares they are or not.
• She wants to open ANWR to drilling.
• She believes that health care must be market-and business-driven. (I guess she doesn’t realize we tried that already.)
• She argues that, regarding the issue of health care, people must take personal responsibility for personal health and that personal responsibility and choices are the keys to good health. In other words, if you get hit by a drunk driver and require nine or ten surgeries that require you to mortgage your house three times, for example, you simply shouldn’t have been driving that night. Bad, bad choice. Or if you get cancer, you probably shouldn’t have been living downriver from the mine that Palin supported.

You can understand why a Barbarian would vote for Palin.

And why are the “righties” suddenly pretending to champion women’s rights and claiming to have invented the idea of a female vice presidential running mate? Geraldine Ferraro anyone? That was more than twenty years ago, way back in 1984, and she was a Democratic party nominee. Also, lest the Dems get big heads on this one, there have been 83 female official vice presidential candidates across the years, the first one, Marietta Stowe, nominated by the National Equal Rights Party in 1884. And I’m not even talking about the presidential nominees. So big fat hairy deal, Republican Party. It’s about damn time.

And one more thing. The fact that Sarah Palin has a pregnant teenage daughter is really no one’s business. But it is most definitely not a sign of her virtue or her moral superiority. The Republicans are pretending that having a pregnant daughter means Palin is a staunch anti-abortionist and therefore ethically superior to those baby killers on the left. But what it really means, if indeed it does mean anything more than the fact that her daughter and her partner didn’t use a condom, is that Palin and her husband didn’t have enough of those all important “talks” about birth control or, in their case, abstinence.

And perhaps abstinence is what I should have practiced in the coffee shop that day. But when someone asks for help, I’m all over it. That’s what I said. I’m Spiderfox.

©2008 Spiderfox