Great Moments With Mrs. Palin

Sarah Palin did not spontaneously combust onstage during Thursday night’s debate: Sarah Palin did not spontaneously ANYTHING during the alleged debate. Mostly because it was not, in fact, a debate in any sense of the use of said term during the past two and a half millennia.

from Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis

The DisneyGOP advanced robotics factory unveiled their re-tooled audio-animatronic creation on Thursday, complete with birthing attachment. Some speculate that the Party of Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln did this in preparation to updating their increasingly aged Disneyland and Disneyworld exhibition.

Ha ha.

Prepping Sarah for the big debate

You take my point, which is going to expand beyond the lifeless, winking simulacrum that Sarah Palin represents.

Post-debate analysis has fallen into two dumbass coteries: that Palin “reestablished her credibility” and “knocked it out of the park”* and that Palin’s winking was kind of creepy, as was her blatant refusal to answer questions, but, rather to read the talking points rehearsed (winks and all) in the weeks leading up to the debate.

[* I'll come back to this.]

You can’t blame them for being pussies. (That’s a contraction from “pusillanimous” and NOT from the common Germanic and Continental term for “vulva” making some obscure comparison with domesticates of the family felidae. Don’t be niggardly in the use of your gray matter, s’il vous plait.)

Just think of how difficult it has been to pretend to be impartial (the media) in this insanely polarized age. Insane, because our National Debate following the Cold War has been no better than a juvenile food fight.

To be fair, in the cultural revolution of the 1960s — which the GOP ticket has benefited immensely from, and don’t you doubt it: John McCain, admitted adulterer, breaker of rules and crasher of jet aircraft, could never run with his allegedly “ex”-drug addicted rich wife without the sexual revolution, and Sarah Palin launched her career on the Phyllis-Schlafly school of anti-feminist backlash, “abortion rights” and social wedge issues begotten and politically organized in the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, who became “Sarah Barracuda” in high school in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Title IX decision, requiring that girls have sports, like basketball, rather than merely being relegated to the exalted positions of cheerleader and baton twirler — became silly and crazy in the aftermath of Watergate.

As I’ve said before: Gloria Steinem was the mother to Rush Limbaugh.

But, really, in comparison to the food fight that’s been going on at a feral level since Ronnie Ray-Gun started the Big Cheat, by deep-sixing the “Fairness Doctrine” paving the way so that Righties like Limbaugh could dominate the airwaves in one-sided “I control the microphone” debates in which they can never lose, Limbaugh and Steinem are moderates, as far as partisans go.

There were two corollaries to the Women’s Movement/Feminism that were never followed up on, and which have crippled our ability to think so profoundly that none of these clever monkeys seems to notice that it WASN’T a debate! Biden won, automatically, by virtue of forfeit.

And, I’ll get to that later, too.

But first let’s talk about the paths not taken, and why they were important:

i. a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind elephant

First: That a new definition of womanhood required, INHERENTLY, a new definition of manhood.

I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up in Wyoming, there was a powerful ethos of “what it means to be a man.” It was Zane Grey, Doc Savage, Ernest Hemingway and Audie Murphie all rolled up into a John Wayne stew of improbabilities. If I heard it once, I heard it ten thousand times: “to be a man.”

(And my father’s favorite corollary: “One boy is half a man, but two boys is no man at all.”)

That vague “Code of the West” included stuff like “big boys don’t cry,” or the famous masculine laconic streak. Speak softly and little, and carry a big stick. It was the Gary Cooper school — which I, as “motormouth” to family and friends wasn’t accorded membership in, nor did I ask for same — of talking softly, and defendin’ your ‘rahts’ with your fists, or, in a national emergency, with your guns.

And, it included the codes of chivalry, etcetera.

But that had to change, and no conscious effort ever seems to have been made, other than drumming naked in the forest and crying because your Father never said he loved you.

Ugh.

And that is why the Republican party of today exudes its phony macho, its phallic return to cigar worship as an affectation, its masculinely myopic weltanschauung and its NASCAR chicks … like Sarah Palin.

Because what we saw at the “debate” was really the antithesis of Feminism in every meaningful sense. Rich Lowry’s now-infamous masturbatory reverie on how great she looked and how he sat up straighter on the couch in a ham-handed allusion to the erection that she inspired shouldn’t draw derision merely for Lowry.

You get it? Sarah Palin is a MALE masturbatory fantasy — albeit not mine in the very least. I once had a bat-shit crazy girlfriend who was a dead ringer for the Alaskan governor and going THERE is literally repellent to me, so I’m immune to the Lowry couch-posture effect.

er … not the biggest part of it

But that SUBTEXT is the 1000 pound gorilla in the room, and we need to talk about it here. Sarah Palin isn’t a woman’s idea of a woman candidate. She’s a man’s idea of a woman candidate. Her appeal is mostly sexual, viz. — she’s attractive, she winks at you AND she’s the breast-feeding mother of a newborn: the perfect Madonna/Whore of most(ly) rotten American erotica.

It even looks like the McCain campaign owns the domain “voteforthemilf dot com,” registered at the same time McCain picked Palin as his running mate. (Check it out: it’s getting damned short shrift in the press.)

But even if that’s NOT true, in a larger, spiritual sense, it’s EXACTLY correct. Sarah Palin as the “Mother I‘d Like to Fuck”

Joe Biden was taken to the woodshed by the clueless for having had the temerity to point out that she’s attractive. Well, duh. He didn’t say he wanted to fuck her. But Rich Lowry danced as close to it in euphemisms as he dared.

And that’s the problem: men in the Konservative Movement (not to be confused with the Bowel Movement, although it is, admittedly, difficult, betimes, to tell the difference) hold to the OLD code of masculinity, in which ofttimes, their guns are subconsciously equated with their masculinity, and their Viagra® moments are important markers of their masculine potency. Virility as substitute for competence, as I learned in porn — most of those gushing about penile size are men. It’s THEIR fetish, not women’s, save in rare instances.

So, Sarah Palin as the queen of the Erect Phallus of the Elephants. The poster girl of the NASCAR idea of the new woman: she shoots rifles for fun, to hunt, lets her husband snowmobile, has babies, plays basketball AND was Miss Congeniality in Alaska’s Junior Miss pageant, and who CARES if she sounds like Miss Teen South Carolina? Right? Just as long as the Rightie Pecker needs a posture adjustment on the couch, right?

Thinking on her high heels

This is retro-masculinity, just as this phony “war on terror” is based in fake machismo. In defining a “war” without a clear objective, half the testosterone-junkies of the Reich confuse the metaphorical generic American war gun with their own, literal penis. And they reason on the “war” with the same stupidity that usually comes of an overcharge of sitting up on the sofa.

So, John McCain and his “brain” trust came up with the MILF candidate. And, after drilling her like a recalcitrant minah bird for two weeks, the Stepford Wife “debated” and our analysis cedes the absurd proposition that it WAS a debate in any sense of the word. The eye-candy versus the almost generic United States Senator.

Whose hands were tied, bringing me to the second, unspoken path not taken:

ii. the Dan Quayles — Palin comparison

“Chivalry” is, as feminists used to know, a specialized trap. By according a class of persons special rights and considerations, equality is not possible in any practical sense.

In order for women to assume their rightful place in the political landscape, they must be accorded only the same courtesies that men are accorded. In other words, it’s OK to open the door for a woman, as long as you open doors for men, too.

By playing the “female” card, Sarah Palin can be a rude, winking bitch to Joe Biden, and he literally CAN’T fight back. Why?

Bill Maher’s Real Time this Friday provided the perfect example, with Alec Baldwin, the actor; Christianne Amanpour, CNN reporter, and Gary Shandling, fill-in guest and friend of the host (the latter explaining the former).

At the beginning of the panel, the CNN reporter makes an astonishing pronouncement: as the sole representative of “the fairer sex” she has a “responsibility” to stick up for how great Sarah Palin is, not specifically as a candidate, but because (implicitly) she’s a member of “the fairer sex,” with the unconscious pun intended, unconsciously, perhaps, but intended nevertheless.

I call this syndrome “pedestiality.”

You cannot assume equal station AND stand on the bullshit Victorian pedestal that women are inherently morally and spiritually superior to men.

And, as we all know, a “mother” gets an extra vote.

It’s somewhere between slightly more than one, and one complete vote (except in the case of a mother who’s a widow, who gets TWO extra votes, since, frequently, they “channel” their dead husbands.)

No: one mother = one vote.

Everything else is pedestiality.

The selfsame pedestiality that makes big vicious headlines when John Edwards (not even a candidate) is “caught” in an affair by The National Enquirer, but generates not a peep when Sarah Palin is “caught” in an affair by The SAME National Enquirer mere weeks later. Double standard = no equality.

And if we are going to move into an era beyond “identity” politics in race, then we need to do so as well in gender: because the indices of both follow essentially the same paths in the brain — the “other” as either better or worse than your “group” (whether you identify by nationality, race, religion, gender, transgender, handedness, or whatever). The mechanism in the mind is precisely the same.

The barbaric impulse that uses these double standards is only the enemy of equality, and, the enemy of civilization and all its blessings, as well.

And, ofttimes, that pedestiality manifests itself as cultural barbarism — that is, using the barbaric mindset that Greater Society exists as a prize to be plundered and pillaged; that the bedrock of civilization — civility, manners, codes and mores — is exploited to further the barbarian’s selfish ends.

(The fashion, of late, while doing this is to wrap the shite sandwich in a festive wrapper of “Country First.”)

In this case, the conscious exploitation of “flirting” into a dead camera lens — which no more means any intent to consummate than Biden’s observation that Palin was “attractive” was a declaration of intent — to blatantly disregard the collectively agreed-upon assumptions of 2,500 years of Western liberal democracies that “debate” is meant to be an honest disputation of ideas and solutions to pressing social problems, is simply wrong and a great civic evil.

e.g. Pro-Choice, versus Pro-Life — a civil debate can be made on the issues. But only if the substrate of civility is agreed upon. This is the very defining characteristic of our democratic heritage. It is the engine upon which all other engines of governance depend. When civility vanishes — as it has, lo, these eight years, replaced by fear mongering and bullying — so, too, vanishes civilization.

No such disputation arose.

And it was the intentional strategy of the Rove Machine that’s running the McCain Campaign that every rule was to be broken, called in popular parlance, “cheating.” (Winning isn’t everything: it’s the ONLY thing.)

Here’s the barbarism that opened the debate. On an open microphone, Palin begins with an INAPPROPRIATE “politeness”: “Do you mind if I call you  ‘Joe’?”

And Biden was mousetrapped. No: it is not appropriate in this venue. “Senator Biden” and “Governor Palin” are the appropriate forms of polite address in this arena. It’s for the goddam vice-presidency of the Yew-knighted States of goddamn America, gosh dang gee whillikers consarn it! Tarnation! Ain’t no Avon Lady convention. Decorum and protocol are IMPORTANT in Washington politics, as have they been going back to goddamned Magna freaking Carta in 1215, Anno Domini, Post Meridian.

Great galloping horny toads.

But the folksy “dumbing down” is to mask the lowering of the bar of qualifications, of course, and I INSTANTLY knew that this was SPECIFICALLY a setup for a slur and a sneer, which came near the end:

PALIN: Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced (sic) your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future.

That’s called the Chicago Black Sox meets Ronnie Ray-gun from the Gipper’s 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter.

“Say it ain’t so, Joe” comes to us from an alleged plea from a tearful young baseball fan to “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, and — think about it — is aimed at an almost exclusively MALE audience (sports stuff). It also belies the age of the debate preparer, because “Say it ain’t so, Joe” from 1919, pretty much lost its luster over the ensuing 89 years, and, like “doggone it” is not much in use in the vernacular nowadays. Might as well say “Gadzooks!” or “S’blood!”

“Bling” is more appropriate to informal settings, which the Stepford Wife was attempting into which to turn the debating thing than is “doggone it.” Great caterwauling furry varmints.

And THAT is cultural barbarism: preying on common courtesy to set up a “sneak attack” for later in the debate. A “zinger” as they say, but, really, in the debate sense, meant as a coup de grace, the public humiliation of the opponent. Nothing civil there, at all. Just the naked cunning of the barbarian.

Vikings may have been barbarians, but the “civilized” Irish and Welsh were unable to stop their plunder for hundreds of years, until the Viking conversion to Christianity in the 12th Century. And, as with the Republican preference of recent years, the fact that a pleasant sounding or pleasant looking female says it is supposed to temper our response to hideous mud-slinging:

Well, she’s just a woman getting back at the awful father/patriarchal figure in the only way she can — verbally.

And that’s slimy and slithery and verminous as hell, and Palin herself is morally culpable for her behavior even if she didn’t — as I suspect — think that one up, but merely learned the trick, as her trainers drilled her over and over and over again.

The civility of a policy debate between equals never transpired. (Especially when you consider that a senator of over a quarter century’s service is in no wise “equal” to a neophyte small state governor and former small-town mayor.)

The common courtesy and civility that form the bedrock of civilization are spurned to “win” in the least honorable and decent manner possible.

Think about how society would manage if no one was willing to take their turn at the ticket line, in traffic, at churches, in stores — civilization itself would cease. And yet, we believe that “please” and “thank you” hold, at best, a ceremonial role in our lives.  No: without a substrate of “manners” civil government, a government of laws is NOT POSSIBLE. “Please” and “Thank you” lie at the bedrock of living as SOCIAL animals, which we humans most definitely are, whether you maintain that the Earth is 6 billion or 6 thousand years old. To have BEGUN the debate with a bit of twisted manners — “Do you mind if I call you ‘Joe’?” — already intending to use the “polite” automatic response of “sure” is a betrayal of everything that “manners” stand for.

That was a ‘Debate’?

Instead, a blatant statement — as shocking in its way as the Governor’s petulant and lawless refusal to honor a legal subpoena in her own Troopergate scandal, as shocking as Rove and Meirs’ and whomever else’s refusal to honor congressional subpoenas — that she WILL NOT be constrained to answer questions, but will use her time to spout whatever Minah Bird speechies that she’s been being coached  in how to STARE INTO THE CAMERA and wink and bat her eyelashes about for the last week.

A cybernetic Eliza Doolittle preparing for the Ascot races.

iii. Palin Want A Cracker?

Because, it seems, no one is willing to hold Governor Mom to the same standard that any male politician would be held to.

And that is a step backwards into barbarism — which, as we all know — is NOT a good thing for women, since the definition of “dominance” becomes, invariably, who is the biggest, toughest barbarian.

Equal rights is only possible because of technology and a civil society. Ironically, Sarah Palin could have ONLY risen as far as she has BECAUSE of a civil society — the same civility she flouted and pissed on in her very first utterance of the evening for public consumption.

Thus, the attempt to hamstring Biden in his position as a male in the presence of a “spunky” madonna, on the one hand, and to castrate him verbally on the other. But no one is willing to admit that it wasn’t anything like a debate. It was a cheat: from giving themselves wiggle room by smearing and slandering the moderator as “biased” with a “conflict of interest,” to the pre-planned campaign to claim victory NO MATTER WHAT. (That includes a hastily re-wired Frank Luntz focus group after the embarrassment of Faux Nooz’s shill “focus group” giving Obama the debate victory last week. This week, SURPRISE! Palin was the big winner. Funny, even the Rightie Rasmussen Reports gives Palin her best polling numbers: 45% Biden Won, 37% Palin Won, and the remaining 18% believe they were abducted by Aliens while watching the debate).

Now, is it evil BECAUSE Sarah Palin is a woman? Of course not. Should we refuse to note that it is evil because Sarah Palin is a woman or a mother or a newbie or whatever else? Clearly not. Gender is not the issue, and should take no part in our considerations. What Palin did was abominable, her rejection of the “rules” of civil debate verged on criminal, and her voice is like nails on a blackboard. Did I mention that?

But even the sound of nails on a blackboard is not a matter of gender, but of presentation.

The sterile sameness of the Rightie pundits and bloggers flogging the same dead horse was only matched in its putrescent glory by the fetid odor of ordure that continues to waft from that abattoir of civility, the Rove Machine’s McCain Campaign.

Just pass over how this “maverick” — literally, an unbranded calf — became the branded property of everything that he opposed in his lust for one last chance at the White House. It’ll only make you nauseous. (And he’ll only move on to his proper destiny as a Viagra® spokesmodel. You know, like Bob “I put my party before my country every time” Dole?)

And, when whoppers like this were laid out, begining with condescension and barbaric rudeness, equating “blunders” of Bush with every other administration, no one dared challenge our Madam MILF:

PALIN: No, I do not believe that it has been. But I’m so encouraged to know that we both love Israel, and I think that is a good thing to get to agree on, Senator Biden. I respect your position on that.

No, in fact, when we talk about the Bush administration, there’s a time, too, when Americans are going to say, “Enough is enough with your ticket,” on constantly looking backwards, and pointing fingers, and doing the blame game.

There have been huge blunders in the war. There have been huge blunders throughout this administration, as there are with every administration.

But for a ticket that wants to talk about change and looking into the future, there’s just too much finger-pointing backwards to ever make us believe that that’s where you’re going…

If we’re talking crime against grammar, the verdict is guilty and the sentence is death — or terminated with a period.

If Dan Quayle had batted his eyes and winked into the camera so many times that it was not only clearly intentional, but clearly PRACTICED, he wouldn’t have been able to show his face in public the following day. But in our pedestiality for “woman” and “mother” we fall into the trap of believing that one sex, and one “productive” fecundity factory is morally superior and ought to be placed on a pedestal. Ought to be judged, ironically, by a LOWER standard.

No: the fact that alleged feminists somehow identify with this feminist Oreo® — Oreo = black on the outside, white in the middle, e.g. Clarence Thomas — is as insulting as the insane false equivalence of replacing Thurgood Marshall, the attorney who WON the case overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, which rationalized segregation as “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas, BTW) with Clarence Thomas, another cultural barbarian who used “affirmative action” preferences to then ascend and decry “affirmative action.”

‘Equality’ means just that.

Equality before the law, and equality before the television camera in a Vice Presidential debate.

This is a woman who worked in front of a local tv camera for five years. Tell me she’s not fucking the camera.

And the proof that this was an intentional, practiced technique is that, at the very beginning, Palin made a POINT of winking at her father in the audience specifically , to defuse any possible criticism, like this, that it was a blatantly sexual technique, albeit a sexual technique in the service of a product, like selling gum with hot young people kissing. Or the absurdist SnapOn® Tools calendars, which featured bikini-clad hot chicks standing absurdly with automotive repair machinery. They (the team that fashioned the performance) knew EXACTLY what they were attempting to do. And it worked on Rich Lowry, fer sure.

If you’ve ever been in front of a camera, you know what it means to project into that dead camera lens. It doesn’t come without a lot of practice, like the winking, and it was entirely intentional, the winking, the batting the eyes, the licking the lips. It was not so much a Vice Presidential debate as the facial equivalent of a pole dance or a lap dance at the local titty bar. There’s nothing feminist here: just a blatant attempt to sell bad soap with sex, like most of the “news” nowadays. Only this is a little over the top even by current debased TeeVee Nooz standards.

Over half of all the producers and on-air reporters in television journalism are now women, except they’re NOT women in EXACTLY the same way that Sarah Palin is not a qualified candidate for the office she seeks.

You get that?

No woman — save Helen Thomas* — can make it to television if she looks like Andy Rooney. If you watch ANY local news broadcast (and I’ve seen them, this summer, from Philadelphia to Grand Junction, Colorado, from Portland, Oregon to Albuquerque, New Mexico and Boise, Idaho) has a “Sarah Palin” reading the news from a teleprompter.

[* Helen's been "grandfathered" in for being a REAL journalist. Sort of like Rachel Maddow has her own show because she's damned good at what she does, an not because she's another TV news Barbie doll who can't pronounce "temperature" even though they mostly get their start doing the weather. "TEMP uh CHURE ! TEMP uh CHURE!" Aargh.]

Sadly, ANY one of them would have been more qualified to debate Joe Biden than Sarah Palin.

Those Barbie dolls of the tube are not universally attractive for nothing.

And it isn’t unusual for them to have begun their careers in some beauty pageant, the Walnut Queen, Fiesta Queen, Miss Congeniality, Miss White Settlement (there actually is such a pageant in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas, and I actually knew a former “Miss White Settlement”).

Sarah “Miss Congeniality”

Use any means to get ahead, including exploiting whether you turned out “attractive” or not.

Limbaugh’s “35 Undeniable Truths of Life,” — believed by the core-constituency that Palin plays to on couches across TeeVeeLand — states (via Media Matters, so’s yas c’n listen ter it):

“I have long told you, for example, Undeniable Truth of Life No. 24, written back in 1987: Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” (R. Limbaugh, Aug. 12, 2005, only one of many instances.)

The prejudice towards “attractive” women was a determinant in the workplace,  both in affirmation and in negation. Pretty girls got jobs because of their looks. And they didn’t get jobs because of their looks, (NEITHER of which has any place in hiring, unless you run a strip club or a topless show on the Vegas Strip!)

A few years ago, Deborah Norville was kicked off CBS news for being too attractive, sent into the eternal purgatory of “Inside Edition” thirteen years ago, to replace the departing host, Bill O’Reilly (he of the “Peabody” awards claims) and continue the coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

[* I'm back to it] Last night on Inside Edition, coincidentally, Norville signed off with “late night comics on the debate”: Leno and Conan making “Palin” jokes, Letterman making a Biden joke, and, to “be fair and equal” Stephen Colbert yelling “She hit it out of the park!”

Except:

I saw the Colbert Report on Thursday, and the setup admitted that, when taped, the debate HAD NOT YET TAKEN PLACE. But, parodying the reality of the Right Wing, he said he could already review the debate, a la O’Reilly — of whose bloviating Faux Nooz™ show the Colbert show is a deft parody of — but that little nuance was omitted from the Inside Edition “late night comics” sendoff fluff. It was a sop to the “fair and unbalanced” Right, and its meaning was neatly turned inside out, so that they could sign off with a point that “balanced” the jokes. Even if that “point” was reversed into a meaning that it never held.

Do you mind if I call you ‘Joe’?

It was the black humor of an Ionesco play at its darkest and most absurdist: Gotta be tough to be neutral media in today’s sulfurous atmosphere.

Now, as O’Reilly throws manic temper tantrums on the air, pushing the NEW GOP talking point — this economic crisis is ALL THE DEMOCRATS’ fault!!! — Norville still hosts “Inside Edition,” but the generation that followed her infests the airwaves AS IF the attractive gene and the journalism gene were somehow commingled in the USA’s late 20th century gene pool.

Hogwash.

The Cult of the Attractive has replaced religion as the opiate of significant masses. Witness the sudden superstardom of a dumb former mayor with delusions of grandeur in Alaska. The PR machine can make ANYBODY a star, if only the wheels are greased with the proper infusion of cash. Witness our “reality TV” celebrities. Or, more like, in quotes “celebrities.”

The female faces on the news are getting their jobs using the same criteria that they used to use to hire stewardesses, before the practice was banned as inherently sexist.

And the idea that just because Sarah Palin can produce offspring and still be a MILF in any wise disqualifies her from legitimate criticism is absurdist on the face of it.

I used to go to Ionesco plays for the black humor of his absurdist works.

Now, I just have to watch the TV news.

BUT THE WORLD HAS NOT BECOME MORE ABSURD.

Get that?

by Goya

It is WE, citizens, who have allowed these nihilist and anarchist credos to be used in our own subjugation as a free people. As Barbie dolls read us the superficial news, the substantive collective looting and pillaging of our shared society continues apace.

As no one has asked: Isn’t total credit a DUMB FUCKING WAY to run a civilization? Credit is a promise, and we are a society of liars. Is it any wonder that this absurd check-kiting scheme is falling apart like the house of cards that it is? And do we believe for a second that printing up more cash to use to buy bad paper is going to prop up the house of cards?

No: we’re just removing the rotted cards from the structure and replacing them with proper cards. But they’re still only cards, when all is said and done.

A final exemplar of this would be Sarah Palin’s Faux Nooz interview, wherein she is given, literally, a “do-over” on the questions she so famously flubbed during the Katie Couric interview. Gosh, I sure as hell wish that would have been around when I took my SATs, eh?

First she gets an open-book “debate” exam where she was noted as having been absorbed in her note cards any time the camera was off her, and ofttimes when it was ON her. Then, she gets a mulligan on screwing up and not knowing the NAMES of any magazines or newspapers she reads all the time? Really?

And what have we learned?

That pedestiality and equality are mutually exclusive practices.

That Ionesco could not have scripted the absurdity of Rush Limbaugh, et al, claiming that Palin is the “victim of sexism”.

That you don’t get to turn your back on 2,500 years of democracy and democratic debate because you’re a “hockey mom.” And noting, by the by, that Palin’s closing lines were verbatim from a Ronald Reagan speech from the 1960s:

PALIN: It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

But that the speech was about the horror of the upcoming vote on MEDICARE, lest it pass and destroy all American freedoms. (Some propheticness there, eh?)

That “shucks,” “golly,” “gosh darn it,” and other hokum cornball “folksiness” ceased to exist within the popular lexicon WELL BACK into the Twentieth Century; only actors in period pieces, and trained-minah birds use such obsolete language nowadays.

That we cannot allow the tools of civility to be perverted in the cause of their antithesis.

That these lying hypocrites deserve, at most, our unbridled contempt.

And, that, in the words of Harlan Ellison: “you lie down with pigs, you get up smelling like garbage.”

Which segues neatly into that GOP pettysan party-san port-a-san:

Today, Sarah Palin is accusing Barack Obama of “not being qualified to be Commander in Chief” [ABC News] [and the New York Times] — as if she’d know anything about it — and that Obama is “palling around with terrorists” [TIME].

So, allow me the counter-accusation: clearly John McCain is palling around with idiots.

Which leads us to the final, distasteful — yet inescapable — conclusion: that Sarah Palin is palling around with vermin.

But she’s still a freaking robot.

Courage.