Unappealin' Palin

Now that the Republicans have lost the White House they are attacking Sarah Palin. Republicans, FROM INSIDE THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN, have leaked to the press that Palin did not know Africa is a continent and instead thinking the whole thing is a single country. Palin was said to have no clue as to which countries made up NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Republican insiders are leaking stories to make Sarah look stupid. She may be stupid. I think all of us are stupid on some subject areas. I feel sorry for Governor Palin.

Palin may have said that she thought Africa was a country and maybe she didn’t get the difference between a continent and a country, but at least once, in the mad harridness of the campaign, someone asked Obama about how many states he had visited and he said he thought he’d been to all 57. If you haven’t been THAT busy, THAT tired, and surrounded by insistant, rude, constant, strange questioners you would say some stupid stuff from time to time.

Don’t get me wrong. I am relieved that Palin is not our VP elect, but I still hesitate to mock Palin’s ignorance, especially since my own moutain of ignorance requires one to strap on oxygen tanks to approach the summit, but then, I was not a VP candidate to a guy who was 72, and has had 3 previous cancer occurances. While I hesitate to mock ignorance, I also don’t celebrate ignorance. I do not advocate for anti-intellectualism. Palin didn’t ask to be on the world stage, she was asked. Yeah, she accepted, and that was a foolish thing to do if you sensed you just weren’t up to the big leagues, but who says she sensed that? If she is as ignorant as some are saying, then she may have had no clue how daunting the job was going to be. If there is real oops I stepped in the poopy going on, it should be with the McCain campaign staffers who pushed and pulled Palin on to the world stage without having her audition for the part. It seems to me that this blame shifting to Palin is more a stain on McCain than on Palin.

Had they properly vetted her, Republican staffers would have found that while most law enforcement agencies and municipals in Alaska absorbed the costs of a rape kit, when investigating that crime, in the city of Wasilla rape victims had to pay for their own forensic tests and this was the practice while Sarah Palin was mayor. They would have found that Palin had a religious explanation for global warming that let polluters off the hook. They might have discovered that she had no clear idea of what the job of VP was, nor did she have a basic understanding of the content of the US Constitution. They would have discovered that she had a shocking lack of knowledge regarding geography, and political current events. Had the Republican staffers of the McCain campaign looked into Palin just a little closer they would have found that she shoots from the hip, that she doesn’t like to prepare, that she was anti-intellectual, that her experience dealing with the press, and high pressure situations were lacked a general knowledge of civics.

The saddest part of all this is that these leaks about what a Diva, Wack-o, air-headed, wildly spending Wasilla hillbilly Palin is coming not from me, not from Democrats, but from staffers inside the McCain campaign. The Palin Bashing IS being reported by the media, and Palin is upset by the media, but the media is not making up these stories. The media is reporting statements coming out of Palin handlers, and McCain staffers high up and inside of the McCain campaign.

If Palin were a car then she may have been a lemon, but the McCain staffers who bought her, never checked the engine, didn’t bother with a test drive, and never kicked the tires. Hadn’t anyone ever heard the old saying, “You can’t tell a book by it’s cover?” If you don’t check, you sometimes get something you didn’t expect to get. If that happens it is not the fault of the book, or the auto-lemon, or the unprepared VP candidate, it is the fault of the folks that failed to check.