This has been Freakout Week for Dems and progressives across the land, and I’ll admit I have not been immune to it. Sarah Palin scares the bejeezus out of me (which is ironic considering how she wants to force the bejeezus into people). I am frightened not because she’s the gun-toting Moose Lady, but because she’s a dangerously unqualified, breathtakingly dishonest, anti-science, anti-woman, diplomacy-challenged, Big Oil-shilling, pork-hoovering extremist crockpot.
Palin’s recent interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson did nothing to settle my stomach; she didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was, and tossed off that we "perhaps" might go to war with Russia. Yeah, that’s just what we need! Isn’t there some protocol against openly taunting nuclear superpowers in casual interviews? What are they gonna do, start an all-ages draft? Stop-loss soldiers until they’re 90? I guess if Russia nukes us, troop retention won’t be an issue anymore.
What’s most upsetting, however, is the audacity of the lies coming out of the McCain campaign, often straight from the lips of the candidates themselves. Just today, McCain said Palin had never accepted federal earmarks. Look, Palin is the Ms. Pac Man of pork: pushing for the infamous bridge to nowhere, then keeping the money after it became a national joke! Palin has chomped down literally hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of pork pellets. And when Obama points out they’re lying (as Palin has repeatedly done about her support for the bridge), they run an ad claiming he’s being "disrespectful" of Palin.
McCain and Palin are testing the theory that, in the media age, you can go beyond mere distortion — you can make things up from scratch and get away with it. For people so addicted to the Cold War, you would think they’d avoid taking their cues from Pravda.
