With a Wink and a Lie

For a horrible moment there, I thought she was going to breastfeed the baby--you know, to really connect with the Hockey Moms out there and maybe give Joe Sixpack a little peek. Sarah Palin's beauty pageant training really came through last night. The wave, the winning smiles, the cutesy winks, the "gosh-darns" and "by-gollys" and "you betchas", the shout-out to the 3rd grade class or whatever it was, and--most of all--the non-stop fact-free verbiage. She really is made for TV--one of those daytime shows with female hosts whose sole purpose is to fill up time with meaningless chatter that no one will remember 30 minutes later. Kathie Lee, Kelly Ripa, Sarah Palin...the career path is wide open if the politics thing doesn't work out.

Of course, she never bothered to answer any of those pesky questions posed by the irrelevant Gwen Ifill, who apparently was so cowed by the GOP's preemptive attack-the-moderator campaign that she couldn't muster the courage to steer Palin (and, to be fair, a few times Biden as well) back to the subject. So there was nothing to prevent Palin from delivering her memorized setpieces of bumpersticker slogans. Or to shamelessly repeat the GOP attack ad falsehoods designed to convince the heartland that Obama is really a crypto-Muslim terrorist who wants to starve Our Troops In Eye-Rack and tax Struggling Families into poverty. Never mind that Biden refuted the charges, goshdarnit, Sarah came right back to repeat her lies in that adorable squeaky cheerleader voice without batting an eye.

And OMG, enough with the "maverick" thing! One of the problems with mavericks (BTW, I'm from Texas, where the term originated) is that you never know what the hell they're going to do, which is why they make good copy but poor leaders. McCain's erratic behavior lately--apparently trying to re-establish his fading maverick cred--demonstrates this pretty well.

But (to use Palin's mantra) let's get back to energy... I'm still waiting to hear about Palin's vaunted energy expertise. From what I can tell it consists of getting herself elected governor of a state that produces oil that is delivered through a pipeline built decades earlier and which subsidizes the state government through a deal established before she was elected. Remember, folks, Dubya was not only governor of Texas (a bigger oil and gas producer), but he actually had his own oil company (which never made any money), so he had even better claims to being an "expert". You can see how well that's worked out for the country. Most of us here in the Lower 48, as they say, have no notion about what goes on in Alaskan politics, so the tendency is to accept the authorized GOP version, but for an alternative view, just check out these sites here and here.

I was relieved to see that polls among uncommitted voters show most didn't buy Palin's act. Move over, Bonnie Hunt!