The chimera

Before John McCain asked Sarah Palin to be his running-mate, they'd met once in February and had one subsequent phone conversation (last Sunday). Bullied by social conservatives who vetoed his favored choices, McCain offered Palin the job on Wednesday Thursday. Palin is the least vetted vice presidential candidate in history, but we're quickly learning plenty about this inexperienced pol. Sisyphus has an illuminating post at 43SB outlining her ties to the corrupt Ted Stevens machine, her extremist views, and her utter lack of national experience. And MoveOn.org has sent this email to its millions of members, detailing - among other things - what Alaskan progressives think of her.

Says one: "Alaskans, collectively, are just as stunned as the rest of the nation. She is doing well running our State, but is totally inexperienced on the national level, and very much unequipped to run the nation, if it came to that. She is as far right as one can get, which has already been communicated on the news. In our office of thirty employees (dems, republicans, and nonpartisans), not one person feels she is ready for the V.P. position." Read it all here, and share these facts and opinions with the swing voters you know.

Comments

[Fairy]

Remember this is the State which has the House of Representatives in which Tom Loertscher said in committee during discussions about Day Care Regulations, "How do we keep moms at home?"

Does this mean that if you have nannys and enough money you can have someone else take care of your little darlings because then you are elevated to the "social status" in which it is okay to be in any job which will take you away from your children.

How could Idaho Republicans sanction a young mother of school age children and a handicapped baby, who will be needing "their very own mother's" care, going off to the grind of campaigning and office holding all over the place. SHOCKING, and if we need to stay home how can it be Ms Palin need not!!!

[ReggieH]

erm. . .cough, cough. . .[whistles inconspiculously and touches finger to nose as if to say "keep it under your nose"].

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-69834

[Bubblehead]

Wow, Julie... haven't you always said that Daily Kos and non-BinkyBoy/morialekafa Idaho Dems are nothing like Democratic Underground? It looks like ReggieH up there and this DKos diary are kind of disproving your point: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/30/121350/137/486/580223

[Julie in Boise]

Fascinating. I take a break for BSU halftime, and what do I find here at RSR?

Bubblehead, I won't pass judgment on this story except to say that the Kos diary in particular presents a pretty compelling case, especially in the photos of Sarah and her daughter. I guess time will tell, but I am feeling some pretty strong Tom Eagleton vibes here. Will Palin last 18 days?

Let's see how this plays out.

[Julie in Boise]

Bubblehead, in my fellow Kossacks' defense, I'll also add that plenty of people on that diary are questioning its veracity. And others are voicing truths like these:

"This is a HUGE DISTRACTION from things that really matter, like a 72 y.o. nominee picking a completely inadequate veep."

[Bubblehead]

Wow... Gov. Palin gave birth in a hospital. With lots of doctors and nurses present. Can a reasonable person assume that you think that so many people would be happy to be involved in a conspiracy? That there's not one Democrat on the hospital staff who would be willing to go public? Do you think most Democrats would say that a teenage girl having a "pooch" is proof that she's pregnant? Or should all teenage girls look like anorexic models to not be publicly accused of being pregnant?

I'm sorry, but this will give Democrats a bad name if it goes any further. (I know! I bet KKKarl Rove planted the photos and posted the diary to make Democrats look bad! Right after he planted the explosives in the World Trade Center and set off the bomb in the Pentagon!)

[Julie in Boise]

Fairy, you raise a fascinating question as well. I have a cousin, an avid fundamentalist, who raised five kids (now all grown) and worked as a nurse most of the time. Her husband is a union elevator contractor, so they probably could have scrimped on his one salary if they were really hard-core about it. But I like this cousin because, even though we disagree on theology, she seems to have a reasonably open mind. (For example, when her eldest daughter decided to have two kids out of wedlock with a Jewish guy, they didn't disown her.)

There seem to be two kinds of fundamentalist families. Some are reasonably egalitarian, with husbands who "let" their wives work. (I almost choked when I attended the wedding of one of my cousin's other kids and the couple actually included the "honor and obey" line in their wedding vows. But in that couple, the wife is actually the main breadwinner.)

Then there are those (like Loertscher) who believe that a woman's role is to have as many children as God wishes her to have, period, and that she needs nothing else to be fulfilled in her life.

I'm guessing that the Palins are in the slightly more egalitarian camp.

[Julie in Boise]

Again, Bubblehead, plenty of Kossacks are raising the same cautionary words that you are. So please don't go all smug and superior on me.

I think Sarah Palin ought to release her medical records and be done with it. If there's any truth to this story, it will come out. I frankly believe it is a distraction from the original points of my post: that she is the least-vetted, least-qualified VP candidate in history, and that the social cons bullied McCain into picking her.

[Julie in Boise]

Here's a Kos diary on the point that Fairy brought up. Apparently many fundamentalists don't think Palin is a good pick at all since she really oughta be home raising her kids:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/31/1469/85335/817/580901

[Sisyphus]

"Again, Bubblehead, plenty of Kossacks are raising the same cautionary words that you are. So please don't go all smug and superior on me."--what Julie said. Please remember Bubbles that blogs are a pretty good forum for vetting. Since you are a McCain supporter why don't you tell us why she's a good pick.

[Bubblehead]

She throws a bone to the base to get them to STFU (hopefully) while diverting press coverage from Sen. Obama's speech. Politically, it's a great move. Is she the 2nd best person in the Republican Party to be President? Of course not. McCain is signalling a return to the era of the "do-nothing" Vice Presidency, and I'm all for that. People keep comparing her to Sen. Quayle (who had about the same federal experience as Sen. Obama) while seemingly forgetting that Bush-Quayle won. Politically, I think it's also to Sen. McCain's benefit to have Democrats being the ones to keep bringing up "experience", since traditionally people end up voting on the top of the ticket, not the VP.

As I've frequently said, I'd be happy with either ticket winning; McCain because I honestly believe he really is -- and will govern as -- the "old" McCain (and not what he's turned into as a candidate), and Sen. Obama because I believe he won't lose the War, and hopefully we'll get progressives to see that being nice to people all the time doesn't work in the real world, and so maybe they'll STFU. (I also like most of Sen. Obama's domestic policies better.)

From the standpoint of someone who appreciates absurdity, though, the choice is an absolute winner -- seeing progressives complain about working women while Evangelicals say they see nothing wrong with it is priceless. As a bonus, it's bringing out the conspiracy theorists, which is always entertaining. (You should look into the "Sen. Obama was born in Africa but his mother flew him to Hawaii afterwards and had his birth certificate fraudulently generated" wackos -- they're on the same page as the "Gov. Palin didn't really have her 5th child" crowd.)

[ReggieH]

Clarification. I'm not pushing that story. Not many are, I don't believe. I do find it interesting, though. I agree with Julie that it is a distraction, but one cannot help but be slightly intrigued by it(heh. As evidence by the number of comments on it. All I did was post a link. I was curious what anyone here might have to say on it.)

All I know is that I remember hearing about the Edwards affair late December and thinking along the lines of "No way, that's complete bullspit--it's in the National Enquire." And we all know how that turned out. Sometimes these crazy far out stories have a way of turning out true. For example the whole thing about Larry Craig having been rumored to be gay for so many years[not that it mattered whatsoever], I remember hearing about it so long before the bathroom thing happened, and thought "No way, no way". Boy was I wrong there.

Regardless, I do not think this is something that should be touched anyway[1, because I think the majority of Americans will come down sympathetically on the side of Palin if Democrats are perceived as "attacking" her on this, and 2, because in all honesty it really does distract from the more prevalent meme that she is completely unready for office, hasn't been vetted, is being investigated for an ethics violation, is a complete pander by McCain, so on and so forth). I probably shouldn't even have posted the link but I was just too darned intrigued. So sue me, right?

[Bubblehead]

The Edwards and Craig cases were much easier to believe from the start, due to the nature of the allegations. As a general rule, the chances of a secret getting out is proportional to the square of the number of people who know. In those cases, only a few people (very close staffers) would have known what was going on, and these people all had a vested interest in keeping the scandal quiet. (I'm assuming here that Sen. Craig's sex partners weren't that likely to know Craig from any other anonymous guy.) In the Palin case, such a large number of people would have had to be in on it (everyone in the general public who saw Gov. Palin during her last month of pregnancy, all the airline personnel who saw her flying home, all the doctors and nurses in the hospital where she "supposedly" gave birth) that the odds of keeping it quiet for even a little while were next to nil.

Plus, it turns out that the "daughter baby bump" picture was taken in 2006, and the baby was born in 2008. Not such "compelling" evidence anymore, I'm guessing. ( http://townhall.com/blog/g/9b3375c7-6a27-4b5e-9204-b267282a1ce1 )