The Lonesome Rhodes half of the Republican ticket took to the stage on Thursday, twanging and twitching and winking and grinning–doing everything but playing a chorus of “Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life” on the guitar. All that was missing from the cheerleader act was the baton. It may have been the first time in history that a Vice Presidential candidate flirted with the voters.
It was all she had. Corseted rhetorically too tightly to breathe, she had nothing to say and no ability to say it. She was either absent from grade school the day they diagrammed sentences, or witch hunting evangelicals believe grammar is a tool of the devil.
She is perky—I’ll give her that. Perky has never been considered one of the essential skills for the leader of the free world, but it does go down well at scout meetings, sorority parties, and sales managers’ conventions.
Tourette’s symptoms aside, with the sound off, she was energetic eye candy.
One suspects that’s how the middle-class and working-class Republican faithful live their lives–with the sound permanently off. While the rich send impoverished children off to die in immoral wars, poison the air, pollute the oceans, and wreck the economy, the faithful keep reelecting them year after year. Kick me again, please. Harder. It’s for God and Country.
With the sound on, Palin may be uneducated, ignorant, and inarticulate, but she is no naïf. She has always wanted power—she told her campaign manager in 1996 that she wanted to be president – and believes she knows how to get it. Her staff solicited national exposure for her before McCain reared his head and flew into Alaskan airspace.
From her earliest campaign in Wasilla, she brought a full-blown Republican agenda to small town politics (much to its surprise), and was elected with the support of the Republican Party. She has followed the conventional Republican platform. The maverick part lies in her right-wing religious fundamentalism, the secretive and rancorous style of her administration, and the extreme anti-American views with which she and her husband have sympathized.
Mavericky there, all right.
She has the manipulative ruthlessness of an ideologue, the disposition of a demagogue, and the political instincts of a piranha. She is a Bush-Cheney hybrid with breasts.
Her kitten-with-a-whip tactics have intimidated a number of her critics, but in case you have a taste for dominatrices, you might want to consider one of the following inauguration gifts: bronzed moose antlers, a grenade launcher for hunting, getting her enemies list bound in vellum.
So far we’ve survived Frances, Jeanne, Wilma, Katrina, Rita, and Fay, but in Sarah’s case, we might want to say, “All right, Governor, put down the hunting rifle, take off your stilettos, and back slowly away from the Vice Presidency.”
We won’t send her home empty-handed.
Rumor has it that Revlon is naming one of its new fall shades “Sarah”. It’s the color of dried moose blood with a hint of dung for that edgy, rural hunting look. And it comes with its own makeup bag and a sample of their new sunscreen made from polar bear oil.