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The Red, White and Blue Disguise

The Absurdity Exhibition

“Sarah Palin: Babe-raham Lincoln,” says a t-shirt featuring a dated beauty shot of the Alaskan Governor. Alas the phrase of Wayne’s World fame seems to have some application due to the thunderous arrival of former pageant queen and current Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

For those of you unfamiliar with Palin, she’s the down-home Jesus freak, corrupt Governor of Alaska who gives her kids dog names and thinks global warming isn’t man-made and believes the Iraq War is a “task from God” and could very well be running your country in the coming months.

But the shirt says she’s Abe Lincoln with boobs.

Of course that’s a ridiculous statement. Abe Lincoln and Sarah Palin — two sides of the same coin? Two peas in a pod? Two balls in a sack? I mean, they’re both white supremacists but the similarities end there. (Oh come on you know that’s a joke. After all Palin’s condescending dismissal of “community organizers” as do-nothing wimps has nothing to do with their penchant for helping impoverished black people.) Abe didn’t claim moral superiority by anointing his “small town values” over the big city values (presumably the values of blacks and Latinos and gays and trannys and Jews and Muslims and the undesirable Whole Foods-shopping white people who live among them) of his opponent. Abe didn’t have a cutesy nickname (Sarah Barracuda). Or maybe he did (Honest Abe), but at least it didn’t suck.

If condoms, birth-control and all the other contraceptives that, when used properly, make it nearly impossible to have a baby were around in Abe’s time, I’m guessing he’d want adolescents to be made aware of their existence, unlike Palin, who wants the United States government to institutionally brainwash high schoolers into thinking that abstinence is the only way to keep from getting pregnant, thus giving parents the task of counterbalancing this propaganda. Along those same lines I doubt Abe would impose his personal belief that life starts at conception on 300 million people, thus stripping women of agency over their own bodies and giving it to the government. Even more along those same lines, I doubt Abe would, on behalf of his pregnant teenaged daughter, demand privacy of choice after preaching as gospel that choice is not a private matter.

But these are the things Palin stands for; this is what Palin has done.

And despite what her handlers want you to believe, Palin has charmed the shit out of the “liberal media.” The “thrill up the leg” that Chris Matthews got from a Barack Obama speech seems like an unassuming handshake compared to the Palin-induced throbbing boner that he now sports around MSNBC. She even injected Pat Buchanan with a friskiness reminiscent of his exciting years bashing gays and Jews.

And this is the point that is the true shame of this Palin-heavy leg of the campaign — the media, the only body with enough credibility, power and resources to inform the American people of exactly how dangerous it is to have a person who’s been Governor of Alaska for 21 months just a heartbeat away from running the United States, is eating this shit up.

Instead of asking, “If she becomes president, what evidence is there that Palin will have any idea what she’s doing?” the media are analyzing what Palin’s addition to the ticket means for ex-Hiliary supporters. Instead of highlighting how little Sarah Palin knows about anything associated with being president, the media is highlighting how strong of a woman she is. She’s a mom! She has a child with Down Syndrome! Hockey mom! Hunting! Church! PTA! Small town! Fishing! Values! Fighter! Identifiable! Identifiable! Identifiable! Identifiable!

Identifiable? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Since when is being superficially similar to the people voting for you a credential to be president of the United States? Moreover, why the hell would we want someone we can identify with running our country? Being as dumb as us (and we are very, very dumb) and as flawed as us (and we are very, very flawed) and as bigoted as us and as irrational as us and as lazy as us and as unqualified as us is no argument. We elect you because we trust your judgment, we know you’re that smart, we know you are the one person out of all of us adept enough to run this country…not because you can shot a moose and skin it properly, or because you remind me of the lady who sits in front of me at church every week, or because you are just so fucking neighborly.

This woman is not a governor. Her role in this country and in this campaign is not to govern, so let’s not legitimize her by calling her as such. What she is is a General in the Culture Wars. She’s a leader of the side fighting for censorship and capped freedom, for a mangled Christianity and the values of our racist, sexist, bigoted past, against you.

She’s been tapped by the same corrupt fascists at the GOP who have fucked up our country so impossibly over the past eight years in order to bring her misled, crazy-eyed warriors out to the polls on November 4 in a last-ditch, slimy attempt to keep power in Republican hands. And the more and more this campaign goes on, with the media —paralyzed and negligent — feeding us this “real people” bullshit, the more and more it looks like that’s exactly what she’s going to do.

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