SULLIVAN’S SORROWS..

Sarah Palin: the most underqualified vice-president ever?

“It is a farce. It is absurd. It is an insult to all intelligent
people. It is a sign of a candidate who has lost his mind. “

“McCain has rendered himself unfit to run a branch of Starbucks, let
alone the White House. “

“She had no idea what the Bush Doctrine was – the central and most
controversial foreign policy innovation of the past eight years.”

“Then we have the now mountain of lies that follow Palin everywhere she
goes, lies she keeps repeating as if they are not subject to factual scrutiny” -
etc. etc. ad infinitum

There you have him, Andrew Sullivan, Sunday
Times correspondent, and - for reasons that elude me - “one of America’s most influential commentators“, frothing at the mouth.

Needless to say, the courtesy of the political journalist is usually
inversely proportional to his common good sense. More pertinently, they often
lose sight of the difference between wishful thinking and a reasoned conclusion.
And Andrew is no exception. For if, instead of quarrelling over how many angels
can dance on the top of a pin, he’d taken a single step backwards, he would
clearly have discerned that denying the truth does not change the facts. For
even though the racial mix of America is altering as immigration fuels
population growth, Obama is, in fact, at this moment in time, unelectable. And
so, for that matter, is McCain - pickled, as he is, in Botox and walking like
the Golem of the Ghetto. Let us not pretend otherwise. In fact, it is hard not
to admire what either Obama or McCain achieved, but the histrionic conduct of
their thousands of helpers also suggests that an element of ever more desperate
self-deception has long since pervaded their respective electoral campaigns.

So with the electorate caught between a rock and a hard place. Sarah
Palin is, in truth, the answer to a prayer. So far from being “a massive,
unforgivable, inexplicable decision by someone who has either gone insane or is
managerially unfit to be president of the United States“, she is, in all
probability, the single most effective recruiting agent ever to be nominated for
the vice-presidential responsibility. A stroke of immaculate conception, in
other words, rather than an act of Biblical savagery.

But, of course, when a media war is waged on someone thought to have
done wrong, the executor in the one instance can easily become the victim in
another. And if you really have a problem with women being nominated to the Vice
Presidency while not knowing the Bush Doctrine, she seems to me to be a
prophetess of the changed world one so longs for. She doesn't know, as yet, what
the eyes of the dead are like. For here's the point. The perniciousness of its
ideology can easily be acquired, whereas a guiltless personality is a divine
bequest.

Or think of it this way, Andrew, at least when she’s kissing them, we
know she’s been the mother of, rather than murdering, babies...

Dreamy