Palin is a bright shiny target rich environment - a new Dan Quayle, a woman Spiro Agnew. But we can't get too distracted. The main target still has to be McCain. Sure, Palin is the latest in a series of bad decisions. But McCain has made a lot of worse ones - supporting the war, opposing renewable energy, opposing Veterans benefits.

So let's continue to give his old classic mistakes the attention they deserve, not ignoring Palin, but not making her our main topic of discussion when reading voters.

Oh and a side note: to the extent we pay attention to Palin, let's concentrate on things we would worry about if she were a man. After all an anti-choice, creationist, Dominionist one term governor in the midst of an undue influence scandal who does not know what a VP does offers plenty to criticize. That she has kids to take care of are no more a knock on her than than being a single father was on Biden during his Senate term. Similarly her having been a Miss America contestant means no more than the fact that at least one U.S. President was once a male model. (I'll leaving googling who it was as an exercise for readers.) I think we've pretty good at avoiding sexism (in her case) so far, but be aware of the traps. The mainstream media will pull some of this stuff - misogyny occasionally outweighing Republican bias. Just because it is directed at one of the bad guys does not mean we need to quote it approvingly.

I am listening to CNN tonight and the pundits talking about Sarah Palin as the veep choice for McCain.

I fell off my couch laughing when I heard this gem from Bay Buchanan - I am paraphrasing her, as I don't have the exact quote just yet...

She just stated that Palin's son is going to be deployed and that is the first step for Palin's Foreign Experience!

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sorry, I had to compose myself after I typed that perfect gem.

This isn't much of a diary, but a game for us to listen and post the most lamest excuses that the talking heads give us about Palin.

So, I just gave the first one.  Who is next?

The most interesting thing about McCain's bizarre and desperate choice of VP is that it's consistent with conservative ass-backwards methods of choosing candidates.

If you remember: Bush, as a candidate, had no experience & wasn't fit to be president. But they said it was the content of his heart and all that identity bullshit that mattered. Their idea: If a person's a good person (yeah right) they can do the job.

Next week in Minnesota they'll be crying in their beers about her qualities as a person but they'll be short on her real POTUS qualifications, thinking that it won't matter. "Just anyone can be president if they're a good person. Even 'C' students." Good one. How'd it work with Bush?

But this is but another way to stir up something when you have NOTHING to really run on, policy-wise.

So McCain has nominated a woman Republican for vice president and upstaged the Democrats' change message to some degree. In 2006, I predicted that if the Democrats did not nominate a woman in 2008 then the Republicans would do so, if only for the tactical advantage it might provide.  Before I was banned from participation at DailyKos for failing to make a contribution there, I pointed it out in an essay at DailyKos on Friday, July 28, 2006 that if Hillary Clinton or another woman were not on the Democratic ticket, the Republicans would use the issue to upstage Democrats in 2008.  I said,

If the Democrats are indifferent or averse to the value of [women] "firsts", there is a significant political history suggesting that the Republicans might grab and claim this ground for women before the Democrats do, because they typically have arrived first in the past. The Republicans historically have been the first to elevate women. The first women in the US Senate, the US House of Representatives and the US Supreme Court were Republicans. "In 1917, Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, entered the U.S. House of Representatives, the first woman ever elected to Congress." In 1978, "Nancy Landon Kassebaum, a Kansas Republican, was elected to the United States Senate in her own right. In 1981, "Sandra Day O'Connor, a former Republican state legislator from Arizona who had served on a state appeals court, was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as the first woman ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court." Prior to the election of Nancy Kassebaum to the US Senate in 1978, all women who had ever served in the US Senate had succeeded their husbands in Congress or had first been appointed to fill out unexpired terms of somebody else." [ http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/... ]

So, if the Republicans have been first to elect women to the US Senate, the US House and to appoint a woman to the US Supreme Court, will the be the first to nominate and elect an woman President? I certainly hope not, because her name might be Condoleezza Rice. Yes, most Americans expect that US Senator Hillary Clinton will be nominated by the Democrats in 2008, but she is not then Condoleeza Rice or another Republican could become the first female president of the United States. [ http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/... ] That's something for Democrats to ponder as they weigh whether "firsts" have any remaining value in the post-Jackie Robinson age.

It is unfortunate that the only way that women could make strides into public office historically was when their husbands had held those offices first. Yet we must be grateful for those historic first because without them women might still be precluded, by custom if by nothing else, from participating at all. Certainly, our country should have been more "free" and it should be more free today. But, to lament and criticize the "husband route" is effectively to say that all-male leadership was and is preferable - a proposition that I hope few of us are yet ready to support. Criticism of the "husband route" has the damnable effect of supporting and advocating the sexist status quo.  DailyKos, July 28, 2006

Cross Posted to Clintonistas for Obama

Cross Posted to Daily Kos

Well, today has brought an interesting selection of a Vice Presidential nominee. John McBush went out on a limb and selected Governor Sarah "Panderbear" Palin as his Vice Presidential candidate, citing her as the running mate who can "best help him shake up Washington".

Or she could be the running mate that "best helps him pander in an intellectually dishonest way" to disillusioned Hillary voters. Sarah went right to work on that today, of course, comparing herself to Hillary and Geraldine Ferraro as a "groundbreaker" and telling us how she's going to finish Hillary's job and break the glass celing that has 18 million cracks in it.

My contribution: $

(Proudly cross-posted at Clintonistas for Obama)

OK, now that the convention is over... It's time for us to get back to work! And for us here at C4O, this means getting more & better Democrats elected. So today, I'd like to introduce you to a truly awesome person who will make a fantastic Senator from New Hampshire.

Are you ready to meet her?

Let's compare some quotes:

Fox's profile of Palin: http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/08/29/ sarah-palin-seen-as-gop-rising-star/

Almanac of American Politics: http://www.nationaljournal.com/almanac/2 008/people/ak/akgv.php

FOX:

Palin grew up in Wasilla, just outside of Anchorage, played on Wasilla's state champion girls' basketball team in 1982, wore the crown of Miss Wasilla in 1984 and competed in the Miss Alaska contest.

AoAP:

She grew up in Wasilla, just outside of Anchorage, played on Wasilla's state championship girls basketball team in 1982, wore the crown of Miss Wasilla in 1984 and competed in the Miss Alaska contest.

Firing someone for not doing family favors (not knowing why she fired him does not cut it); knowingly promoting a sexual harasser; creationism, only two meeting with McJoke, inexperience, endangered species killer, potsmoker, etc., etc. We learn all this is in only four hours. Tomorrow we will have a tome.  I have a bold prediction from a reeling mind and BTW: McJoke truly lost his marbles-in comparison to Q, at least Quayle had a foot in the ground (he was inexperenced but got a bad break- the potato spelling thing- please: he was a two term Senator from a major state coming from an important family- and he did have some important accomplishments)- the convention may be postponed- and if it is, the hurricane is only part of the reason-This time next week Palin will no longer be the VP nominee- you heard it here first.