Full disclosure. Interest in Sarah Palin has provided the reason, perhaps the excuse, for buying two issues of the National Enquirer, the first such purchases of my life and not cheap at $3.95 a pop. But the Enquirer did such a good job on John Edwards’s lies that I felt I could rely on their crack investigative staff to get the straight poop on Palin.
Sure enough I found that the Enquirer team has been hard at work in the frozen American wastes on the Russian border and has unearthed rich veins of scandal. In the small town of Wasilla, Sarah’s home, there appears little to do other than drink, use drugs, fornicate and go to church. Pretty much the same thing happens, almost in plain view, across the Bering Strait. Palin herself on her recent visit to NYC for the first time seemed to acknowledge the sensory deprivation of her northern haunts when she exclaimed, twice, that there was “plenty to do here” in pagan NYC. So it is not surprising that Palin and family got involved in drugs, booze and fornication, all of which the Enquirer documents so earnestly. At this point the Enquirer is especially interested in Palin’s own affair with hubby’s business partner some years back – one which was “unconsummated,” or so goes the story thus far.
But on reflection I think my Enquirer purchases were unnecessary. Palin would be a rotten president, as evidenced by the fact that she is a rotten mom which was evident right off the bat. No extra reading necessary. Consider. She apparently limits her kids’ sex education to “abstinence only.” Pregnant daughter Bristol is a tribute to the efficacy of that curriculum. Now 17 year old Bristol and her lover, Levi, another teenager, must wed, the time-honored term for which is a shotgun wedding. Levi certainly would have nowhere to run since the good governor could find him with her troopers or perhaps track him down herself in her helicopter, gun at the ready, as Levi tried to flee below over the permafrost. Think of it – this young woman and young man are having their horizons narrowed as they enter the starting gate of life in the 21st century. Neither may ever recover. Good going, Governor Palin.
For Palin’s first press conference, Bristol, clad in obscuring black, held Palin’s Down Syndrome baby to hide her own pregnancy, one of the most cynical cover-ups, quite literally, in politics where the bar is quite high for this sort of thing. (Perhaps the only ploy recently to rival this was John Edwards’s excuse for his affair while his wife wis dying of cancer. Edwards claimed that, at the time his affair began, his wife was in remission. To which Jon Stewart responded: “What was he doing – celebrating”?)
Palin’s oldest son is now being packed off to the war on Iraq, a killing mission without justification. How can she send him to a war that is so obviously a war of aggression at this point? What is the mindset here? So Palin, the conservative Evangelical, is willing to sacrifice one child to Venus and another to Mars, because Jesus has so commanded.
Now if Palin’s fundamentalist ideology is so extreme that she is willing to sacrifice her own children to it, then can we not be certain she will be willing to do so to the rest of us and our children? From the moment she came into public view it was evident that Palin spelled trouble – more so since she is only one errant melanocyte away from the presidency. The problem is not that Sarah Palin is trailer trash; she and husband Todd seem to live quite fashionably. The problem is that her deeply held beliefs are trailer trash ideology.
Note.
Fuller disclosure. This writer holds no brief for Obama/Biden either. And he will watch the Palin-Biden encounter this week, certain to be more entertaining than the first McCain/Obama debate, a real snoozer loaded with verbage (a legitimate word which is a conflation of “verbiage” and “garbage”) as Sarah has correctly, if inadvertently, labeled McCain’s rhetoric.
JOHN WALSH can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com.