We woke up this morning to the news that John McCain has chosen Sarah Palin, the Governor of somewhere or other, and--as the news reports are taking great delight in telling us--an ex-beauty queen, for his running mate in the American presidential elections. The fact that she was a beauty queen, of course, means nothing, and the British media is actually being rather sexist in reporting it so rabidly.
There's a suggestion that one of the reasons McCain chose Palin was to try to poach disillusioned Hillary Clinton supporters from the Democrats. I don't know if that's true, not being a Facebook friend of John McCain's, but I can believe it might be. What I struggle to believe is that anybody's alliegance to a political cause could be so flexible that they'd abandon it just because a candidate with the same genitalia was selected for the other team. But then, I am known for my dogmatism when it comes to politics. A friend of mine recently said, "Bruce, for such an intelligent and nuanced man you see things in very black-and-white terms." (of course, he would say that. Capitalist swine that he is.)
5 comments:
Very fine......
couldn't agree with you more, Bruce. the whole thing just makes me want to move to Canada...
I think it's easy to skip back and forth when you detest the choices equally.
I'm going to add your link to my blog if that's ok with you. Well, I really plan to do it regardless so it's more of a notification than a question.
Kim
Now we are beginning to find out more about Palin, at least over here. You probably knew already in America. So she's a gun nut who likes to eat moose and is opposed to gay marriage, eh?
Of course, in feminist terms it's complicated. Palin may be a conservative and therefore a supporter of all the traditional power structures which have oppressed women for as long as they've been in place, but as Barbara Ellen points out in today's Observer newspaper, it was Michelle Obama who had to give the American media her recipe for cookies (or whatever it was), and say, on stage in front of thousands of people, and the world media, "I come to you as a wife." So which one of them is closer to Debbie Reynolds? (Of course, neither Debbie Reynolds nor Barrack Obama could make a speech as good as Michelle's was.)
The moose thing, of course, brings about our latent hypocrisy. Are Biden and Obama vegetarians? I don't know, but I doubt it. And killing one animal for food is much the same as another. After all, moose may be cute in their ungainly way, but cows have beautiful eyes.
I would vote for Obama without even thinking about it if I were over there. I don't believe for a minute that he will deliver on all his promises, as vague as most of them are, but an Obama presidency would at least make the tone of government less odious. McCain, aside from being, like Palin, a conservative--which automatically makes him odious in my eyes--has a little of that George Bush-Ronald Reagan aw-shucks folksiness about him which Europeans (and probably intelligent Americans) don't want to see in anybody other than Jimmy Stewart.
Kim,
By the way, I'm delighted to have you link to the page.
Bruce.
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