Anyone who saw the grand mal seizure that passed for Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric on Thursday has got to be wondering whether it was they, Palin, or everyone concerned who was 'shrooming through the experience.
Here's a representative excerpt:
Couric: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?
Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundary that we have with Canada. It's funny that a comment like that was kinda made to...I don't know, you know...reporters.
(Just in case you were wondering, the ellipses in the transcript were placed there to mark Palin's pauses, not to stand in for the parts where she explained what the fuck she was talking about. That came later...)
Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.
Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of.
Seriously, if you vote for this woman, you owe this planet one First World liberal democracy.
Of course, it's hard not to notice that every time a Republican candidate makes a lunatic VP pick, he manages to win. Whether it's a callow frat boy or the nexus of evil in space-time, they always manage somehow to pull it off.
How can this be? Well, perhaps the answer is to be found in a quirk of evolution peculiar to gazelles and similar animals called "stotting." Stotting is a stiff-legged gait or jumping behavior in savanna prey animals that actually makes them more vulnerable to predators. Wikipedia describes it this way:
Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, refers to stotting and explains it as the animal's attempt at advertising its health. Since mammalian predators tend to hunt old or unhealthy animals, stotting informs the predator that the animal is actually very healthy and strong and the predator might do well to try to hunt the other animals in the herd.
So by picking confused bimbos, village idiots and Satan's fluffer, perhaps Republican presidential candidates are advertising that they can overcome anything -- even glaring handicaps -- thus projecting an aura of strength.
Unfortunately, John McCain is not a healthy gazelle. He looks like Nosferatu's uncle, for Christ's sake. The Vegas over-under on his tenure in office is currently William Henry Harrison minus 27 days. And when the stiff hits the fan, our president will be a woman whose chief foreign policy qualification is that she can find Russia and Canada on a map.
Don't fall for it again, America. This broad is nuts.