Does John McCain actually believe that women might be attracted to Sarah Palin merely because she is woman? That we are so desperate for a woman candidate (never mind that the Dems have offered women veeps before) that we will take anything? Wouldn't that mean that American women as individuals don't matter at all, that we're interchangeable really (and I could get more graphic here but I won't): that women will vote for anything that looks vaguely like us--albeit in the case of Palin, a former beauty queen, somewhat better than many of us.
As my fifteen year old daughter would say: Eeeewwwwwwwww
Disaffected Hillary supporters who want to vote for a woman won't find a kindred spirit in Palin, who is vehemently anti-choice. Five kids, one only seven months old and disabled to boot, must keep her pretty busy, too, and it's hard to believe that hard core conservatives who are screaming and yelling with joy about her being chosen would really support her working as hard as a veep would have to and leaving that little baby at home with a nanny. Aren't good Christian Republican ladies supposed to stay at home and raise their own kids?
But be that as it may, Sarah Palin is not good for anyone who cares about the environment, as she supports drilling in ANWR; anyone who wishes to keep jobs in this country, as she wants to give those drilling rights to a Canadian company; anyone who values her right to privacy when it comes to her body, as Palin is a fundamentalist Christian who is anti choice all the way.
In addition, her barely two years as governor show a marked lack of experience should the old man who is vying for Number One suddenly keel over, and she has done very little in the way of anything, other than challenge the establishment of a state with a very small population. Her designation as America's Hottest Governor, which the Republicans are touting, could easily apply to the fact that she's a good looking woman. At least that is what the word "hot" has come to mean in the past ten years. Ask anyone under forty.
But what is even more troubling is that not even the venerable New York Times chose to mention that Mrs. Palin is under investigation according to two articles in the Anchorage Daily News here and here, and was even reported a month ago in the Wall Street Journal.
I wholeheartedly decry violence against women and in fact helped start and worked for more than a dozen years for a battered woman's organization in the town where I formerly lived, but one does not use one's political power to fire a former family member. There are other ways to get justice. Especially now that more progressive laws, including one by Joe Biden, have been enacted. What Palin did was a pure corruption of power. If she pulled that kind of stunt less than two years in office, what would she do with the power of the White House behind her?
Palin is indeed a Hail Mary choice, as some have characterized it. A last minute, desperate attempt to appease the conservative Christian, right wingers who were not on board with McCain's candidacy (Richard Viguerie gave another of his telling interviews on the Ed Schultz Show today when he admitted that, finally, he could get behind McCain when just hours ago he had still been furious at him) and just another example of the man McCain has become: a sad old codger who has lost anything and everything that ever made him decent.