Sarah Palin

It looked to me as if McCain was looking at the podium to see what she would say next so as to smile or applaud at the right moment, or perhaps to remember what he was going to say next.

Fingering one's wedding band is a common nervous habit even if not contemplating adultery.

I do agree that her nomination — a token female — is a joke. He might of picked someone with actual experience and success in office, such as Linda Lingle, Mayor of Maui for a long time and now 2nd term Governor of Hawaii. I don't like her politics, but she is competent and experienced. Oh, that's right, Lingle is pro-choice. That would never do....

Then there's the chance that McCain tried to get other running mates but was turned down and had to scrape the bottom of the oil drum to find one.

This "choice" demonstrates two things very clearly. First, that McCain has no impulse control and makes snap decisions on important questions based on little more than trying to screw the other side (grab headlines from Obama), and political expediency.

Second, it demonstrates the Republican Party's utter disregard for government itself. They don't believe in government and have riddled the federal bureaucracy with right-wing hacks who oppose the mission of their own agencies.

Palin is in that mold. She is exactly the kind of Commander-in-Chief you want when you intend to completely privatize government and fit it into Norquist's bathtub — pretty face, empty head, able to repeat meaningless right-wing talking points ad nauseum.

I did notice that Larry Johnson is hailing her as a great choice on his blog. If only that were an attempt at satire, it might make some sense.

I have an uneasy feeling that there are millions of Americans who are indeed so 'militantly stupid' that this could actually put McCain over the top.

Check out Sarah Palin in a US flag-bikini posing with a rifle at www.kunstler.com. Kunstler's comment:

"Family Values Republican Style: Meet America's first trailer-trash vice-presidential candidate: Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska ("the state closest to Russia!") — soon-to-be grandmother of out-of-wedlock child carried by 17-year-old daughter, Bristol. Shown here relaxing, Alaska-style."

Unfortunately or fortunately the item is photoshopped. An excellent site for background on this Alaskan tale is at http://mudflats.wordpress.com/

George, George, George

As much as I find your stuff hugely interesting and thoughtful, this is beneath you!

You should obviously have understood that this is an email or internet hoax, and that the photo is fake.

What is however much more disquieting, is the disdain you show for poorer whites in the US. I am not American (and am not even writing from the US), but I can assure you that they ("trailer park trash") are no better and no worse than anyone else on earth in similar economic circumstances. If you despise them for their perceived intellectual shortcomings, then you should similarly despise 98% of the worlds population — or would you have felt differently if they were black?, or at least non-whites?

This issue is what Republicans in the US use when they refer to the Elitist Left (EL). It is the EL who support Obama, despise and feel superior to "normal people", and who they claim poison American culture with strange ideas which throws overboard centuries of understood morality.

In the normal world, away from the intellectual fantasies of the EL, it is the EL who appears strangely maladapted. That is why Obama will almost surely lose this November, because he appears to be of the EL himself — and to his detriment, have the support of so many prominent elitist leftists.

Meanwhile the world goes on, and those people in the trailer park whom you trash here, are getting ready to vote McCain and Palin in, over your objections, and also because they understand the hypocrisies of the EL when it comes to issues such as Obama's pastor (but the EL only condemn "Christian fundamentalists"), or the economic hypocrisies of the EL (who want to tax Exxon, but give super-rich Hollywood stars and film-makers all sort of tax-breaks), or the moral hypocrisies of the EL (who will not even acknowledge that there may be a moral problem with late abortions (never mind early abortions), but are quit willing to dehumanize the already living as "trailer park trash" or "stupid", and never mind the racial statistics when it comes to the incidence of abortions (in the US, abortions are hugely skewed towards minorities, do you not find this disquieting?).

The point is that the "trailer park trash" at some level understand these issues, and you are wrong to underestimate their intelligence (why is that the EL always think that the Right is stupid?), or at least their political instincts. This is why the Right so often prevails to your frustration, and may do so yet again. So come off the high horse, and start to show some respect for your fellow humans, even when they were not given the amount of grey matter God gave you for free. More grey matter, by the way, does not mean that you are better or more moral or even more worthy. On the contrary perhaps.

Well, believe it or not, I have actually lived in a trailer park, in the early 1970s, in Kalispell, Montana. It's one thing to have a theoretical appreciation for poor whites, another to have lived with them or even — shudder — to be related to a few of them. I would merely point to my own words and VR's use of the term "trailer park trash," and note that Joe Bageant makes the fine distinction that poor whites as a rule hate "trailer park trash" on account of they're unwilling to work. The other part of it, about the stupidity of poor whites, stands proven by experience. As H.L. Mencken put it, "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." So true then, so true today!