Sarah Palin is like Jesse Ventura; she’s a "novelty" governor. Every once in a while, Americans like to stick it to the pols by electing an amateur. It shakes things up for a while. Sarah Palin is a joke, but now McCain has endangered our beloved nation by taking her seriously. Here’s a scenario: McCain is elected, he dies or is taken out by a conspiratorial maniac, and there’s a dangerous small-minded, uneducated, right-wing fringe religious-bigot demagogue in charge of the nuclear stockpile.
Governing is the most difficult of all arts, and yet Americans seem to think it’s a snap. When you take your car in to be fixed, you want an experienced, knowledgeable mechanic, not, not an actor or an athlete. I’m yet to meet a person who wants his impacted wisdom tooth treated by a citizen dentist. But to run the government — let’s just hire anyone at all.
I’m reading Milan Kundera’s excellent novel, The Joke. It’s set in 1950s Czechoslovakia, and like all novels of the communist era, portrays a world in which the government is in the hands of mediocre people chosen and promoted not for brains, wisdom, or talent but for ideological orthodoxy. t’s a system that’s doomed to failure, but it’s exactly the system that has now been imposed on this country by the Bush administration, which regularly hired graduates of Patrick Henry and Liberty –ideologically pure right-wing colleges — over applicants of genuine distinction.
Republicans oppose affirmative action when it works to the advantage of the underrepresented, but they are its greatest proponents when it comes to political correctness. Major examples (there are zillion minor ones) are such disasters as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Justice Clarence Thomas, and now likely Vice President Sarah Palin.
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