Entranced by Sarah Palin?! Well, here are a few articles to consider.
Sarah Palin's Dazzle Camouflage
By Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons, minister of Beverly Unitarian Church, Chicago, IL
Dazzle camouflage was a camouflage paint scheme used on ships during World War I. It consisted of a complex pattern of geometric shapes in contrasting colors, overlapping and intersecting each other. Dazzle did not conceal the ship but made it difficult for the enemy to estimate its speed and direction. The idea was to disrupt the visual sensors used for naval artillery. Its goal was confusion more than concealment.
The GOP Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, sports the political equivalent of dazzle camouflage. When you look at her, you don't quite know what you're looking at. She's brash and tough, yet feminine and pretty wearing a skirt and heels. She's a PDA-toting child of the information age, yet tries to ban books from her town's public library and opposes sex education for youth. She's a strong, empowered woman, yet opposes women's right to abortion even in the case of rape. She's a compassionate mother of five, yet kills large animals for fun.
The pressure to be all things to all people is familiar to public leaders. As a parish minister, I see every day the conflicting desires people project upon their leaders, particularly female leaders. People long for female role models who are both nurturing and powerful, comforting and challenging, ordinary and extraordinary. In fact, successful leaders in both politics and the clergy are often chameleon-like, able to adapt to the needs of the moment and speak multiple social "languages." But Sarah Palin exhibits almost a caricature of this quality, cloaking herself in a dazzling, dissonant array of personas that tug on our heartstrings while keeping us guessing.
The thing about dazzle camouflage is that it works. The zigzag and plaid contrasting neon colors of Palin's public face confuse the American people. Many of us see in her a progressive, Gen-X feminist, challenging "the man" at every turn - a typical mother who understands our concerns. Yet her actual political and social views bespeak extreme religious fundamentalism reflecting only the concerns of a right-wing minority.
Make no mistake: Sarah Palin is not just conservative, but regressive. She wants creationism taught in public schools. She is rabidly anti-abortion. She opposes gay rights. She denies human causes of global warming even while miles of her own state's coastline melt into the ocean. She is anti-environmentalist, intent on reviving the long-debunked "owls vs. loggers" dichotomy. She is anti-intellectual, mocking those who have "fancy" educations.
And she is not just regressive, but aggressive. Much as she extols the freedoms found "only" in the U.S., she herself governs like an autocrat. She is ruthless toward anyone or anything that crosses her, from polar bears whose protection might interfere with oil drilling to the Wasilla public librarian who resisted banning the books on her blacklist. Far from being the breath of fresh 21st century air that she seems to be, Sarah Palin is a throwback to the most parochial and repressive voices of the 1950's.
As a religious leader and as a woman, I find it terrifying to think that Americans could be so fooled. I don't believe that Americans want to return to the McCarthy days of banned books and rape victims dying in back alley abortions. I don't believe that Americans want to deny global warming and continue the destruction of our most delicate ecosystems. I don't believe that Americans want to see our human rights eroded along with the Alaska coastline. We are moving beyond all that.
But Sarah Palin jams our radar. This, and only this, is what makes her so dangerous. It's time to strip away the dazzle camouflage. If and when the American public sees her clearly for what she is, I feel certain that she'll vanish quicker than a Juneau snowball in a D.C. summer.
We Don't Want Another Agnew
By Colbert King/ Washington Post
Folks in the McCain camp are engaged in one giant pity party over the way in which the media are trying to scrutinize their hero, GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Let’s hope her defenders don’t drown in their crocodile tears. A more counterfeit show of woe would be hard to find.
With Election Day only eight weeks away, Sarah Palin is the least vetted member of a presidential ticket in recent history. The McCain team, of course, wants to keep it that way -- since the image they’re created of Palin as the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan and Betty Crocker seems to be a winner.
The press can’t let that happen. We fell for that trick once before, and America hasn’t experienced a similar political nightmare since 1973. Lest we forget, another Republican presidential nominee pulled the same stunt that John McCain is trying to perform this year.
McCain’s role model? Richard Nixon. To recall: A stunned America learned in 1968 that Nixon had asked a politically obscure Republican governor, Spiro T. Agnew, to join him on the ticket. As with the impact of McCain’s out-of-nowhere announcement of Palin, some of the 1968 Republican convention delegates were heard to ask “Spiro who?”
At the time, Agnew -- like Palin -- had been governor (of Maryland) for only two years. Also like Palin, Agnew’s political career began at the local level, when he was elected Baltimore County executive in a campaign in which he was billed as a reformer. He went from county exec to vice president in six years.
One more similarity to McCain's surprise choice: Nixon knew very little about the nature of Agnew’s service as county executive and governor. Nixon and the rest of the country didn’t learn about the vice president’s previous life until word leaked out that Agnew was under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Baltimore on charges of accepting bribes during his time as governor.
The government nailed him. Vice President Agnew was allowed to plead no contest to charges of money laundering and tax evasion in exchange for his resignation in 1973, payment of a fine and three years' probation. Spiro Agnew left office in disgrace. That he even reached the nation’s second-highest office and ended up a heartbeat away from the presidency is because Richard Nixon didn’t do his job.
But Nixon wasn’t alone. The press failed the American people, too. To look the other way this year because the McCain camp is cynically making us out to be the enemy is to shrink from our duty. Of course the lives of Sarah Palin’s children are none of our business. Palin's public service, however, as a council member, as mayor and as governor, is very much the American voter's business. Thus far, all we have about her from the McCain camp is fluff. That’s to be expected.
But Americans who go to the polls in only a few weeks need to know more about the character and integrity of Palin’s service, her use -- or misuse -- of power and the public purse, and her ability and capacity to handle a job on the scale of the vice presidency.
Agnew was a fool and an idler. "No assassin in his right mind would kill me," Nixon is said to have joked to his aide John Ehrlichman, according to Agnew's obituary in the New York Times. “They know if they did that they would wind up with Agnew.” I’d say that judgment came about four years too late.We can’t make that mistake again.
Figuring out the McCain/Palin spin:
* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."
* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.
* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
* Name your kids Willow, Trig, Bristol and Track, you're a maverick.
* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.
* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.
* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.
* If you teach children about sexual predators, you are irresponsible and eroding the fiber of society.
* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.
* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.
* If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude,” with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that hates America and advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.
