The Palin Project - Volume 3: Sarah W. Bush?

Despite all my excitement and optimism after Barack Obama's acceptance speech, I'm legitimately a bit worried after Sarah Palin's speech last night at the Republican Convention. Not because it was good, God no, but because Palin struck me as someone very familiar - George W. Bush. Why should it worry me that Palin reminds me of the worst president in American history? Because America elected him twice... well, one and a half times.

She has everything the neocons loved in Bush - she's young, a Bible-thumper, moral crusader, hypocrite, celebrates ignorance, a manufactured backstory, easily controlled by her handlers and is completely devoid of any substance. Oh sure, her speechwriter (George W's, by the way) got some great jokes in there, but unfortunately, pretty much everything she said wasn't true. See for yourself here: Factchecking Palin and here: Palin vs. Reality.

I won't waste your time by pointing all the details out here, but two of them really stuck out to me. Sarah Palin told America that as the mother of a special needs child, all parents of children with special needs would "have a friend in the White House." She says this when less than two years ago, she slashed funding for school programs that cater to special needs children. It's even more amusing that she has also cut funding for programs that help pregnant teenagers, when she now has a pregnant teenager daughter. I know I say this a lot, but I'll say it again - you can't make this shit up, folks.

Oh, I'm sorry, families are "off-limits," right? Again, families would be totally off-limits if Republicans weren't so blatantly obvious with their hypocrisy. "Gay people can't get married! We need a constitutional amendment to ban gays from having the same rights as others... but please pay no attention to Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter!" No one is denegrating Dick Cheney's daughter, no one is bashing Palin's pregnant daughter or her disabled son, we're bashing Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin. You can't vote against something that goes on in your own home.

The other part that really bothered me was this quote:

Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America. He's [Obama] worried someone won't read them their rights

Really? This coming from the campaign with the P.O.W. at the top of the ticket? John McCain was brutally tortured in Vietnam, a heinous act that no one should ever have to suffer through... unless they're Arab? Either we're a country that treats all human beings fairly, regardless of their alleged crimes or we're no better than those who held John McCain captive for five years. Justice should always be served to those who wish to harm America, but it's the principles of this country to treat everyone with basic human dignity that makes us the world's true superpower.


Getting back on track, the media is a hot button issue right now in regards to Sarah Palin, they're being so tough on her! Yeah, you know, doing all that mean research that John McCain should have thought about doing before picking her as his running-mate? Just like the Bush Administration, Sarah Palin has managed to "work the refs" and blame the media for the laundry list of scandals that has come out about her. Sorry again, Ms. Palin, but dissent and scrutiny is not bias, it's the media doing its job. You signed up for the job and called Hillary Clinton a "whiner" when she went after the press during the primaries - once again, you can't have it both ways, Governor.

The thing that struck me most about her speech last night that parallels George W. Bush was her bitterness, sarcasm and elitism. The left gets charged with the "elitist" tag quite often, but just like Bush, she's managed to make herself look like the down to earth person while belittling and mocking her opponent. The audacity to criticize Barack Obama's time as a community organizer is just jaw-droppingly offensive to the very people you claim to represent. Obama did his community organizing through a church group and you're going to mock that? This is someone who could have worked at a major law firm and made some serious cash, but instead chose to help those who fell on hard times by setting up job training programs, asbestos removal in old buildings, and a voter registration drive. Speaking of the voter registration part, his group managed to register over 150,000 new voters - that's 1/5 the size of Alaska's entire population.

Here's a guy that literally put "country first" one neighborhood at a time, got in there and told people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and reach their potential, and that's amusing to you, Ms. Palin? While you were mayor of a town with literally less than a thousand voters, Barack Obama was in the south side of Chicago, working to make it a better place. The fact that you even tried to compare your second biggest achievement to something Obama did twenty years ago - at the start of his career - speaks volumes of your character (or lack thereof).

Barack Obama could come out and say, "While I was the president of the Harvard Law Review, Sarah Palin was entering beauty pageants," but he has more class than that. He has more class than to exploit his "off-limits" children on national television by mentioning their "special needs" or that they enlisted in the military on September 11, 2007; but Ms. Palin showed last night that she doesn't have that kind of moral fiber. It's no surprise, it's what Republicans like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush do, they tear down their opponents and hope that no one will notice the glaring hypocrisy and then blame the "liberal media" when someone does.

Sarah Palin is a joke. An embarrassment on every level and wholly unqualified to be anywhere near the Oval Office. She has no record, she has no agenda for making this country a better place, she wants to tell you what you can do in your own home (but pay no attention to what goes on in hers), she wants to censor materials that she feels are inappropriate, and she wants to continue to drive the partisan wedge between this country while running on the false notion that she's a "reformer" - just like a young man from Texas that appeared on the national stage about eight years ago.