First off, allow me to congratulate the Republicans on their splashy “Hollywood” production last night. With Old Glory waving, and not one Greek Styrofoam column in sight, they thoroughly convinced me of Sarah Palin’s preparedness, at least on this score. From day one of a McCain administration, Sarah Palin will be ready to read from a teleprompter. Of what else I was to learn from her cynical speech last night, I remain unaware. That she can be snarkey and snide? Has there ever been doubt regarding that truth when it comes to the Republicans of our generation?

You know, it has always been part of the American myth to have our hero characters appear out the backwoods in whole cloth. Abe Lincoln splitting rails comes to mind, Paul Bunyan, Andrew Jackson as the unsullied defender of everyday folks. And now we have Sarah Palin appearing suddenly on the American political scene as if made from angelic robes and Lenscrafter glasses. Why, think of it. Just last week she was busy ‘raslin’ beaaars up in Skagit and locking up all those no good frontier rapscallions.

It brings to mind Christopher Lasch’s foreword to the ’73 edition of The American Political Tradition, where he addresses the progressive interpretation of American history popular at the time Hofstadter’s groundbreaking tome first appeared in print. As Lasch put it, a resurgent American cultural chauvinism had taken hold in American letters, a tiresome celebration of the American past, and quotes Hofstadter saying how this had helped bring into being a “literature of hero-worship and national self-congratulation.”

I am well aware of these delusionary notions about our founding fathers. I grew up having them spoon fed to me and have watched the Republican Party pawn off to the same myopic American mythology to public over the past thirty years, until I begin to feel like one of those hapless characters in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Always the flag waving with those folks, this longing to return to a once unsullied American past. It’s George Washington cutting down the cheery tree and Abe Lincoln splitting rails, and more recently, Ronald Reagan riding in on a white horse of conservative principles. Never mind that Reagan was once the head of the Actor’s Guild Union and one hair’s breadth removed from being a member of the Communist Party.

So it is with Sarah Palin. When she tells us adoringly of her sons and nephews going off to war, and speaks of that extra prayer she says for them every night, and gushes warmly about her three daughters, and notes how husband Todd is a lifelong commercial fisherman and a production operator in the oil fields of Alaska's North Slope and a proud member of the United Steel Workers' Union, just an everyday kind of guy, she conveniently leaves out Todd’s roughly decade long stint in Alaskan Independence Party  or her own fling with secession, or that when you peel away her cheap family veneer and their purported Christian values, Sarah Palin and the whole lot of them start to sound more like Desperate Housewives meets Northern Exposure than anything else.

Why is it, I wonder, that Republicans feel forever bound to disparage Democratic principles today, only to idolize one of our members who’s no longer around to defend himself? It wasn’t enough that Sarah Palin hearkened to the memory of her parents growing up in a small Missouri town, and how they had both worked at the local elementary school and how proud she was to be their daughter. No, that had to be a tie-in to a young farmer and habber-dasher from Missouri named Harry Truman, who happened to follow his own unlikely path from a small town to the vice presidency.

Well, to paraphrase the famous words of Lloyd Benson, you’re no Harry Truman, Sarah, and you can bet there was no love lost between our dear Harry and your beloved Republican Party. In case you have any doubts on that score, here’s a direct quote from his acceptance speech in 1948.

“Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it — don't forget that! We will do that because they are wrong and we are right, and I will prove it to you in just a few minutes.”

Yes, Sarah, we’ve all heard how you’re just an average hockey mom, who signed up for the PTA because she wanted to make her kids' public education better, but your claims about running for city council and the mayor’s office and eventually for governor without any thought of focus groups and voter profiles just doesn’t wash. As noted recently online, in your campaign for mayor of Wasilla, you were found to be a “highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.” Yep, by dragging in the state GOP and bringing “big-time politics into a small-town local race" your career as a politician in Alaska got off a lot more like that “pit bull with lipstick” you described in your acceptance speech last night than your friendly community organizer. Even Vicki Naegele, the managing editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, and a person who shared your Christian faith found your methods contemptible. As she recalled, the average friendly small-town race, "turned into something much different…" "I just thought,” Naegele said, “…she should concentrate on roads, not abortion."

And speaking of community organizers, they may not have actual responsibilities, as you suggest, but they do know the duties of a vice-president without asking, and I know one who’s not known for calling people dumbass behind their backs.

Yes, it all sounds very noble, this portrait you create of yourself not being a member of the permanent political establishment, and how you’ll head to Washington to serve the people of this country, not just mingle with the right people and to seek their good opinion. I heard your pledge to continue the same spirit you brought to the governor's office, where you took on the old politics as usual in Juneau and you stood up to the special interests, the lobbyists, big oil companies, and the good-ol' boys network. But in truth, your politics were just the same old game of clashing parties and competing interests. The integrity, good will, clear convictions you swore to uphold went right out the window when someone got in your way.

No, Sarah, there just wasn’t much of anything truthful in that venom you attempted to disguise with a smile last night. You spoke of your willingness to drill anywhere to get that oil, but dismissed your rival as an impediment to energy independence for our nation, when in fact Barack Obama stood up early with his support for a natural gas pipeline in your state, and when in fact you praised him for it. You said Barack Obama had never reached across the aisle and had not sponsored one piece of important legislation, when a simple Google of his legislative career would have proven you a liar.

To paraphrase your own invective, Sarah, you could give an entire speech about wars, and never use the word "humility". In fact, when the cloud of your rhetoric has passed, and the roar of the crowd fades away, and the stadium lights go out, and that Nazi like symbolism of flags waving behind your head is hauled back to some Third Reich studio lot, what exactly is your plan for this country’s future? You didn’t tell us one thing about what YOU plan to do to turn back the waters and heal the planet?

All we know for certain is this. While you’d like to make government smaller, you will without fail make the coffers of your fat cat donors bigger. You will raise the taxes on the poorest of us and lower the taxes on the rich. You will tell us victory in Iraq is finally in sight but never fail to leave the average American cowering in fear. You will make American weaker abroad by dismissing the importance of observing the constitutional rights of others around the world.

Yes, you are absolutely right, Sarah. There are those candidates who will change anything about their beliefs in order to get elected. Who will one day call the religious right “agents of intolerance” then go back and lick their boots the next year. Who will acknowledge the obscenity of giving the wealthiest people in this country a tax break in times of war and then come back and say it’s a great idea. As you so aptly said, there are those who will use their careers to promote change and those who put politics in front of leadership. There are those who have done great things, who are capable of great things and those who are simply in the hands of lobbyists and special interests.

It’s true that John McCain was once a man who did not run with the Washington herd, but that man is nowhere to be found today. He is a man who, unfortunately, lost his gift of "personal discovery" on his way to the American presidency.

The fact is, Sarah, in the cynical house of mirrors that is the Republican talking point machine, you and your minions have made a man’s ability to inspire others a liability. You have made hope an unwanted orphan. You have narrowed the criteria of worthy experience in life to only those who have so-called “executive experience”, thereby relegating to the trash bin half the men who have presided in the Oval Office.

Hey, come to think of it, in attempting to find some
way, any way, to diminish the value of your Barack Obama’s life experience, you
have left your own ticket open to an unthinkable charge. As the only with
“executive experience” in this Presidential race, you’re more qualified than
your own running mate.