Are you experiencing these symptoms?  Arguments with coworkers?  Sleepless nights?  Compulsive blog/news checking rooted in an obsession to hear news of a Palin gaffe?  You may be suffering from Palin Overdose brought on by Early Onset Palin Exposure.  Palin Exposure is a real condition which affects millions of Americans.  Palin Overdoses can affect relationships with friends, family, and loved ones.  Palin Exposure is caused by an increased intake of Sarah Palin.  As information in the 21st century approaches singularity, the mind is constantly producing Palin Hormones which increase with each episode of Palin Exposure.  As levels of Palin-blockers in the brain increase to prevent brain damage, Palin Hormones cling to receptors in the brain which require higher levels of Palin-blockers for balance.  When Palin Hormones and Palin-blockers rise you are at an increased risk for Palin Overdose.  Seek help immediately.  You can dramatically reduce your risk of Palin Oversode by taking small steps to eliminate your amount of Palin Exposure.  Exercise, gardening, stamp collecting, and reading a book are all effective ways to reduce your Palin Hormones.  If you feel you are having a Palin Overdose, do not panic.  Turn off your television or computer, open a window and take deep breaths.  It is very important that if you believe you are seeing Sarah Palin crawl through the screen of your television into your living room and she is holding a very large hunting knife in her teeth and carrying the severed head of a moose you are probably experiencing a severe Palin Hallucination.  Try repeating tough foreign policy questions in an Exorcist tone until she becomes scared and crawls backwards into your television.

Are you experiencing these symptoms?  Arguments with coworkers?  Sleepless nights?  Compulsive blog/news checking rooted in an obsession to hear news of a Palin gaffe?  You may be suffering from Palin Overdose brought on by Early Onset Palin Exposure.  Palin Exposure is a real condition which affects millions of Americans.  Palin Overdoses can affect relationships with friends, family, and loved ones.  Palin Exposure is caused by an increased intake of Sarah Palin.  As information in the 21st century approaches singularity, the mind is constantly producing Palin Hormones which increase with each episode of Palin Exposure.  As levels of Palin-blockers in the brain increase to prevent brain damage, Palin Hormones cling to receptors in the brain which require higher levels of Palin-blockers for balance.  When Palin Hormones and Palin-blockers rise you are at an increased risk for Palin Overdose.  Seek help immediately.  You can dramatically reduce your risk of Palin Oversode by taking small steps to eliminate your amount of Palin Exposure.  Exercise, gardening, stamp collecting, and reading a book are all effective ways to reduce your Palin Hormones.  If you feel you are having a Palin Overdose, do not panic.  Turn off your television or computer, open a window and take deep breaths.  It is very important that if you believe you are seeing Sarah Palin crawl through the screen of your television into your living room and she is holding a very large hunting knife in her teeth and carrying the severed head of a moose you are probably experiencing a severe Palin Hallucination.  Try repeating tough foreign policy questions in an Exorcist tone until she becomes scared and crawls backwards into your television.

At this point, I believe that we should accept the fact that the Palin pick will change all life on this planet as we know it.  The election has been lost, and there is no way that the Obama/Biden ticket can stop this thing.  Panic immediately.  Lose sleep over it.  Throw things at your pets.  Say goodbye to loved ones and resort to whatever means necessary to protect your family.  This will probably include doing things you never thought you were capable of.  You are an animal now, trust your animal instincts.  Do not waste your time clinging to what hope you have.  It has been an entire week now that the media has been talking about the Palin bounce, and there’s no reason to believe that over the course of the next two months anything could possibly happen to change the polls.  In fact, it’s safe to assume that the media will call off the debates, that Obama will drop out of the race sometime in the middle of October, and that Palin and McCain will take office in early November just to get a head start on having you imprisoned in political death camps.  It’s over.  Absolutely over.  God hath forsaken this campaign.  Head to your local gun store or Wal-Mart and arm yourselves to the teeth.  Or, if you do not believe in guns, take off a sock and fill it with lug nuts.  Swing that sock at anything that moves or tries to speak to you, even if its just asking for directions.  This is no time to relax or to wait to see what happens, that will only give others a chance to locate precious resources first.  Rise from your computer and panic.  Engage in cannibalism and the wearing of goat masks.  Avoid sunlight.  Find shelter in sewers.  If you have friends or family which can help you through Mexico contact them immediately.  Continue moving south until you reach Argentina.  We will regroup there.  You will know us by our goat masks and socks filled with lug nuts.  You will know us as The League of Extraordinarily Hasty Pussies.

Please God,

 

As you know, this election is very important to a lot of people.  There are many people who have many different needs in this election year and the choice between either candidate could mean good things or bad things to those people depending on that outcome.  The vast scope of American politics is beyond what even one person or group of people can fully understand, which is what makes it exciting to us.  We see a process which is so turbulent and unpredictable that it makes things relatively fair.  Nobody can predict the outcome and no one person can dictate it either.

 

With that in mind, God, would you please stop poking around our political system and mind your own business?  It seems that every time a political leader speaks to you, about you, or invokes your name it makes an utter mess of things.  Seriously, just back off this time and stick to turning tides and appearing on grapes.  And while we’re at it, why do you choose hopeless grinning idiots as the vessels through which you speak?  You seem to have a bias, God, for the same prototype of person who would invoke your name to pass social policy and then get caught haggling with a prostitute.  What substantive quality can you provide to our political process?

 

Before you can answer, let me remind you of your track record.  God, you were wrong about the Iraq war.  The Iraq war has been a complete disaster, which you have yet to inspire one of your leaders to admit.  You were wrong about Terri Schiavo as well.  You said she was still alive.  We said remove the feeding tube and see.  Who was right?  I don’t recall Mrs. Schiavo standing from her chair and dancing the Charleston under any miracle of life.  And as far as economic policy, the meek are yet to inherit the earth, only crushing debt.

 

You can be a divisive spin-doctor who resorts to the worst kinds of partisan rhetoric and Rove-style politics to propagate your agenda.  Just because you wrote one book a million years ago does not give you a mandate to dictate American policy or elect yourself as President.  We are one genome and a Hadron Collider away from knocking you down the pecking order, and don’t think we aren’t serious.  You have been put on notice.   Now be about your business.

 

Oh yeah, and thank you for all the majesty in sunsets, babies, and rocky mountain landscapes.  I thank you Lord, amen.

While sleuthing through the documents provided online by the City of Wasila website I found something incredibly interesting that may be the key to unlocking the McCain/Palin strategy.  As many of you are aware, the focus of the McCain/Palin ticket will not only be on economic issues, but oil and foreign policy as well.  They have many difficulties in providing a comprehensive plan with regards to addressing the cost of food, the size of our military, or the decline of available clean oil resources.

On the City of Wasila website I searched through museum documents and may have stumbled upon a political bombshell which you can access here: http://www.cityofwasilla.com/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=440

For $9.95 you can purchase from the City of Wasila Museum a book entitled, Giant Cabbage: An Alaskan Tale written by a mysterious unknown author.  If Palin as Mayor of Wasila has been able to secretly cultivate and grow giant cabbage she may be able to grow other things, such as giant soldiers and giant oil.  With McCain providing foreign policy experience her armies of cabbage-fed super giants will walk upon the earth with impunity, ensuring 100 years of Republican domination.

1.  Grow Giant Cabbage
2.  Run As Vice President
3.  ??????
4.  PROFIT!!!!

Watching Palin-mania run wild on the Obama base I begin to wonder whether their professed belief that the Obama campaign is about change for poor working class people is as important to the Democrats as their own idealistic pride.  How did this Hockey Mom knock the white knight from his horse?  I’m reminded of a scene from this summer’s The Dark Knight where Batman has The Joker dangling from the edge of a building.  Batman, believing he has essentially won the good fight for Gotham, is shocked when The Joker tells him that he has wasted his time in a street fight because meanwhile The Joker had an “ace in the hole” with the heel-turned Harvey Dent whom Batman had completely overlooked.  In this moment Sarah Palin has become The Joker to the Obama ticket, luring his campaign into a street fight that he is completely incapable of winning.  So how did the mighty fall so quickly when months ago Palin’s appearance on the ticket would have seemed so cynical and pathetic?

 

Obama lost his authenticity over the summer.  Cry fowl all you want, the fact is that there was a point in this campaign where the man was so different from every other politician that voters were magnetically attracted to him because they wanted to believe that there was a person who was successful in running for office who didn’t have to compromise his beliefs or negotiate campaign rhetoric.    He stood firm against attacks on his former pastor, he refused to compromise himself and he wouldn’t allow his persona to be simplified by being compared to other leaders in history.  He was unbeatable, and even as the brunt of his own personal scandals began filling the nightly news he was still able to beat Hillary when every bit of traditional thinking said it couldn’t be so.

 

Those of us who watched Obama over the course of the primaries believed that as summer approached he would win the nomination and rise up to the occasion, drawing upon his intelligence and originality to propose new ideas and a vision of what America could be in the 21st century.  But shortly after Hillary’s defeat, it seemed that he was whisked away to political re-education camp and returned as a moderate-seeking compromiser who would vote for FISA, waver on gun control, and consider drilling for the sake of bipartisan unity.  And worse, he would have to focus his campaign on the imaginary legion of disaffected Hillary supporters, the few mice who roared and who wouldn’t have voted for McCain anyways.

 

While I don’t necessarily begrudge him for trying to seek out swing-votes, I do believe that if you are going to run a campaign based upon “change” you carry the burden of showing why your change is fundamentally different than your opponent’s and why it is worth risking cold-comfort on.  So far what I’ve seen from Obama is a definition of “change” which means “not Bush”, hoping that if we simply do everything opposite than the Republicans we can correct our course.  His speech may have had passion, it may have been inspirational, but I fail to see how stances on alternative energy and upper-class tax hikes are anything but the typical knee-jerk reactions that we as Americans have come to trust and love.  Is there anybody who would argue that we don’t need alternative energy?  It is after all a technology, and with or without Obama’s leadership technological innovation will always prevail.  Do we really believe that by simply removing all of our troops from Iraq that we can actually detach ourselves from that conflict?  As though the people in that country will simply forget all the wonderful things we’ve done to their families, their sense of security, and their dignity?  And at a time when it’s widely accepted that the divide between the rich and poor is the largest it has been in a hundred years who wouldn’t applaud taxing the richest five percent?

 

Is this really change?  How are these platforms really going to make a fundamental difference in the quality of life in America over the long term?  Obama addresses symptoms of issues but has no prescription for the actual cause.  There are major problems within this country, the least of which are high gas prices and economic instability.  Tell me how replacing the leadership in Washington will erase the precedents which have been set by our current administration.  Tell me how moving soldiers from one conflict to another does anything to address our security or our fundamental problems with our military industrial complex.  Tell me how moving our resources into alternative energy prevents a future stranglehold on our economy from a wealthy elite who will, and you can be sure of this, will eventually turn alternative energy into another means to dominate the economy.  Will providing mandatory universal health care to all Americans do anything to address the fact that actual medical care, not just the insurance, costs more in the United States than anywhere else in the rest of the world?  Tell me why I should be excited by the prospect that our government will now pay an emergency room 10 dollars for a band-aid instead of the patient who will pay for it anyways through taxes.

 

While everybody is urging Obama to take his gloves off and step into the ring with Sarah Palin I believe that he should shake up this campaign by providing real, substantive proposals and they need to be ideas which we have yet to hear argued over the last 30 years.  One stroke of brilliant, creative policy would turn this campaign around in his favor.  McCain has made an offensive maneuver by pitching a controversial candidate whose spotlight puts Obama on a defensive strategy.  Propose some kind of program or legislation that has the same broad emotional and universal impact as Palin’s selection and use it to throw the ball back in McCain and Palin’s court.

 

As a voter I am tired.  I need to be told how these changes will help create a permanent solution to these issues so I don’t have to wait another four years to hear them argued again.  Obama will lose this election unless he shows up to this campaign as the leader we believed he would become, the man who would finally move us into the 21st century.  George W. Bush leaves office in 2009, whether Obama wins this election or not.  You can be sure that if Obama decides that trading petty policy blows with a Hockey Mom from Alaska is going to create a sea change in this country, Bush leaving office is the only change you can count on.

 

By the way, why is Obama arguing Republican issues?  Anybody remember stem cells?  Net neutrality?  Changing the war on drugs?  You know; those issues that the Democrats had broad public support for?