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.

Don't know if that's true or not, but one can rightfully ask, where was the maverick in McCain’s decision? Why didn’t he tell the party bosses to go ahead and shove it? Pick Lieberman like he wanted, or even Tom Ridge, a Republican with whom McCain is presumably cozy bedfellows? As with McCain’s pandering to the late Jerry Falwell, or his flip flop on the Bush tax cuts, wasn’t this Palin nomination one more display of a man who has no political courage? At the least it was some sort of Rovian ploy. After all, it’s certainly kept the Obama experience issue in play. That’s all you hear from the right wing anymore. You’re questioning Palin’s experience? Well, she’s got more executive experience than Barack Obama.

Still, the Palin choice is a gift that just keeps on giving…and giving…and giving. You got Troopergate, Preachergate, Bridgegate, Secessiongate, and lest we forget, Babygate in the oven. I love it. Don’t you? In the famous words of Lewis Carroll, things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser. Where will it stop? Who knows. I saw the betting line on recall was 18% this morning. It’s going to be hour by hour before the week is through.

But lost in all the kerfuffle, I suppose, is the question of what’s actually germane to our public discourse. Obama tells all his supporters on Monday. Just back off. Babygate is a private family matter, and under most circumstances I would tend to agree. Let’s take the high road. Certainly all the right wing pundits would gleefully go along. Yet a broader issue is at stake here that I suggest undercuts any attempt to dismiss this pregnancy out of hand.

Take Barack Obama’s genesis as an example. He was born out of wedlock to a white mother and African father, but as everyone generally agrees, a woman being pregnant out of wedlock is nobody’s business but her own. Also consider Barack Obama’s association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Rightly or wrongly, if Obama had ever espoused the same sort political views of America, he’d have been damned for saying it long ago. But apparently enough of the public could see through that ruse and decided it was not fair to hold a person accountable simply for sitting in the pews.

Conversely, Sarah Palin has demonstrated that she not only embraces her personal pastor’s end of the world revelations, but has taken to the pulpit and espoused virtually the same apocalyptic visions. And just as the Republican Party has preached to us endlessly on the matter of moral issues, laying themselves open to public scrutiny on the subject of moral rectitude, Ms. Palin’s intolerance on personal morality has laid her and her family open to a public scrubbing. When the seemingly placid façade of Sarah Palin’s home life is peeled back and we find it more resembles Desperate Housewives than Ozzie and Harriet, we have a right to inquire more thoroughly. This isn’t a matter of sleaze. This is a matter of holding people accountable to their own standards. And it that’s not possible, we can rightfully ask them to shut up.

So, the cry comes from all quarters to leave Bristol Palin alone. Her pregnancy is a personal family matter. Okay. I find that to be admirable, and even appropriate as a political standard. Your teenage daughter got knocked up out of wedlock and you want to keep it from the public domain? You want to railroad this unfortunate young father into a shotgun marriage? Go ahead. Knock yourself out. It’s no one’s business but your own.

It has been oft said that the choice of a vice-president is the first presidential decision each candidate will make, and I’m not even going to bother with links and footnotes here. Everyone already knows the story about Palin. McCain met her once. He subsequently spoke to her once on the phone, then made his choice. What does this say about McCain, that he was willing to put this relative novice one heartbeat away from the presidency? I am reminded of Bush’s early comment about Putin. He looked into the man's eyes and could see the man's soul. Well, the ability of John McCain to look into the soul of Sarah Palin has the same incredulous quality about it.

Just as a mind experiment, imagine Sarah Palin to be a man instead, but with the same lack of knowledge in  international affairs. Wouldn’t there be fireworks then? This may not represent the very first case of reverse discrimination in politics but it sure rates right up there. A guy could feel slighted. All women should, to have this sort of patronizing bone thrown in their direction.

But more on all that later…

I had been purposely sitting back this past week, allowing events at the Democratic convention to play themselves out and thinking it was probably best to hold my tongue. There were already enough talking heads picking at the “as yet to be born” carcass. The Clintons were sure to make mischief. That seemed to be the primary refrain, followed closely by is Obama ever going to punch back?

Of course, once the convention actually got under way, the ensuing laments were all too predictable. The whole thing was dull, uninspired. Where were all the balloons and waving flags for God’s sake? And as if to have their cake and eat it too, the pundits couldn’t help but note how the entire affair was short on substance.

Well, lo and behold, though the many hours of speechifying were indeed plodding at times, the seeming chaos slowly progressed towards a measured and well thought out crescendo. From the down to earth chutzpah of Montana’s Governor Schweitzer to the roar of elder statesmen Al Gore, from Hillary hitting it out of the park to former President Clinton’s ringing endorsement, you couldn’t have scripted a more thorough healing of the rift within the Democratic Party, or a more thorough staging for Barack Obama’s speech on Thursday night. And finally, there was Barack, standing astride the world’s stage, the fulfillment of the Martin Luther King’s “promised land” unfolding before our eyes, that more perfect union to which Abraham Lincoln had alluded finally coming to pass. I must confess, I got a little something in my eye.

In all that stunning imagery and historic pageantry, it was all too possible to overlook the most compelling aspect of Obama’s speech. That for the past several months, as the right wing droned on and on about his lack of experience, and everyone on the left wrung their hands over Barack’s unwillingness to fight back, he had been patiently waiting, knowing full well a dramatic moment  awaited him wherein to answer those attacks in an imcomparable fashion.

I marveled and thought. Now, isn’t that the sort of long range strategic thinking we’re looking for in a President?

To those in the center, and even those on the right, I would say, weigh Obama’s measured demeanor against McCain’s desperate Hail Mary in picking Sarah Palin for a running mate. In a sad attempt to shake up a moribund campaign and steal the fire from the Democrats’ thunder, McCain recklessly proposed to a political bride like a drunken sailor in a waterfront tavern. And for that, we got Harriet Myers with beauty pageant credentials, Gale Norton with a chirpy countenance, George Bush in high heels.

There is much giddiness in the air today on the part of the evangelicals, but they may want to stop their gushing long enough to hear the more sober voices in their own party. Gone is McCain’s most important political leg to stand on, that white-haired father figure role, which so comforted all those who trembled at the specter of another 9/11 and would rather their sacrifice constitutional rights than to embody the very ethos to which they hearken as a constituency. Home of the brave. Land of the free.

They might also want to consider, while allowing themselves to wax so giddy. The real possibility exists. After a few more unseemly revelations about Sarah Palin, McCain, the drunken sailor, may be forced to ask his new political bride for that five dollar ring back.

Setting aside for the moment Rick Warren’s failure to police these Republican weasels properly, and the fact that we’ve been listening to this same cocksure cowboy bluster about Iraq and foreign policy for the past eight years, I think a broader reverberation from this event may have taken place, the ignoring of which says volumes about what kind of campaign John McCain is running, what kind of President he’d make and confirms for me why I’m so fearful of seeing his finger anywhere near the proverbial red button. Even more to the point, John McCain’s decision to play to the three thousand church members in the audience provided a stunning contrast between Obama’s candidacy and his own and I think offers further hope for our prospects in November. While McCain was willing to gain an unfair advantage by gaming the rules, and was fixated on winning the battle of the pews, he imprudently lost the wider strategic war. Because, let’s face it. Both candidates are preaching to the choir for the most part, until it comes to that ten or twenty percent of swing voters in the middle, and those weren’t the people in the audience.

Understanding this, and displaying all the methodical, farsighted wisdom we witnessed in President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, Obama framed his answers carefully and to the millions of viewers out there in TV land. McCain was channeling General Jack D. Ripper for the front row.

As to the particulars, I found it especially telling when Warren asked “who were the three wisest people each candidate would rely on in their administrations” that Barack immediately mentioned Michelle Obama. Cyndi McCain’s name never came up. McCain instead lauded General Petraeus and mentioned a trip he had made to Iraq last year with Lindsey Graham, blathering on about all those brave soldiers reenlisting to fight for freedom, the same soldiers who happen to be donating to Barack over McCain at a rate of six to one.

McCain then inexplicably threw out Congressman John Lewis’ name as someone he’d seek for advice, I guess just to cover his civil rights’ bases, then went on to laud Meg Whitman, E-bay’s CEO, as a darling of the new economy. Again, McCain had attempted to hit all the high notes, but his thoughts, as always, lacked a coherent thesis, a thing at which he is depressingly like the current President. In contrast, Obama offered this humble but stirring conclusion, proving he remembered the question and actually understood it. The idea of having diverse opinions around you is to be apprised of any blind spots or predispositions a person might possess. Imagine that. Instead of riding out with the cavalry every time new and some unexpected international conflict gets a burr in your saddle, our President might take the time to consider the matter cautiously and make a sound judgment before loading his cannons.

Having downloaded a transcript of the Warren’s event, and pouring over the text the past two days, there are so many points at which I find McCain’s worldview utterly vexing. Where I’m ready to pull out my hair. Where I am reminded that the John McCain of 2000 would never vote for the John McCain of 2008. But more than anything, I found his answer to Warren’s question about evil in this world particularly alarming. Where I had to stop and think, what a jaded and narrow-minded demagogue this old man has become.

Warren had asked, “does evil exist, and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it?” Obama answered the first part of the question to the affirmative, went on to explain evil’s many guises, from Darfur to ourselves and our own domestic policies, spoke in terms of “confronting” it but cautioned about the need for humility. A lot of evil has been perpetrated over the years in the name of good.

When asked the same question, McCain, who we now know was peeking from behind the curtain, channels Charlton Heston as Moses in contrast to Obama’s answer. “Defeat it,” he says to a raucous round of applause and with a look as stern as old prophets.

The fact is, McCain never even bothered to address the first part of the question, or to frame his answer in terms other than us against them. It is shocking to think this man can’t get beyond a paradigm in which we are forever at war in this world, today, tomorrow and always. After all, where there is good, there is evil. The fundamental nature of conscious reality is one of duality. Our only hope is to transcend this first cause and to view the world in a brand new way. For there to be any hope, we need to get past this foolish, playground nonsense of us against them, or at least to have a lot less of it.

McCain’s failure to see this or move beyond the worldview of another century is shocking enough, but what really set off my alarms, and should set off alarms in the minds of even so-called devout Christians during this campaign, is that McCain is deluded enough to play God upon the stage of this world.

I refer to the Bible.

See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil. Deuteronomy 30:15.

I don’t mean to be cute here and remain unsure whether or not one can possibly call upon logic in these circumstances, but if evil is God’s handiwork, who are we to think we can rid the universe of it? To take the Bible at face value, as I expect John McCain and most Christians do, isn’t it the worst form of demagoguery to suggest we can undo the very nature of the world as God created it? Better what Obama had to say when asked the same question. All we can do is be God’s humble soldiers in that ongoing struggle.

But what the hell. If John McCain’s going to play at God, why bother with channeling that old fire and brimstone God of the Old Testament. Didn’t Jesus say he had come to fulfill the old law? So let’s hearken to something on the subject that is closer to the true spirit of Christianity.

…Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7

There were the so-called liberal operatives getting themselves safely away from the scene of the crime, the right-wing apparatchiks waxing indignant, David Bonior throwing Edwards under the bus. Even the usually level-headed Jack Cafferty was beginning to foam at the mouth. Only Roger Simon of Politico could drag himself to admit that Edward’s statement, released while the shows were in progress, had been a sincere expression of remorse. Everyone else simply got more indignant over the “99%” clause. They’d have put poor Jesus on a cross. 

My heart goes out to you, John, on both accounts. You must suffer the wounds of your own infidelity, and then be dragged around in a form of public lynching.

I have committed many sins of my own, and will no doubt make more, but I come at this today as a man who loves a woman with all his heart. In such a way, that I have never once been tempted to betray her trust. I thank God everyday that I have been given to adore someone in that way. I thank God for these feelings of devotion. I wouldn’t know how to face my sweetheart if I fell from grace in a similar way. 

But that only makes me more compassionate of others, and but reminds me this is about choosing people for public office, and the absurdity of doing so on the basis of their private peccadilloes. If the measure of worthiness is whether or not someone has committed a sexual transgression, we would never have had Roosevelt, or Kennedy. The list goes on and on.

What we’ll always end up with instead is the milquetoast of a Coolidge, the moral rigidity of Reagan and Bush, or a scoundrel like Tricky Dick. People who don’t have to wear a red face during Sunday’s sermon, perhaps, but who will publicly admit they don’t possess that vision thing, who can’t form a proper sentence, who aren’t the best of the best. 

More so, we will forever find ourselves as a nation in this self-righteous Calvinistic, witch-hunting mode, the stones being passed around, preparing to punish the sinner, forgetting that we have, or are certainly capable of, doing the same damned thing ourselves.

Peter O’Toole, as Lawrence, has just taken Aqaba from the rear, has crossed the Sinai Peninsula on camel and is there in Cairo, in full Bedouin garb, to inform the British Admiralty of this heretofore improbable triumph. Jack Hawkins, as General Allenby, and Claude Rains, as Mr. Dryden from the Arab Bureau, a menacingly benign presence always lurking in the shadows, have greeted Lawrence, congratulated him on his success and are now seated around a fountain in the Admiralty’s Cairo Office, trying to figure out how best to use Lawrence’s talents going forward against the Turks.

Lawrence, at General Allenby’s behest, and as the fatherly Mr. Dryden listens on, commences to explain what will be required to further the Arab revolt. “I’ll need five thousand rifles. And sovereigns. They don’t like paper money. And instructors for the Davis guns. And more money. Much more later on.”

“Right!” the unflappable Allenby says each time with a sidelong glance at Dryden.

“And two armored cars. And field artillery.”

 “Right! Right!”

Lawrence, in his Bedouin garb, is soon dismissed and swarmed by fellow officers, while Allenby and Dryden are seen marching off to more important business, with Dryden expressing his concerns about Lawrence’s requests. “If you give the Arabs artillery, you will have made them independent.”   “Well, then I can’t do it, can I?” Allenby concludes.

And there in a nutshell, you have the policy of the Western world towards the Middle East over the past hundred and fifty years or so; meddling, patronizing and driven by our economic and imperialistic ambitions hand in hand; acting as if we know better how to deal with someone’s sovereign territory than the owner’s of it do themselves.

What makes this scene so especially poignant is the backdrop of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was basically the French and British drawing up control of the Middle East on a napkin, and which one only learns about at the end of the movie.

So there you have Lawrence, playing the role of chivalrous knight in a battle for Arab independence while Allenby and Dryden use him and the Arab army like pieces on a chess board. Lawrence, an exceptionally well schooled man with a deep seated sense of morality, was so sickened by the experience, he spent the rest of his life serving in the British forces under various assumed names, in the hopes he and the whole contemptible episode could be forgotten.

You can bet on this. The people of the Middle East never forgot it. Their feuds and rivalries go all the way back to Saladin battling Richard the Lionhearted for control of Jerusalem. It may seem utterly absurd in our minds to go back a thousand years, but not to them, and it goes to the heart of why a McCain presidency and a Obama presidency would be so very different. As witnessed by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s recent agreement with Obama’s troop withdrawal timetable, the Iraqis are not counting the months and years before we leave, as the press seems to be obsessed with here back in the States. The Iraqis are looking with a wary eye at our long term intentions.

In what was mostly skirted and ignored by the mainstream press over the last five years, the Bush Administration had every intention of keeping permanent military bases in Iraq from the start of its misguided war, a fact that fed in large part to the very insurgency we ended up fighting. It may not stick in the craw of someone on the right, who thinks dictating terms to the rest of the world seems like a grand idea, but you try having a couple thousand Iraqi soldiers parading around your home town, knowing full well they’re building a permanent just down the road. We all know goddamned well every gun toting NRA member would come crawling out the woodwork with his rifle and camouflage gear on. Why should anyone be surprised by the Iraqis’ resentments?

There is not much we can do now about having blundered into Iraq in the first place. And having done so, one can only hope to be, as Obama so aptly expressed, “as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.” But the devil is not in the details, as one would normally expect. The devil is in how the Iraqis and the wider Muslim world perceive our long term intentions. And that is why, as a mere matter of perception, an Obama presidency will diffuse so much of the anger directed at us from the Muslim world.

If we finally retreat to the benign role we played between World War I and World War II in the Middle East, we can expect to be embraced once again as friend and honest broker, from Islamabad to Damascus. But if we continue the role of an imperial power, as we have done for the past sixty years, we can expect this “never ending war on terror” on which Bush and McCain’s foreign policies thrive, to go on as long as we all shall live.