I Don't Know Where To Start

Which is what Joe Biden said at one point Wednesday night during his debate with Sara Palin when she spewed out words signifying nothing. Me too. Where does one start re this Sarah Palin impersonation One of Palin's locutions that will be repeated endlessly is, “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?” This is after, as Dave Letterman pointed out last night, Palin's minders had told her to set up the above point in her "Our Gal Sunday" script by saying, upon greeting Biden, "May I call you Joe?" Bob Herbert noted in his New York Times Op/Ed piece this morning. "Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years. We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality." What we're witnessing now is another "Wag the Dog" segment in Republican leadership. A completely phony person has been created out of the rags and bones of a narcissistic opportunist named Sarah Palin. And why not? They've done it before. Following the pattern of the character in Budd Shulberg's "A Face in the Crowd" (which was Will Rogers out of the psyche of "the old redhead" Arthur Godfrey), the Repub makeover-mavens fashioned man-from-Connecticut George W. Bush into an east-coast politician's idea of a Texan. Now they're working on an east-coast politician's idea of a 1950's midwestern farmwife (complete with phony folksy dialogue) who's been isolated in Alaska but is plucky and cutesy with a dollop of Unsinkable Molly Brown thrown in. One can only comment. One cannot analyze or speak in rational terms of what the McCain crew and the RNC and the Republican Party thinks it's doing, because it is so bizarre. Someone had a daydream about a salt-of-the-earth mother of five who wanted to be a movie star and decided to go into politics instead, and out has popped Sarah Palin. By the way, speaking of commenting. What was that little baby of Palin's doing at the debate? That was uncalled for as far as the kid's well-being is concerned, and I will bet you he was tranquillized. Or did the RNC Make-Your-Dream-Come-True Production crew rent a baby or use an animatronic lifelike kidlet instead?