Let Them Eat Moose

After eight years of the wild west, one would think we'd had enough of cowboys. Enter Alaska's answer to Annie Oakley to walk everybody's favorite, if ambivalent, maverick down the yellow brick road.

And, what better day than today, when we pay tribute to the contributions of the working man and woman of this country, to think about just who will be entrusted with a return to economic sanity. Arguably, Ma Barker, (nee Arizona Donnie Clark), would do a better job of this than Ma Palin.

When running for president, in 1960, John F. Kennedy suggested, in a campaign speech, that Republicans only think about labor one day a year. Well, that's not true of Gov. Sarah Palin. Palin thinks about labor every time her water is about to break.

If blue collar, Bible-thumping, gun-toters think they've found an advocate for the rights of working people in this country, rest assured: she may have married union, but she is 100% management. Moreover, she's not just interested in managing the human race, but the animal kingdom, too.

Yes, we can sleep a little better knowing, when that 3 a.m. phone call comes, we have a vice president who will be out shooting moose. If voters go to the polls in November, and vote for McCain/Palin, we'll have a vice president who has as her motto the "right to life." Wonder what the moose thinks about this idea of a "right to life?"

Wonder what Alaska wildlife, including wolves who have been subjected, for the past 18 months of her governship, to aerial hunting, being gunned down from helicopters and airplanes, and Alaska's polar bears, think of their governor's right to life position? Whose life anyway? The lives of the unborn over those of the polar bear?

Silly me, of course, moose, wolves, and polar bears don't think, so they're easy targets, but if all those who didn't think were to be targeted, we wouldn't have to worry about overpopulation, now would we, and when a wise man said that the "meek shall inherit the earth," maybe he was thinking about those wolves, and polar bears, not the hunters.

Amazing, isn't it, how Palin, and other members of the Rapture gang, support the notion of hierarchy of being. How can anyone claim to believe in life and, at the same time, boast of shooting moose, and skinning them to make moose burgers?

Are humans endowed by their creator with a great right to survive than animals? And, by extension, are some humans more worthy of saving than others? One has only to look at the demographics of the infant mortality rate, in this country, as well as that of death row, to see the hypocrisy inherent in the McCain/Palin notion of a "Christian nation."

Ms. Palin shows it's possible to be a Dominionist and dominitrix at the same time, but she confines her domination to the animal kingdom, to those who are hunted, and don't hunt back; to those who have no lexicon for acts of terror, but only for survival.

If the governor, and her fellow Dominionists, see divinity as the deregulation of nature, they're bound to put the human race on the endangered species list.

We're already on the endangered "specious" list. Better not think about what Europe will say with a vice president, lifetime member of the NRA, whose claim to leadership experience is that she was elected mayor of a small, red neck town population 9,000, served for less than 2 years, and contends that she's more prepared to handle delicate developments with Russia because Alaska is the state closest to Russia? Leaders of countries like Iran, China, and Venezuela will have a field day with her logic.

Selecting an obscure, obscurantist, governor whose years as a PTA member outnumber her years in elected office by a margin of 2 to 1 shows that John McCain is serious about who's going to be boss in his administration. He's confident that he'll stay on top because he picked a running mate guaranteed to stick to the bottom of the pan. Look on the bright side, he didn't choose another Cheney. Indeed, Palin is Cheney's idea of having the last laugh.

Lots has already been made of McCain's VP pick, and her adamant anti-choice stance, her "Big Oil" energy policies, her defense of fossil fuels, and her lawsuit againt the Bush administration for listing polar bears as endangered species.

We wouldn't want a little thing like wildlife to interfere with more drilling for oil, but what we don't know about Alaska's answer to Annie Oakley is that she hides behind being a woman in much the same way that others hide behind the American flag. Make no mistake, Sarah Palin has as much concern for women's issues like equal pay, childcare, choice, and equal opportunity as she has for the wolves she shoots from 20,000 feet.

While Palin will, undoubtedly, know her place in the passenger seat of a vehicle driven by a presumptive, and presumptuous, presidential candidate who "ordered" the Republican Convention all but cancelled, any attempts to portray her as dumb will backfire. Sarah Palin is dumb all the way to the bank.

She knows the right buttons to push, heaven help us, and if she ever becomes our next commander-in-chief, there won't be any question about that. She may stumble over the word "nuclear," but she'll point that firearm as if she were shooting at a rambling deer, and push us over the edge which is, after all, what the Rapture folks want.

Any comparisons to Dan Quayle are ludicrous. Dan Quayle didn't work to exploit his gender to gain leverage in a close presidential race. That Sarah Palin would play the Hillary Clinton card shows that she may well be Karl Rove in a dress.

The thought that this woman could someday be our next president is more terrifying than the prospect of a dozen bin Ladens marching down Broadway. Institutionalized incompetence, and mismanagement, pose a far greater threat to the average American than Al Qaeda ever could.

The kind of incompetence that thinks human actions have nothing to do with global warming, and that there's a place for creationism in the public school curriculum. But, if there were such a thing as "intelligent design," there'd be no need for this discussion.

If there were such a thing as intelligent design, the past eight years would have been the subject of an X rated horror movie, and not relegated to the overworked annals of history.

When the press corps does its job, Annie Oakley will be back home watching "Easy Rider," and we will have a president for whom Labor Day means something 365 days a year.