HEATHER, WEATHERIN' THE PALIN* RAGE

*quick now - what's red white and blue? ohnonononono, guys, we aren't talking about the Stars and Stripes. We're talking about the newly acquired "star" candidate of the Republican Party, Red as in neck, White as in Pal(e)in and Blue as in why isn't everyone voting Democrat!?

Our compatriot and fellow journalist Heather Mallick, surely one of the better writers that the Globe and Mail let go, in a fit of someone's pique, recently wrote a column about the Republican Convention. (Read it, it 's engaging and entertaining - http://www.heathermallick.ca/cbc.ca-columns/a-mighty-wind-blows-through-republican-convention.html) In it she cited yet another terrific columnist, John Doyle, who called Mrs Palin an Alaska hillbilly, and that, along with a number of other statements, appears to have ignited a "firestorm" on the right, who seem always to have their panties in knots about something(http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/080920/world/us_cda_palin). Someone named Greta Van Susteren repeatedly called her a pig - well, she is on Fox News, what else should one expect? Fox prides itself on being the deliberately dumbest, most ignorant, most prejudiced television entity around and it is all about money.

And the ignorami commented with such stupidities as "Canada is made up of small towns and many if not most trace their ancestry back to their 'redneck cousin' and they still have relatives here in the U.S." - dream on, bozo, Canada is a cosmopolitan country made up of virtually every nationality on the planet. We too have our rednecks, who currently are gearing up to vote for one Stephen Harper, who is probably your wet dream boy.

And calling us morons - why, that shows that your vocabulary has reached a grade four level. Keep up the improvements and you ought to be getting out of grade school in time for retirement.

Way to go Heather, we are standing right with you.

The U.S., we are told, is the home of the brave, and still - let's hope - the land of free speech. So let's examine Mrs Palin a little bit more.


Mrs Palin is a type, all right, a power-hungry, I'll-smack-you-upside-the-head-if-you-don't-behave type of mom, a hockey mom all right but the kind whose great loud mouth is used to drown out other hockey moms. One who cloaks her desire to run everyone's life with the piety of religious belief. We have known her many a time in our years of being a different type of mom. One can sense her coming before one even has her in view.

One sees it in the glint in her eyes as she is traipsing across the U.S., a country conveniently shell-shocked by last week's self-immolation of Wall Street. It is nakedly obvious that she smells power. One can hear the wheels grinding, the calculation - every day he gets a day older and a step closer to the grave
>chortle< and then!

and then, ladies and gentlemen, we truly will have an ignorant person, small-minded in the extreme, beholden to some of the darkest, slimiest powers behind the shaky throne upon which she is thrust, and with her finger too damn close to the button for our comfort.


Mrs Palin will be debating Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden but this has come about only after the Republican Party held out for a tightened debate format, one that will consist primarily of yes-no questions that require nothing of her but that she remember which is which.

One supposes that it is actually fruitless, perhaps even stupid, to assume that she might have some coherent thoughts that have not been put into her head by one of the boys still sniffing "eau de W" on his nose.

And yet one can't have just the presidential candidates debating, especially not in a year when the Reaper is in the precinct. One hears him rattling around occasionally, when McCain has one of his blank moments, reminiscent of Keats's "drowsy numbness", in which he looks entirely lost - the same look Aunt Violet had shortly before she decamped entirely to Neverland. McCain's hiding behind his obviously fresher memories of forty years ago, his aimless, doddering aura, also recall Baudelaire - "Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé" - where [in whose body] flows, instead of blood, the green water of Lethe - Lethe being the Greek personification of forgetfulness, oblivion. Before we leave him there, let's all remember that Lethe is the root of our word "lethal". Anyone need a definition of that?

It is curious that simply being a Republican is not in itself lethal this election year, given the corruption, lies, and gallop toward totalitarianism of the Bush years. It's old news that the election of 2000 was stolen, the Democratic candidate of 2004 was deliberately sabotaged, the dismantling of rights guaranteed by the Constitution continues at breakneck speed, and it's startling that none of these evinces even a yawn from the broad populace. Perhaps they, too, have dipped their oars into the waters of Lethe.


c2008 bluemlein.blogspot.com