Palin’s Fatal Fundamental Flaw

McPalin wowed the base* with Rovian rancor and division; what’s new.

Maybe Sarah Palin was a fine mayor of Wasilli; I ‘ownt even know. And, if in the performance of her “actual responsibilities” as governor of Alaska, she got a bad cop off the street and spared a family some domestic violence, well that’s wonderful. Alaska, and by extension, The United States, is a better place.  Above all, I even heartily applaud her personal dedication to God’s Will, and wish every American could live the moral and ethical equivalent of divine good to all mankind.  But the reality is, many Republicans, like John McCain, are just as Barack Obama described him in his acceptance speech. They just don’t “get it.”

They didn’t “get it” in the twentieth century, and they’re not going to get it in the twenty-first, either. Their moral and ethical clocks, wound so tightly around the culture war issues of the neocon religious right that they are frozen in time, will never catch up to the moving vanguard of twenty-first century morals and ethics. Ever.

That’s not to say they couldn’t drag America kicking ans screaming back into the twentieth century; after all they like it back there; it’s what they know; even if it’s cold, rotten, and reeking of spiritual death.  It simply comes down to this: Are there more of them than there are of those who embrace a new and higher level of morals and ethics?

And will their votes count?

Religious freedom, especially in a nation where a majority prides itself as a “Christian nation,” must be experienced as an equally vibrant freedom for all Americans. John McCain feels “Judeo-Christian values” are America’s values, and he has driven this point home to us by selecting as his choice for vice-president a Christian whose religious views skew so far to the extreme political right, she becomes immediately unacceptable to many other religionists, and even mainstream Christians. Exhibit One: She stands in lockstep with the delusional Bush when she sees America’s War in Iraq as a divine task. Speaking before her Pentecostal church, Palin said:

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. . . That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that [sic] plan is God’s plan.”

It’s “hard work” to stay current in an endless culture war that many Americans take about as seriously as they do the War on Some Drugs, but apparently many non-Republican folks missed what should be considered the most profound consultation yet for an American president, right up there on a par with Abraham‘s conversations with Melchizedek and Jesus‘ communions with his Father. To wit:

Dear Republican Christians,

Tell everyone I said America is to become the world’s enforcer of freedom— Launch a pre-emptive attack on Saddam Hussein before he can find the materials to make a bomb and explode it because he “hates [your] freedom.”  And rest assured, Evangelical Christians are still my favorite Christian sect out of all 38,067 of them, but here’s a heads up for you: the Bobo dreads of the Mansions of Rastafari  moved up to second place last quarter; better keep on your toez if you know what’s good for you.

In My Holy Name,

God

Sigh. I had no idea God had started directing our Department of Defense; but if this is His idea of making America a safer place in the world, he’s FIRED.

Palin’s Fatal Fundamental Flaw is simply this: Her religion is so extremist and “prophetic,”  that it makes her, and the McSame-Palin ticket, even more unacceptable than it was before she was selected. No American is going to put a Christian extremist like her in the White House and not get another holy war against “Islamic Terrorists.” But America has no business fighting Religious Wars.

Reagan’s whacky speech writer, Peggy Noonan, not always the voice of clear sanity, did get it partially right the other day when she swapped straight talk with yet another whacktoid, Mike Murphy, while East coast Liberal media lackey Chuck Todd kept the tape rolling:

“. . .they went for this— excuse me— political bullshit about narratives — Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.”

*base: without moral principles; ignoble : the electorate’s baser instincts of greed and selfishness