HOCKEY MOM VP CANDIDATE CUT FROM SAME IDEOLOGICAL CLOTH AS GEORGE BUSH

The dynamic of the 2008 presidential campaign was forever altered last week with John McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Besides bringing color to the normally listless and bland McCain, Palin is a candidate that much of the Republican Party’s Christian base can relate to. She is one of them, a fact made crystal clear by the coded messages to the “faithful” littered throughout her acceptance speech at the Republican convention in St Paul last week.

But this in itself is not bad. Nor should her religious beliefs necessarily disqualify her from one of the world’s highest offices. Her desire to incorporate these beliefs - - extreme by any method of measurement - - into mainstream American life, should.

Make no mistake; Sarah Palin is a religious zealot. A former Pentecostal, her current church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, recently gained fame for billing itself as a refuge church for people of faith during the approaching end times.

Honestly, you would think that after nearly eight years, the religious zealotry of George W. Bush would have most Americans wary of political candidates who claim to converse one on one with the man upstairs, and of leaders who allow religious ideology to consistently trump science when making policy decisions for the nation.

You would think, but you would be wrong; as you would be if you underestimated the extreme disconnect in beliefs that exists between those of us living on the coasts, and the people scattered in the middle of this great big country, specifically when it comes to the criteria used for selecting candidates for political office.

For some insane reason, insane at least to me, many of the people in the middle tend to consistently make their decision as to which candidate to vote for based on the faith of the candidate, and not his or her qualifications for elected office. It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter to them whether this candidate has their best interest in mind, only that he or she worships as they do.

Like most good Christian extremists, Sarah Palin puts her faith squarely in abstinence and opposes educating teenagers about sex and contraception. This is troubling news in today’s world, as is the fact that had Governor Palin paid as much attention to the science of this issue as she apparently has to the theology, she would know of the peer reviewed studies linking increased instances of sexually transmitted diseases originating from anal and oral sex to teenagers who had pledged abstinence.

Then again, if she had been following the data, she would also know that even Uncle Sam’s own studies, the one’s commissioned by abstinence advocate, George Bush’s government, have over and over again scientifically proven that abstinence as a method of preventing sex between teenagers is a decided failure, and an expensive one at that.

Forgetting about the science for a minute, there is the human tragedy that this naïve way of addressing the issue of teenagers and sex leaves in its wake; the pregnancies that could have been avoided with just a little bit of information and a condom, or a trip to the gynecologist for the pill.

Now it is unfortunate when any teenager finds herself pregnant and unwed. This is as true for Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin’s 16-year-old daughter, as it is for any young woman. But worse than the damage that being pregnant at so young of an age can do to the young woman in question’s psyche, is that which will be done with a forced marriage, particularly one not necessarily based on love, but being staged to satisfy the crotchety old white men who run her mothers Vice Presidential campaign’s need to wrap up loose ends. As the father of a daughter, a beautiful 22 year old, it saddens me to see a young life squandered so needlessly to a parent’s blind ambition.

Not surprisingly, Vice Presidential candidate Palin also opposes abortion. It doesn’t matter to the candidate whether the woman in question was the victim of rape, of incest, or merely messed up her contraception ritual. Palin believes that pregnant women should have no other option but to carry their baby though to term, though like most fundamentalist Christian republicans, she offers no guidance on what to do after the baby is born, or support for any programs designed to assist the new mothers.

Rounding out the trifecta of social reforms that Vice Presidential candidate Palin would inflict on America if she gets the chance is her belief that Creationism should be taught in schools alongside evolution.

In the eighty plus years since John Scopes first gained worldwide attention for teaching evolution in a rural Tennessee school, volumes have been written making the case that this is the way that life developed. Virtually all of the world’s scientific community is in agreement on this. They are also aligned in placing the age of the planet at over 1 billion years old.

world in six days around six thousand years ago, and that he had a direct hand in advancing man’s development to his current level of sophistication. Amazingly, Vice Presidential candidate Palin believes both of these to be true.

My issues with Sarah Palin, however, go far deeper than her religious beliefs, or the way that she chooses to run her family. My concerns with the candidate are more about her seemingly troubled relationship with the truth. Case in point: Her comments at the convention in St Paul last week regarding her opposition to earmarks and to the now infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.”

History tells us that until she was recruited last week to bolster the sagging McCain ticket, Sarah Palin was your typical small town Republican politician, meaning that she never met an earmark, a handout, or a tax break that she didn’t embrace, whole heartedly.

In fact, while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Ms. Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington DC annually to secure earmarks for her town. She was so successful that while she was mayor, tiny little Wasilla secured earmarks totaling over $27,000,000.00, major money by any standard. (Source: AlterNet)

So you have to understand my skepticism when Vice Presidential candidate Palin pledges to wipe out frivolous spending in Washington, for it wasn’t all that long ago that Mayor Palin burdened the citizens of her hometown with $20 million in long-term debt, which breaks down to about $3,000 per resident, big money in an economically depressed state. (Source: AlterNet)

Then there is the little matter of that bridge. In her acceptance speech at the convention the other night, Vice Presidential candidate Palin took great pains to distance herself from the now infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” Since that time the McCain campaign has excerpted the part of Palin’s speech focusing on that issue and made it the basis of a new television ad campaign. There is only one problem. It is not true.

In the real world, not to be confused with the oz- like revisionist never never land constructed for Vice Presidential candidate Palin by Republican Party media strategists, (and apparently bought into by most in the mainstream media), truth is what ever they want it to be.

But around here - - and in the progressive blogosphere in general - - we believe in the eons old intent of the word. Hence our need to quote facts, one of which is that Vice Presidential candidate Palin, during an earlier incarnation as Governor Palin, supported plans to construct the $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to that island with the 50 residents, but withdrew her support after the plan received worldwide attention and ridicule, as an example of Washington DC corruption and cronyism at it’s worst.

But the lies do not end there. Also in her acceptance speech Vice Presidential candidate Palin pledged to create jobs with clean coal and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources.”

Granter wind and solar were at the end of a line of mainly fossil fuel energy sources, but they were there. Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why Governor Palin recently vetoed money for a crucial wind energy project, or why she opposed a crucial clean water initiative that would have banned metal mines from discharging pollution into salmon streams.

But her environmental sins do not end there. As Alaska’s Governor, she also approved legislation permitting oil and gas companies to nearly triple the amount of toxic waste they can legally dump into an important fishery.

But what concerns me the most is her obvious support of the nuclear industry. As an environmentalist, I find the recent focus by republicans on expanding nuclear power fascinating; particularly now that even Uncle Sam’s in-house nuclear agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has stated that an atomic renaissance at this point in time is a bad idea.

It seems that the resistance is to a large extent caused by the industry’s inability to figure out a way to safely dispose of the nuclear waste, coupled with the always-present possibility of a Chernobyl style meltdown. Just because we have been lucky so far in our dealings with nuclear power, does not mean that that luck will continue to hold, no matter what any politician tells you to the contrary

But meltdowns and nuclear storage problems are worries for the long term, and if there is anything that a modern Republican politician avoids giving much thought to, it’s that. Which is why the George Bush’s of the world have no problem running up massive deficits because in the back of their mind they know that they will be long retired and maybe even dead by the time the bills come do.

Sarah Palin and John McCain are more of the same. And to think that there are those in the GOP making the case that Vice Presidential candidate Palin is a lot like Hillary Clinton. What an insult to Hillary Clinton. Love Hillary or hate her, in no way dos she deserve to be compared to this empty suit.

Not on Sarah Palin’s best day is there even a shred of similarity.

-DENIS