Lee Wochner: Writer. Director. Writing instructor. Thinker about things.


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Candidates that give me the shivers

sarahpalin.jpg

Thinking back to when I was an 11-year-old taking my required hunter safety classes, I can’t recall anyone else out in the field looking anything like the vice-presidential candidate above. If there had been someone similarly outfitted, my seriously hormonal self would have taken note. But no, it was a cleared field filled with somewhat clueless boys in dungarees and hunter-orange vests getting tutored in the way of the gun by middle-aged men who were passing on what they had once learned at the same age.

One of the things we were taught is that a gun is not a toy, that it is not to be treated as such, and that because we should always assume it is loaded and ready to go off, we should never point it at anyone or treat it as anything less than an instrument of death. It’s because of that thinking, which has informed my life, that I look at this image with nothing but dismay. Sarah Palin is by all estimates a skilled hunter and fisher — but I don’t like her cavalier attitude with that gun.

In most political seasons at least half of one of the main tickets scares the pants off me. In 1992, it was the utterly unqualified and unmoored Dan Quayle (and, more precisely, his scarily intolerant and rigid wife, who would have wound up running the government had something happened to Bush the First); in 2000 it was Dick Cheney; and in 2004 it was a trifecta:  Bush the Lesser, Cheney, and John Edwards, a hypocritical ambulance-chaser of the first order (which made it hard to support John Kerry — except for the alternative, which we’re now enduring).

This year, it’s Sarah Palin who gives me the shivers. I don’t like what she says, and I don’t like what her choice says about John McCain.

I think Palin’s shortcomings have been widely documented already, so I’d rather discuss McCain, a man I used to esteem. McCain is running on a platform of “Country First,” which by extension indicates a criticism that someone else — perhaps his opponent? — is not putting country first. But in picking an utterly unqualified number two, has the aged and cancer-prone John McCain put country first, or has he thrown a sop to the fringe elements of his own party while nakedly attempting to attract even a sliver of the disenfranchised Hillary Clinton supporters? Every year around budget time, I have seen McCain on C-Span voting against and speaking out against budget earmarks — but he has just selected a running mate who sought (and got) dozens of them for her small town and for the state of Alaska. Is this truly the person he thinks best equipped to step when the president is incapacitated? While I’ve rarely agreed with his politics, I’ve generally admired John McCain. Now that he’s caught Potomac Fever and is willing to sacrifice good judgment for his own election, I just think he’s a hypocrite. Embracing Bush the Lesser was bad enough; positioning someone for the presidency whom you cannot believe is capable is just selfish and unpatriotic.

3 Responses to “Candidates that give me the shivers”

  1. Paul Crist Says:

    I wonder if the photo has been photo-shopped. If it is real it is very scary, that she does not know or show proper respect for a weapon.

    That aside I do not like her stance on many issues, well practically everything she stands for. For me the worst is that she supports creationism being taught in schools. I am not opposed to having a blurb saying that there are religious beliefs about the creation of the universe, I just do not want it taught as science. This would open the door to more junk science and any religion wanting equal time.

    Plus she seem to be intolerant to outside views. She reminds me of a female boss I had who treated anyone who did not think she was God’s gift to the organization as a walking simpleton.

    Here is an examination of her acceptance speech from Dick Polman, the Philly Inquirer political columnist.

    http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/americandebate/Palin_and_the_mastery_of_illusion.html

  2. Lee Wochner Says:

    Yes, the story on angry-white-male radio this afternoon is that the image is Photoshopped. It may well be. Or not. Either way, I haven’t heard any rhetoric from her that doesn’t match up with the image.

  3. Lee Wochner Says:

    Yup. It’s Photoshopped. Here’s the original.

    http://urbanlegends.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://flickr.com/photos/97897149%40N00/208036176

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