Palinesque

I haven’t written about Sarah Palin since the convention (OK, I haven’t written about much of anything since the convention due to other factors in my life with a higher priority than blogging), but I was glad to see Steven Pinker’s column Everything You Heard Is Wrong this week because I think everyone has paid entirely too much attention to the Palin phenomenon, as if we all finally got to be judges on American Idol rather than American voters, and far too little about what she actually believes and stands for beyond the winks and nods. Mr. Pinker – oft accused of being in the conservative camp – apparently agrees. Said he:

“Voters judging Ms. Palin’s performance should focus on the facile governing philosophy that is symbolized by her speech style, not the red herrings of accent or dialect.”

That said, I have found the newly coined term “Palinesque” useful over the past few weeks. Not least to describe GW Bush’s flacid attempts at explaining the financial crisis & bailout. It shows that it really is useful to have a leader in times of trouble and also why it’s a bad idea for a president to lie. Did anyone believe a word he said last week? Did he? Or had someone simply propped him up and fed him the lines he was to say regardless of the meaning or relevance– a la Palin at the debate. He was reduced to repeating his bravo performance ante the Iraq war, only this time replacing the mushroom cloud reference with a parallel reference to the Great Depression. And, what do you know, it worked.

Now my real theory of Sarah Palin is that she was not chosen to appeal to women or independents or even blue collar white men. She is a NeoCon parasite implanted in the soft body of the McCain campaign not to save it, but to destroy McCain forever as a serious player in the GOP and to launch her own career as the NeoCon standard bearer of 2012. Time will tell if the strategy is successful (although Part I seems to be well underway). The problem I guess they didn’t consider is that the parasite has emerged bloody-fanged from the husk of the McCain campaign in full public view while still in her larval stage. That hasn’t been too pretty.