The Avatar of Replicanism...

...is Sarah Palin, it would seem. Jane Smiley at HuffPo has put it in terms more eloquent than I can muster, so I recommend you check out her post first.

Have you read it? And you came back here and you're still reading my blog entry? Oh thank God(s). :)

I'm just staggered by McCain's VP choice. Not so much with her being neo-conservative and ultra-Christian -- McCain needs to make some strange bedfellows if he wants campaign donations from anyone other than telecoms, oil companies and defense contractors. I'm not even surprised that her first major presentation to the world at large contained bald-face lies about her own record as well as her rivals'. I mean, hypocrisy is the bread and butter of the Republican party.

Case and point, this tired refrain: "Oh, John McCain was a POW! You can't challenge the consistency of his positions when he served his country with honor!" Well, John Kerry is a war hero, and that didn't protect him from being labelled a flip-flopper and things much, much worse. It didn't stop the Republicans from attacking John Murtha and Wesley Clark did it? Oh, no, but suddenly McCain is sacrosanct because he was fought for his country and that magically makes him, and him alone, immune from criticism.

I'm not awestruck that McCain chose Palin. I'm awestruck that he and his campaign botched it so very badly. The cat's out of the bag about her daughter's teen pregnancy, the religious fervor of her associating the War in Iraq (who are we at war with again, exactly?) with "God's work," and her ties to an Alaskan secessionist movement. How long did these guys have to do their homework on Palin so as to spin it somewhere useful (or at least, somewhere obfusciated and harmless)? Or, God(s) forbid, pick someone else with the same qualifications (womanly bits, belligerent partisanship, ultra-Christian) who hadn't descended into sheer crackpottery? Instead, they equated "a long and thorough vetting process" with "late night cram session" and Sarah Palin was the result.

Fortunately, for us perhaps more than for Republicans, she is the perfect icon of the Republican Party.