Going down?

I used to dislike Peggy Noonan for many reasons, one of which was her vulgarization of American political commentary. That was back in the day when calling the Clinton entourage "buttheads" could still make me cringe; that was long before calling a major party candidate a traitor, terrorist, a hard core Marxist radical and an illegal alien who is plotting to kill his grandmother, could be the main thrust of a modern Presidential campaign.

I still despise her, but even she has begun to gag on the candidate she so ironically calls a "symptom and expression of a new vulgarisation of American politics" Sarah Palin. Such an uncharacteristic understatement.

While many important Republicans have been seen leaping for the life boats recently, the new Republican shibboleth may no longer be abortion, gay rights or snake oil tax policies, but loyalty to a losing candidate's last minute and desperate choice for Vice President, Sarah Palin. Those who cling to Sarah Palin and her increasingly insane and inane rants aren't likely to survive. If People like Limbaugh go down with the ship, so much the better. If the most rabid of them spend their waning years yearning for the return of Palin as messiah, I'll enjoy their discomfiture no end.

I don't use the word insane lightly, after all some of my best friends are a little odd at best, but what do we make of the Palin Proclamations about Obama taking away our houses by giving us a tax break, when Republican tax policies are taking them away as we speak? Obama will bring a "nightmare Communist State?" Collectivize all private property? Barak Obama, asserted the wild-eyed harpy would bring about an America "where the people are not free."

Sam Stein at the Huffington Post points out the interesting fact that McCain himself promoted the idea of a progressive tax before he got on the loony train and that Obama's proposed top brackets were the same as during the Clinton years when we had the most prosperous period in our history and erosions of personal freedom were nowhere near the Bush minimums.

Perhaps Palin herself is clinging to the anchor as the ship founders. The only possibility for her new role as the sacrificed savior or hidden Imam would be National Amnesia or a pandemic of contagious insanity. You never know, but the spectacle of the woman who has become the focus and rallying point of the ridiculous right, spitting and hissing like one of Pastor Muthee's witches tied to a stake can't be what John McCain or his party envisioned just a few weeks ago. It's certainly not what I envisioned and feared. Who might have thought the experienced, tested, elder statesman would choose a running mate that could destroy the Republican Party all by herself?