Time to pony up

After watching GOP VP nominee Sarah Palin deliver her remarks last night at the Republican National Convention I fought off the urge to vomit and went immediately to the Obama campaign's web site to make a donation.

Almost everything that Palin said was a mischaracterization of the truth, if not an outright lie. She's against earmarks and lobbyists? She says she is now, but when she was a mayor she hired Wasilla, Alaska's first lobbyist, who brought back $27 million in earmarks to the city. She killed the infamous "bridge to nowhere"? She did, but only after it had become a political nightmare. Before that she supported the project. The pollsters and pundits counted McCain out of the race? They reported the truth -- that at the end of last summer he had no money, few staffers and little national support.

Palin's snarky attitude and disregard for fact, however, mean nothing to the party loyalists she wowed in St. Paul. There's no denying that she delivered the speech with more pizazz that the entire McCain campaign had shown up to then. She also did some of her running mate's dirty work, taking several shots -- none of them true -- at Obama, despite the fact that Democrats were quite respectful of McCain at their convention.

One particularly sickening aspect of her campaign is that she continually uses sons Track (soon to be deployed to Iraq) and Trig (born with Down syndrome) as political chips, while McCain's campaign makes a fuss of anything written or said about daughter Bristol (she of the baby bump), despite the fact that the any mention of the 17-year-old that I've seen in the legitimate media (not the National Enquirer or Us magazine) has not been critical of the girl's pregnancy but rather of her mom's positions on abortion and sex education as they relate to young women such as her daughter -- all within the range of acceptable topics.

Having Sarah Palin in the White House is a scenario that actually scares me. This is a woman who says that the US invasion of Iraq is a "task that is from God" and that the same divine being supports her efforts toward getting a natural gas pipeline built through Alaska. Unlike George W. Bush -- who put on a show of religious faith to get elected -- Palin is a real evangelical Christian, and having her anywhere near America's nuclear arsenal should frighten everyone. If elected, will her policy advice include instigating a war in the Holy Land? Many evangelicals believe that this is destined to happen soon and that when the Armageddon comes only they will be saved.

I hold to my initial reaction: John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate is irresponsible at best -- and it may even be dangerous. Who knows? America has so little information about her and the GOP campaign won't let her loose with reporters or the general public because even they are unsure of what she might say. I'm sure I'll be giving more money to Camp Obama before Nov. 4.