Thought you’d seen it all? In an evident attempt to steal the spotlight from the Democrats the day after their convention, and to engage that supposed crowd of disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters, John McCain announced his choice of Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his running mate, and  in so doing brought into spectacular doubt his allegiance to the national interests and demonstrated his evident contempt for the office to which he aspires, and for the country he so hypocritically purports to put “first.”  John McCain ought to be run out of town of a rail.  

It is not as a Democrat with partisan heat in my blood; it is as a citizen of this once proud republic that I say this choice is outrageous and it shows so many terrible and reckless things about John McCain and his judgment, his desperation,it would be fair to hope that the RNC might re-consider its options and refuse to nominate him this week. 

Sarah Palin has served as governor of Alaska, whose entire population (683,000) would fit nearly twice into the city of Dallas (1,213,825), for about 18 months.  Before that she was the mayor of a town whose population is less than 7,000 souls, and before that a sports reporter, a local - not even state-wide - beauty pageant winner, and reportedly a member of the PTA.  

Oh, and also, Governor Palin describes herself as a hockey mom.  

That’s it.  Such are the credentials of the person who John I’m-a-former-POW-how-dare-you-criticize-me McCain has proposed to be his running mate, proposed to be his next-in-line to the presidency.  

This is the person John McCain says would be capable of steering the ship of state, and of standing in as as commander in chief of the mighty and terrible armor of the United States!  John McCain turned 72 the same day he announced Palin’s nomination.  He said he forgot that it was his birthday.  Think about that.

Lest you put McCain to his own standard by protesting that Palin is inexperienced, hold the phone: She’s not inexperienced they say.  Her experience is “different” and, after all, unlike the Obama family, she’s a proper pro-life christian. Unlike Joe Biden’s decades in the Senate - Joe Biden! - Sara Palin’s bona fides, as described above, are sufficient to place her a heart-beat away from the presidency, because...?  And of course there’s that important PTA post.  Think of what lengths the McCain campaign will go to to twist this ridiculous woman into some kind of asset. Cindy McCain defended her lack of foreign policy experience by reminding us that Alaska is near Russia! 

Picture this: The President of the United States, John McCain  somehow becomes unable to govern.  Say he succumbs to one of his many health problems.  What happens to the football? For those who don’t know, the football is the Red Button.  The football is a device that, activated, immediately and irrevocably sends all of the U.S.’s strategic missiles, the ones carrying hydrogen bombs as payload, toward targets throughout the globe, wherever enemies of the United States reside and do not reside.  This device is carried wherever the President of the United States goes to insure a speedy response to nuclear peril.  

So now it’s President Sarah Palin who gets to make that decision.  This is perhaps the most insulting thing that has come out of this haughty and vicious crowd running John McCain these days, who are asking you to take a chance on the no matter how remote possibility that, in a national emergency, Sarah Palin might transform into, I don’t know, Hillary Clinton, should the moment arise.  Or Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, even Angela Merckel.  This woman’s name ought not even be mentioned  in the same sentence as these.  And yet John McCain wants you to place her next in line to the presidency.  Think about that.  

Apparently, to use his own fateful words, John McCain would rather win an election than act in his country’s interests.  Who’s the patriot now? Apparently John McCain has been listening to the psycho wing of the Republican party who want you to believe all kind of shocking fictions about Barack Obama, but most especially that unlike John McCain, Barack Obama has not shown himself to be a “man of honor.”  Apparently John McCain is living in bizarro-world, if not only in his mind.  This choice is so cynical, it should be universally condemned.