| Sarah Palin has been on the political stump now all of six weeks, arriving as a gift from heaven with few of the attributes of a seasoned politician, but possessed of charms that, if you aren’t sure what they are, you’re still likely to believe she has ‘em.
I believe Palin was not John McCain‘s choice as a running-mate, but that of his keepers. The Republican far right (its passive voice) is composed of Evangelicals and followers dedicated to returning America to the past when religion was all powerful.
Palin‘s “white flag of surrender” refers less to Iraq, the intended base for further Middle East incursions by the US, than to Islam. Geo W. Bush is an Apostle of the Evangelical Movement of Holy War, and his administration is geared to achieving its ends, which explains his reluctance to withdraw from Iraq. The work is just begun
Palin’s pentecostal and fundamental beliefs meld conveniently with the Republican passive voice making her a suitable mouthpiece for the far right’s plan to use the Republican Party as its agent in pursuit of glory; her imprinted belief in the supernatural extends even to a belief in witches, making it easy for her to attack Barack Obama’s character. The campaign has reverted to Middle Age tactics when the Church, by its Edict of Faith, insisted witches were real.
The blueprint for the far right’s conduct is in the examples provided by the Book of Isaiah whose prophecy announcing Jesus’ coming “in less than a year,” made the manger scene just one of many anomalous constructions to confound impressionable minds. The Gospels were written 60 to 100 years after the fact by Christian scribes doing as they were asked to do, using extreme metaphorical imagination.
Isaiah admits he was taught to believe what he espoused. Palin’s rhetoric comes straight from the Republican passive voice. Both were/are worthy-bearers of the tales they tell to emphasize the chosen cause of their teachers. Evangelists are pretenders whose instances of chicanery are legion; people ought to know better, but choose instead to accept obediently and in silence what they are “given” to believe is true, but is not.
“Compassionate conservative” is a term adopted by Republicans to give the impression they would rule as benevolent despots. Over the last eight years we have seen what despotism can do. Bush’s war-of-choice in Iraq has sacrificed some 4200 lives not counting the tens of thousands severely wounded. He has damaged America’s reputation abroad, reduced constitutional rights of citizens, and failed in his responsibility to New Orleans in the false belief that “God’s in His heaven, all’s well with the world,"...including the environment. Well, it is not.
By pretending God is in control, Bush and his deputies removed regulation that released the worst of human-nature to let the rich get richer [own more mansions than one can recall], and the poor get poorer. It is time for a change.
Sarah Palin, a neophyte of the far right, believes U.S. troops are doing God’s work in Iraq and the Middle East. She waxed poetic as a patriotic-conservative when she accused Joe Biden, and Democrats, of “raising the white flag of surrender” in Iraq for wanting to withdraw to end the U.S. occupation.
“Winning” means Iraq must submit to Bush’s rubric demand of continued occupation which is at the root of Bush’s invasion of Iraq in the first place. The far right defines anything less as the equivalent of a shameful U.S. surrender, not against Iraq, but Islam. Bush’s successor could change the rules, but John McCain says he won’t!
Barack Obama could withdraw, leaving the U.S. Embassy intact, and let Iraq solve its internal problems in its own way, using the billions in savings to bolster the U.S. economy, for, as all thinking Americans know, “Charity begins at home.” Withdrawal is not surrender, it is logical, and makes nothing but sense.
Commentary by Ken Ramey,
Paso Robles, CA
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