Lipstick on a woman

OK, you're going to hear it here first. Ms. Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president is not a woman! Nope, you read that correctly-- in the eyes of the Republican electoral apparatus, Ms. Palin is not a woman, she's a demographic!

You see, for the last eight years, the wheezing, larcenous, and paternalistic Republican party figured out they were losing even their loyal wives as supporters. In the name of "national security" they manufactured barely enough evidence to attack the feckless Saddam Hussein, and now are mired in a 2 trillion dollar neighborhood rehab project in Iraq that hasn't made any Americans safer (quite the contrary). The GOP gave a couple of hundred billion dollars in taxes back to the super-rich, and somehow turned the fiscal surplus the Clinton administration left into a record deficit. During the Reagan administration, taxpayers were forced to bail out the Savings and Loans to the tune of 500 billion dollars. We are now in the process of bailing the mortgage industry out to the tune of another 500 billion at least. Facing the highest gas and heating oil prices ever, the GOP is now proposing drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. To Hell with polar bears, I need to gas up my Hummer! And on top of that they're planning for an attack on Iran, and financing a proxy-war there, just in case. Farmers can't get their crops picked because the conservatives have somehow equated migrant workers with el-kaaduh terrists, and turned ICE (I believe they're the enforcement arm of INS) onto an unprecedented crackdown of undocumented workers.

The GOP has been unmasked by the brainless foibles of G. W. Bush as having zero leadership, zero vision, and zero charisma. This is the W who wanted to turn all of our Social Security over to Wall Street-- a particularly troubling thought, given the recent mortgage-backed credit mess that's going on there.

So now, the GOP candidate, recognizing even his wife wasn't going to vote for him if something didn't change, has chosen Ms. Palin as his running mate. What could be better? She's a Christian fundamentalist and pro-life. She's from a "small" state (population-wise, at least). She hunts and fishes and runs a family and goes to PTA meetings and runs a small town (smaller than the US Capitol at noon, I believe) as mayor. And she's a lady dag-nabbit, so Mr. McCain can stand up for her aggressively if she's not treated like the "lady" she so obviously is. So when one of them tax and spend Dems (Mr. Obama) uses a quaint old-fashioned term like "put lipstick on a pig" it's obvious it's time for Mr. McCain and all the talk-show pugiligists to come to the defense of the honor of their "lady." Lady's use lipstick, right? And they ain't supposed to be called "pigs" right? Ferget all those nit-picky debates about issues that matter-- there's a lady in distress!

So we've got a useless war (in which our involvement so far has lasted longer than the two world wars combined), and a health care crisis, and an immigration crisis, and a class crisis, and the financial markets are in shambles, and government is going through its own crisis in ethics, and the Republicans seem to be interested only in nostrums of "national security" and "defense of a lady's honor."

It's time for the GOP to be out of Washington and go back to where they came from and find out what their constituents really want. And here's a hint. They're not primarily interested in the lady's honor. Even in lipstick.