We felt cocky enough to bring two bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne to election night dinner at the new Royal Thai restaurant in Atlantic Highlands, my mother’s town. The Jersey Shore community is home to Republicans and Democrats adequately civil to hold simultaneous events in adjacent rooms at The Shore Casino. It is where Mother and Father settled in for the last legs of their careers; where he retired and she refused to; where he keeled over in the kitchen one afternoon and she sat on the stairs and wept; where she has spent the last twelve years missing him; where I was visiting from California to help prepare her for the move into my sister’s home; where it occurred to me, sitting at the restaurant table with family and friends and their new baby, achingly eager but still afraid to celebrate, that Mother and the nation were both in the throes of a momentous transition.

The champagne on ice, awaiting absolute confirmation of an Obama-Biden win, we looked along the restaurant’s rich, red walls, through the front window and across First Avenue to the local Republican Headquarters. McCain-Palin supporters were gathering in the storefront, waiting for the first polls to close, sipping drinks, and I wished I’d brought Father’s binoculars. Not to spy, but, come eight o’clock or so, to see what their faces would surely reveal. We joked cavalierly, at Republicans’ expense, proposing a Tina Fey v. Sarah Palin contest in 2012. We fretted the fate of same-sex marriage, twisting in the winds of three states’ ballot measures. Marriage is a human right, we argued with absent opponents. Are homosexuals the twenty-first century niggers?

Still we waited, waited to know for sure, distracting our lust for resolution with the exotic flavors of a country that has survived its own history of transitions and avoidance thereof. We introduced Mother to the pleasures of Thai food — the savory curries and warm coconut milk, the spicy peanut sauce and sweet noodles — while she worried about making creamed chipped beef in an unfamiliar kitchen. We delighted in the wonderment of the baby and turned silent on the pending angst of her parents, two men who know intimately the slings of fearful hatred.

And then Barack Obama won.

We drank the Clicquot, wept for the joy of revived hope, for the sorrow of Mother’s fading independence, for the cruel rejection of our friends’ humanity, for the evolving wisdom of our nation.

The next day, Mother said, “I don’t want to give up my home,” and I abandoned her to her mourning, counting between sobs the Obama bumper stickers on the Garden State Parkway.

At Newark Airport, the rental car return agent held my door and asked how I was doing. “Happy,” I decided, “happy that Obama has won.” She hugged me.

I landed in San Diego in time to drive north to Fallbrook, jump into a gown and drive on to a Marine Corps Birthday Ball, where a four-star general explained to my husband why he voted for Obama. I dared mention it at our table, and the other guests looked uncomfortable and had no comment.

The next morning, one of the coffee and muffin regulars at the old soda fountain counter-cum-café said the general was an idiot, lambasted Obama as an inarticulate incompetent and stormed out, the new government more than he could publicly bear.

That evening, Mother called to say she would certainly stay at my sister’s only until the summer, when she would return to her own home, with stairs she can no longer climb and Father’s books slowly disintegrating and rooms gathering dust and losing memories, the permanent departure from the house in which they grew old together more than she can bear without him.

Sunday, I drove to the gate at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton and watched the sentry’s eyes land on the Obama sticker, still centered on my windshield. He smiled, asked, “How are you today, Ma’am?”

“Happy, happy that Obama won.”

“Yes, Ma’am!” he said.

I could have hugged him.

Instead, I drove to the ocean, inhaling the spray of Santa Ana-swept crests, wondering how we will rid the state of a constitutional amendment that denies people the right to marriage, wondering how it would feel to live on without a spouse of fifty years, wondering what successes Obama will give us as his enemies decry him, how profound will be the moment when one of my own — when a woman — is elected president, if Mother will live to see it, wondering how many more of our warriors and those they would help will be shattered before we know some peace, how the world got to be so huge and so intimate and so chaotic, how cool it would be to just plop in the white Pacific sand with one of those frou-frou drinks in a coconut shell and not a thought of anything but my navel.

I laughed and cried and kept driving, and imagined the young and newly widowed Madame Clicquot having said in 1805, with more gravitas than typically afforded the phrase, “C’est la vie.”

This is life.

Love,
K-B

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My husband received a letter from Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin Wednesday. I was interested because we hadn’t previously received anything from Palin, and, after her rather vitriolic campaign speeches to the converted, I was particularly curious about what she would have to say to a bipartisan household such as ours.

Imagine my disappointment when I learned from Palin that I — along with all Democrats — possess a “fearful and pessimistic mentality.” She also suggested I don’t share the “spirit, courage and strength” of my Republican husband.

Wowy, I guess I suck! How could I have not known this? How has Steve put up with me all these years?!

I’ve skated through adulthood thinking the occasional lows were just that; assuming when I strode into a new challenge it was my confidence and courage boldly leading me; believing no matter how many hurdles crossed my path, my spirit and strength would see me over them.

Apparently, it’s all a fantasy and I’ve actually been face down in the mud, my trepid tokhes in the air and my gloomy legs ensnared in the hurdle’s bar. How could I have so misread my disposition? Have all Democrats been engaged in a vast conspiracy to deny this ugly secret to each other, to ourselves, or am I’m the only Democrat unaware of just how lousy we are?

And lousy isn’t the half of it! According to Palin, my fellow Democrats and I are raising $1 billion to “relentlessly flood America’s airwaves with [our] negative and false attacks.”

Ye gods, just kill me now! I had no idea the depths of my masked malevolence. I thought the evil twin sister line was just a stale joke. Perhaps Democrats all suffer an exotic personality disorder only Republicans have the wisdom to discern.

I grabbed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to name my psychosis and determine its severity, but I could find not a single condition that affects only Democrats.

Desperate for recovery, I returned to the letter and read on in search of helpful guidance from Palin to regain my sense of self, my sound mind and good character. And her letter lifted a corner of the dark and dismal fog enshrouding me: I could heal myself by helping “battle back against Democrats and their same old tired-and-failed policies of the past … by joining the Republican National Committee with a 2008 campaign contribution of $2,000, $1,000, $500, $100, $50 or $35.”

This advice gave me hope: My will to survive had not yet succumbed to the debilitating mental disorder of being a Democrat. I struggled to swim through the miasma of my wretched disease, franticly doggy-paddling toward lucidity, my lungs aching for mental health. I had a vision — an addled vision of eight years of Republican tired-and-failed policies bringing the nation to its knees before a dismayed populace and a disdainful international community. The thought of a lifetime of anti-hallucinogens and their disfiguring side effects flitted through my dwindling consciousness — and then I saw the light!

I burst to the surface with a gasp of clarity: My vision was not an hallucination; it was reality. Palin wasn’t writing about Democrats; it was the Bush tenure she was describing. It must have been a typo.

I breathed a sigh of sweet relief and tried to finish the letter, but when I got to “Working together we will work tirelessly,” I gave up and turned back to the DSM. It’s much better reading, and I noticed a few diagnoses that rang true.

Love,
K-B

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

I’ve been accused of picking on Sarah Palin. Apparently many Sarah fans would prefer we all be gentle with the little lady, tone down the challenging language (despite her rabble-rousing ugly language in others), maybe hold the door for her (OK, I like this one, too).

One friend even suggested that were Palin pro-choice, our common body parts would have precluded my writing about her as I have (read You Can Put Lipstick On a Fib and On Sarah Palin).

Pshaw! (There, that was toned-down language.) As I’ve written before, body parts do not a feminist make, and Sarah Palin is no feminist; paltry is more like it.

However, I have pretty much had enough of her, but in deference to the last week of the campaign, I’d like to draw attention to three of my favorite picks from other Palin pickers along the campaign trail:

Flirting Her Way to Victory
Sarah Palin’s farcical debate performance lowered the standards for both female candidates and U.S. political discourse

By Michelle Goldberg
guardian.co.uk, Friday October 03 2008

At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night. Read more…

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin:

The VP presidential debate

The Katie Couric interview

A message from Gov. Palin and Sen. Clinton

And, in the penultimate slot, the most ridiculous and thus entertaining late at night:

Visit Palin As President and click on things in the picture to learn more about a potential Palin presidency. Some items provide a new surprise each time you click on them. Enjoy!

Please don’t deny the right to marry to ten percent of our population.

And please don’t amend the California Constitution to force pregnant teens to turn to parents and guardians they don’t trust.

Love,
K-B

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

In our zeal to win, our passion to topple the opposition, our thirst to put our favored candidate in the throne, we’re transforming the traditional campaign groupies — the mothers with kissable babies, the cheering sign bearers, the grannies who stuff envelopes, the enthralled hand-shakers — into troglodytes, littering the road to the White House with verbal rough-hewn clubs, false accusations and defaced yard signs.

During the presidential primary, one idiot asked about Hillary Clinton, “How do we beat the bitch?” which a flustered John McCain fumblingly described as “an excellent question.”

More recently, a couple hoodlums yelled “Kill him!” and called Barack Obama a “Terrorist!” which Sarah Palin ignored, but the Secret Service did not.

Another doofus reviled Obama with, “He’s an Arab!” which tweaked even McCain. Apparently she was led by some other nitwit to believe being Arab is bad and having an unfamiliar name confirms it.

And a palterer from McCain’s Pennsylvania campaign fanned the flames of a racially charged accusation by a white volunteer that she’d been attacked by a large black man who challenged her affiliation by carving a ‘B’ in her cheek. The disturbed volunteer admitted the incident was a hoax and the campaign worker danced away from the unsubstantiated details he’d previously tossed to the media.

Now, there’s a schmuck in my own neighborhood who tried to change my Obama bumper sticker into a NObama bumper sticker and in the process disfigured my car with permanent black marker.

My first reaction was horror that some jackass would interfere with my First Amendment right to free speech. Damnit! My husband, my father, my uncle, my grandfather, my great grandfather (and I could go on) fought for that right. They laid their various fannies on the line so my neighbors across the street can put McCain-Palin signs in their yard and I can sport my Obama-Biden stickers and two neighbors around the corner can have dueling ballot proposition yard signs. They did not risk themselves and their future issue so we can batter each other with hostile, threatening words and vandalize the property of those who don’t agree with us.

My second reaction was fury that some cretin slathered permanent black marker on my chili pepper-red midlife-crisis VW bug convertible. Cretin and kindergarten dropout: What happened to drawing inside the lines? Damnit, again! This is the first non-utilitarian car I’ve owned; it’s good for nothing but fun; and it makes me happy.

So my third reaction was to jump in my wounded wombobile and drive to the soothing tunes of Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder as my fiery ire cooled — until it occurred to me that any number of the hateful dolts out there would hurl the “terrorist” barb at Toure simply because he’s Muslim, except he died in 2006, a hero to his Malian village for funding its electricity, among other things, and the thought of his gentle artist’s soul being slandered by churls was riling me up all over again. But then I hit a lovely stretch on the east side of town, and I turned up the music and bopped my head to the meditative rhythms of the Ghimbala spirit world and imagined drifting to serenity on the Niger River.

That’s when my fourth reaction kicked in with a nasty jolt: I realized I was becoming the enemy, denigrating their intelligence, maligning their characters, vilifying the fearful and ignorant for being just that, when sympathy and a comforting hug should have been my instinctive response.

That’s what a good person would have done.

But right now, I just want to know which nimrod of a neighbor messed with my bumper sticker. I’ll be good after the campaign.

Love,
K-B 

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Lying is a bad thing. From children, who’ve barely acquired enough language to do so, to the president and members of his administration commonly accused of it as prelude to the Iraq War, we all know we’re not supposed to lie.

Of course we do it anyway. But the boldfaced lie (BFL) seems a thing of the past. I miss its clear and direct nature, its economy of deceit and relative ease of exposure. Instead of the BFL, liars now machinate their ways around the malevolence of lying via euphemism: Lying isn’t quite so despicable when it’s thought of as fibbing, dissembling, bluffing or the contemporary classics perfected by our leaders: misspeaking and having no recollection of a particular thing.

We further confuse the issue by embracing gradations of situational contrivances to lighten the load of lying. On the lighter side, the little white lie (LWL) is a time-honored act of social kindness that has a well-worn page in every caring person’s repertoire. Who hasn’t uttered the likes of “Oh, you brought your nonfat, sugar-free, gluten-free cookies. Yummy!” or “Darling, that gown is devastating; it wraps your vast, uh, beauty in a swath of silken loveliness”?

But the LWL grows heavy with darker intent when its purpose is the liar’s benefit.

Bush Pants On Fire Doll

There’s the procrastinator’s prevarication: “Oh ye gods, my hard drive crashed! Can you believe it? I’ve contacted I.T. and they’re on the job — aren’t those guys great! So, I’ll get that report to you tomorrow.”

And then there’s the salacious swill of the sycophant: “It is such an honor to meet you. I admire you so much! Your last piece in The Atlantic was so powerful, so masterful: It thrusts the reader into the depths of your soul — again and again!”

This might lead to the opportunism of the engorged oaf: “Do I love you? Oh baby, you know how I feel about you, you’re the only one for me, baby, oh baby, can I put it in now?”

The LWL’s meanderings through the intermediate shades between black and white do little damage but to pull snags in the moral fiber of the fabricator. The objects of such duplicity either recognize the reprobates for what they are or they like hearing that trash, in which case liar and victim deserve each other.

Lies of omission (LOO) have a somewhat more sinister and utilitarian character in the hands of the great deceivers of our time who have come to know and intimately practice the school of “If one is not asked, don’t offer — and never remember, recall or recollect.” Imagine what juicy tidbits we’d have gleaned from President Ronald Reagan or President Bill Clinton or Vice President Dick Cheney or Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or even Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North if we had queried them before LOOs became all the rage in D.C. — Washington National Airport might have remained just that.

Yes, the methods of equivocation are as diverse as the mouths from which they emanate, but it is the fear of being caught in a lie that puckers the fannies of even the most practiced in the ranks of liars. This might account for the stunning absence of stately men and women grandly standing before the cameras in pursuit of President George W. Bush and Cheney for their scheming hearts and lying ways. We, the people who pay for their wars, have not been subjected to the persistent nightly news babblings about Bush and Cheney’s deceptions, deadly though they are, that historically drove President Clinton to prayer and a House vote to impeach for lying about diddling an intern. Perhaps the collective congressional deaf ear turned to the lonely calls to impeach Bush and Cheney from the likes of Representative Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney (who formerly represented congressional districts in Georgia and now heads the Green Party ticket for president) was at least in part a function of the don’t-do-unto-others-what-you-wouldn’t-have-them-do-unto-you school of thought.

Today, our decline to a commonly-tolerated state of deception has the very people who debate before the nation, eager to replace the Bush-Cheney den of thieves, subject to review by such lie-o-meters as factcheck.org, which measures the veracity of their proclamations, the extent of their hyperbole. Have we truly sunk so far that the men and women who would be king cannot be trusted to be true and that a lie is not a lie but an exaggeration?

I’d prefer the leader who can say, “I cannot tell a lie.” Instead, we’re dragged from Sarah Palin’s Joe Six-pack of exaggeration to John McCain and Barack Obama’s Joe the Plumber, with whom they attempted to TKO each other in the final presidential debate — and who, it turns out, has been snaking customer’s bowels without the required license.

Are we inured to lying? Is boldfaced honesty passé?

Oh, Joe, say it ain’t so! (Thanks, Sarah — may I call you Sarah?)

Love,
K-B

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

CHAPTER 1. They meet at a mutual friend’s wedding.

“Oh yes, hi! Audry’s told me so much about you!”

“Oh yeah? Should I duck?”

“No, no. She’s your most ardent fan — and a great sales rep. My little heart’s going pitter patter in your manly presence.”

“She’s told me a whole lot about you too — every factoid of it favorable, of course, intentionally tailored to the male on the prowl. So, I suppose this is a set up?”

“We’d be fools not to admit it. But she does have lovely taste. Perhaps we should sample the glass before we reject the vintage?”

“Say what?”

“Oh, who cares if she’s playing Yenta? We’re the only two left at this shindig who’re young enough to remain upright without assistance. How about asking me to dance?”

“Dance? With you? Here, now? Well sure, yeah, I’d like that, a lot.”

CHAPTER 2. They close down the Moose Lodge Community Banquet Hall, drawing the last, weary notes from Joey Brown and His Band of Renown, a quintet that relies heavily on the Polka. But this isn’t the end of it. …

“Hi, I’m glad you called — a movie sounds good!”

“You sound good, exceptionally good. I, I’m attracted to you, and I’d like to explore this further.”

“You sound surprised?”

“Welp, dating’s no man’s forte. It’s always an adventure.”

“I understand, and I’m happy you’ve overcome your male enculturation. Forthright ranks high in my book; it’s a rare treat. Bravo! So, were you thinking sherpas and yaks, or something a bit more tame that would allow me to get all dolled up?”

“Ah ha, there’s a smart aleck lurking beneath that conservative exterior. I like that!”

CHAPTER 3. After many movies, moonlit beach strolls, sunsets — and sunrises — things are serious.

“Are you awake, Babe?”

“Not really.”

“Well, wake up, please? I had to take a leak, and standing there, I realized I have a status report I have to deliver.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. You, you are my joy, my anguish, my passion, my frustration, my effervescence, my hope. I thank God for nudging you across my errant path.”

“Oh, Sweetie, you know I love you, too. I love living with you, cooking for you, sewing your buttons back on. I’d be happy to grow old and crotchety with you — and wipe the drool from your chin.”

CHAPTER 4. Love is sweet, but not without its hurdles.

“Oh God, your mother detested me! She hated my outfit. She hated my hair. She hated my sense of humor. She hated my teeth. She hates me!”

“But, Babe, a good portion of the population hates you — oh come on, that was a joke. Where is that outrageous sense of humor when you need it most? Look, Babe, she just met you. And admit it: You’re not what she had envisioned for me all these years.”

“I know, I know. She was hoping for the four Bs: blond, beautiful, Bryn Mawr grad, baby-making material. Right?”

“Wrong. When it comes right down to it, she just wants me to be happy. And she did give you shortbread to bring home. She makes you shortbread; you’re in. So, relax. She’ll come to love you — but never as much as I absolutely adore every iota of you. I want you to be within reach always. Seriously, I want to be with you forever. Look, I’ll wash the dishes to my dying day, if you’ll cook. Will you marry me?”

“Yes, yes indeed I will!”

CHAPTER 5. And Tom and Harry live happily ever after in wedded bliss.

Don’t deny someone’s child — perhaps your own — the right to marriage.

Vote No on Arizona Prop 102

Vote No on California Prop 8

Vote No on Florida Amendment 2

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

She struts in on someone’s arm, a support she doesn’t need in the slightest and promptly abandons. Her hennaed hair, engineer’s boots, magenta fingernails and matching lips; all five feet eleven inches of her are more than enough to stop everyone mid-conversation and carry their attention with ease.

And when she sits down — her legs spread wide in black leather pants fitted for a stunningly identical mold — she’s still bigger than any man in the room. And they are, all the men, riveted as tightly to her as her pants. So, in fact, are the women.

The accountant she’s pounced next to, a guy who surely counts his luck at being close enough to smell the mixture of her leather and patchouli, stares agog, visibly struggling for a way to initiate verbal contact. With a burst of courage born of investing every personal asset at hand, he asks her what she does.

Ventilated fingernail polish guards c.1940

“What I do,” she tells him with black eyes flashing and one of those long limbs wrapping around his chair leg, “is nails. I have a gift for it. Like Picasso. Only I paint with acrylic.” And she snags every pair of eyes in the room to her serpentine finger as she draws an abstract in the air just beyond his sternum. “Call me,” she breathes close to his ear, “I’ll do yours,” smoothly tucking a business card into his pocket and gliding off to taunt the hors d’oeuvres.

I watch her work the party, annoyed with those pants and the vamp shtick. There are more important things to do than attract men. The world is fraught with compelling issues that demand our attentions from such foppery as nails and Egyptian hair treatments. She probably has a weird body part piercing, too.

After reducing a PR man to a blithering idiot, she abandons him and heads in my general direction, leaving the man dribbling margarita down the front of his heavily starched Brooks Brothers. I feel a pang of pity, but figure he deserves it for succumbing to her silly mating rituals, and I wonder which male is behind me. But there is none.

She crosses the room in three determined strides. “Hey, I hear you’re into politics,” she says. To me!

“I used to be. Gave it up to have a life. The system is corrupting, and I didn’t want to start disliking myself as much as I did my clients.”

“You’ve gotta still follow the game,” she insists, leaning deeply into my personal space. I wonder if maybe she’s bi.

“Well, it is a bit of an addiction.”

“So, like, what do you think of the Republicans?”

I pray for a man to come distract her improbable focus.

“And, hey, what about that last debate thing? What a slam! Palin and Biden, they were both kind of duds, but their handlers must be all high fives that neither crashed and burned. Still, a girl for vice president, shit hey! But what’s she good at? You know, that’s it! That’s the problem with her; you just can’t see her in the Oval Office except for maybe like a photo op. Like, right? Besides what real woman’s gonna vote for that hair. Now McCain, he’s whack and old — and I’m no ageist. He’s doing his classic self-destruct thing, man. Take one look at him on camera and his whole aura flashes ‘Eject! Eject! Eject!’ Obama, now, he’s got swag, he’s the dude to do it. We’re not gonna get any better. What was that line, change we can believe in? Change is hot. That’s what this country’s gotta be all about, dude, you betcha!” and she gives me a wink over her shoulder as she heads for the next male.

So, what I bet is that her startling analysis, whatever it might be lacking, is brilliantly honest, unlike most. That she would even attempt to distinguish the duds from the dudes gives me hope. And those nails, they’re kind of growing on me.

Love,
K-B

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

I would never vote for Sarah Palin for anything, based on the few issue statements she has managed to articulate, but I would have appreciated a female vice presidential candidate of either party with the character, knowledge and wisdom to serve as a role model for girls and young women around the world.

Instead, in Sarah Palin we have an immature, unseasoned and unreasoned politician who relies on her femininity to win a point, an ambitious woman who resorts to cutie-pie shtick when she can’t deliver substance.

If Sarah Palin had a penis, she would never have degenerated to flirtatious body language and coquettish responses in a United States vice presidential debate watched by concerned people around the world.

She also would not likely be on the ticket if she had a penis, dontcha know!

If Palin were my employee, I would sit her down firmly and counsel her about her unprofessional, undignified behavior, and she would have to work long and hard to earn her way back into the executive conference room.

Sarah Palin is not a role model for any woman who wants to be taken seriously, who wants to achieve the same rights and opportunities as men. Palin is no feminist, conservative or otherwise. She should stick with what she does best: providing fodder for Saturday Night Live and Tina Fey.

[Smile wide, cock head, wink, deliver line.] “Oh, Joe, say it ain’t so!” [Smile again, pucker lips.]

Love,
K-B

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

I’m a feminist writer. This means I advocate for women to have the same rights and opportunities as men. It does not mean I sent my daughter to kindergarten with a prophylactic in her Polly Pocket lunchbox.

Can you put lipstick on a pig?

As a feminist, I support candidates who support feminism, for instance, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I do not support whichever party’s slate has the most female body parts. That would be sexist.

I support Obama for some other reasons: When he was interviewed by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, at a magazine publishers’ conference and Remnick asked him to explain how he is different from President Bill Clinton, Obama paused, cocked his head and said with a clever smile, “I inhaled.” He also writes books, things near and dear to my heart.

But these are stupid reasons to support a candidate, aren’t they? Yes, they are.

Just as stupid, is supporting Sarah Palin for the inane reasons folks are offering up:

Because she is “fresh.” What does that mean? The only fresh thing I’ve noticed about Sarah Palin is her mouth. And I suppose her mama taught her to put on fresh underwear every day. …

Because she can reach out and practically touch Russia and Canada, thus possessing an executive-level understanding of foreign policy. Whoa there! Although Palin defended this proximity as enhancing her credentials, saying, “Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of,”* millions of Southwesterners can reach out and lasso Mexico, which qualifies them for nothing but a long border-crossing wait, a cheap drunk and the opportunity to learn a little Spanish. And a whole mess of them know that Palin can chant “executive” until the moose come home, but it won’t correct her sentence structure.

Because she’s a “conservative feminist” dedicated to women’s issues. Oh, is that what she demonstrated as the Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, where she approved cutting rape kit funding from the city budget and charging rape victims for their forensic test kits? Is being a conservative feminist what motivates her to encourage our white male dominated legislature to define women’s reproductive rights? Is it her conservative feminism that puts those little form-fitting skirts on her comely caboose? I suppose it’s conceivable that someone might claim Palin was practicing conservative feminism in her executive oversight and stand on women’s rights — someone whacked out on Arctic snow.

Because she likes guns. So do millions of other folks, but that doesn’t qualify them for the vice presidency — or for gun ownership, come to think about it. Remember Dick Cheney and his hunting buddy’s shot-marked face.

Because she has a pregnant, unwed teenager. I can surely sympathize, but I wouldn’t reward Sarah Palin with the vice presidency for that failure — and it is indeed a failure, albeit a shared one. Neither would I reward her — or even sympathize with her — when she parades her disabled infant and pregnant teen through the international media and then complains that folks write about them. Don’t drop you drawers in the tundra if you don’t want to be put upon by bloodsucking Alaskan mosquitos.

Because she claims she said “No” to the now mythic Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere.” What is myth, is that Sarah Palin killed the project. As many now know (and her admirers still ignore), the bridge died a slow, bureaucratic death at the hands of Congress, which withdrew the earmark for the bridge after it had become a pork-barrel embarrassment for all, including Palin, who had campaigned for it. And as governor, Palin did not return the federal funding; she redirected the 223 million porcine dollars — our tax dollars — to other projects in Alaska.

Her claim that she stopped the bridge is a fib, a large, rotund fib, and Sarah Palin’s pants are on fire. Her snarky little smirk might make her delivery entertaining (and I write this freely, having a snarky smirk of my own), but it does not make her a competent, honorable leader.

Sarah Palin can put lipstick on a fib, but it’s still a fib, and I suspect she knows it.

So how about this, how about casting your vote for sound reasons? How about choosing our next president and vice president because of their track records on clean energy and reproductive rights and public education and pay equity and the Geneva Conventions and civil rights and access to healthcare and Social Security and voters’ rights and the military-industrial complex and foreign policies and honesty? And their ability to articulate a linear thought.

Love,
K-B

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

* During the week of September 22, 2008, CBS News anchor Katie Couric met with Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin at the United Nations. Much of the discussion focused on foreign policy, which some say could be Palin’s weakness. What follows is an excerpt of an exclusive interview with Gov. Palin.

Katie Couric: You’ve cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundary that we have with Canada. It’s funny that a comment like that was kinda made to … I don’t know, you know … reporters.

Couric: Mocked?

Palin: Yeah, mocked, I guess that’s the word, yeah.

Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.

Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of.

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