It's So Cold In Alaska
It was 9 p.m. Saturday, night one of the Dog & Pony Show at Safari Sam’s. I had already put my little brother to bed in the car (he had singlehandedly upheld our proud family tradition by getting immediately and extraordinarily soused) and was chatting with the members of the incredible Ruby Friedman Orchestra, sort of an Irish-inflected (even Poguesy) band fronted with operatic caterwauls of the loveliest kind. “Pretty exciting weekend!” said I. “Blah blah blah, clever thing, Alaska!”
“Huh?” they explained. Didn’t they know there’d been a Category Three game-changer? Really: fucking musicians.
The next night, my friends Abby and Davan showed up. “What have you been up to?” I asked Abby to be polite, once we’d exhausted the topic
of how skinny I am and how bitchen I look. “I’m a domestic goddess lately,” she told me with a fetching nonchalance. “But you only have the two kids,” I said, perplexed. “You have no excuse not to be the governor of Alaska!” And oh, how we laughed and chortled.
Then Davan, who’s the managing editor of the L.A. Times, introduced me to their friend Paul, the Times’s foreign editor. “What part of the world should I be paying attention to?” I asked Paul. I figured he’d say Georgia, which is boring and I’d rather not, but it’s always nice to break the ice by pumping people about something they might in fact know. For instance, you could ask me about gin.
“Alaska!” Davan shot in, and we guffawed in delight.
How good it was to be with my tribe. Musicians, they are useless.
Friday’s news of the selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate turned what had been (following Obama’s triumphal convention) merely a feel-good cruise to a better tomorrow into an honest-to-God game, and while I wouldn’t mind a blowout for my side, I’m happy too with some good clutch plays and a double OT, so long as the refs – or the Roberts Court – keep their noses clean. As the news first broke and pundits pooh-poohed the effect she’d have on women by saying Hillary voters were hardly likely to vote for a pro-life right-winger, I scratched my little noggin. Did they know about some secret American tradition of voting on the issues? Did they think all women were pro-choice, or even feminists? Did they have no idea how beloved Palin is among our Creationist fundie friends, who would surely have found some tile that needed grouting on Election Day if their only incentive were McCain? Had they never had neighbors who homeschooled their (really, very fine) children, and couldn’t they foresee the flat-earth JCPenney mob of electoral elation, assuming their husbands and the Good Book permitted them to vote?
Here’s a great-looking, plain-spoken, sometime reformer, with an ass even McCain can’t keep his peepers off of, every inane, Dave-like Hollywood dream come true, and she’s Just Like Us.
Damn, John McCain! You’ve turned this election into a spicy meatball!
Since I read Wonkette (and you lucky citizens do too, since CityBeat is the website’s sole print partner), I knew who Palin was even if Kay Bailey Hutchison didn’t: She’s a baby-poppin’ hottie with an itchy finger squeezing triggers both actual (Bambi’s mom) and metaphorical, as she’s got a tendency to fire any civil servant varmints in her Katrina-like path. Her body count, for those wondering, is up to five, from the public safety commissioner you’ve all heard about by now to the library director of the tiny town in Alaska where Palin was mayor, because the library director hadn’t supported her campaign. I’m pretty sure too that she killed Vince Foster. If for some reason McCain happens to regretfully accept the governatrix’s resignation, she’d make a swell AG!
So Sarah Palin has most definitely won the news cycle; in fact, she’s all I can think about! My American hat, lady governor, is off to you, with the truest admiration. Just today, Labor Day, I am hearing about: 1. your lawyering up in the Troopergate matter, for which you’re expected to be deposed in the coming weeks, 2. your preggy teen daughter, 3. how long you allowed your amniotic fluid to leak before hopping a plane from Texas back to Alaska to give birth there instead of hitting a hospital but posthaste, 4. your total lyingness about the Bridge to Nowhere, 5. your directing fundraising for disgraced indicted Alaska Senator Ted Stevens’s PAC, even though one of the Sunday news show GOP talking points was if you could stand up to Ted Stevens, you could stand up to Putin, and 6. as of today, John McCain is only now sending lawyers to Alaska to vet you. That’s a lot of news for a holiday weekend! I may never turn off MSNBC again!
I don’t expect Palin to withdraw her candidacy, and I was the first American reporter to predict Harriet Miers would (for what that’s worth, which is all of nothing; I just like to remind me of it every once in a while). But lord, every half hour is bringing a tidbit. Even Democrats are taking extraordinary delight in poking into a teenage girl’s bedroom, a nation of Gladys Kravitzes. It’s so messy, and raw, and very, very real and totally exciting, and I’m not too good to pry.
Meanwhile, our noble Barry isn’t just making the right sounds about leaving poor Girl Palin alone; he’s backing it up with why we should, right down to his own teenage mother. And as he does the right thing, a favor the other camp would have never returned – for sweet Jesus’s sake, “newscasters” on Fox called Michelle Obama Barack’s “baby mama” even though they’re married – Joe Biden is being excoriated as “sexist” for joking that one difference between Lady Palin and himself is that she’s good-looking. It really takes a set of big, hairy balls to twist something that’s both self-deprecating and a compliment to one’s opponent into a grievous insult. The GOP is milking it, and so are some idiot women.
As an actual feminist, I have the great good joy of getting to determine what is and isn’t sexist. Sexist: Asking whether Sarah Palin shouldn’t be staying home with her baby and her other children. (And yes, I’ve heard you asking just that.) Not sexist: Pointing out that Sarah Palin is an utter twit.
Three years to the day after Katrina, and with another big angry hurricane on the horizon, our brilliant American electorate looks poised to fall in love with a fun huntin’ lady they’d like to pull a shot with, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did just that.
Then again, in the finest pundit tradition, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t.
Published: 09/03/2008
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
