Vic Socotra

08 September 2008

Speechless

I got way sidetracked this morning and there is no likelihood of a story emanating from Big Pink this morning.

The lay-out people at the Quarterly say they need a table of contents for the Fall issue, and a filler article to cove page 47. I can do that, I think, and have located the necessary fluff and pictures to do that.

The subject will be a building rising at McDill AFB, dedicated to the memory of LCDR Vince Tolbert, USN, who died with CDR Dan Shanower and 114 others that awful day at the Pentagon seven years ago this week.

That is important, and I will get to it. Then I had to wade through the political detritus in the in-basket. They are after Sarah Palin in a big way. I have not made up my mind about the matter of her candidacy, though I think the whirlwind of vitriol is pretty remarkable. Considering the slime that was thrown at Senator Obama and Senator McCain, and the endless bricks thrown at Mrs. Clinton, I should not be surprised, and yet I am.

I will not dignify some of the worst lies by repeating them.

I know that the real issue is whether John McCain, icon that he is, is suitable to get us out of this self-inflicted mess we are in, or whether the undeniably attractive Senator Obama is who he says he is. I have a track record on the former, and nothing except a nagging sense of unease that the latter. His mentors and father figures were identified them by nick-name in his famous books of self-discovery. They tell an inspirational tale. Interestingly, when the individuals in his autobiography who helped mold him were identified by real name, they turned out to have remarkable narratives in their own right. They devoted their lives in large part to the struggle for justice.

It just turns out that it was Marxist justice.

John McCain has flopped over to Karl Rove's strategy of innuendo here at the end-game of the campaign, which is either who he was all along, or someone different. Barak Obama is suddenly in favor of the 2nd Amendment and the revised FISA Bill. Neither of these recent incarnations reflect the men who started this long and exhausting process.

The only thing I trust about either is their unwavering commitment to personal victory.

John McCain threw the "Hail Mary" pass on his selection of the Vice President. That is what hung me up this morning. Sarah Palin is by all accounts a remarkable and ambitious person, and there is not much time to destroy her before the election. Her experience is one valid area for exploration, as it is for Senator Obama. Governor Palin may be coloring her past for the most favorable hues, but that is true for Senator Obama. His long list of voting "present" in the Illinois House is cause for the most unease. Sarah Palin at least said what she was going to do and actually did some of it.

It is not all pleasant, but governing is not a pleasant trade, regardless of the face we put on it.

So this morning it was Gov. Palin who invented the idea of shooting helpless wolves from helicopters, and a long list of books she tried to ban from her local library, and an impassioned letter from a housewife in her hometown who has a list of particulars of her small-town public life. I don't know if it is real or not, since I don't have time to sort it out. The book list was easy enough- it is actually a list of all the books ever banned from American libraries. She is in favor of predator control, as best I can determine, and the proof of that has traditionally been the presentation of a body part of the animal.

Neither are new, nor inventions of a Hockey Mom, lipstick or not.

Maybe the most curious thing is the picture, shown below. I don't know what to make of it. It is clearly a private picture of some sort, and how it came to be in my e- mail in basket is quite beyond me. I did not go looking for it, any more than I searched for a long list of books with which to slander another citizen. The picture appeared as part of a joke line that had the official portraits of the three other public figures in the race. The punch line was something along the lines of what you get in this election. The images of Obama, Biden and McCain flow down and then there is this.

I don't know what is next. Senator Biden in a leopard Speedo? He has not been trashed to the extent that everyone else has. There must be something awful and irrelevant we can be led to think about him.

I would say this is a national disgrace, but we are so far beyond that point that I am actually speechless.

Close Window