Too much

Don’t confuse me with someone who has faith in bipeds, but I do remain capable of astonishment, which will only be amplified by several orders of magnitude if the Sarah Palin circus is sustained for two additional months and results in her becoming Vice President. The flimsiness of this gimmick is apparent for anyone not in a coma, and now we will have a chance to see whether the swayable muddleheads in the undecided column can be bamboozled with a good show. Or not.

One staggers under the weight of all the hypocrisies and double standards operating in this cynical climate:

After a season of harping on Obama’s inspirational qualities, we now have a candidate (from the party of movie star Ronald Reagan) who could fit onto Desperate Housewives.

After insisting that Obama tour the war zones and show his seriousness in the foreign policy arena, we’re now to accept Palin as vice president based on a tourist jaunt to Ireland.

After belittling Obama’s short tenure in Washington, her stint in the backwoods is to make us smile confidently.

After denouncing big government, taxes and liberal money-spenders, we’re to swallow a governor who passes out welfare checks to every state resident.

After a half-century of insisting on DIY self-improvement without government handouts, we get sneers about ‘community organizers’.

After two terms of a presidency that installs the torture of defenseless detainees as official state policy, we are to coo and sigh over their worship of the sanctity of ‘life’.

And if anyone who gets tapped by the most reactionary party in the western hemisphere can be called a ‘maverick’, then I need a refresher course in my mother tongue.

The whole thing is too ludicrous to contemplate, for which I advise the sending of donations and attention to any good summer fiction still in the magazine rack. One must protect the remnants of mental health while this challenge to sanity drags on.