I’m starting to think Bill Engvall was wrong. We don’t need for stupid people to carry signs warning us who they are. We need for people who do actually have two working brain cells to rub together, to carry signs letting us know they’re not stupid.
Ever since John McCain clinched the GOP nomination, I’ve been watching as otherwise intelligent-seeming Republicans have been trying to come up with his ideal running mate. Almost every one has been either a woman or someone with other than European heritage.
As a short-term, pandering response to Barack Obama’s nomination, it makes a kind of cold-blooded, winning-is-the-only-thing kind of sense—but as just one more rabbit-punch to the idea of America as a cohesive society, it’s the kind of attitude that makes me think the Founding Fathers were wrong, that we have failed them irreversibly and perhaps were fated to do so.
It wouldn’t bother me so much if so many of those whose names have been floated, were not already out of the running for one reason or other, either because they don’t want it or because McCain would never risk being overshadowed by such an attention-getting choice.
Today I saw one too many “it’s not rocket science” arguments for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be McCain’s running mate, completely ignoring that SHE HAS A NEWBORN SON WITH DOWN’S SYNDROME and therefore more important things to do than gallivant all over the country on a speculative bid for an office she doesn’t want, and where she will never be as effective nor as popular as she is right there in Juneau where her constituents overwhelmingly want her to stay.
I’m content to wait for McCain to make his choice. I’ll give him one last chance to impress me and make me think maybe I’ve been too quick to reject him. If there’s one positive thing I can say about him it’s that he’ll make his own damn choice regardless what anybody else says. Hell, he could potentially earn my vote by choosing a running mate that just totally pisses me off. Or, you know, he could just totally piss me off and make me more determined than ever to avoid voting for him.
But if he panders—to identity politics or to me—I definitely wouldn’t vote for him.
Come on, you people: we conservatives didn’t get in this fix by being smart. We got here because somewhere along the line we stopped being smart.
Unrelated: And the past tense of “wreak” is not “wreaked,” it’s wrought! Seeing “wreaked” in place of “wrought” overwreaks me something fierce. Not to mention, it reeks.
