Sarah Palin's Hair

Yesterday my friend Candace e-mailed me this picture with a note: “This could be the answer to Sarah’s hair problems.” Of course, I had to send it to practically everyone I know—that is, everyone I know who’s supporting Obama. GP replied with a link to “What If Sarah Palin Was Your Mom?”(politsk.blogspot.com/2008/09/Sarah13.html), a site that offers you the opportunity to type in your name and find out what it would have been if Sarah Pail had been your mother.

I am Slap Spear Palin which I think is pretty cool—though I have to admit I’m really jealous of my friend of S.J. who turned out to be Chisel Dustup Palin. She was very kind I when confessed this, and told me she thought Slap Spear was a swell name. But I know she thinks Chisel Dustup is way cooler. I mean, don’t you?

FYI: John McCain is Steam Fango Palin; Cindy is Crop Schooner Palin. George W. Bush is Jeep Pike Palin; Dick Cheney is Wood Corps Palin; Rush Limbaugh is Crank Widow Palin; Vladimir Putin is Can Lightning Palin.

I could go on and on. (I did, actually. Britney Spears is Spine Breeder Palin, for example. There’s no end to the pleasure in this addictive exploration.)

Sarah herself, renamed,which is only fair,is Flack Gobbler Palin.

Serves her right.

I've been laughing my head off about all sorts of stuff like this since McCain gave us Palin as his running mate. The internet's been buzzing with it. God knows, she's fodder for humor. And I need the laughter to balance the sense of dread that washes over me when I consider the real possibility that Sarah Palin could end up being our president.

I'm no Hillary fan. But there's no comparison between the two women in terms of their intelligence, education, and experience. If McCain really believes that Hillary supporters will be just as happy with one woman as another, he doesn't think much about women, generally. If women--Hillary supporters or not--vote for Palin just because she's a women, they apparently don't care much about women's issues either. By which I mean, the issues that I think most women, Republicans or Democrats, would probably agree most directly affect their lives and the lives--among them, equal pay for equal work, affordable health care, and a foreign policy committed to searching for peaceful solutions before sending our children off to war.

We Democrats have delighted in Palin's gaffes, like revelation that she didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was, in her interview with Charles Gibson. My own daughter does a fabulous impression of Sarah saying, "Ooh, gosh, Charlie. I can see Canada from my window."

But we're not going to be laughing if she's the one picking Ruth Bader Ginsberg's replacement on the Supreme Court. We're not going to be laughing when she employs her secretive,mean-spirited management style to banish anyone who crosses her in any way and replaces them with cronies from high school whose main qualification is loyalty, no matter what she does. (Been there, done that.)

Last night I went to a meeting of "Wiser Older Women for Obama." The young, wonderfully idealistic Obama volunteer in charge of women's issues who spoke to us said, "We have every confidence that Democratic women will come out for Obama. They're insulted by Palin; she's not Hillary.

"You're not worried at all?" I asked.
She said, no.
"Well, I am," I said. "I'm really scared McCain might win.
Some of the other Wiser Older Women agreed.

The Obama campaign has registered 750,000 new voters in Indiana alone, the volunteer told us. The polls don't reflect voters who use only cell phones, most of whom are young. If Obama gets wins all the states Kerry won, plus Iowa--which he has a good shot at, he'll just need eleven electoral votes to win the election. Indiana has eleven electoral votes.

"We can do it," she said.

I hope she's right. I'm going to do all I can do to make it happen.

I'm not going to stop worrying, though, until it's a done deal.

Meanwhile, may Sarah continue to make bigger and more alarming gaffes so that it will be clear to anyone who's really looking that she is the wrong woman for the job.

Signing off,
Slap Spear