My Concerns with the Palin Pick

Understandable as it is for Senator McCain to attempt to smooth over the problem of his extreme old age by reaching out to those of us, born in the 1960’s, who grew up loving Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I still foresee a Pandora’s box of problems growing from his choice of Palin as a running mate.  Am I wrong – or is this not the right room for an argument?

If the worst happened and McCain did not survive his first term, would the world trust, as our leader, the onetime pet-shop owner who not only refused to admit he had sold John Cleese a dead parrot, and not only sent him off pointlessly to a non-existent shop in Bolton, but then claimed that he had meant “Ipswitch” as a “palindrome” to Bolton when everybody knows the palindrome to Bolton is NOTLOB!

And with our nation’s reputation so tarnished by our use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and black sites across the globe, do we really want – even as #2 in command – a person so associated with the Spanish Inquisition??

Maybe it’s not my problem, but don’t the Republicans need to at least make a pretense of reaching out to their conservative religious base?  I just don’t see how the choice of Palin, who has made a career of lampooning religious hypocrites, helps in that goal!

OK, I do hear everybody out there saying that McCain is attempting to appeal to women with this choice, but I just don’t see it – what women are such incompetent cooks as to end up with half the sherry in their hair?

And in the age of David “Diaper” Vitter and Larry “Wide Stance” Craig, how is it helpful to remind voters of Sir Galahad “the Chaste”‘s adventure in that famous castle filled with underaged oversexed girls?

Granted this is obviously an attempt to burnish the “Republican brand” with humor, hipness, and world-travelling urbanity, but many of us Anglophobes are going to suspect a more sinister, long-term plan of re-establishing British hegemony over her long-lost colonies in the person of a Palin Caesar!?

I’m sorry, it just doesn’t work for me.

About Vern Nelson

Greatest pianist/composer in Orange County, and official political troubadour of Anaheim and most other OC towns. Regularly makes solo performances, sometimes with his savage-jazz band The Vern Nelson Problem. Reach at vernpnelson@gmail.com, or 714-235-VERN.