...I'll tell you what I think of Sarah Palin.

UPDATED (below)

When I rolled out of bed this morning and limped into the kitchen, I was considering getting on here to tell you about my trip to town Thursday.  I went into Wasilla to finalize the sale of my old car Streak that's been parked in front of Greyfox's cabin since a year or so ago when it broke down on another trip to town just before the pneumonia laid me low. 

Telling you about the town trip would logically include the story of the harrowing phone conversation with Greyfox the night before, during which he kept asking me what I planned to do about the tires (better ones on Streak, bald ones on his replacement Blur, how to arrange the switch, etc.), then when I'd start laying out the complicated options, he'd come all unglued and freak out, screaming and yelling before I could finish answering his question.  It might have made a good story.

Stepping on yet another shrew on the kitchen floor reminded me that I had only briefly mentioned the cats' seasonal rodent collecting behavior.  I did, also, want to tell about my fall yesterday morning that has me limping today.  It has not completely disabled my cordless phone, but the water did disable the LCD so I can't see the battery charge level or know how long I've been talking, and the soaking also affected the speaker, adding some blur and crackle to the sound.

But that's another story.   Dlm0908, and lupa, and pinkjag have asked me to tell them what I think or know about Sarah Palin.  How can I resist?

Where do I start?  Well, she has several of the traits of a successful politician.  She can lie convincingly.  I'd say most people believed her when she said that if she was asked to be McCain's running mate, she would decline and stay on here as our governor.  I'd be willing to bet that, at the time, she no more than the rest of us believed that the party would choose her, an unqualified, relatively obscure and inexperienced woman from the hinterlands, currently facing an investigation into her (and her spouse's) abuse of power, as its candidate.

She also has that facility that most successful politicians have, of evading questions to which she doesn't know the answers or to which her true answers might not be what the voters want to hear.  Very early in her campaign for governor, I became disgusted at her evasion of direct and pointed questions regarding specific policy issues.  She had a little canned speech about defending the constitution of the state of Alaska that she inserted every time someone asked her a real, searching question.  Has she trotted it out yet, slightly modified, for her vice presidential campaign?  If not, she will, just watch.

In her run for governor, her major strength was her status as an outsider.  She won a lot of votes by promising to sell Alaska 1, the private jet purchased by her predecessor, Frank the Bank Murkowski, who, by the way is rumored to be cruising somewhere in the tropics and hasn't been reported seen in Alaska since he left office. 

Greyfox was an early supporter of Palin.  He even put up a campaign sign for her on his front porch.  But he says he didn't vote for her when the time came.  Somewhere along the way, that cute face and sweet voice lost its appeal when he began to see and hear the lack of substance behind it.  He now says that she is all style, no substance.

Pinkjag mentioned Palin's latest baby.  If she knew ahead of time that her fifth child would be born with Down Syndrome, that fact wasn't made public.  She might have elected against amniocentesis.  She kept her pregnancy secret until almost time for the birth.  A while later, there was an official announcement to the effect of how proud the family was that God had chosen them to care for a defective child.  That's not a direct quote of course,  but that's the gist of it.

Mark Nickolas writes:

Question: How will conservatives reconcile
the fact that 70 days on the presidential campaign trail is going to be
brutal for Palin at the very time she's caring and breastfeeding a Down
Syndrome infant, not to mention what that would mean for the next four
years if she were to become VP?

Frankly, I think the father ought to step-in -- breastfeeding
notwithstanding -- and pick-up the slack. But social conservatives tend
to think very differently about the traditional role of mother and
father when it comes to raising infants. How will they react to this
issue once the euphoria of the selection wears-off?

Todd Palin, the aforementioned "father," Alaska's First Dood, is another matter entirely.  He's really good at what he does, racing snowmobiles.  He's one of those yee-haw good ole boys who tear up the tundra and smog up the air quality with their iron dogs.  Juneau insiders have been complaining about his throwing his weight around down there in the capital, trying to exert authority he doesn't have, on the strength of his wife's office.  There have been reports of shouted threats and physical intimidation from Todd.  It's quite a contrast to Mrs. Todd's saccharine style.

This morning, APRN's AK program reran part of their show on Sarah from back when she was our new governor.  The part they chose to run was the first segment, with her critics voicing their opinions.  Now, they're threatening to run her current comments on the party's selecting her, the "soccer mom from Alaska," (according to her) as vice president.  It's running in the background now.  If she says anything different or sensible, I'll tell you.

ADN today brought out the big type they'd usually reserve for reporting on the Second Coming, and devoted the front page to hip hooray and rah rah for the home team.  Speaking of home teams, when Sarah Heath and the Wasilla High School's basketball team won the State Championship in 1982, she was known as Sarah the Barracuda.  A couple of years after that, she won the title of Miss Wasilla and placed second in the Miss Alaska pageant.

Yesterday, she pulled a Jewel by putting career advancement in the Lower 48 ahead of keeping her commitments in Alaska.  She broke a signed commitment to appear at the State Fair, and instead made that announcement of her candidacy from the appropriately named Nutter Center in Dayton, OH.

Officially, of course, the Republican Party of Alaska is behind Palin 100%.  That's not quite 100% true for every Alaskan Republican:

ADN also says that, "business minded Republicans consider her a misguided populist and intellectual lightweight."  I heartily concur with the assessment of her intellect.  The newspaper quotes extensively from Andrew Halcro, a former Republican who became an Independent to run against Palin for governor after his party chose her. 

Okay, so Halcro has to "respect" her for demolishing him in political attacks, but some of us, Andrew and Sarah's fellow Alaskans, are not so respectful even though her political ability is impressive.  She hasn't proven to be a good administrator.  The "probe" underway now, to which national news media have paid scant attention and which the Party has downplayed, involves the firing of the Commissioner of Public Safety.

Sarah Palin's little sister was married to an unruly Alaska State Trooper and they were going through a messy divorce.  Among other things, that Trooper was reported to have tasered his young stepson, the governor's nephew.  Learning that the governor didn't have the authority herself to fire her brother-in-law, Palin ordered the Public Safety Commissioner to do it.  He says he informed her that there were procedures in place for such a move, and that he didn't have that authority, either.  She fired him for insubordination.  At least, that's the story that has been reported in local media.  The investigation is ongoing.

I wasn't going to vote for McCain anyway.  Greyfox said yesterday that some people on the forums at totse.com, where he is a moderator, who had intended to vote for McCain, changed their minds when the choice of Palin for veep was announced.  Yaaay.  Doug reported similar remarks from people in his chat rooms.  Yaaay.

Reason suggests that if Sarah debates Joe Biden, he'll demolish her point by point, but even if he does, she might out-sweet and out-pretty him, and I have so little confidence in the intelligence, perception and discernment of American voters, and in the health of John McCain, that I seriously fear that Sarah Palin could end up as first female president of the U.S.  As Greyfox pointed out last night, such an eventuality would set back women's issues and women's rights past where they were forty years ago.  She'd screw the pooch (his words) so bad, that nobody would want to risk another female president again.

EDIT (1:30 PM):

When I told Greyfox the gist of this piece, he told me that another Alaskan commentator had his say in the editorial pages of today's Anchorage Daily News.

A tidbit:  "...most Alaskans like Palin. I know I do.

"But let's be honest here. Her resume is as thin as the meat in a vending machine sandwich. I'm thinking being mayor of Wasilla doesn't qualify her. And she's less than two years into her first term as governor. Except for her high-profile gas pipeline legislation -- which I like a lot -- she doesn't have much to show. Oil taxes? Most of that work was done by the legislature. Ethics? Ditto. And her role in killing the much-touted Bridge to Nowhere? Talk about coming in after the battle is over and bayoneting the wounded."

Mike Doogan's opinion piece on Palin.

UPDATE (8-31-08, 8:20 AM)

I am getting really sick of hearing all the hype and hoopla about Sarah Barracuda.  Here is a brief excerpt from an email I received today from Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood:

This morning, as soon as we finished talking about the weather -- rain is keeping Greyfox from opening his stand at the weekly public market -- we started in on politics.

Without exception, my votes on every candidate and issue in yesterday's primary election were nullified by the majority of my fellow Alaskans.  I haven't voted with the winners here since 1974, when we elected Governor Jay Hammond. 

To those who say "we" get the government we deserve, I give a big wet raspberry.  They get what they deserve, and the rest of us have to take our lumps.

The other day, listening to the natterings of callers to a local radio talk show, I realized once again that when you add together the normal uninformed voters and the gullible ones most likely to be swayed by slick ads, the rest of us haven't a chance at the polls.  Doug and I were talking about that on the way to vote yesterday, and he repeated something that Mr. Stull, his high school history teacher, told his students, that unless you vote, you have no right to complain.

We voted for our bitching rights.

Sometimes my email subscription to NASA updates brings me more interesting things than at other times.  Today, it was this beautiful photo by Siamak Sabet:

I have been trying for days and daze to get some pictures of Koji and Linda Piebean, and they just won't hold still for it.  This is an active interaction they have, so try and overlook the motion blur and focal problems.

She started this weird game they play.  From the time the Piebeans came out of their nest under the kitchen cabinets, this one has liked to curl up next to the dog on my bed.

I think Koji might have misunderstood her intent.  Maybe she liked the warmth, or felt more secure hanging with the big guy, but he is not content just to curl up with her..

The dog won't leave her alone.  He sniffs her all over, licks and slobbers, puts his snoot under her and flips her over.  When she bats at him with a dainty paw full of sharp claws, he yelps, rears back, and whacks her with one of his big paws.

She flees from him, then comes right back for more.  It's obvious that they both want to play, but just not the same game.  Koji has been spending a lot of time on his tether.  He whines, and she goes over to him, and they do it all again.  Earlier today, she was trying to hide from him in an empty cereal box, and he was giving her a wild ride all over the room in the box.

"Fighting like cats and dogs," is a cliché I have heard all my life.  Nobody ever mentioned playing like cats and dogs.

Today, I replaced the Kurt Vonnegut quote about living on the edge, which had held top billing in my quotes module, with one that I had found this morning, by the late Douglas Adams.

I used to have severe depression occasionally.  The diagnosis was bipolar type 2, hypomania, meaning that my moods tended to swing more down than up.  Sometimes I got suicidal.  The last time that happened to me was about twenty years ago.

In desperation, I turned to laugh therapy.  I watched video tapes of old Marx Brothers movies and listened to audio books of Douglas Adams reading the 5 or 6 volumes of his Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy.

I survived a very bad winter that way, and the depression never came back after that.  As my son Doug likes to say, I don't get depressed, just a little indented.

Thank you, Mr. Adams, wherever you are.

I have blogged a few times about my tendency to take, "pill vacations," when I get fed up with swallowing handfuls of medication and nutritional supplements.  It is one of those self-destructive, self-indulgent things I do in one state of mind and then, in another, more lucid state, wonder why I did it.

I have been dependent on supplements since infancy, when it was determined that my body didn't manufacture the B complex as a normal person's does.  As an expensive addiction, it is nowhere near the magnitude of a heroin habit, but it's significant.  When I was a kid, my mother believed the TV commercials and switched me from the expensive vitamins the doctor prescribed, to the much cheaper One-A-Day, and I nearly died.

Some of my lapses from my nutritional regime have been from economic necessity.  In prison, I wasn't allowed any vitamins.  There have been times when life just swept me up and I simply forgot that I was supposed to be taking meds.  What all those times have in common with each other and with my rebellious pill vacations is that I end up ill -- more ill than usual, that is.  Some of those ill-making lapses have been precipitated, ironically, by illness.  George Carlin said it:  "The sicker you are the more likely you are to forget to take your meds."

Sometimes I have rebelled against my allergies and made myself sick with "treats" I know I shouldn't indulge in.  The process of learning which things are safe for me, and which are not, has been a lifetime pursuit.  The see-saw pattern of self-care alternating with self-indulgent self-destructiveness has also been going on for as long as I can remember.

Six years ago, after some intensive study of nutrition and the serendipitous find of a special book, End Your Addiction Now by Charles Gant, MD, I found a combination of foods and supplements that worked better for me than anything had before.  I was living sugar-free, gluten-free, and caffeine-free.   I had lots of energy, lost about 90 pounds without exercise or caloric restriction, and got off prescription allergy and asthma meds for several years. 

Ironically, my lapse from that occurred after repeated exposure to coffee and "birthday" cakes at Narcotics Anonymous meetings.  First, there were a few tastes, then there was a descending spiral back into full-blown addiction.  Isn't that the way it always goes?

Three weeks ago, on the day of the New Moon/solar eclipse, I got back on the allergen-free non-addictive diet.  As previously, I went through a few days of anorexia, as my body protested that if I wouldn't give it the goodies it didn't want anything at all.  I'm still not getting all the supplements I need, because I have been expending my energy on moving woodstoves, repairing the porch, and such, instead of putting together a new batch of med packs.

Even so, I feel so much better just from avoiding the sugar and gluten that I have asked myself a few times why I kept that binge going so long.  When I expressed that to Greyfox, he drew a parallel with his alcoholic binges.  Yesterday, the thought crossed my mind, "I could bake cookies."  Sure, I could.  I don't want to, and wouldn't eat any even if they were right here right now.  I won't deny that the binge was fun.  If it hadn't been fun, I wouldn't have done it.  But it's over now.  I had enough.  I'm through.

This week's subject was suggested by Stixandstonz:

Is this something like what you had in mind?

Naaah, I didn't think so.  I shot that one as insurance because, for a while, the real, live, furry four-leggeds in the house were not cooperating.

Koji had his feet all tucked under.

So did Count Spatula.

Then, when I found Pizarro with his furry feet exposed, Spats had to get into the act.

P. K. Piebean wasn't pleased when I interrupted her nap.

But I persevered, and got a couple of decent shots of furry feet.

Everyone is welcome to join in. All you have to do is post one or more photos regarding the subject on your site and comment on the challenge post that you have posted, so we can all come by and have a look.

Final posting day is on Thursday. Each Friday there will be a new challenge as long as you keep sending in subjects. (Look here for upcoming subjects.)

The photo challenge is not a contest. It's not about who comes up with the best photo or who has the most expensive equipment. It is about people from all over the world who love taking pictures. You can't win anything, except maybe some new xanga friends.

It gives me a warm feeling, even with no fire going, to know that the new stove is in here, the flue pipe is installed, and everything is ready for when we need the heat.

The little rollers on Charley's roller bar were frozen with corrosion when we brought it home a few days ago.  Yesterday afternoon, Doug and I were outside with 2 cans of WD40, working them loose, when Charley arrived with a borrowed hand truck.  We had brought over some cement blocks from Elvenhurst, our old place across the highway, and a motley collection of 2x6 and 2x10 planks, plywood and chipboard of varying thicknesses in various stages of decomposition.

Giving up on making the rollers roll freely in this decade, after getting both old stoves out of the way, we used the bar and the boards to make a ramp for the hand truck.  Doug pulled while Charley pushed, and I stood in the doorway ready to grab the stove at the top and turn it toward me.  It did not go smoothly or according to plan, but it went.

As always when the 3 of us are working together, there was a lot of discussion and conversation.  Charley believes in Murphy's Law.  I don't.  I prefer to expect the best while preparing for whatever might happen.  His philosophy appears to be something like, "Everything's going to shit anyway, so why prepare for anything?"  Doug spotted a couple of weak spots in the plan before we started, and I saw a problem developing early on and stopped things to fix it.  Charley hurt himself slightly, while Doug and I got through the job unscathed.

All this was accomplished without having to repair the rotten porch, but it is going to be fixed anyway, probably.  A friend of Charley's said she would come over tomorrow and take me up to Sunshine to buy plywood, and Charley said he will help me nail it down.

Now, with the new stove out of the driveway, Doug having moved a pile of last year's remaining firewood out of the way, I can order a few cords of wood for the coming winter.

---

Today, people in Turkey, France, Bulgaria, Poland, Brazil, Vietnam, Malaysia, Venezuela, Algeria, India, Peru, Australia, and the Russian Federation, as well as in various parts of the United States, have been reading my memoirs here.  Someone in the U.S. is going through the memoir links in chronological order, while someone else is going backwards through all six years of my past posts.  Is that interesting?  It is to me.  This is why I appreciate Xanga Footprints.  I feel more connected to my readers, even though they are anonymous, when I know where they are, what they are reading, and when.

My post yesterday, about someone who tries (with mixed success, I suppose) to project an image much more benign than her true personality, provoked some discussion.  I like when that happens, because the feedback stimulates thought and helps me understand these issues that trouble me.  Thanks, all of you.

Chabutter said:  "i hope you are able to get away from her negative energy."  I have never even considered escaping from "negative" energy.  I'd be willing to bet that some of you who know me better, and have been reading me longer, than Chabutter, would be expecting me to respond to that.  I suppose that my words, such as, "I thought she was in denial about her shadow side, unaware of the
viciousness of her temper and the magnitude of the hatred she sometimes
projects," are easily interpreted as negative judgments, but that's not what I'm feeling when I say such things. 

I hope I made it clear that I don't think of lying as "evil," but was only saying that this is how some people see it.  In my far from humble opinion, such dualistic judgments as "positive" and "negative" preclude rational thought and discussion.  I prefer to understand motivations, backgrounds, sources, adaptive or maladaptive factors, and issues such as awareness versus unconscious drives.  Better versus worse is about as far as I'm willing to go on the dualism road.  Running away from troublesome behavior would prevent me from being able to learn anything from it, and would be totally counterproductive from a therapeutic perspective.  I know she is sick and unhappy.  I'm looking for ways to approach helping her.

Fairydragonstar displayed her usual spiritual perspective and metaphysical awareness with her comments.  "...by hiding your true self you are not in
touch with your self so much as you desire to recieve acceptance from
others and are afraid that if you let your true self be seen that it
will be found lacking... when you practice deception and denial you are not seeking your higher self," and, "...some people lie and do deceptive things
purely for entertainment value. ...I sometimes don't know what to think about
people that do that...I think on some levels they are such good liars
that they have lied to themselves but I think on other levels they know
exactly what they are doing...I do believe it isn't a simple
answer...it is more complex..."

I have to agree with that, because no matter how I look at the questions I asked, I find no simple answers.  I know that the most convincing of liars are those who have convinced themselves, but they are also the most ridiculous ones, displaying monstrous gullibility.  Having been adept at denial in my youth, and then having swung in the opposite direction into thoughtlessly blurting out the truth at every turn, I do have my own perspective on the issue, but I also know that my experiences and my motivations are not the same as everyone's.

Apocatastasis, in comments too lengthy to quote here, tied this issue into a larger discussion he and I have been having about fear versus love, and brought up "manners."  One synonym for "manners," is, "forms," and I have already made my position clear on the forms of miscommunication that our culture calls "polite fictions."  I see in them insidious threats to sanity and social harmony.  I think they covertly work in just the opposite manner to their overt intent.  I won't condemn people for expressing what they mean by saying its opposite, but I constantly endeavor to avoid picking up the habit myself.

I've had an issue for quite a while with someone I know.  She plays the lady role, wears a sweet mask, and for a long time I thought she was in denial about her shadow side, unaware of the viciousness of her temper and the magnitude of the hatred she sometimes projects.

I have been paying closer attention to her lately, and also going back over our past interactions, and I think I was mistaken about the denial.  It seems more likely to me now, that she is a chronic liar and hater, not so much in denial as putting conscious effort into concealing her real feelings.

I realize that I have no control over her situation in either case, and it is of interest to me primarily because I had always been baffled by some of her behavior, but now with that new insight it makes a lot more sense.

Depending on one's mindset, lying can be viewed as either evil, or normal, or sick.  I have been told that everyone lies.  I don't believe that, but I also don't think that lying is an uncommon thing.  To whatever extent it can have destructive consequences, I suppose it qualifies as "evil," but mostly, I consider chronic deceptiveness to be pathological, sick.

The question I asked myself today was whether it is sicker to be in denial, to be deluded about one's own feelings, or to understand oneself and hide the truth from others.  I'm undecided on that, and not even sure it's a valid question.  Trying to rank psychopathology might be a completely futile pursuit, nuttiness in the first degree.