Senator Obama may talk about “restoring America’s reputation“, but Governor Palin is actually doing it. After the deplorably emolient multilateralist Bush second term, the world’s sophisticates haven’t been this pumped about America the halfwit hyperpower since the heady heyday of the “swaggering cowboy moron” of the early 21st century. All over the world, condescending cosmpolitans are putting their backs out bending down to paste “ALASKA” over the third word in their hilarious “SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS A VILLAGE IS MISSING AN IDIOT” bumper stickers.
From the CBC up north (Canadians’ tax dollars at work), Heather Mallick:
She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn’t already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America’s name inside and outside its borders… Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are… the stolidly Republican ladies branch of Citizens for a Tackier America… rural, loud, proudly unlettered (like Bush himself)… Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade’s woman… Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the “pramface”…
In The Guardian, Linda Grant is more circumspect:
The conviction by the left that the right is stupid is one of the defining and least attractive characteristics of contemporary politics. Assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is too dim to get your point is not itself a particularly brainy way to win others over…
But hey, why let that stop you, Linda?
Were I an East Coast Democrat, which is the only kind of American I can ever imagine being, I would have no objection to small-town Republicans – to their church-going and their hunting rifles and their flag-decked porches and their meatloaf with gravy, and their lemon chiffon cake. I could admire their intimacy with the wide prairie and the vast sky.
The problem is that when they’re running the whole country, they want to take away abortion rights, drill for oil in Alaska (a Palin policy), ignore climate change, and start unwinnable wars. With the small-town Republican mindset in charge, the rest of America and the rest of the world is forced to live by small-town values, which aren’t much help when you’re trying to decide what, if anything, can be done about Iranian nuclear ambitions or more humbly, workplace date rape.
Ha! Under the lash of Sarah Palin, even the moose are being lined up for workplace date rape.