Would You Could You

On 9/11, would you feel safe if Sarah Palin was president?

On 9/11, would you feel safe if the man who picked someone as ludicrously unqualified as Sarah Palin as his running mate was president?

-Tristero @ Digz

The utter crassness and apparent unanimity of the Donk's pivot on the Importance of Experience, now that they have some dummy chick to whale on, is the sort of Soviet touch that makes me suspect our empire may be perne in a gyre, as the poet put it, of greater speed than I'd be otherwise inclined to believe. At first the Experience line was vague, just a thin notion that Palin lacked the requisite CV, that maybe she was a little underqualified, but hey, we'll keep your resume on file for a year and maybe call you if something opens up. Now, however, it has coalesced around the idea that We Live in a Dangerous World. How can this bimbo Keep Us Safe.

The theme of safety within the warm embrace of the fatherland under the watchful eye of a stalwart guardian, i.e. Commander-in-Chief, was of course the central motif of the last Most Important Presidential Election since 1860, and at the time Democrats hollered that this infantile conception of a nation of helpless sheep protected by a watchful, White-House shepherd ran contrary to the Spirit of '76 and Rugged Individualism and Civil Liberties and John Locke and Jesus and god-only-knows-who-else. Much quoting of Franklin on liberty and security. Much hair-pulling and garment-rending over the susceptibility of folks to arguments that they must over-empower their government or else die at the dusky hands of evildoing terrorists.

Now the shoe is on the other foot, glove on the other hand, vice on the other versa, and die-hard partisans like the above-cited want us to contemplate the horror of having some oft-prego chick twirling her hair and reading US Weekly while the barbarians are at the gate. (And I'm cynical, a nihilist! Yoy.) We live in uncertain times. I bet someone's going to haul out the Existentialist Threat any moment now. "Can you trust Sarah Palin to escalate the war in Afghanistan?"

No one, of course, felt safe on 9/11, not even those of us whose first thoughts had to do with homecoming chickens and their roosts. It was a frightful day, although far less so for the 275 million or so of us outside of metro New York and Washington than the typical day in the life of an Iraqi or Afghani or Palestinian, etc. But in the time since we have seen the bipartisan pursuit of precisely those imperial policies which provoked that attack, and since neither John McCain nor Barack Obama nor Sarah Palin nor Joe Biden has sought to repudiate America's policy of invading other countries and blowing other people up, the question of which administration will make me safer is irrelevant; the answer is neither. The question is moot.