Palin: A red herring in a black suit

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of women lined the streets of Wisconsin over the weekend with signs waiving in support of Sara Palin. When I saw this on the news I shrank a bit inside. They took the bait. These women, only a sample of the perhaps millions, bit down on a red herring. The motivations of the McCain campaign are ones I can only guess at, but the tremendous turn taken on the issue of the importance of experience leads me to believe they were more concerned about pulling votes than honest policy when they chose her for the VP running mate. And she is, to my eyes, a red herring in a black suit.

She has no apparent policy positions for our nation that require sustained inquiry into the factual world, the world outside of her church. Instead, she seems to have crammed for the test at the last minute and is traveling the nation repeating from rote the policies of the man who invited her to this testing situation. What she can speak to from a place of apparently fervent and long held belief is her opinion about abortion. This again!!

Look at the front of any major newspaper this morning and you will see that the largest mortgage companies in the nation, Freddi and Fannie Mae, holders of 70% of new mortgages and 50% of all mortgages, are getting saved by the most economically conservative government in recent history because their utter failure could literally drowned our economy. We're depending on money from China to pull these corporations out of the apparently inevitable chaos reached when they are allowed to do as they please without any policing.

The weather is also making the front page. Thousands of scientists have supported the global warming model that decades ago predicted increased hurricane activity in the Gulf because of warming waters. One hurricane passed through last week and there are a line coming in from the Atlantic. This is one environmental issue. There are millions more.

A friend who is a special education teacher told me yesterday the rates of autism in the children born in this country to parents who recently immigrated from Somalia are rising quickly. These are children born to families with no history of the kinds of disabilities these children are demonstrating. One may argue they just didn't have professionals to diagnose the disorder in Somalia. I would argue that the chances of seriously disabled children surviving the conditions of Somalia would likely be pretty low. Obviously, this is an area that deserves extensive and serious research. I mean here to just bring up another possible warning sign that our dirty environment is harming our children.

I have mentioned here only a couple issues of serious concern, the environment and the economy. These are issues that our nation is in desperate need of leadership on. We need explicit, well-informed policy and a well articulated plan of action. In this serious time, McCain offers us a woman who clearly has not given a lot of thought to the breadth and depth of the critical issues we, as a nation, are grappling with. She offers us a pretty face, political positions on abortion informed by evangelical Christian doctrine, and the kind of trained-parrot speeches that any University of Idaho trained TV journalist could spout given a TelePrompTer and a camera.

But what upsets me most is the footage of those women lined up along the streets yelling and screaming in support of Palin. These women may be leaving a toxic environment and third-world economy to their children and grandchildren, and they're praising Palin's right-to-life position. What kinds of lives are they intending for these unborn babies, anyway?