Beyond the Palin

So, to sum up:

The USA looks quite likely to elect a man as president who's main qualification appears to be that he spent part of his younger years dropping bombs on innocent people, and then subsequently got shot down and spent some time in jail (not that I want to belittle his time in jail, which I'm sure was not exactly a bed of roses - and since in the last 8 years the US has managed to acquire a reputation for torturing people, this might actually prove to be of some use to him). This man is a bit off the wall, and regularly loses his temper quite spectacularly or goes into some kind of bizarre mental loops where he says he can't remember anything and people should stop asking him difficult questions. He is also 72 years old. He looks healthy enough, frankly, but, should the worst happen, then power will transfer into the hands of...

Sarah Palin. A religious fundamentalist who doesn't believe in evolution, who thinks that the war in Iraq was God's will, and who urged people in Alaska to pray to get a gas pipeline built. Someone who claims that she is "as pro-life as any candidate can be" yet believes that gay people shouldn't get health care, and that capital punishment is a good idea (and presumably the right to life doesn't extend to Iraqis). Oh, and she thinks the environment is just something that gets in the way of making money. Drill for oil, and kill polar bears, appear to sum it up.

She is billed by the Republican party as a "typical" American. Well, you know I lived in the US for 6 years, and in all of that time, I never met anyone mad or stupid enough to believe in creationism. I never met any of these vocal but minority fundamentalist nutters who hate gays and oppose Roe vs Wade. I never met any fervent gun rights advocates, and most people I met were very concerned about the environment. She is in no way typical. She's typical of the extreme religious right of the Republican party, not typical of anything else. The only way in which she's a "typical" American is in the fact that she's white, which is presumably what they're not-so-subtly getting at here.

With this lot with the very real possibility of taking over the White House from the previous bunch of fanatical cretins, with Putin/Medvedev in charge in Russia and with bigoted warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu likely to take over in Israel before long, I reckon we're all doomed. And not because of the large hadron collider either.