Wednesday morning, RNC version

I am not watching. No way. Sorry, but my anger and rage is enough as it is. :) Watching George Bush is enough to make me spew obscenities. Watching people applaud him? Forget about it.

Reading through the blogs this morning, a couple of interesting notes. Sullivan, who has been a watch-guard on torture, notes that both Bush and Thompson describe John McCain's POW ordeal without mentioning torture. Of course, for Bush he can't, because the techniques that McCain experienced are not torture under his definition. That is really stunning to me. Still. I still remember telling SOF that torture would force evangelicals away from Bush in droves. I don't think I have ever been so wrong, or so surprised to be so wrong.

Of course, both are speaking to the same group of people who applauded Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani for embracing torture. Republicans, your base is fucking scary. Sorry.

Then just read at Yglesias that Bush said this:

If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry Left never will.”

Sigh. People angry about George Bush's policies are the same as Vietnamese Communists. Bush is so unbelievable it makes your head spin. Dishonest to the core and lacking even basic morality, I still wonder what conservative evangelicals saw see in him. What a thug. Sorry, but it is hard to describe this man's lack of character. Thugish, dishonest, stupid, and mean. Wow, what a poster child for the Gospel! Heck uv a job there, religious right! You have just made your heartfelt faith synonymous with this guy. More like a mob boss than the Jesus I know.

But to the topic of the week, Sarah Palin. Turns out that as Governor Palin Slashed Funding for Teen Moms. Part of why it is hard for me to take the pro-life people seriously. If you really want to preserve life, you don't fight contraceptives for teens, and you sure as hell don't cut funding for homes that help teen girls bring their pregnancies to term. Let's see if I have her take on this:

1) abstinence only sex education with no instruction on how to safely protect from either STDs or pregnancy outside abstinence.

2) if teenager gets pregnant--no abortion

3) and no state resources to help that pregnant girl bring that pregnancy to term

Sigh.

And as the vetting continues, we find out all sorts of things about her past. When she ran for mayor (part of her executive experience, you know) she did so in a very small town, where locals there remember her injecting national politics into what had always been a non-partisan, and mostly congenial race. She made abortion and gun rights part of her race in a tiny town, and when she won election, she ran with an iron fist--firing people disloyal to her, and not allowing her staff to even speak to reporters.

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

My way or the highway. And boy do I love the conservatives who think that we should have less government, but enough to censor the books at the library. Wow, where has traditional conservatism gone?

(I was thinking about that in conversation with Ubub last night and remembered that Barry Goldwater lost patience with this crowd. BARRY GOLDWATER! And he was crazy! )

Those are all deeply relevant to this discussion about her governing approach. And then there is her crazy pastor. I am really curious how this will play given that conservatives still like to throw Reverend Wright in my face. Just two weeks ago, Sarah Palin sat in church during this:

Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.

"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can't miss it."
Palin was in church that day, Kroon said, though he cautioned against attributing Brickner’s views to her.

Does that reflect Palin's views? I have no idea. But the same scrutiny that followed Obama better be applied here.

Then there is this nice video the Governor sent to the Alaska Independence Party. Here she welcomes their convention and speaks about how much she shares their approach to defending the Alaska constitution. While it does appear that Sarah Palin was not a member, her husband certainly was. The founder of the AIP had some very strong words about America.

The founder of the Alaska Independence Party -- a group that has been courted over the years by Sarah Palin, and one her husband was a member of for roughly seven years -- once professed his "hatred for the American government" and cursed the American flag as a "damn flag."

Does Sarah Palin share those views? I doubt it. But her husband was a member of the party until recently, and I think it is fair to ask her about both these issues. Don't you? Since Obama has been linked to William Ayers, isn't it fair to wonder if Sarah Palin objected to the AIP's denigration of America. Does she actually love this country? Perhaps she needs to prove her patriotism in her speech tonight. My friend D was laughing about the AIP--"a group that loves America so much they want to stop being a part of it!"

Oh wait. Not only is she white, but she is conservative. As Jon Stewart joked last week, "everyone knows Republicans love this country. They just hate half the people in it."

A note about Palin's family. I really appreciate that Obama responded so well to this. He has to, and it was a good thing. But I also want to note that McCain and Palin made her family, including her infant with Down's syndrome and teenage pregnant daughter--political pawns. We are supposed to vote for her because, in part, her family values and her willingness to bring that baby to term and support her pregnant daughter. They made family just another political commodity, much as they have done to faith. Well done.

And let's just play a little party game. Imagine any of these scandals attached to Obama and tell me how Richard Land and James Dobson would respond. This will be fun. We can turn it into a drinking game. Or take anything that Dobson and Land have recently said about feminism and replace the word "Palin" with the word "Hillary" and watch their heads asplode.

Sigh.