Pit Bull Palin

When Sarah Palin joked about herself and her fellow hockey moms as pit
bulls with lipstick, she may have revealed more than she intended. She made it
sound a compliment -- portraying herself and her peers as ordinary mothers
who look good but are tough, tenacious, and defend their family at any cost.
But do we really want a potential President whose prime trait is an eagerness
to bite your throat at any pretext? We already have that: Dick Cheney.

There's a reason why pit bulls have been banned for their lethal
belligerence from England, Norway and France,
to Miami, Youngstown
Ohio, and Springfield Missouri.
They attack indiscriminately, whether other dogs or children or an elderly
Seattle-area woman two of them nearly
killed this past week. There's a reason you don't say, "Great,
a pit bull just moved in. How nice for our neighborhood." Even people who
want some protection usually pick other breeds, like German Shepherds, because
they know pit bulls might turn on them.

Now some of us admire their tenacity, and that's a virtue, but
other dogs are also tenacious -- you can pick them up by the sock or rag
they're playing with. But they aren't loose cannons that just might
maul your neighbor's five-year-old. You don't want pit bulls running
your block, much less the United
States. Pit bull presidencies don't
work for issues like terrorism, global warming, our declining economy. You
can't solve them by simply ripping your enemy's leg off.

Pit bulls have their uses, as junkyard dogs, or sidekicks for drug
dealers, but most of us reject them for our home. We've seen all too much
what a "my way or we'll destroy you" approach has done to our
country in the past eight years. The single-mindedness of a pit ball can be
useful, but it can also be disastrous. The Cheney crew had this in their
obsession with attacking Iraq,
even as they were dismissing Clinton-era reports of the threats from Bin Laden.
If they hadn't been so focused on attacking their enemies, we might never
have embarked on the disastrous Iraq
war.

Yet Sarah Palin seems to relish the pit bull role, with an attack dog's taste
for blood. Her high school classmates called her Sarah Barracuda. She won her first
race as mayor by bringing in the state Republican Party to a nonpartisan
contest and focusing on guns, abortion and how she was a true Christian and the
incumbent wasn't in a race that normally focused on roads and sewers. She
fired the Wassila librarian who resisted her
suggestion that some books might have to be banned and the
police chief who didn't support her candidacy. She fired the head of
the Alaska
state patrol who wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law. She sat
laughing while a shock jock interviewer mocked one of her political opponents
(a cancer survivor and fellow Republican) for her weight, and called the woman
a "bitch" and a "cancer." And then there's the
convention speech that catapulted her to superstardom. Not only did it repeatedly
distort the truth, it embodied every character assassination scenario from
the past 30 years-taking the polarizing politics of Richard Nixon, Spiro
Agnew, George Wallace, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, and dressing it up, with
lipstick, in Palin's charismatic package. She even attacked the very idea
of citizens working for change when she mocked community organizers.

If we read the polls, Palin's pit bull approach may well be
working. Pit bull politicians can be great campaigners-especially when
their prime goal is to bloody their targets whatever the cost to truth, U.S. politics
and ultimately, to our country. But do we really want a pit bull as vice
president?

We should already know, because we've had one for the past eight
years. Palin is younger, more attractive, and a better shot. But she has a similar
ruthlessness, bellicosity, and eagerness to destroy anyone who gets in her way.
She's similarly secretive and resistant to accountability beneath the
disarming charm. Despite her image as the outsider reformer, she has her own
ties to pay-to-play politics from serving
as one of three directors for the political action committee (PAC) of corrupt
Alaska Senator Ted Stephens, to fighting for the Bridge to
Nowhere before it became politically untenable, to hiring
a lobbyist (when Mayor of Wassila) who not only was a former Stephens Chief
of Staff but also worked for now-convicted crooked Republican lobbyist Jack
Abramoff. And she's just as beholden to a hard political right that denies
reality: from global warming to seeking to ban abortions for rape or incest
victims.

Not every Republican embodies the pit bull ethic-I'll be
voting for a Republican
Secretary of State who's meticulously fair and has played by the rules
even when he's taken heat from his own party.

Likewise, many once respected John McCain across party lines for what
we thought was a departure from the Karl Rove, Lee Atwater politics of personal
destruction. We assumed he'd learned its cost after the Bush campaign
defeated him in a South Carolina primary by doing push/polling phone calls
about his role in the Keating S&L scandal and spreading rumors his having
two illegitimate black children. He was the rare current Republican who spoke
out against torture and condemned reckless tax giveaways for the rich. Now
he's disavowed all this and hired one
of the prime architects of the Bush campaign's South Carolina attacks on him to help
prepare Palin's now-fabled convention speech. His own speech was also
full of repeated
falsehoods. He even embraces the chorus of contempt toward Obama for
daring to say that America
is better of when we observe international rules like the prohibition on
torture. And his encouragement of Palin's distortions speaks worlds about
McCain's prizing politics over country.

Lets' hope we finally reject the pit bull approach this time
around, no matter how shiny the lipstick looks.