Palin - "Sarah Barracuda" and a pit bull (even without lipstick!)

[Photo - supporting the Bridge to Nowhere]

It's probably not all her fault. Palin's speech last night was written some time ago by males within the McCain camp. Not knowing what McCain was up to, they wrote it for a male. According to a McCain spokesman, when surprised by McCain's pick of Palin, the speech had to be revised to make it more "feminine."

Sarah "Barracuda" Palin, the "pit bull" from Wasilla, did her job. A few weeks ago, she didn't even know what a vice president does. It is likely she still doesn't know. But she can read a speech written by others, and she can look the world in the eye while curling her lip and lying through her teeth!

McCain did good choosing Palin, if you think "good" is a "hockey mom" from a teeny little town in the Alaska wilds with extremist Christian credentials, who believes that God put her in the governor's office, that the Republican Party should decide what women do with their own bodies, that creationism should be taught in our public schools, that abstinence education is the best way to teach our children about sex, that the right to shoot wolves for sport from airplanes should be protected by the government, that polar bears have no rights, that global warming is a myth, and that you need Jesus in your heart to be a good person.

Palin is your candidate if you think George W. Bush and Dickie Cheney have done a good job.


Palin's speech was a divisive, bitter attack on Obama, Biden, the media, and everyone who lives in a city rather than a small town. It contained almost nothing of substance. As Steven Rosenfeld says in an Alternet article: "Energy was the only domestic issue Palin discussed at length in her speech, which notably did not mention the economy, health care, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, immigration, family planning, appointing Supreme Court judges or the relation of church and state--she is an evangelical. She dismissed Democratic priorities such as global warming and civil liberties."

But she did stress we need to drill, drill, drill for oil!


And she lied! Attytood at the Philadelphia Daily News calls Palin's speech, "The Speech to Nowhere," for Palin baldly proclaimed "I told the Congress, 'Thanks but no thanks' on that Bridge to Nowhere. ... that was a lie, and the worst kind of lie in American politics, a blatant falsehood that showed utter contempt for the American people that Palin pledged to serve, assuming we are too stupid to look up or know the truth, that she pushed for those funds in Congress and while she got great political mileage out of announcing that she was killing the project, she still has not returned the funds to [the] American people."

The Anchorage Daily News says that "The Alaska governor campaigned in 2006 on a build-the-bridge platform, telling Ketchikan residents she felt their pain when politicians called them 'nowhere.' They're still feeling the pain today in Ketchikan, over Palin's subsequent decision to use the bridge funds for other projects..."

USA Today notes that "While running for governor in 2006 ... Palin backed federal funding for the infamous bridge, which McCain helped make a symbol of pork barrel excess."


Palin told other lies, also, such as the one about fighting against wasteful earmarks in Congress. As we have noted previously, she not only did NOT fight against wasteful earmarks, but actively sought them while mayor of the great metropolis of Wasilla. And in order to obtain these earmarks, she hired a lobbying firm connected to the disgraced Ted Stevens, which resulted in about $27 million tax dollars siphoned off to help Wasilla obtain a few pet projects!

Jim Kuhnhenn, a writer for the Associated Press, goes a bit further to decode Palin's lies. "In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation."

Palin lied about Obama when she said he has not "authored ... a single major law or reform -- not even in the state senate." Kuhnhenn reminds her and us that Obama "has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate."

Futhermore, "In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures ... studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations on potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation."

Palin said that "The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars." [It is doubtful that Palin even knows what most of that means - but it doesn't matter when you're simply reading crap written by nasty Republican operatives!]

Again, Kuhnhenn takes issues with Palin's "facts." "The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.

"Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families.

"He would also raise income taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest. He would raise payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make over $250,000 a year would see taxes rise."


Again, from Attytood: "It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin had the nerve to talk at length about John McCain's 'torturous interrogations' in the very same speech when she all but condoned the continuation of similar, abhorrent practices that have been directed for eight years by our own U.S. leaders, when she stated that Democrats are 'worried that someone won't read them [terrorism suspects] their rights.'"


And finally, Attytood sums it up perfectly: "I hope America wakes up tomorrow and realizes that Sarah Palin's words were rousing -- and completely empty, that they offered no road map (let alone bridge) for America other than more of the bogus partisan name-calling that has gotten us into the mess that we're in now."