A Liberal Endorses Sarah Palin

I’ve recently started my fifth decade on this planet. In retrospect, I never expected much from any of our prior Republican Presidents. They certainly did not disappoint my low expectations. I have continued my up and down professional life in four different cities and always working in the private sector. I started Internet blogging about a year ago on TMV.

I shied away from the public sector because I noticed that both Republicans and Democrats at all levels of government lacked any good ideas or goals beyond getting re-elected. I have worked with public sector bureaucrats on many occasions. I have noticed that life-time public servants developed noticeably different worldviews from those who live and work principally in the private sector. It is unfortunate that so few people have successfully bridged the two worlds. My father was a rare and highly-respected exception.

I was not an original supporter of Barak Obama as he left me uninspired despite many on the left who idolized him. I voted for him in preference to the McCain-Palin ticket as the lesser of two evils. I’m a perpetual pessimist that only hopes this country can just continue to “muddle through” and slightly outperform the rest of the globe. Unfortunately during the past decade it has become painfully obvious that the highly-competitive and increasingly interconnected global economy is leaving many parts of America way behind.

My opinions on various social, political and economic subjects vary greatly but most people and TMV readers would probably place me in the “Liberal” camp, despite my many obvious “inconsistencies.” I can list a whole group of pretty wacky ideas from the left. I enjoy cherry-picking good ideas from all over the political and economic spectrums though there are pretty slim pickings from most conservatives and libertarians out there. I’ve always liked the phrase by Ralf Waldo Emerson “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

After spending most of my adult life in a country whose social, political and economic values were and are still dominated by conservatives and Republicans, I wondered how an alleged “post-partisan,” completely neophyte “progressive” Democratic President would perform. I already knew that the entire U.S. political system, particularly the Legislative Branch, was hopelessly paralyzed, corrupt, dysfunctional, highly partisan and ideological, incompetent, and generally unable to function or address any national issues. I also view the majority of my fellow Americans as pleasant creatures, but too many are uneducated, lazy, inconsistent, anti-intellectual simpletons regardless of their political or economic views.

I graduated from law school 25 years ago and was not impressed by the characters that were law professors. They were highly intelligent individuals who were consumed by self-centeredness, arrogance, narcissism, and aloofness. They constantly sought ephemeral adulation and shallow popularity among students and their colleagues. By any objective measure, most were not fit for political or business leadership roles. The “Socratic” method of analysis leads to many questions but no firm decisions. So when we elected one of them as President, I was a bit concerned. Getting messed up by fighting in the trenches and actually standing for something were not their strong points. Making pithy, entertaining and sometimes accurate comments from the expensive loges while observing the great theatre of life was more their forte.

It is a shame that so many intelligent people, including the President and his top counselors, are clueless on the big picture and how to get things done in Washington. However in their partial defense, our national government plus our perverted economic system may be too dysfunctional as to do anything. It has morphed into a complete oligarchy and corrupt crony capitalistic system known as “corporatism.” Perhaps no one can govern anymore and the natural corollary is that the people we elect to Congress and the Presidency do not matter any more.

The majority of Americans are angry and throwing childish temper tantrums for a variety of reasons. Few people are prepared to calmly discuss the facts and the various options we have to save our country from utter collapse without resorting to mindlessly repeating of idiotic, constricting, close-minded, and generally discredited old ideologies, biases and worldviews. We are witnessing and participating in a national “meltdown” and nervous breakdown.

Thus we need a President who will take us quickly over the cliff. Only after the fall can the long, difficult, task of rebuilding our country start sooner than later. The only way Americans can figure out that their prior opinions, beliefs and ideologies are really worthless is to have them proven by the cold, hard facts. Americans must be literally and figuratively struck with numerous and massive blows to our collective heads and buttocks. The final result has to be so terrible, obvious and painful to shock us into the radical changes we need to make.

No one is going to accuse Sarah Palin of possessing too many brain cells between her ears, but then we don’t need a smart President to lead us over a cliff – former President George W. Bush happily lead us up to the abyss. Unfortunately President Obama is wasting our time dancing us around the cliff when we really need to be shoved over. That’s where Sarah Palin comes in.

Sarah couldn’t make it thru a simple compound-complex sentence if her life depended upon it. Halfway thru her mini-thoughts, she happily mangles the grammar, syntax and overall point so completely that any intelligent person is left perplexed and speechless. However, many voters don’t care she has no coherent thoughts, and they don’t think it matters so long as she’s “one of them.” Her supporters really resent all those “elitists” pointing out her all-too-common human mistakes and limitations. If so many intelligent elite politicians and businessmen have gotten into this massive mess, we don’t need more of them to “lead” us in the future.

Politics is principally about emotions, images and sound bites. It has nothing to do with putting together coherent thoughts and policies. It’s always been about delineating real and imagined fights between “us” and “them.” Sarah gets the essential parts of 21st century leadership in America where the truth is wholly immaterial to inspiring, entertaining, and winning.

Before the country previously considered and adopted “liberal” ideas during the 1930’s, it really had to fall of the cliff into the Great Depression. Being saved temporarily in 2009 by a variety of policy moves from falling over the edge is just not enough. The mob is still angry, impatient, flailing about, and blaming anyone they think is in charge. They really should be gazing up – broken, bruised and desperate – before they can think straight.

Obama is the accidental President who parallels Herbert Hoover rather than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ronald Reagan was lucky that the full force and consequences of his original policies did not come to full fruition for almost 30 years until the end of the second Bush Presidency.

Republicans don’t want President Obama to succeed so they will uniformly oppose everything the Administration proposes. They are biding time until they politically control Washington – not to accomplish anything policy-wise, but merely to reap the benefits of power. Most Blue-Dog Democrats have no principles or ideas except to appease their largest campaign contributors. Americans are still so afraid of their own shadows and their various demons, that they cannot try anything new or different. Liberal Democrats cannot articulate a few simple narratives that can appeal to an angry mob. They are not cohesive in their own policies, nor do they possess sufficient numbers to accomplish anything in Washington.

Some national polls still temporarily show that the majority of Americans do not think Sarah Palin is fit to lead – but that makes no sense. In a broader sense, we don’t need competence or thoughtfulness from our leaders at this point in time. Under our current political and economic system the person we have as our nation’s President is almost irrelevant.

Too many angry, disillusioned, and foolish Americans hope that everything can just go back to “normal” or we can return to “better times” such as we remember during the second Reagan and Clinton Administrations or up until 2006 when we faced no consequences for our collective stupidity, greed, self-centeredness, and short-sightedness. However the unspoken fear among many Americans is that this time the party is really over and all we have to show for it is a lot of worthless financial paper – mere confetti – while our national “house” is in shambles, we’re broke, and the world is quickly passing us by.

Thus as a “liberal” I might vote for Sarah Palin in 2012 over President Obama – even if she is still only a candidate for Vice-President. I’m certainly voting against every incumbent this November. I expect nothing much from the other 2012 Republican nominee that will be on the ticket but perhaps this is what the country needs. Our national insane asylum defies any attempts at intelligent discourse. We deserve a warden just as crazy as the inmates.

The political party that brought us to the brink of national economic and political disaster in 2008 through its rigid conservative ideologies and policies should be the one to march or push us over the edge. Life is too short to waste time trying to discuss any sane alternatives and long-needed new policies for our country when few people in the country want to think rationally.

The majority of my fellow citizens give every objective impression that they want to and really deserve to fall off a massive cliff. Therefore we need a completely surreal leader such as Sarah Palin and her “first dude” to star in and bring to a close America’s nightmare play that is a perversion of what its founding fathers established and what we were just two decades ago.

Schadenfreude lives on.

Submitted by Marc Pascal — as always, ranting from warm, sunny Phoenix, AZ and wishing all TMV readers back in the Midwest, East Coast, and across the globe a very pleasant weekend.