The czarina

Sarah Palin can see Russia from her back porch. Maybe that's how she became gun-tottin', holy-roller Catherine the Great of the 21st Century. Several days ago I posted a brief essay on what bothered me about Sarah Palin - I mean, the thing that bothered me the most about Sarah Palin. What I said was that we should be disturbed that this little dictator rolled into her small town - her meaningless little suburban spot on the frozen landscape - and shoved abortion and God into a campaign where neither of those things belonged, and then, when she won, fired everyone she thought was disloyal. She continued this pattern of dismissive governance as governor. Now, the New York Times broadens the story. We now know she hired friends without relevant experience and gave them high paying jobs for which they were not qualified. She concealed scientific findings paid for by taxpayers because the results would upset the people she really served, the oil companies who didn't want a finding that global warming was killing off polar bears made public.

Doesn't all of this - the disdain for truth and transparency, the contempt for science, the dismissal of any sense that government should serve public purposes, and the use of government payrolls to hire unqualified friends and political allies - sound remarkably like the past eight years. How could anyone dismayed by the Bush record - the drafting of energy policy by the oil companies in secret meetings, the dismissal of intelligence that didn't square with their needs, the hiring of horse-show CEOs to run crucial agencies - vote for John McCain and Palin?

And for all those women I see on TV saying they'll vote for McCain because Palin is "just like them," I say: she's not. She is the girl these women remember from high school, the one who was popular but mean. She's the evil coniving boss everyone hates. The rat who gets what she wants by manipulation and lies, and then shit cans others who earned their positions through effort and preparation. She's not the American dream, she's the hateful executive who axes good people on a whim, condemning those she fires to a nightmare of uncertainty and unpaid bills.