LIES

Maybe it’s genetic, but Sarah Palin sure is good with a gun. It seems that daddy loved bringing down those nasty Alaskan brown bears in a town where little Sarah first learned to alarm the local moose community. But trust me, I’m not knocking moose stew; it might be a really good meal.Palin grew up in Alaska, where people hunt and fish. So be it. This is not going to be a dissertation on animal rights or a moral critique on her spare time activities. Moose and salmon and wild birds are fair game for hunters in her neck of the woods, and Sarah hunts and fishes with the best of them. Good for her.But in her new role as the GOP veep candidate Sarah Palin has crossed a line, even for a hunter. This time she has set her sights on a new and unfamiliar target. This time she is not aiming at a herd or a bevy or a flock. This time she is going after a large group of intelligent, thinking Americans known as women voters. .And this time, as she hunts in uncharted territory, Sarah Palin has made a strategic error. For some distorted reason, Palin thinks she is hunting lemmings.Please don’t email TvNews.org to explain that lemmings really do not commit mass suicide. I know that, I really do. But these little rodents serve as an effective metaphor for people who blindly follow the opinions of others, often with disastrous consequences. In a previous editorial, I described the herd mentality of many US legislators as they fell in line and supported the insane and destructive policies of the Bush/Cheney administration, and I still stand by that portrayal.So, for Sarah Palin, the GOP party hacks, and the idiot corporate media punditry to assume that millions of American women will abandon their convictions, their ideals, their needs and their politics to vote for a candidate just because she has a uterus is totally ridiculous, and highly, highly insulting.It boggles the mind, it really does. Surely, Sarah Palin will delight those who support her right wing, ultra conservative views on issues such as choice, gay rights, global warming, evolution, gun control and war. Without question, the GOP base has been energized by a candidate whose extreme ideology makes even the late Jerry Falwell sound like a benign moderate.But to suppose that any other group of Americans will collectively dismiss the problems that confront this nation and cast a collective gender vote is absurd. I have to believe that Sarah Palin and her GOP partners also believe that thinking women would rally around Ann Coulter, had she been the nominee. What nonsense.This election is not about Hillary supporters or glass ceilings. It is about a nation on the edge of total disaster. When Sarah Palin suggested that she was the natural successor to the legacies of Clinton and Ferraro, she showed a cynical and calculated disrespect for every voter in the nation, and most particularly for women. Sarah Palin does not support a single policy for which Clinton and Ferraro fought their entire political lives. In the end, people will vote on the issues, and on the quality of the candidates before them. To suggest otherwise is demeaning and belittling to us all.I truly hope that I am right, and that no thinking man or woman will cast a vote in this historical election solely because the slate includes a woman. Sarah Palin is emerging from Alaska into big time national politics where she has to convince the American public that her values are worthy of their vote.But first, she has to call off the hunt and deal with the reality that the women of America will not self destruct on her behalf. As they campaign for the most important positions in the nation, Sarah Palin and John McCain must understand that this is not lemming season in America.