As the American election season draws to a close, the world will be looking towards January 20th, 2009, when George Dubya Bush's successor takes office. Depending on which side you tilt towards, that will be either John McBush III or Barack Saddam Hussein Obama bin Laden.[Interestingly, the only words Firefox thinks are wrong in the last sentence are "Barack" and "Obama"; I'm getting little red dotted underlines at those words. Looks like that's telling something about Mozilla's political leanings]
January 20th, will obviously also be the day "W" would finally cease being the leader of the free world and beacon of democracy. Unlike most of the world, I was inclined to see this as a not-so-good thing.
Now lest I be mistaken for those affectionately labeled as wingnuts or chickenhawks, I am not a fan of the Bush administration. Far from it. In the last eight years, Bush has come to symbolize incompetence in a leader. But another thing he has come to mean to the world is a repository of a lot of relatively unknown knowledge. From revealing the shocking fact that North Koreans are carrying out kidnappings in the White House (scroll right to the bottom) to expressing his ability to collaborate and also kick ass in a deeply Freudian manner as,
I can press when there needs to be pressed; I can hold hands when there needs to be -- hold hands.
to of course, his most famous revelation about the WMDs in the Eye Rack, George W Bush has been an important point for information dissemination. Through these eight years, George W Bush has pushed the bounds of reality in a way those godless scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (another suspiciously Freudian name) never could. He has boldly gone where no explorer of truth has gone before.
And so, his departure, I believed, would also have meant we would not be having an important source of factoids. I actually felt that in a handful of months the world would come to miss this genial Texas cowboy, having discovered that neither Obama nor McCain were halfway as informative as W. Who, I thought, would have the immense talent to replace the tremendous void that W would leave behind?
Mea culpa; I confess - I underestimated the power of the American nation, its limitless pool of talent, a pool that would ensure that we would never notice the loss of Bush. As darkness fell on the world as Bush's exit drew closer, a faint light shone in a less famous corner of America. A light, from the far reaches of Alaska, to give us a sign that all hope is not lost.
Sarah Palin.
When John "Bomb Iran" McCain announced the little-known Alaska Governor as his Vice Presidential candidate, many reasoned that it was a cynical ploy by the Arizona senator to get the bitter Hillary supporters and feminists on his side. Never mind the fact that he voted against equal pay for men and women, the fact that he had a woman as running mate would rally the Clinton people to him. While the jury is still out on whether that succeeded, I don't quite believe that was McCain's intention.
[Oh, and by the way, those who don't know how to pronounce Palin, it rhymes with "failin'"]
It could also have been to rally the Christian evangelist crowd, which were rather disappointed with McCain, and the choice of a anti-choice Creationist would win over the god botherers. But recent events have led me to believe that McCain is primarily looking to attract different section of the population - those who believe Bush did a "helluva job". And it is a sizable section indeed - 19% of Americans believe W did a good job. In a close election like this, 19% can make a "helluva" difference.
Palin has done the impossible - she has become as good a disseminator of information as W, if not better. For instance her famous assurance to the American people that her foreign policy credentials are strong because, she "can see Russia from my house". There have been uncharitable sarcastic comments in response such as "I can see stars from my house, so I'm an astronaut." What these sexists don't understand is that seeing stars from your house makes you an astronaut only if you put lipstick on a telescope and look through it.
Another example of Palin's aggressive ignorance would be her lack of knowledge of the Bush doctrine. Most would find it odd that the more popular person on the Republican ticket would have no idea what the Bush doctrine is, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Not allowing knowledge or the facts to distract him is one of the rare qualities that made Bush successful. Who knows, it may turn out to be a bonus for Palin too.
But what makes her truly extraordinary and puts her in the august company of GW Bush and Pratibha "I see ghosts" Patil, is her stance on Russia. When she declared that a war with Russia over the Georgia issue was a real possibility, many were horrified that Palin would speak so bluntly when she's not even elected, that too about a war with a nuclear weapons state. Sexism once again. What Sarah Palin's detractors don't realise is that while Russia is visible from her house, the Russian nukes are not. Easy mistake for a Russia watcher to make.
And then, in a very recent interview she dropped the bombshell (figuratively; she won't be literally dropping any bombshells before Jan 20th) that Putin is rearing his head and entering US airspace in Alaska.
There are reports that Putin, watching the interview choked on his vodka as he realised that he had been entering US airspace without even knowing it. Or maybe it had been his evil twin Sergei.
Palin has been in (inter)national limelight for around a month, yet the number of gaffes she's made and the valuable information she's spread is enough to encourage anyone but the jaded cynic that she would make a more than worthy successor to W as the world's Informer-in-Chief.
Come November 4, the election day, Americans will take the call on whether the Palin-McCain ticket will ascend to the White House on Jan 20th. So we come to the most important question: will Palin-McCain win? I'd say it's likely. The polls are quite close. Common sense, and what we call "anti-incumbency" would normally be enough to ensure that the party of Bush wouldn't have a icicle's hope in this election. But as Mark Twain said, no one ever went broke betting on the stupidity of the American electorate. The fatal mistake made by AIG, Lehman Bros etc was that they betted on the subprime market rather than the stupidity of their nation's electorate.
So keep your fingers crossed - McCain could still win this elections, bringing Sarah Dubya Palin a heartbeat away from the Presidency. The Bush show could very well go on.
[Image credits for the Putin photo: Boing Boing]
