Palin

The problem with Sarah Palin is not her “inexperience,” her specific abuses of power as governor, her vague relationship to an Alaskan secessionist movement, her family dramas, or her apparent ignorance of the history of the Pledge of Allegiance. Nor is the problem some kind of “meta” fact about her character that these various factors reveal, in combination or separately. Nor indeed is the problem that McCain apparently chose her with that peculiar blend of cynicism and recklessness we’ve come to expect from the Republican Party and McCain in specific.

No, the problem is that she’s a right-wing nutjob. Under no circumstances should she be allowed within fifty miles of the judicial appointment process or the running of the federal bureaucracy — again, not because she’s inexperienced or has a tendency toward self-aggrandizement or might have covered up her daughter’s pregnancy, but because her views on virtually every policy issue on which she’s formed an opinion are insane and because she is being given a “crash course” on the remaining issues by a man whose views are also insane.

The fact that her selection is being hailed by a major faction of the Republican Party is further evidence that the Republican Party is a fundamentally illegitimate political organization, not because they’re incompetent or corrupt (plenty of Democrats are incompetent, corrupt, or both), but because they have insane beliefs or are willing to pay lip service to insane beliefs. It’s content, not form — would that liberal commentators could recognize that.