The Political Harridans

I am not an admirer of S. Palin.   She strikes me as being a hopeless lightweight, who, however, has just enough smarts to have discovered that in the tragically upside-down Republican world, she can pass herself off as something more -- a quise that instantly disappears whenever she takes a step into the larger setting.   But in the current sorting out of the Republican aspirants to the Oval Office, I have to admit that in one sense she is performing a valuable service.   Just by being she throws a clear perspective on the other harridan in that contest, M. Bachmann, who has been taking advantage of that same atmosphere of black is white and up is down.

So far Palin hasn't officially thrown her hat in the ring, and instead she is playing a daring game of letting anticipation work for her, until in her judgment just the right moment arrives to make her announcement.   Meanwhile, in the absence of Palin, Bachmann has been doing a lot of grunt work that has given her a certain amount of credibility that would have been available to her only in a world of the insane.

Putting aside their physical attributes and Palin's warm look and Bachmann's near hysterical frigidity, Bachmann's thought processes suffer just as badly in comparison.   Palin is funny.  Palin is a comic, and she has high entertainment value, if you're willing to temporarily overlook certain things.  In contrast, there's nothing whatever funny and entertaining about M. Bachmann.  Instead everything she does and says is freighted with malevolence.

Consider the kind of stuff Palin said when J. McCain first brought her off the tundra.  So far Bachmann has come out with nothing to approach the charm of Palin's sincere and simple contention that from Alaska she could see Russia.   Instead you will find things like Bachmann's statement that the recent earthquake, followed by the floods of Hurricane Irene, were God's punishment to the U.S. Northeast for the liberal political leanings there.

So, was the terrible rainlessness that deeply conservative Texas has been suffering this year a sign of God's wrath, too?

Things got worse when, seeing that that remark went over like a lead balloon, Bachmann quickly tried to cover herself by saying that she had just been joking.  This is the standard lame excuse that adolescents use whenever someone calls them on some act that went awry, when in reality the culprits did intend just the sort of harm that they inflicted.   Therefore in so speaking Bachmann was not being Presidential; instead she was being juvenile -- and worse.

I think of Palin as being too disengenuous to pull something as diabolical as that out of her gluteus.   The devil may make fleeting appearances in her but doesn't find the soil in her as fertile as it does that of M. Bachmann.  This is what comes of the latter's habit of throwing professed Christianity at everything that moves.