Palin Delivers Hollow Speech

As my wife and I sat in our darkened living room watching Sarah Palin’s momentous speech last night, I was left with a lot of anger, bewilderment and admiration that she would talk for such a long time without saying anything of substance about herself and John McCain. But as the evening progressed and I listened to the praise that she was getting and the excitement that she had engendered, I was struck with one overriding thought: Who in the hell does she think she is? Or more precisely, who in the hell does Bush’s speech writer think she is? This woman spent a good part of her speech unmercifully blasting Barack Obama, and yet to my observation, she is so far removed from national politics, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that she has no right to criticize anyone, much less a solid, popular and fully vetted candidate who has been campaigning in the open for just about the same amount of time that Palin has been the governor of Alaska.

It might not have bothered me as much if she was debating the issues with Obama and contrasting them with her own, but her attacks were overly sarcastic, curiously divisive and mean, but most critical, downright inaccurate or just an outright lie http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080904/ap_on_el_pr/cvn_fact_check

There is no doubt that Palin is a formidable candidate. She is ballsy and no shrinking violet. She is a very persuasive and passionate speaker, and her style will cause most people to overlook or completely ignore her severely conservative social positions and the fact that she plays hardball Republican politics with the best of them.

It is absolutely essential that we, the Obama supporters and the campaign itself, not take this woman lightly or count on the fact that the rest of this country will recognize who this woman is and what she represents. They won’t!! Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the campaign must come out with guns blazing, and it is up to all of us to communicate to everyone, including the media, who Sarah Palin is, what a bundle of hypocrisy she is, and insist that she be questioned thoroughly and in a detailed manner drawing out all of her objectionable positions and just tremendous lack of exposure to foreign policy and most issues that are most important to people of the lower 48.

If we witness the love affair that most media outlets are having with the image being created of Sarah Palin and sit back while they get lulled into a stupor and somehow forget to ask Palin or McCain for that matter about anything of substance and/or challenge any statements or assertions that they’ll be making over the next several weeks, then the last line of defense will be all of us making absolutely certain that we work our butts off making sure that Obama’s message gets out and we take advantage of every opportunity to let anyone who will listen realize that Sarah Palin will only push a McCain presidency even further to the right and force a continuation and perpetuation of the Bush-Cheney regime that we are trying to overcome after eight very difficult years.

The very sad thing is that Barack has been constantly criticized for being just a gifted speech-giver filled with hollow rhetoric and not much to offer. As insulting and untrue as that is, this is exactly what Sarah Palin has done so far. She’s delivered one speech. She has not campaigned for the office of vice-president nor has she sat down for even one interview since she’s been named as the Republican nominee for VP. And just like Obama, she has a record to run on. So far, Obama’s record has been mischaracterized, mutilated and really just unfairly mocked during this convention. I can only hope that Palin’s, which also has been embellished and glossed over depending on the issue in this convention, will be exposed and examined fairly and accurately as this presidential campaign draws toward the finish.