VP Pick Leaves Me with No Choice

I’m childfree, and I am an independent, because I like the luxury of choice. Party, shmarty—just give me a candidate who can get the job done—red or blue, or green, or violet. I don’t care.

I’ve always admired McCain. I like his party outsider status. As the Senator from Arizona, he was the guy you could count on to reach across party lines and kick ass and take names. I like Obama, too. He’s smart but he’s not an egghead, he knows what’s doable and what’s not, given the resourses. He knows where his priorities lie, but he’s not an idealogue.

So I was happy with the presidential candidates, both were a welcomed departure from Dubya, so I was anticipating an interesting campaign season, where the outcome was uncertain. I was the Bachelorette, in the final episode. I was on the edge of my seat. My vote still to be wooed, I was looking forward to the final courtship process. The bended knee.

Then came Sarah Palin, leaving me with just one choice.

It wasn’t hate at first sight. I was pleased there was a woman VP candidate. We shared a few things in common. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, I could be found warming a seat at the hockey rink; my father was a hockey coach, he spent fall weekends hunting moose; there are family movies of my grandmother in a cap with ear flaps dragging a dead moose out of the woods.

So it wasn’t the pitpull with lipstick, frontier hunter/gatherer chick thing that turned me off. It was three simple things:

1. Under her watch as Mayor of Wasilla, victims of rape were expected to pay for their own rape kits.
2. She appears determined to defend abstinence-only education, despite direct and compelling evidence that an alarming number of young people who vow to stay virgins until married abandon ship like rats on a sinking ship, without life vests (read: condoms).
3. She hadn’t travelled outside of the United States and Canada until 2007 when she was Governor, having applied for her first passport so that she could visit Alaska-based troops in Iraq and Kuwait.

If Palin was the candidate for mayor in my hometown, I might overlook the passport thing, but I would be very concerned about the other two. But she’s not running for mayor, she’s running for Vice President, next in line to someone who, if he gets the votes, will be the oldest elected first-term president in our history.

I shudder. I imagine some factory in China doing double shifts trying to fill the next container full with Sarah Palin masks. It will be the scariest thing I see at my door this Halloween.