In Beauty and The Beast, we knew which one was the Beast

JoAnn Wypijewski's September 10th, 2008, article in The Nation shows John McCain's rampantly hypocritcal morality for what it is. As I read through the article, once again I was infuriated by his cynicism. He didn't pick Sarah Palin for her qualifications. He picked her because 'Palin is the sex symbol they've been waiting for, better looking and more real than the ghastly gasbags Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham.'

Remember John's first wife? Carol? The one he dumped because she was in a wheel chair when he returned from Viet Nam, and the 'sight of her appalled him?' He replaced her with Cindy. Wypijewski writes:

At 42 McNasty, as he was called in high school, took up with 24-year-old Cindy, a former junior rodeo queen, and, having boosted his image and his net worth via a marriage vow, soon reverted to the pattern of insults and macho egotism that has typified most of his life. He denigrated her education at USC as a tour through "the University of Spoiled Children." For all but one of several miscarriages, he left her on her own. When she was popping ten to fifteen pills a day to mask her pain and "do everything he wanted," he never noticed. In 1992, in a rage over her gentle teasing about his thinning hair, he exploded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt," a one-two punch hurled in front of three journalists and two aides but unreported until recently, by Cliff Schecter in The Real McCain. On the campaign trail in June he joked about "beating my wife" and took umbrage when others failed to grasp the simple good fun in the remark. In early August he said he'd encouraged Cindy to enter the Miss Buffalo Chip beauty pageant at the high-revving, flesh-swinging biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. It might have been a fine quip except that up on the stage with her daughter Meghan, staring out toward the throng where a sign urged Show Ur Tits 4 McCain, Cindy had the thin, fixed smile of endurance, not joy. Just before the Palin pick, Mrs. McCain was so brittle that a supporter's energetic handshake put her in a cast. With the press and vast swaths of the country swooning over the Obama family, John needed a new queen.

And the new queen is Miss Wasilla 1984, a woman who believes dinosaurs and man walked together on an Earth created 6000 years ago. Lovely. Even Cindy McCain feels this is a perfect match.

She is Rush Limbaugh's wet dream. "Sarah Palin: babies, guns, Jesus, hot damn!" he crowed. "We're the ones that have the babe on the ticket!" Never before has a political woman been pictured so often in a T-shirt, armed--Rambette. Never before in a major political figure has the image of Mother been merged so readily with fantasies from porno. "You Go, GILF," proclaim buttons on Republican chests, that is, Governor (or Grandmother) I'd Like to Fuck. McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis said that "this election is not about issues; this election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates," as cynical a statement as any Republican has made. This election is not about issues, it's about personality.

JoAnn Wypijewski refers to the Biblical Book of Esther. King Ahasuerus dumped his queen, Vashti, and held a beauty pagent to replace her. Esther was his Miss Wasilla, 1984. However, Sarah Palin, a biblical literalist, will know the outcome of this story. Esther enables her people to engage in bloody slaughter against the king's other subjects, maneuvers for the public execution of his closest adviser and the man's sons, sees her de facto father become the de facto king; in sum, sabotages and unmans Ahasuerus.

We have seen Sarah Palin in action. She ranges between absolutely idiotic to charming and cagey. She's played all sides against the middle, from using sexuality as a tool to claiming her Christian values, from supporting the Bridge to Knowwhere to opposing it when the politics of that support became untenable. She's Anita Bryant with a high-powered rifle. And, she can stick the knife in your back, and twist it with a smile.

John McCain may have met his match, and he may have unleashed this disaster on all of us.