Seriously, why?

I’ve made a lot of excuses for the Democratic Congress I helped to vote in, two autumns ago. They’ve been hampered by an antagonistic President, of course. They’ve been criticized from the beginning, even by their constituents. Still, they were better than the alternative.

Now, they can kiss my ass.

This is my hometown: Pensacola Beach, Florida.

It looks this beautiful quite often.

I’ve traveled fairly widely, from Hawaii to Rome, and I still think this is my favorite place on earth. I was first dipped into seawater here, as a baby in the late ’70′s, when the beach was nothing more than low concrete block houses and tiki bars.

Now, I try to keep the condos and hotels to my back, and just wander out of the bar with a cool drink in my hand, letting the horizon pull me slowly towards the water. The sand on Pensacola beach, like many places along the Gulf of Mexico, is fine and white like sugar. I have never, in all my life, stepped in tar here.

Thanks to the new pro-drilling bill the House of Representatives signed, that may change.

Bush I, of all people, passed a moratorium on coastal drilling in 1990, protecting the east and west coasts of the U.S., as well as the central and east coasts of the Gulf of Mexico. Bill Clinton continued that moratorium in his early days in office. I was living on this beach at the time, and I could see out of my bedroom window what was at risk. It was the very first political issue I truly cared about and became active in…and it would have made or broken my future support for the President.

And I’m afraid it’s broken my support for our current Congress.

I’ve never considered myself a single-issue voter. I generally hate such narrow-sightedness. But then, I never thought our government would be stupid enough to take this risk.

Alaskans might chant, “Drill, baby, drill!” Let the idiots do it there, then, if they like it so much. I was against ANWR drilling. Then they gave us Palin. To hell with Alaska seceding—I’m beginning to wonder if Florida should.

And before anyone lectures me on how much we need this oil: I’d happily give up my car and never drive again, to protect this beach. Are you that committed to anything?

On sexism.

The Rude Pundit strikes again:

“What’s sexist is that Palin is being used because of her sex. There are plenty of men McCain could have chosen to shore up the base, most of whom would have sucked it up and voted for him anyways as long as he didn’t go all Jewy and pro-choice. Palin is nothing more than the eye candy a con artist uses to distract the marks while he robs them blind. So it’s not sexist to go after the woman who will set things back for women in horrific ways. The bottom line is that there’s a responsibility to take her down, incumbent upon the media, to proclaim that she’s not only a garden variety Republican hypocrite, but a barely educated ideologue who wants to reign with an idiot’s understanding of the world.”

I consider Palin’s selection as VP candidate a success of the feminist movement—not because a strong woman would be in power, but because so many strong women are in power these days, that we finally have the luxury of rejecting the shitty ones.

There are good and bad women, just as there are good and bad men. Thankfully, we are at the point where it wouldn’t harm women’s rights to admit that.

On Palin.

I’m not going to go into too much depth about this. Smarter people than me can split Sarah’s perfectly-coiffed hairs. There are as many levels of hyper-meta-wharrgarbl to deconstruct from McCain’s choice, as there are attention-whore pundits in the world. My gut instinct is that she is political porn, and McCain’s decision to throw her like shiny Mardi Gras beads to conservatives is cynicism of the lowest order.

She’s a gun-totin’ sex symbol.

She’s the freaky librarian—who hunts and rides four-wheelers. She’s the meat-eatin’ mama who can stack piles of cash, and raise a hottie little daughter who obviously puts out. She’s got a little dominatrix edge (she balanced a budget!), but clearly doesn’t mind male control of women’s bodies (pro-life).

In sum, she’s the Conservative Male Wet Dream.

She’s been injected into the Republican campaign like a shot of Viagra straight in the eye, attempting to galvanize the conservative males’ voting peckers in a way that their weak message and limp lack of credibility failed to do.

But Viagra wears off. And our underlying problems—sexually and socially—remain.

Sure, she’s looking good now. That’s her point—the bait and the hook. Republican women place a high value on looking good, at least physically. But what will she look like The Morning After in America? This next administration faces an abominable uphill battle to restore stability and credibility to the United States—assuming of course that they intend to try, it will test the strongest character. Sarah Palin is a hypocrite, and will crack under the pressure.

Not because she’s a woman, but because her character is flawed.

Republicans deserve better.

I’m a Democrat, but I would have been delighted to see Condi Rice picked as McCain’s running mate. Not only is she African-American and a female, thereby one-upping Obama in the spin column, but she’s got credibility and massive international experience. I wouldn’t vote for her, any more than I’d vote for Hillary—I don’t think they’re good people, female or no. But I’d have loved to see the battle between two worthy opponents.

This choice? It stinks of a failed Karl Rove-like maneuver. He wouldn’t even be this obvious. And when your party tries to be Rovian and fails, you know you’ve reached the absolute bottom.

Palin’s been protected from public scrutiny, just like a good woman should be.

She’s been foisted on the collective American consciousness like an object to be consumed, just like a good woman should be.

Her supporters have viciously attacked her questioners and accused them of bigotry, just like they viciously accuse Obama supporters of doing. She, as beneficiary of this defensiveness, need do nothing but sound reasonably sane and look eminently fuckable—her male patrons (and acolytes) will do the rest.

I’m not saying that Sarah Palin’s just a pretty face, so don’t bother accusing me of anti-feminism. I’m saying that that’s all she’s being used as. But that’s classic Republican sexism.

I’d feel sorry for her—but she once fired a school librarian for refusing to remove “objectionable” books.

As a writer, I find that evil…and typical.