John McCain's Shadow Has More Reflection Than He Does

Even if in jest, former half-term Governor Palin's admission that she may have contributed to the failure of the 2008 GOP Presidential ticket betrays a very real paradox:

“To claim last night, also, our president saying ISIS is not Islamic, um, ISIS says they’re Islamic,” Palin continued. “They are so full of deception that America should be concerned with the policies that are going on. And, as I watched the speech last night, Sean, the thought going through my mind is ‘I owe America a global apology. Because John McCain, through all of this, John McCain should be our president.’ He had the advice, today, still giving it to Barack Obama, and he will not listen to it, about the residual forces that must be left behind in order to secure the peace in Iraq that we had fought so hard for.”

The first sentence is absurd, and insulting to not only largely Islamic nations and groups that US interests intend to ally with, but to the hundreds of thousands of Muslim people slain by extremists boasting this murderous and unorthodox doctrine of indiscriminate slaughter. Leaving aside that Palin's syntax largely consists of intermittent dog-whistles and static mixed with uncertain subject/verb agreement, she makes the case that Senator McCain should be president, but is not, because she agreed to run with him.

She's being entirely too hard on herself. The only reason she was in a position to agree to that unfortunate bargain was that he asked. And he asked, because his campaign had begun in such a perpetual motion of fail-flail that she looked like a good life preserver anchor. (Recall, things got so bad at one point that he needed not only to be propped up by herself, but also a stand-in for Everyman in the form of Joe the Plumber.) She looked like a serious running-mate to him. The individual who went on to blustering with a struck-deer face though a relatively soft-ball Katie Couric interview and made Dan Quayle sound like Marcus Tullius Cicero whenever she opened her word-hole.

It could be worse, of course. Sarah Palin has hardly been the albatross to Sen. McCain's credibility that, say, wanting to arm Gaddafi or, say, ISIL, should be. And yet the fact remains that Sarah Palin is, as these things go, a guest on a putative news-related program doling out foreign policy critiques when she is far better versed with drunken brawls * than the intricacies of basic newspaper-content. And McCain himself is still left claiming that he knows very well who to arm in Syria.  And I would humbly posit this claim is murky at best. But probably less murky than whatever impetus allows for McCain still being put out there by news-outlets as expert in any damn thing when the legacy of his 2008 run, Sarah Palin, follows him like a very loud and wrong shadow.

She is the proof of how unsuited for office he ever was and is.

*About which--you'll find the link comprehensive if not obsessive regarding the Palin Clan's dead common behavior, with such appallingly déclassé touches as a "stretch Hummer", the tacky war-cry of the barely-been: "Do you know who I am?", and the mental image of Track Palin, tipsy and shirtless, as though auditioning for a role on that long-running FOX reality program--Cops. Yes, there is a touch of schadenfreude within that scene--but however did she and the family end up in such a scene? It would appear, a lack of even basic social diplomacy skills, tribal loyalty, and a predilection for violence. And yet, not once has Sen. McCain issued a "global apology" for elevating the status of this unique creature to serious consideration for the Oval Office.