Sarah Palin, too weird.

Yeah, but McCain created his own liability. Even today, he speaks well of Palin. The conservatives have lost their freq'n minds!

edgar, I think you hit the head! Dumbing down seems to work for the conservatives. However, they can't see their party getting smaller and smaller. The 64 thousand dollar question for us today is how much of the votes will she get in 2012? How much of the conservative liberals and moderates will she win?

You refer to Palin as a threat to the lefties. You must know that, importantly, she is a threat to the country.

I was shocked when Pat Buchanan recently said that the Republican nomination is Palin's for the asking. Is that true?

If Palin is a threat to the lefties in this country, we're in real big trouble!~ We'll have a president that doesn't read, doesn't answer questions, and thinks she has foreign experience because her state sits between Russia and Canada.

How will she ever lead on foreign affairs, our economy, federal budget, and recruiting the best into her administration when she hasn't a clue how diverse and the skills needed for every post? We all know what happened when Bush recruited his team; total incompetence.

She has been taken seriously for a year, she has the support of more than the standard 8% of the truly ignorant and/or crazy......we already know that we are in trouble as a collective.

AS a collective, she has no chance of winning the presidency. Her max votes will be 22% - those who voted for Bush, and continues to support him to this day.

Some people still can't see all the damage Bush has done to our country and the world at large. Even after proving that Bush was an incompetent, approved torture, broke domestic and international laws, and couldn't even speak the English language properly.

There's no cure for stupid.

Finn's "they talk about her, therefore they are scared of her" formulation is Limbaugh-stupid. We'll assume that Obama is talked about by the right perhaps 100X as much as Palin, therefore the right is 100X as scared of Obama.

Conservatives are despairing about future electoral chances, of formulating policies which the electorate find compelling, and of finding a leader to help them out, thus the nearly entirely negative thrust of everything they are doing presently (hurt Obama is the singular and over-riding strategy).

We (liberals) can only hope that the conservative movement continues to forward this lady as a representative of what they stand for and value. And we can continue, happily, to assist them in putting her front and center.

They won't need much push or encouragement, because they're doing it all by themselves. It's a hoot!

CI

As one of the bright boys at The Democratic Strategist put it recently, a very significant problem for the modern RNC is that they actually believe what they believe.

In regards to what the RNC may believe, i direct your attention to my signature line (which, for some reason, i can't see here):

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.

-- Samuel Clemens

set

What a bright and clear-eyed man he was.

Don't get too excited, as the liberal Democrats are no less separated from where the mass of the collective is. It is time to drive a stake through both parties, to come up with something new and better. Both parties have proven that they can't work together, that they either don't know or don't care what is best for America, have both proven unable to engage in reform of either themselves or Washington. The longer we wait to get rid of them the worse our problems will get.

hawkeye, That would seem to be the only solution from the current divisiveness of the two major parties, but that will never happen. It would be simple if we could drive a stake into both parties, and start anew, but that is as far-fetched as getting rid of much of the problems we face as a country today. We have a "yes" party and a "no" party with some people who call themselves "moderates."

We know the divide is too great when the "other" party would promote Sarah Palin as their key candidate for the president of our country.

"Hope" is a word we'll need to keep in the recesses of our mind, so that in a few decades, this prominent division in our country lessens to some workable level. The young-uns will have to do a much better job than those of us who will be gone by then.

the polarity of the parties is not a problem, it is a strength of the American system. The problem is that neither party is fighting for America, they are both fighting for their petty self interest. Democrats are the ones who just recently rushed though a sham $700 billion stimulus plan (it was a $700 billion candy distribution bill), a democratic administration is the ones that illegally used TARP money to save two auto companies and then made a mockery of Bankruptcy law to save them from themselves, so don't get all pious on me. Both parties may not be equally offensive, but they are near enough to being equal for me to despise both of them equally.

hawkeye, I couldn't agree with you more - especially on the bailout of the auto companies. The government has no business rescuing poorly managed companies. The biggest problem I see is that many taxpayers without the same pay level and benefits are bailing out those who by their own accord (mostly through greed and incompetence) ran their companies into bankruptcy. That's not fair at all.

When I look at the history of our country since I was a child, many things have changed in the way our government is run. Since we are the culprits that voted these yokels into office, we have created the problems. How that can be changed is the issue of our day. Can we change it?

Ya, it is called having a will, and then imposing our will upon those who in theory serve us. So long as we claim that we are to busy with our private lives to care or to deal and say "let someone else deal with it" the problem will never get solved. Who was it that said that a "little revolution now and then" is a necessary component of democracy?? I think that it is time.

However, the interesting dynamics that happens to elected officials is that most people who reelect incumbents think their representative is good, but congress as a whole is bad. How do we overcome this problem?

the first step would be to end the ability of Congress Members to use the US treasury as a slush fund for their gifts of pork....that is to say reform the way the US government decides how to spend money. Bureaucrats should decide, not elected officials, and no one should be taking the credit. Congress is supposed to set the priorities, make the general rules, not decide what individual projects get funded and which ones don't.

Handing out candy is fun though, and it empowers the members of Congress. I don't expect to see any reform until the citizens demand it.

All levels of government are guilty of passing out candy. They really don't watch their spending, and rarely if ever save for that rainy day. Most governments are showing such huge deficits, they're cutting away at the meat now. The biggest problem I see is they're cutting school funding while they pass out freebies (more sweets) to too many people.