Musings: Think About It

I don’t know what it is about 3:30 a.m. — a clairvoyant friend calls it “the spirit hour” — but I nearly always wake at that time, usually from a vivid, strange dream, and quite frequently I indulge the restless urge to go outside and see what’s happening in that dark, silent realm, and of course, Koko is always good to go.

That’s what happened last night, and after a comforting little visit with the stars I was able to settle down and fall back to sleep, waking up at a more “reasonable” hour, when only Jupiter remained in a sky of palest blue just waiting for the sun to rise and deepen its color.

As we walked, Waialeale’s cloud cap tilted jauntily, then flew off and joined the masses forming around all the horizons, and after releasing a blast of pink, the sun disappeared altogether, leaving the sky gray instead of that vibrant September blue.

I was resting on a bench at a school bus stop when Andy rounded the corner, walking two dogs that belong to his daughters, along with his own, so we joined the gregarious family pack and Andy and I began, as we often do, talking politics.

Gov. Palin was the first on the list. It really irritates me that she’s dodging not only the press, but the public, too, repeating the same tired speech and same old lies, and refusing to take questions until her handlers decide she’s ready.

I’m sorry, but when you’re picked to be VP you’d better be ready to meet the press, and it blows my mind that the media is letting her get away with this. They should be asking questions, and when she refuses to answer, that becomes the story.

Instead we’re supposed to wait, breathlessly, as if its Angelina and Brad releasing their baby pictures, for her interview with hand-picked journalist Charley Gibson of ABC News.

One can only wonder what kind of sucking up he had to do, and concessions he had to make, ala Barbara Walters and her celebrity interviews, to get the assignment at all. And of course, the McCain campaign never would have chosen Gibson if they thought he’d be tough on her.

Speaking of the McCain campaign, I was sent a link to this youtube video prepared by someone who really picked up on McCain’s body language. More amusing was this clip from the Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart skewers right wing talking heads talking out of both sides of their mouths.

And if you’re tired of the McCain as war hero myth, you might be interested in hearing what one of the guys who was in the POW camp with him has to say about McCain’s fitness for the presidency.

Personally, I think someone who has been a POW isn’t the best choice for president. I mean, don’t you think that being imprisoned for years and tortured would kind of tweak somebody’s head? Look at the guys we detained and tortured at Gitmo. They emerge from the experience as shattered shells, and weren’t the Commies in Hanoi supposed to be even more vicious?

Of course, anybody running for president has to be a little bit whacked, or why would they even want the job to begin with? Still, it doesn’t make sense to deliberately pick someone who was psychologically scarred at a tender young age. And if it didn’t affect him, shoots, that’s even worse.

While I find it hard to believe that any thinking person could actually cast a vote for the McCain-Palin ticket, a friend warned me: “Never underestimate the stupidity of the American public,” a statement with which Andy immediately concurred.

One only has to teach college to know it's true, Andy said, because those kids come in and they don’t know anything — aside, perhaps, from how to operate a Blackberry. They’re good at that kind of stuff.

His suggestion: If the Republicans get in again, just go along with them and let them destroy public education, dismantle the NEA, because it would be obvious then that it wasn't working and they'd clearly never taught people how to think.