Palin to Pensacola

"I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down."

H.L. Mencken, Last Words (1926)

GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is headed for reliably Republican Pensacola today. Odd choice, unless the ticket is in deep trouble here, too.

The Palin-plays-Gidget act is scheduled to premier at 2 pm in the Civic Center. Local Republicans are enthused, of course. Some measure of their thinking is evident from the words of a typical panhandle resident as quoted in the Ft. Walton Beach Daily News:

Miriama Devine, a 27-year-old Crestview mother of three, brought her year old daughter Meilana with her to pick up Palin tickets. Devine said she can relate to Palin, a mother of five, on a personal level.

"I'm intrigued by her," Devine said. "Just the fact she's like this every day. She's a woman, she has kids, she can hold a job and run a household. She can do it all. She definitely makes me interested in knowing she could run our country."

Right. Hold a job and run a household, just like the other 146,00,000 Americans. Every one of them, of course, qualified to be a heartbeat away from the president. Because we can "relate" to them.

Has there ever been a lower entrance requirement for the White House?

As Matt Taibbi wrote in what has become an instant classic in the Menkenesque mode of political coverage:

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.
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The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters

And a lot of them will be cheering Palin on in Pensacola today.