Why being a woman is not enough

The long gap in posts is because I've had my son staying, on holiday from his job teaching English in China. I treated his two weeks with me as my midwinter holiday, and we had a great time doing perfectly ordinary things, like having morning tea at the magnificently retro Martha's Pantry, eating lunch at Sweet Mother's Kitchen, and going to see the marvellous Rita Angus exhibition at Te Papa, followed by Mamma Mia (loved all those older women leaping energetically about the place, but I'm afraid poor Pierce Brosnahan was TOTALLY miscast).

But now he's gone and it's back to real life, complete with the advent of yet more rain, and the even more depressing advent of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. She's a woman, yes. But that's sort of beside the point.

As the gorgeous Jon Stewart went to some pains to point out on The Daily Show (10.30 pm Tues-Fri on C4, in case you're missing it), she claims that her pregnant 17-year-old daughter Bristol made her own choice to proceed with the pregnancy, but wants the law to deny all other women the right to any other choice. So she opposes abortion, but supports the death penalty and the war in Iraq and gun rights (she's a staunch member of the National Rifle Association).

She has only recently obtained a passport, and although she is now Governor of Alsaka, her political experience has been mainly as the mayor of a town of 9000 people. And given that McCain is 72 and in far from perfect health, she is literally a heartbeat away from the presidency.

The really scary thing is that McCain is currently (as of 5/9/08) at level pegging with Barack Obama. This does not surprise me. If Obama had been called John Smith, I think he would have stood a much better chance of being elected. But ever since Hillary was defeated, I've feared that too many voters - including too many Democrats - will get into that booth and decide that voting for a non-white man who is half Kenyan, is vaguely connected with Muslims and has a very strange name which sounds uncannily like Osama is just a stretch too far. Sadly the advent of Sarah Palin has made the prospect of a McCain victory even more appalling than it was before.

PS: Elsewoman gets an award! I was immensely pleased to see that The Hand Mirror chose Elsewoman as one of its seven best blogs for the Brilliante Award - yay! Now all I have to do is choose another seven blogs and put the Award pic on this site - but I haven't figured out how to do that yet!