Wednesday October 29, 2008

McCain’s goodlooking liability

On the campaign trail
By M. VEERA PANDIYAN

Dan Simon didn’t mince his words when asked to describe the Republican Party’s vice-president candidate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

“She’s an idiot. A politically immature woman, A complete idiot who just doesn’t get it. It is a joke that she is running for vice-president,” he said.

Simon, a human resources manager who is attending the Human Society for Human Resource Management’s Diversity Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, is from South Dakota, a state known for backing Republicans in presidential elections.

He used to be staunch Republican supporter too but not anymore.

“I’m voting Barack Obama. He’s the only one who’s speaking rationally and sensibly in these trying times. People believe that he can turn this country around,” he said.

Simon has voted for Republicans in most presidential elections. He supported Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr, Bill Clinton (Democrat) in his second term and although he didn’t say it, I suspect he voted George W. Bush too.

Asked if most people in South Dakota were thinking like him these days, he said the state still leaned towards Republican and people like him were the exceptions.

Simon said McCain exposed either his poor sense of judgment or his weakness in compromising with the powers in the Republican Party and picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.

“He is 72 years old and has undergone treatment for cancer. If anything happens to him, she will be president. God forbid, If that happens, I will migrate to Canada,” he said.

Simon said he did not believe that McCain genuinely wanted to pick her but was told to do it so that the Republicans would also have their historic first woman vice-president on the ticket. He said Palin was also seen as somone who could bring rally the ultra right ground.

“He must be regretting it because she’s become an embarassment and she’s dragging him down,” he said, adding that the conflicts between the aides of McCain and palin were already beginning to show publicly.

Simon’s views reflect those shared by a large segment of traditionally republican supporters. Most polls show that the majority of Americans consider Palin as unqualified for the office.

Most Republican leaning newspapers have endorsed Obama for president over McCain for the same reason. Ironically, the list includes the Anchorage Daily News the most influential paper of Alaska, Palin’s home state.

In its endorsement, it said: Obama displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand. The same cannot be said of Sen. McCain.”

The scientific community has also been expressing its disgust with Palin with some of the ignorant things she has been saying lately. The harshest came from PZ Myers a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota.

Myers, who was shocked by Palin’s speech last week in which she claimed that she wanted more support for children with disabilities, more tools to test for disorders, but decried the expense of scientific research.

She reportedly said:” Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense.

“Sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Myers responded in his popular blog:

“ I am appalled. This idiot woman, this blind, shortsighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks basic research and the international research community. You damn well better believe that there is research going on in animal models.

What does she expect, that scientists should mutagenize human mothers and chop up baby brains for this work?

Yes, scientists work on fruit flies. Some of the most powerful tools in genetics and molecular biology are available in fruit flies, and these are animals that are particularly amenable to experimentation.

Molecular genetics has revealed that humans share key molecules, the basic developmental toolkit, with all other animals, thanks to our shared evolutionary heritage (something else the wackaloon from Wasilla denies), and that we can use these other organisms to probe the fundamental mechanisms that underlie core processes in the formation of the nervous system — precisely the phenomena Palin claims are so important.

This is where the Republican party has ended up: supporting an ignorant buffoon who believes in the End Times and speaking in tongues while deriding some of the best and most successful strategies for scientific research.

In this next election, we’ve got to choose between the 21st century rationalism and Dark Age inanity. It ought to be an easy choice. “

The Star’s Associate Editor M. Veera Pandiyan is observing the US presidential polls at close range under a programme organised by the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ) and the US State Department.

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