A Brief Proposition: Attacking Sarah Palin Is Not a Sexist Act (Featuring Gratuitous Use of the Word "Bitch"):
Let's tread into some dangerous waters here, shall we?

On his HBO show last week, Bill Maher attacked Wall Street Journal spoogebag John Fund for defending Sarah Palin's idiotic answers during her interview with Charlie Gibson. Maher said that Fund and others like him were cynics because they believe they can put one over on the stupid people and take advantage of their stupidity. Fund, that goddamn smirk smeared across his face, kept telling Maher and the other guests criticizing Palin, "Keep it coming," because, in his world, criticizing Palin gets her (and, to a lesser extent, McCain) votes.

But let's take it just a bit further. Choosing Sarah Palin as a running mate was not just a cynical political move by the McCain campaign; no, it was a repugnantly sexist move. "What the fuck?" you may ask. "How can it be sexist? She's a chick and that means by definition it's not sexist." And the Rude Pundit would say: "Read on."

You can bet that somewhere, in some office in DC or elsewhere, while trying to figure out which non-Lieberman to pick for VP, some Republican operative said something like, "Hey, get a load of this crazy bitch. Seriously, this Alaska bitch is the looniest bitch we could find, the kind of bitch who'll fuck the whole football team and then say she's still got time for the lacrosse guys to run a train on her and then find Jesus a week later. Motherfuckers at Obama Central won't know what to do with this bitch. The awesome thing about our bitch is the way we can say we love all the bitches. And we'll trick bitches into actually voting for this bitch." That may not be verbatim, but it's probably pretty fuckin' close.

The sexist act is in believing that a large number of women in this country are so stupid and beaten down by the nation's innate sexism that they'll vote for a woman, no matter who she is or what she believes, as long as she seems "like them." It's sexist because if Sarah Palin had a penis (and, frankly, with all the lies coming from the McCain camp, even that's up for discussion) we'd only be talking about her if we lived in Alaska or were getting upset about her Mussolini-like way of leading her state.

(And don't bring up Hillary Clinton. The comparison fails in nearly every way.)

What's sexist is that Palin is being used because of her sex. There are plenty of men McCain could have chosen to shore up the base, most of whom would have sucked it up and voted for him anyways as long as he didn't go all Jewy and pro-choice. Palin is nothing more than the eye candy a con artist uses to distract the marks while he robs them blind. So it's not sexist to go after the woman who will set things back for women in horrific ways. The bottom line is that there's a responsibility to take her down, incumbent upon the media, to proclaim that she's not only a garden variety Republican hypocrite, but a barely educated ideologue who wants to reign with an idiot's understanding of the world.

Palin exists as a candidate to offer another narrative in order to take the focus off Obama as insurgent. As a cyncial political move, as the Rude Pundit's said, it's rather brilliant. And it shows a depth of powermongering in John McCain that'd make Attila the Hun go, "Whoa, there, old man, that's a bit too far." Because even barbarians know that you don't do shit that'll come back and bite you in the ass. Palin is Frankenstein's monster in a JC Penney executive skirt. Obama has to stop trying to reclaim the old narrative and create a new one.

We've begun to hear the refrain that Sarah Palin is someone women (and men) want to have a beer with, the kind of shit we heard with Bush. But you know what? At the end of the night, whoever the Rude Pundit has had a beer with, he'd rather the designated driver take him home.