In the 2012 campaign, it is a lesson of history we should learn from the 2008 presidential race.
Sarah Palin at the time, appeared to those of us not blinded by the obsessive loyalty, or driven by ideology and partisan conformity, to be a disaster, an umitigated and unqualified mistake. There have been many women in politics and roles in government, on both the right and the left, who are not so severely flawed as Palin was and is.
I find myself wondering about the qualifications for this year's right wing candidates, and how many of them are a significant improvement.
Or NOT much of an improvement at all?
Palin just announced she would not 'close the door' on being the candidate selected by a brokered GOP convention. IS the GOP that stupid, that desperate, that flawed? Palin certainly hasn't appeared to learn her lessons, to improve and correct her mistakes or to strengthen her weaknesses.
Anything is possible, but those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
A dramatization of that very history lesson, one which is more accurate than say Tennessee Tea Partiers attempts to make education more dishonest, untrue, and factually INaccurate is this:
Certainly neither of these women in right wing presidential politics, Palin or Bachmann, have the qualities that one finds in women like Hilary Clinton or Condi Rice. It is about quality, not gender, and not ideology, that success and failure hang.
Michele Bachmann would have had different flaws, mostly different weaknesses, but would have been in many ways a poor choice for the GOP and the Tea Party for the same reasons as Palin. The party and the voters appeared to have figured that out; Bachmann, not so much, based on her assertions throughout the campaign before she quit. I guess either God changed his mind after telling her to run for the Presidency, OR, she has been hearing voices in her head that aren't really there all these years. I have always been deeply unconvinced, profoundly skeptical, of the premise that God likes some people, or some countries, better than others.
In any event it appears the religious right, at least some of them, wanted her out, because they did not feel that it was appropriate for a woman to fill the role that was in authority over so many men. Some of our citizens, on the right, are not fully living in the current century, when they believe such things. Heck, if you go back to the Victorian era, and further, you could successfully argue they have missed some very important eras of world history relating to strong women leaders.
Sadly, not only is the right making the same mistakes which have garnered for them record high DISapproval ratings, worse for the Republicans than the Democrats; worse for the Tea Party than the Republicans; but they are doubling down on those mistakes, going further right, hurrying faster off the cliff of extremism and over-reaching arrogance.
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