An open letter to Sarah Palin (that has nothing to do with poetry)

[Joanne98]

Dear Sarah Palin:

I’m a pretty open-minded woman. You and I really couldn’t be much further apart on the political spectrum, but I pride myself on being a person who genuinely listens, and who likes to be persuaded. Until about a year ago, your running-mate was one of the voices I most looked forward to hearing-- John McCain was, I thought, a person who thought independently, and while I disagreed with him on most things, that “straight talk” earned my respect. Senator John Kerry delivered a pretty remarkable speech at the DNC that pointed out the problem with the John McCain of 2008:


“I have known and been friends with John McCain for almost 22 years. But every day now I learn something new about candidate McCain. To those who still believe in the myth of a maverick instead of the reality of a politician, I say, let’s compare Senator McCain to candidate McCain.

Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once denounced as immoral. Candidate McCain criticizes Senator McCain’s own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you’re against it.

Let me tell you, before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself. And what’s more, Senator McCain, who once railed against the smears of Karl Rove when he was the target, has morphed into candidate McCain who is using the same “Rove” tactics and the same “Rove” staff to repeat the same old politics of fear and smear. Well, not this year, not this time. The Rove-McCain tactics are old and outworn, and America will reject them in 2008."

If John McCain is elected President in November, it will be disheartening, dispiriting, and dismaying, not only because it will mean another four years of failed Bush-Cheney policies, but because the mind and heart at work in the Oval Office will have been so weakened and diluted by the journey there. This is a man who shepherded campaign finance reform through the Senate, who now adheres to the Karl Rove playbook. This is a man whose biography is, of course, impressive, whose story is inspiring, and whose experiences have shaped who he is. When waterboarding (remember waterboarding?) was getting a lot of attention and the candidates for the Republican nomination were being asked whether or not they thought it was torture with some frequency, Rudy Giuliani said “It depends on how it’s done <...> It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.” John McCain’s response was that “people who have worn the uniform and had the experience know that this is a terrible and odious practice and should never be condoned in the U.S. We are a better nation than that.” He was even more clear a few months earlier on The Daily Show:


“I’d close Guantanamo Bay and I’d declare that we never torture another person in American custody.”

At least he thought so until February 13th, 2008, when Senator McCain voted in opposition to the Intelligence Authorization Bill-- a bill that would extend the Army’s ban on torture to include intelligence agencies. It passed through the House and the Senate, but was vetoed by President Bush, who said such a provision “would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror."

So the John McCain I respected seems to have withered into yet another politicians whose convictions run a distant second to his ambitions. A McCain presidency would be even more heartbreaking than the last eight hellish years, because frankly, McCain knows better. He should be better than all this mess.

However, President McCain wouldn’t be enough to make me move to Canada.

On November 3rd, 2004, when I sat sadly in a rehearsal studio in Kalamazoo, Michigan with seven or eight of my closest friends, the big ‘run for the border’ was a topic of significant discussion. This was a group of people with a lot to lose. They were, and are, all artists, and not only would funding and support for the arts clearly be further reduced under the continuing Bush administration, but creativity and expression seem to shrink and wane in certain political climates. Several of them were gay, and weren’t looking forward to four more years of being told they were ‘less than’ by the federal government. A few of us had loved ones in the military-- my boyfriend at the time was stationed in Tikrit on his second tour of duty, and another good friend had a brother in Baghdad. None of us liked the idea of somehow condoning the practices of the Bush administration by continuing to live and pay taxes in a society defined by them. And so, we talked about leaving. At the end of the discussion many of us, myself included, had come to the conclusion that to leave now would be wrong, and somehow cowardly. My friend Joel pretty plainly articulated that he thought it was the responsibility of the intellectually curious, of the artists, of the voices of dissent, to stay and do our part to make our country a better place. It was our job to ask the questions, and if all the people who could do that left, then nothing would ever get better. It’s a conversation that stayed with me, and I’ll feel the same way about a McCain presidency if we’re so unlucky. There’s very little that could make me abandon ship.

Which brings me, Ms. Palin, to my point:

If you get anywhere near the Oval Office, my vagina and I are moving to Canada.

Y’see, Sarah, I’ve been paying attention. I’ve read a lot about you at this point. I’ve listened to a lot of opinions. I watched your speech at the RNC. I watched your interview with Charlie Gibson. As information trickled out, I took most of it with a grain of salt-- clearly there are operatives in both parties that will do or say anything to take out a politician, and so I paid no mind to the reports that your newborn baby was actually your daughter’s, or your support of Alaskan secession, or ‘Troopergate’, or any of the other ‘scandals’ that were unearthed in the days following your very sudden appearance on the national stage. I even tried my best to not be irritated when you invoked Hillary Clinton’s primary bid in your first speech as a part of the McCain campaign. These things will fade away, and we’ll be left with substantive information, I told myself -- she’s clearly conservative, but she’s probably not the book-burner they are making her out to be, and there’s no way she’s such an enemy of women’s rights.

So imagine my surprise to discover, a few weeks later, how much of it was true.

I know you’re not here to please ‘the liberal media’, Sarah, but if you pick up a copy of yesterday’s New York Times, or today’s Washington Post, you’ll find some interesting information about your time as mayor of Wasilla, as well as your journey to the Governor’s mansion. It takes a real maverick to make women pay for their own rape kits. Only a real reformer would tell three museum employees that only two of them could stay and that they had to choose which one of them got fired. (They all quit, the haters.) You may be a Washington outsider, but it’s pretty clear that you’re one-hundred percent crooked politician.

So, you surround yourself with people who won’t disagree with you, and you see to it that voices of dissent are silenced, and you do it all with bravado. You play fast and loose with the truth. This is nothing new. It’s all very ‘George W.’ I have faith that the constitution will keep you the hell away from my library, my pen and any theater I happen to be in.

However-- and this is a big however-- I have zero faith that it will keep you the hell away from my reproductive system.

It won’t keep anyone else away from it, either, I know. But here’s the difference: you insist on saying, over and over again, that you’re doing this for ME. Let me be clear: You. Are. Not.

I don’t care that you have a vagina. I don’t care about your lipstick. I don’t care about you playing hockey mom to your five kids-- and, by the way, you lost any chance you had at getting my mother’s vote when you said that you didn’t even hesitate when John McCain asked you to be VP. “Either she’s lying,” she said, “or she’s a terrible mother, because no mother I know would say yes to something like that, knowing what all the media scrutiny would mean for her kids-- especially her poor daughter. She knew that girl was pregnant, and even if she wasn’t, what kind of person doesn’t hesitate before deciding to do that to her kids?”

The point is, Ms. Palin, that you do not speak for me. You keep saying that ‘the women of this country aren’t done yet!’ You keep saying you’re doing this for me. I’m not that stupid. I’m not only willing to listen to people who disagree with me, I’m eager to, but only if they’re telling me the truth. You and your running-mate seem to think that the women of this country can be hoodwinked by a couple of jokes about hockey moms, by making community service sound like a waste of time, by giving the same speech with the same soundbytes and lies over and over again. You think that you can get people to think that this is a step-forward for women just by saying it is. What’s the difference between a hockey mom and an ideological Trojan Horse?

There are a lot of people writing about you right now, Sarah, and a lot of them are women, and many of those women are more articulate than I, and better informed. I expect you’ll continue in the Bush tradition of not reading the opinions of those who disagree with you, even if they’re members of the sisterhood you claim to be so proud of-- so I doubt you’ll see this piece by Eve Ensler, or this one, by Erica Jong, or this one by Maureen Dowd, or this one, by Naomi Foner. I doubt you’ll watch Tina Fey’s dead-on portrayal of you on last night’s Saturday Night Live. I don’t have anything to add that these women and others have not already said, and said better. But I needed to say -- stop using me as an excuse. Stop saying you’re doing this for me. Take all the energy you’re using when you trumpet Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments and start to educate yourself about all the things you just plain don’t know. Or don’t. Hopefully come November you'll be back in Alaska, where you can keep an eye on Russia for President Obama, and it won't matter.

But please, stop speaking for me. Please, please, please, keep my vagina out of it. It won’t vote for you, either.

http://allisonshoemaker.blogspot.com/2008/09/open-letter-to-sarah-palin-that-has.html