Palin: New voice, same old inanities

The Republicans have found a bright new voice, with a neat accent and razor-sharp comic timing, to mouth their same old tired inanities.

As a performance, Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was really, really, really good.

Any Democrats who tuned in hoping to see a "moose in the headlights" moment from an overmatched rookie had to be dreadfully disappointed.

This Palin kid can deliver a line with stiletto precision and beaming elan. She can trowel on the family schmaltz as shamelessly as any seasoned pro.

What the vice presidential nominee had a harder time doing was making any sense.

Her great claim to fame as a governor was balancing Alaska's budget by levying a big tax on oil companies.

Yet she insisted we should run screaming into the night at the prospect that Barack Obama might raise taxes on business.

She repeated another claim to fame that is (how to put this politely?) a case of rampant Kerryism. You see, Sarah Palin was for the infamous "bridge to nowhere" before she was against it. Vociferously for it – until it became political poison.   Though she didn't fork over state money for the span, she kept the federal money for other purposes. (The impolite term for what she said about the bridge in her speech would be "lie.")

A lot of questions have been raised about the sloppy vetting of this nominee by John McCain's team. Here's one:  How was it that John McCain, the Biblical scourge of congressional earmarks, never noticed that Gov. Palin has been as avid for these pork-barrel goodies as Bill Clinton is for one more ovation?   Alaska, though styled as a temple of rugged individualism, is in fact just one huge, frozen ward of the federal government. Its state symbol ought to be a palm extended way, way out to that hated "inside-the-Beltway" that Palin bashed so often to such raucous delegate cheers.

And, that, of course brings us to one of the tiredest, most hypocritical, most detached-from-reality Republican tropes. The way Palin delivered it (and delivered it and delivered it, in her charming Wasilla accent) gave it some undeserved freshness.

But, good Lord, is anybody still falling for the absurd riff that Republicans are just a bunch of Mr. Smiths come briefly to the Potomac to do battle with the awful, America-ruining status quo? This mythical status quo is populated, apparently, by "elite media," smug Washington insiders and "do-nothing" Democrats? (If they "do nothing," how could they be so dangerous?)

Dear Republicans: a news flash. You guys have run America for the last eight years, and 16 of the last 24. You've spent untold millions in corporate donations in your quest to get all three branches tightly in your grip. Your pundits rule the airwaves; your grandees rule the salons of Fairfax County. You ARE the status quo. You are the Insiders.

If America is screwed up, awash in red ink, run incompetently, losing its way, then it's ... mostly … YOUR FAULT!

To give Sarah Palin her due, she really hasn't had any impact on anything important in Washington from her perch in distant Juneau. But those people who cheered madly on the arena floor as she promised to join four-term senator McCain in clearing out the rascals? Many of them are themselves the rascals, or the people who provided the money to put the rascals in.

Watching that scene was an out-of-reality experience.

Yet Palin made it seem an exercise in avenging all-American wholesomeness.

She's good.  As a politician, she really is. Last night she crisply sidestepped the Eagleton trap-door her evasions and blunders might otherwise have earned her.

How long her reprieve lasts may depend on how much reality Americans can bear.

Because her speech, which will no doubt poll well, consisted of shouts and salvos from an alternative universe that exists only in conservative imaginations.