{pic by sloomis08}

Liberals and progressives alike are understandably pleased about would-be Vice President Sarah Palin’s atrocious performance in an interview with Katie Couric on CBS Evening News last week. After all, Palin demonstrated her ignorance of both economics and foreign policy with such incoherent brilliance that even veteran comedienne Tina Fey was hard pressed to outdo her. One might reasonably hope that, upon seeing her incompetence so vividly displayed, some erstwhile supporters of the McCain-Palin ticket might have second thoughts.

Alas, knowledge and experience are not essential qualifications in the eyes of most Palinophiles. As Shankar Vedantam points out in the September 29 Washington Post, the political behavior of most partisans, left and right, is based more on a sense of herd identity than on ideological beliefs or intellectual analyses of issues. Moreover, McCain’s selection of Palin was intended to mobilize the white evangelical Christians who infest the Republican base—a group that tends to hold the cerebral cortex and its elitist functions in low regard. According to polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 65 percent of white evangelicals believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible—meaning that, even at the dawn of the 21st century, they are still unable to comprehend the difference between a science text book and a collection of religious parables.

Palin may be an idiot, but she is no more of an idiot than her supporters. So one must not be too quick to assume that she will lose the support of her fans just because she advertises her idiocy.

{pic by Kaptain Kobold}

There are many reasons to question the competence and qualifications of the Republican Party’s newly minted vice-presidential candidate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Her level of political inexperience on the national stage makes freshman Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama look like a seasoned veteran. She moralistically trumpets a brand of home-taught, abstinence-only, anti-choice sex education that failed dismally within her own family, transforming her into an unlikely advocate of teen pregnancy and teen marriage. But, most disturbing of all from an intellectual perspective, she apparently believes that evolution is a figment of the liberal imagination.

This raises a fundamentally important question when it comes to evaluating her readiness to assume a position of authority: Does she also believe that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are real? If she is ready to go on “faith,” blithely ignoring science, evidence, logic, and common sense in order to accept the Bible’s literary parable of creation as literal truth, then how can she make rational decisions on matters of public policy? Creationists have an uncanny ability to confuse fact with fiction, reality with flights of fancy. When this unique ability is applied outside of a religious context, it is usually referred to as “delusion” or “psychosis” rather than “faith.” Regardless, one need only look at the disastrous global legacy of George W. Bush to see what can happen when power is entrusted to someone with a predilection for willful ignorance and a blissful disdain for ideologically inconvenient facts.