Please go away, Sarah Palin.

I can’t take it anymore. I’ve avoided blogging about politics until now but I am so offended by this election campaign that I have to write this.

Her rallying cry “you folks, you just get it!” summarizes everything wrong with the way McCain is allowing his campaign to be run. It is divisive, inflammatory, and intellectually deadening. It encourages people to cheer wildly in favor of their unexamined fears. It takes those fears, which are legitimate and deserve to be discussed openly and analyzed deeply, and encourages people to harden themselves around them. “You just get it!”means “hey people, you can claim to have moral and political conviction and you don’t even have to be able to explain what it is!” It is a rallying cry which encourages people to be complacent and self-righteous.

Elections are an invaluable opportunity for the country to engage in productive conversations that help us all think more sharply about where we stand on matters of critical domestic and foreign policy. How can we accept the nutritionless garbage we are being fed in this campaign? Why do we take seriously a candidate for the number 2 position in the country who stands up in the one and only vice presidential debate and says openly that she doesn’t want to give direct answers to the debate moderator’s questions?! Why are we wasting our time listening to irrational, McCarthyesque challenges about who is more “Pro-America”? We are squandering an important time to examine qualifications and policy plans, and it is our duty as voters to do so.

We are at a critical point in the history of the US. Our moral authority has crumbled, our military successes are patchy at best, and our economic dominance is severly eroded. We need the smartest minds of the century – on both sides of the party line – to guide us into a safe and productive future. I feel cheated by the offensively inadequate ticket the republicans have put to us, and I am baffled that 40% of the country finds it acceptable.

I am reminded of the anecdote my father tells to explain how the obnoxious pretensions of art school culture in New York in the 70s compelled him to drop out of Cooper Union. He said he was in class one day for a group critique. One of his classmates walked in the door, late, swaggered over to the board at the front of the room and pinned up a plastic baggie of feces. He said, “This is a crap I took this morning. It is art. Analyze it.” My father walked out.

This is the way I feel about the republican campaign in 2008, except I don't want to walk out -- I want them to walk out. A president is only as good as the people around him and, in my opinion, McCain has made an unforgivable mistake in appointing this bad joke to be his closest political associate. You can dress it up in lipstick and let it make some feminist-sounding comments about high heels and mom-power, but anyone who doesn’t recognize what’s been pinned up to the board is kidding themselves.