Bewitched by Sarah Palin?

I've been watching this woman - Sarah Palin. She's definitely conservative, definitely manipulative, definitely confident, definitely a bit retarded, and definitively the perfect Republican candidate to follow in the rich tradition of GW Bush. She looks better than Bush, but she's by no means as capable of making us laugh. In fact, she gives me the shivers.

Just when I was wondering where I should start about this creature that the Republicans have unearthed and unleashed on the American people as their probable next Vice President, this article came today on Yahoo! news.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080925/ap_on_el_ge/palin_witchcraft_blessing

According to this article, Sarah Palin is receiving some kind of holy protection from witchcraft! I have always believed that religion is a personal thing, but if people are using their religious beliefs to ask for votes, I don't think they can hope to be immune to their faith being questioned in more ways than one. But to believe in the power of witchcraft is simply... priceless!

Can you imagine if you were one of the geniuses on the cutting edge of America's science and technology and you are about to join hands with ten other countries in sending a manned mission to one of the moons of Jupiter and your Vice President comes running in with her witch hunter and wants you to form a ring around the launch pad to pray for the mission to ward off a curse? Now, maybe hanging the head of a moose on the windshield (facing outward of course) of the spacecraft would help scare away some of the evil spirits on the way!?

This is who the Republicans have signed on to represent you, America! I haven't even got to the scary thoughts yet. So, what's the big deal - believing in God, believing in witchcraft, what's all the noise about? True, it all comes down to some things we believe in that scientific reasoning cannot agree with. Like creationism that Sarah Palin wants included in school curriculae. That can be argued against and any rational mind will tell you that you cannot "educate" someone in something that has to be "accepted" at face value. The counter argument will always be that since you cannot conclusively prove that there is no God, you cannot say creationism is invalid. This is not even the cycle of debate I am about to engage in.

The most important characteristics of leadership are the ability to understand information, process it efficiently, and be able to take decisions based on the merits of "knowledge" not "belief". So, when you have a leadership that is more based in belief than in knowledge, you are bound to have an inability to assimilate information, an inability to process it without dogma, and the decisions and actions that result from these inabilities are bound to be ineffective. Sarah Palin is a candidate for precisely those kinds of misjudgements, decisions and actions.

The biggest danger of belief systems is that it provides the framework to shift responsibility on elements beyond human control. If an oil tanker hits a rocky reef and leaks thousands of gallons of oil and causes an awful amount of environmental damage, it would be very hard to assure the insurance company that witchcraft could be one of the reasons for the mishap. Sarah Palin must believe that every oil tanker that makes it safely to port is because of some prayer that warded off "all sorts of witchcraft"!

America, please don't slide to such low levels. The laugh has lasted long enough. When we hear about your private entrepreneurs making it to space on their own, it makes us happy. When we hear of one of you in a San Francisco garage making a plug in hybrid car go 200 miles in one charge - That is the America that we'd like to see more of. If that's what you want, what witchcraft can possibly stand in the way?