Sacrificing the Virgin Sarah Palin

Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein has a great article in HuffPo this morning. After reading Gerard Bigelow's piece in Harpers.org (linked in an earlier post), I'm beginning to understand a word that has long confused me: ideology. We use it as a euphemism for mythology, religion, and a person's beliefs.

I'm taking the liberty to highlight uses of mythology and psychology.

Who was the big loser? In an historic fortnight that had already underscored his erratic nature, John McCain.

The analysis begins.

Sarah Palin's task was an impossible one: to demonstrate that she is ready to be president of the United States. McCain put her in that impossible position; and her performance -- all prep and no depth -- demonstrated the bind he has put himself in....Yes, he "energized the base" with his Hail Mary pick of Palin as a running mate.

The McCain campaign is trying to manufacture a robotic Princess Palin. She's the "virgin" to be sacrificed on the altar of McCain's volcanic ambition for power. Kinda like the way we put our troops in impossible situations, expecting them to spin the carnage of war into gold overnight. Anyone with eyes to see sees right away: she ain't no virgin, and the US has feet of clay. ' So no looking! The Emperor does too have clothes on! The president hasn't gone to a soldier's funeral therefore there haven't been any soldier's funerals. We only kill the right people, never civilians. Killing innocent civilians for political purposes is murder, we don't murder. When we kill innocent civillians, it's the enemy's fault, always.'

Time after time, Biden had to tell Palin what John McCain's real record is -- as instance after instance -- she misrepresented it (or misunderstood the legislative process), repeated easy slogans and bromides and, for the most part perhaps, offended the intelligence of voters who are not already die-hard, ideological proponents of right-wing Republicanism, creationism, or simplistic solutions to tough problems.

She delivered a sermon to The Base. It was more myth than fact. Secularists use "ideology" as a euphemism for mythology, psychology, and/or religion. Here's another euphemism:

his party's reigning dogma and cultural-warrior-infantry

So when the Other is of your own society, they have dogma and engage in a culture war; if the Other isn't of your society and especially its dominant mythology ["In God We Trust" is on every coin]), then those people are religious fanatics, insane, monstrous. We have "cultural-warrior-infantry," they have martyrs, jihadis, mujahedin, and all sorts of weird things.

John McCain's state of mind today,

But we're not impugning McCain's beliefs, we're not even going to bring out into the open the subtext of the words in blue, we're just going to dis them with our own secret faith: Newtonian mechanics applied to the human psyche. Our great Western hubris is, 'The cosmos is a machine, and our dominance of it is evidence of the favor of our god, Science. Other people believe in myths. We are Frankenstein the Scientist, we know better.''

Truth is, we are Frankenstein and the Monster.