I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
posted September 8, 2008

9/12/2008 9:50:27 PM

tl;dr

9/12/2008 9:50:41 PM

wow, so much stupid, so little time

9/12/2008 9:52:24 PM

Quote :

"She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God.""

I strongly dislike Sarah Palin. But in the interest of truth I have to note that in her ABC interview she modified her global warming and holy war ideas to be somewhat less wacko.

9/12/2008 10:10:34 PM

i know, right. it really is wacko to believe in a total lie like global warming. who needs actual proof of rising temperatures, ya know? It's much more convenient to look at one side of a glacier and note all the melting while ignoring the other side where the accretion more than makes up for the melt.

9/12/2008 10:14:28 PM

^agreed.

Quote :

"wow, so much stupid, so little time"

9/12/2008 10:15:22 PM

i'm glad you agree that eve is stupid

9/12/2008 10:16:10 PM

burro, your boo Sarah Palin admitted that climate change could be caused by humans! She even said that Alaska is seeing the effects of global warming! are you calling her a liar?? I thought only the leftist media would do such a horrible thing.

9/12/2008 10:21:02 PM

anyone who admits that GW is truth is either lying or is pandering. Take that as you will. But you can hardly suggest that pandering is the territory of only the right, especially in this election, darling. I mean, Barack Obama has had more positions than the Kama Sutra, for crying out loud.

9/12/2008 10:23:18 PM

Quote :

"i know, right. it really is wacko to believe in a total lie like global warming. who needs actual proof of rising temperatures, ya know? It's much more convenient to look at one side of a glacier and note all the melting while ignoring the other side where the accretion more than makes up for the melt."

you couldn't be more wrong.

http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh

9/12/2008 10:25:50 PM

McCain also believes in global warming! In fact, that's gotta be the reason Palin changed her tone. So both the candidates on your beloved ticket are lying, pandering, or morons? gosh I wonder who you could possibly vote for

9/12/2008 10:26:47 PM

i don't give two shits what either candidate thinks of global warming

i'll be dead before it gets too bad. not my problem.

9/12/2008 10:27:32 PM

^^^ I guess you'll need to go check out all of the reports that the temperatures have been stable for the past 7 years, then, buddy.

^^ it won't be either of the main parties, actually. Both of them are panderers. But hey, ignore that your messiah is one, because the other guy is one, right?

9/12/2008 10:29:05 PM

The fact is that we have seen warming trends over the past 20-30 years. Perhaps this is due to natural phenomena. Perhaps mankind is responsible for it. Do you really want to take the risk and not do anything about it?

you mean like this one?


Even if you were correct, 7 years is not statistically significant over the time period measured.

[Edited on September 12, 2008 at 10:33 PM. Reason : .]

9/12/2008 10:29:33 PM

9/12/2008 10:29:55 PM

Quote :

"Do you really want to take the risk and not do anything about it?"

where do i sign up?

9/12/2008 10:30:12 PM

Quote :

"Do you really want to take the risk and not do anything about it?"

Do you really want to take the risk of ruining the world economy and any hope to actually respond to such an event, all in the name of bogus science?

Dude, you might die tomorrow. Clearly you need to get ready for it. Do you REALLY want to take the risk and not do anything about it? Of course not. You need to go to the hospital and have every expensive test done, man.

9/12/2008 10:31:29 PM

so you're not voting McCain-Palin? that makes me feel a lot better!

9/12/2008 10:32:31 PM

Quote :

"Do you really want to take the risk of ruining the world economy and any hope to actually respond to such an event, all in the name of bogus science?"

On the contrary, the United States could spearhead renewable energy, develop new technologies and create a new economy selling these technologies to the rest of the world.

We have a fixed amount of oil. Instead of burn it all in our cars, let's keep some for things that are much more difficult to replace like jet fuel for example.

Whatever. Clearly you don't want to listen or even really discuss this.

9/12/2008 10:38:59 PM

as long as the oil lasts until i'm dead i'll be happy

9/12/2008 10:39:46 PM

ahhh. see now you are talking about something completely different. I'm not against energy independence. I'm just against it when it is solely for the basis of global warming bullshit.

9/12/2008 10:40:33 PM

well good god, what are y'all arguing about?

you both want alternative energies or whatever. who cares what the reason is?

tww will argue about some dumb shit. that's why TSB was made.

9/12/2008 10:41:58 PM

Hey if you want to seriously discuss this go to TSB.

Of course most of you know where I stand. And Nerdchick, quit acting dumb. If both candidates say they believe in GW, do you expect aaronburro to just not vote?

9/12/2008 11:01:14 PM

TSB scares me

9/12/2008 11:04:07 PM

it does usually scare people who are not capable of rationally thinking for themselves

9/12/2008 11:04:53 PM

oh yeah? well how about these apples...



See? I can't do that in TSB.

9/12/2008 11:06:28 PM

i'd drill there

9/12/2008 11:08:32 PM

Quote :

"And Nerdchick, quit acting dumb. If both candidates say they believe in GW, do you expect aaronburro to just not vote? "

I always assumed he was going to vote McCain-Palin. guess not

9/12/2008 11:09:15 PM

shit like this really cracks me up. Why on earth would anyone believe that we had instrumentation and data collection that was accurate to a hundredth of a degree 120 years ago? It makes you wonder when you see a massive spike start occurring during the era when weather stations would have started making the transition to computerized data collection.

9/12/2008 11:21:46 PM

Quote :

"instrumentation and data collection that was accurate to a hundredth of a degree 120 years ago"

it's an average.

9/12/2008 11:23:52 PM

an average of poorly recorded data from a century ago doesn't make it accurate.

9/12/2008 11:29:09 PM

ahaha arguing about global warming

9/12/2008 11:41:34 PM