Yes, it's a woman!

American politics never cease to amaze me. Having systematically selected the 'only votable' species for over two centuries: a wealthy white, middle-aged man with good Christian values and a wife with sparkling teeth, the World's Greatest Democracy©, economic powerhouse and self-styled Most Advanced Nation On The Planet has woken up, in 2008, to the existence of women. Having discovered black men in 2007 I suppose it was no surprise to see this nation of extremes go the whole hog and offer a potentially powerful soapbox to someone who calls her children Snap, Crackle and Pop and spends her free time murdering defenceless animals. This political heavyweight has already alluded to the possibility of declaring war on Russia, so one can only assume that news of the Soviet Bloc's demise has not yet reached Alaska. She'll be heartbroken when she finds out about John Lennon and his marriage to Cynthia.

The Republicans must have said to themselves: "Those Democrats, they had one of them woman things with those bumps on the front and 18 million people voted for her to be their candidate. Let's see if we can find one, too". Never the sharpest tools in the box, Republican aides set out on foot from Washington DC with diagrams of the strange species they were looking for and clearly couldn't find one until they reached Alaska. And what a one they got. Goodness only knows what would have happened if the be-lipsticked pitbull was out strangling fish the day the politicos called; John McCain would have ended up with a seal or a former shot putter from the other side of the Bering Strait. I can only hope that Sarah Palin's media honeymoon is as short as the average teenager's attention span and that she'll be exposed as the rather dangerous folly she really is.

Women in politics have a chequered history. Ségolène Royal is still as much of a joke as she was in 2007 and the mere mention of Margaret Thatcher's name, eighteen years after she left power, still makes some people reach for the whisky. I don't know much about either Golda Meir or Mrs. Gandhi but Israel has always been able to stand up for itself and India seems to reinvent itself every few years.

So if anyone fancies another spurious, illegal war with all the terrorist threats it will probably entail, put on your silly hat and holler for Palin; a tandem of her and that reactionary fool McCain might end up making us nostalgic for the current incumbent.