Nitpicking the junk mail

My wife has a number of insanely right-wing, small-minded cousins in the Alabama-to-North Carolina area, and they sometimes like to pass along random emails with a somewhat political bent. And they sent another yesterday. So I decided to take the bull by the horns and answer it, rather than just deleting it. I could reprint it here as well, but that would double the length of this and waste everyone's time. If you get something that follows roughly the following parameters, feel free to cut and paste at will.
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You know, my wife recently was sent an email (apparently copied, unattributed, from somebody's newsletter, but I'm not going looking for it; some of it was copied straight from Wikipedia) about Sarah Palin. Some of the rest of you might have seen it. In the first few paragraphs, it gushes "Details of Palin's personal life have contributed to her political image. She hunts, eats moose hamburger, ice fishes, rides snowmobiles and owns a float plane." I'm really not sure why that would make her politically viable, but I'll let that go.

It starts "Finally an intelligent person selected for VP of the USA." Or a small-minded, petty bureaucrat, but you know, you can argue either way. It then goes on with "PRAISE BE TO GOD!!!!! He answered our prayers!!!!"

Depends on what you pray for, I guess.

Then there's a lot of unimportant biographical stuff about where she grew up. I'll skip that, to get to "Her husband, Todd, is a Native Yup'ik Eskimo." Which kind of makes me wonder why she's been quoted calling Eskimos "Arctic Arabs." That must make for some tensions at home.

It's kind of catchy. "Arctic Arabs." She should work it into a campaign slogan. It's not like a lot of Eskimos are going to vote for her. And actually, Todd is only an eighth Yup'ik. (It's important to get the details right.)

Then there's the passing reference to the fact that "Todd works for BP." That's British Petroleum. Which puts an interesting spin on the fact that Todd likes to sit in on his wife's executive meetings. Is that conflict of interest, or just that Todd doesn’t trust the little woman to make decisions on her own?

Then they talk about her family for a while. I'm not going to make fun of her family... except to point out that Governor Palin pushed the "abstinence only" agenda in the Alaskan schools, because it apparently worked so well in her family.

"She also ran for governor on fiscal conservative agenda" - you know, so did George Bush, and he took a record budget surplus and turned it into a record deficit. Did you know that Bush has borrowed more money than all of the other presidents added together? He's running the country on credit cards. Kind of like what Palin did as mayor, taking a town that owed no money, and running it 22 million dollars in debt.

How is that fiscally conservative again?

"She SOLD the wasteful spending jet (the previous governor bought) on EBay, and made a profit for the state of Alaska!!" Well, no. That's a lie. She put it on eBay, but it didn't sell. So instead, she sold it to a campaign contributor for $300,000 less than it was worth.

No, that doesn't look suspicious at all, does it?

"She stopped the wasteful $$$$ Bridge to Nowhere" (I'm really not sure why somebody felt that sentence needed four dollar signs. Strange.) But that's not quite true either. She supported the bridge, until she had the money in hand. At which time she used it for other projects instead of either building the bridge or giving the money back - I'm not sure whether that's fraud, but it's definitely less than honest.

"She fought the Eco-Nazis to get the polar bears (12,000 more than before) OFF the endangered species list, that were just put there to keep oil companies from being able to drill....) and WON!!!" Well, that's interesting in a lot of ways. First, the polar bear was classed as "threatened," not endangered, and that was because their habitat is shrinking. Secondly, you remember that her hubby works for British Petroleum, right? (Things that make you go "hmmm...") And third, they "won"? When did that happen? They only filed in August. That seems to be a lie, too. (But let's just chalk it up to over-enthusiasm, shall we?)

"She's always had a between 80% & 90% approval rating in the state of Alaska." That's odd. The July 30 Rasmussen poll says that 64% of Alaskans rate her as excellent or good. Not bad, but not "between 80% & 90% approval" (at least, not in any of the schools I went to).

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I suggested that they could feel free to stop sending us stuff like this. Or at least find something a little more honest.

Somehow, I think I'm going to get a little hatemail for this one.

Update: And you know what? I was right.