Daniel McCarthy on mixing beauty and politics and the McCain-Palin ticket

Well, if you must vote, other things being equal, cast your ballot for the most repellent politician available. Let’s have more stumpy, squinty, sausage-fingered Denny Hasterts and Bella Abzugs. Inner beauty and outer beauty don’t always accord, but let’s do our best to see to it that they do in politics. There shouldn’t be anything glamorous about the class that inflates away our currency and stirs up hornets’ nests around the world. It probably is no coincidence that the more presentable our blow-dried pols have become the more complacent the public has grown.

Which is why Sarah Palin may actually be worse than her superannuated running-mate. No one has shown any substantial policy differences between the two of them. But whereas McCain is cranky, stale, and cadaverous, Palin puts a sweet seductive smile on executive aggrandizement and perpetual war. She’s a spoonful of sugar to mask the bitter taste of strychnine. But, make no mistake, that’s what a John McCain presidency will be – lethal poison for what’s left of our republic.

~ Daniel McCarthy, "Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice? ," LewRockwell.com, September 3, 2008