Maureen Among The Moose

You know, I imagine there's only one thing that's been in as many different hotel rooms as I have: the Gideon Bible. Don't tangle with me on the Good Book. I must've read it through at least a dozen times.

-Sky Masterson, Guys and Dolls

‘Barbies for War!’
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 16, 2008

Maureen Dowd is still taking it upon herself to emphasize Sarah Palin’s excruciatingly evident lack of foreign policy expertise.

The Wall Street Journal reported that McCain is taking Palin to the U.N. General Assembly next week so she can shake hands with some heads of state. You can’t contract foreign policy experience like a rhinovirus. To paraphrase the sniffly Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls,” a poy-son could develop a cold war.

Cold sore is more like it. Dowd put one her traveling boots (go-go or Army, it doesn’t matter which) to get a feel for the Artic atmosphere that spawned the Palin-nomena. She is so stupefied to be among the hoi polloi that she resorts to serial Alliteration Alerts®:

I sautéed myself in Sarahville last week.

I wandered through the Wal-Mart, which seemed almost as large as Wasilla, a town that is a soulless strip mall without sidewalks set beside a soulful mountain and lake.

In the midst of that, she even pulls off the soulless strip mall/soulful mountain Dowdversion®. Maureen’s anthropological expedition takes her to a Wal-Mart and an alliterative CaffeinatedBeverageEmporium named after the local large cold weather ruminant.

I had many “Sarahs,” as her favorite skinny white mocha is now called, at the Mocha Moose. “I’ve seen her at 4 a.m. with no makeup,” said manager Karena Forster, “and she’s just as beautiful.”

“Skinny white mocha,” indeed. Now there is a metaphor just begging to be set free. Speaking of freedom, Palin’s religious establishments of choice believe that sexuality is a choice. And offers help to those that have made bad ones.

In Anchorage Saturday, I went by a conference conducted by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and supported by Sarah’s current church, the Wasilla Bible Church, about how to help gays and lesbians “journey out” of same-sex attraction.

And in her talks with tattooed former teenage mothers and ex-gay evangelicals, she comes across a Fairbanks educator that gives what may or may not be a compliment.

R. D. Levno, a retired school principal, flew in from Fairbanks. “She’s a child, inexperienced and simplistic,” she said of Sarah. “It’s taking us back to junior high school. She’s one of the popular girls, but one of the mean girls. She is seductive, but she is invented.”

And we know what happens to Mean Girls in the movies. With Maureen tracking her back to her home turf, Sarah is going to learn that in trying to be the Queen Bee, she isn't in the bush leagues anymore.