I’m fishing around, looking up “Sarah Palin” on google images.  The first thing that pops up is a cover for Vogue, which is one clue of what I’m pondering.  After that there are a mass of understandable photographs of campaign related and even related occurences, a photograph of Bush, a “Beauty Contest” photograph pops up a few times.  Get a few more pages in and you will see a couple old newspaper photographs from her high school basketball days.  (And a few more pages in and you learn that during her tenure as mayor of that four-digit population town, her municipality was named one of those “Tree City USA”s.  No kidding.  The town I grew up in was a Tree City a few times too… I sort of think it is something you sign on the dotted line for.)

And then, there on page 2, there’s a faux-photograph of someone who looks kind of like her, and enough like her to do a spit-take as you pass over the images – but which cannot possibly be her, but can be used as much by someone piggish enough to pretend it is the case, which I suppose has to be why it is imaged so high.  A self-described “sophomoric sports’ radio show”, from out of Seattle, and in a list of “past guests” is the Governor Sarah Palin — politicos regularly surface on sports’ radio programs for the same reason more national politicos surface on late night talk shows.  The faux-photo shows a saucy looking red head in a cut off Seahawks shirt and no pants bending over — leaning against a Seahawks helmet.

Proceeding apace, the photograph that was used on the front page of today’s Oregonian is placed, shirt skirt at her office or home next to a stuffed bear — with the caption “Nice Gams”.

And you can buy this.  And why is it that when I watch the video on youtube, it looks as if John McCain’s attention keeps gravitating toward her butt?  Skip to 2:53, 4:04, 5:19, 5:44, 6:30 and at around 6:53 it looks as if he is completely unaware that Palin is even talking… but maybe if I looked for that, the same seeming effect would turn up with the Obama / Biden introduction as well?

There may be method to this madness – and let’s just leave aside that sneaking suspicion that McCain just wants to get into Palin’s pants.  By picking Sarah Palin (as opposed to, say, Kay Baily Hutchinson), McCain has ensured two popular culture memes — Palin is a (look her name up on youtube and this video will show up)  “VPILF” and the other one  that Palin is a light-weight (replete with possible hits at the task of raising multiple children and going about her career), both of which are insulting to those unreconciled Hillary Clinton supporters (and perhaps a few seemingly fully reconciled Hillary Clinton supporters) upset about media and cultural and campaign sexism through the Obama versus Clinton campaign.

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