All-American Girl

Yep, Sarah Palin appears to have snorted cocaine with her addict husband, cheated on him with his best friend business partner, and she had a spate of jungle fever -- which she consummated, prior to marriage.

If she ran on all that, even I might vote for her.

But, then again, she's a quitter.

Cheaters

Putting aside sexting on Twitter, how about trying to rig an election with a bunch of fake candidates?

Wisconsin state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) is standing by the state GOP's new strategy of recruiting fake Democratic candidates for the state Senate recalls -- which have been launched as a Democratic counter-attack on Gov. Scott Walker's anti-public employee union legislation -- in order to force Dem primaries and delay the general elections.

As for playing chicken with the Federal Debt Limit, the top GOP economist is telling his party not to play games:

Contradicting GOP lawmakers who have suggested a US default would not lead to economic disaster, a bipartisan group of budget officials warned on Tuesday that even a brief lapse in payments could trigger a crisis. Among them were Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former CBO director under President Bush and a frequently cited Republican economic advisor.

"It's a bad idea," Holtz-Eakin said at a panel discussion of former CBO heads in Washington. "Little defaults, big defaults; default's a bad idea period and there should be no one who believes otherwise."

Holtz-Eakin has supported the GOP's efforts to secure cuts in exchange for raising he debt ceiling, but made clear that at the end of the day it had to be raised. He cited numerous dangers from a default scenario, such as its effect on the bond market.

"The idea that somehow it's a pro-growth strategy to raise interest rates on a permanent basis in the United States is just crazy," he said. "We need to grow at this point more than anything else."

Let's face it, today's GOoPers are anything but adults:

Robert Reischauer, CBO director under Presidents Bush Sr. and Clinton, said while he could envision a scenario in which a sudden plunge in the stock market shocked both parties into compromising on a deal, it was too unstable and dangerous an approach to trifle with.

"Do I advocate that? No," he said. "Do I think that's risky? Yes. But we're looking for adult behavior here and seeing none. "

Republicans lawmakers have raised eyebrows in the bond market in recent weeks by suggesting that defaulting on US debt as part of a partisan standoff may not have major consequences for the economy. Last week Moody's warned Congress that even approaching the August 2 deadline that the Treasury Department has set before defaulting on their payments would lead them to downgrade US bonds.

Maybe they just want to sink the economy in hopes that that will be their ticket to a victory in 2012.

You know, the Global Depression strategy.

Tragic Women

Scoured the news of the day and these two stories stood out above the sordid fray of the U.S. campaigns and the surge failure in Iraq, two women who have made grave decisions gone tragically, horrifically awry.

On one hand you have Marion Jones, once a young American Olympian and hero, a record-breaker, the fastest woman on earth. Now, at age 32 with two young children, she finds herself sentenced to six months in prison for lying to Federal prosecutors (you know, what El Presidente allowed apparatchik Scooter Libby to get out of), in financial ruin as she is stripped of five Olympic medals and all titles after 2000 erased from the record books.

One imagines she's nothing but contrite, certainly based on her public statements, and got some breaks for going against her ex-coach in a fraud investigation. It's too sad to imagine, this golden girl of Sydney 2000.

Then there's this account in BagnewsNotes of Condoleezza Rice's personal responsibility for coaxing Benizar Bhutto to return to Pakistan:

For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy — and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan's most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington's key ally in the battle against terrorism.

...where she was promptly assassinated:

On October 26th, Wolf Blitzer also received a now highly publicized message from Bhutto, via Siegel, to be disclose only upon her death. It detailed the basic security requirements above, and asked that the reporter make it known that the four police vehicles she had requested to surround her vehicle while traveling were never supplied. ...If you haven't seen the video footage of the assassination, by the way, you might notice that not only was there no escort, but three nearby policemen supposedly tasked to protect Bhutto's car at the moment of the attack where simply idling around.

Blood on their hands.

Marion Jones' cheating meant the diminution of the second place athletes, the ones who seem to have played by the rules and had their careers eclipsed by hers. The blood of her reputation as a human being, as a member of society, whether on the national stage or buying groceries in the supermarket.

Condoleezza Rice, trying so obviously to wash the blood of Iraq off her hands (and, to some of us, some stainage from 9/11) with the renewed yet inconclusive Mideast peace initiative and the stabilizing of Pakistan.

She put her faith in another political woman, one who had once run the country to which she was being spurred to return; and then, with whatever degree of culpability, sent her to a swift and violent grave.