Pit Bull Palin by Paul Loeb

[livvy]

Pit Bull Palin
Paul Loeb

Posted September 11, 2008 | 12:56 AM (EST)

When Sarah Palin joked about herself and her fellow hockey moms as pit bulls with lipstick, she may have revealed more than she intended. She made it sound a compliment--portraying herself and her peers as ordinary mothers who look good but are tough, tenacious, and defend their family at any cost. But do we really want a potential president whose prime trait is an eagerness to bite your throat at any pretext? We already have that: Dick Cheney.

There's a reason why pit bulls have been banned for their lethal belligerence from England, Norway and France, to Miami and Springfield Missouri. They attack indiscriminately, whether other dogs or children or an elderly Seattle-area woman two of them nearly killed this past week. There's a reason you don't say, "Great, a pit bull just moved in. How nice for our neighborhood." Even people who want some protection usually pick other breeds, like German Shepherds, because they know pit bulls might turn on them.

Now some of us admire their tenacity, and that's a virtue, but other dogs are also tenacious - -you can pick them up by the sock or rag they're playing with. But they aren't loose cannons that just might maul your neighbor's five-year-old. You don't want pit bulls running your block, much less the United States. Pit bull presidencies don't work for issues like terrorism, global warming, our declining economy. You can't solve them by simply ripping your enemy's leg off.

Pit bulls have their uses, as junkyard dogs, but most of us reject them for our home. We've seen all too much what a "my way or we'll destroy you" approach has done to our country in the past eight years. The single-mindedness of a pit ball can be useful, but it can also be disastrous. The Cheney crew had this in their obsession with attacking Iraq, even as they were dismissing Clinton-era reports of the threats from Bin Laden. If they hadn't been so focused on attacking their enemies, we might never have embarked on the disastrous Iraq war.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-loeb/pit-bull-palin_b_125555.html

"Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly, email [e-mail] with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles"

on edit: This may have been posted before, but I just received it via email. If it's a repeat, my apologies.