It's my party and I'll lie if I want to

By Capt. Fogg

It's a bit like Take Your Little Girl to School Day. Little Sarah Palin gets to go to the office with daddy and meet important people like the hand-picked president of the country we occupy: ex-oilman Hamid Karzai. Press coverage would be tacky and intimidating to a little girl, so we're not going to have any of that.

Of course the little girl is 44, and soon to be a grandmother, but in terms of stepping into daddy's shoes and running a superpower she might as well be four and daddy knows it. No reporters, no TV other than for a brief establishment shot -- proof of her being competent to deal with world leaders: all the proof we're going to get until it's too late.

Following true to form, Palin is likely to confuse the meeting with an actual trip to Afghanistan, as she did with her trip to Kuwait, "confusing" it with being on the battlefield in Iraq. Who knows what she will make of her planned meetings with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, Henry Kissinger, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Will they bring flowers?

In a way it's her coming out party, but she won't be coming out and we won't be coming in. We'll just have to accept that she's too fragile and innocent to be exposed; fragile and innocent enough that our right to know just how out of her element and over her head she is sitting at the big desk is trumped. The Party, the Jesocrats, the lobbyists, the Wall Street Wazirs: they all say she's the best and if we don't want to wake up with a bloody horse's head, we'd better fuggetaboudit.

Cynicism aside -- this is the most outrageous attempt at passing off the flower girl as a debutante and without even Professor Higgins' ability to teach her to enquire about the rain in Spain. It's time for the Real Sarah Palin to come out of the closet, put her foot in her mouth, embarrass her masters, take off the costume and go home to that room somewhere. It's time for us to ask how much more we are going to have to take of this charade, this farce, this willing suspension of disbelief before we are allowed to enquire as to just who that masked woman is?