handwrting on the wall

HANDWRITING ON THE WALL


Handwriting in our States is on the wall,
and on the hand of Sarah Palin:
Wall Street is ailin’, and about to fall.
If you read this you can mail in
your solutions to the problem. Sarah’s
may sound simplistic but have been
endorsed by most Republican wayfarers.
Were she a candidate for Queen
I’d surely not be trying to unmask her,
but since she wants to be the Pres-
ident I’d rather leave her in Alaska,
affording majesté no lèse,
afraid that that any time that I would ask her
a question she would read her hand,
on which the lifelines don’t seem to be healthy.
Issues she can’t understand
can’t be interpreted by all her stealthy
attempts to write them on her thumb.
Instead if she would write them down on paper
she would be sent to kingdom come,
and there would be no need to videotape her.
Divinely intervention struck
Belshazzar in his biblical fine feast,
and will, if we don’t stop the buck,
the doe-like Palin party arriviste.
What Daniel in the lions’ den,
confronting problems in the Middle East,
once managed, we’ll do too. Amen.

Inspired by an article in the NYT, February 14, 2010, by Frank Rich (“Palin’s Cunning Sleight of Hand”):
Liberals had a blast mocking Sarah Palin last weekend when she was caught addressing the Tea Party Convention with a cheat sheet scrawled on her hand. Even the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, couldn’t resist getting into the act and treated a White House briefing to a Palin hand gag of his own. Yet the laughter rang hollow. You had to wonder if Palin, who is nothing if not cunning, had sprung a trap. She knows all too well that the more the so-called elites lampoon her, the more she cements her cred with the third of the country that is her base. Her hand hieroglyphics may not have been speaking aids but bait. If so, mission accomplished. Her sleight of hand gave the anti-Palin chorus another prod to deride her as an empty-headed, subliterate clown, and her fans another cue to rally. The only problem is that the serious import of Palin’s overriding political message got lost in this distracting sideshow. That message has the power to upend the Obama presidency — even if Palin, with her record-low approval ratings, never gets anywhere near the White House. The Palin shtick has now become the Republican catechism, parroted by every party leader in Washington. Their constant refrain, delivered with cynicism but not irony, is this: Republicans are the anti-big-government, anti-stimulus, anti-Wall Street, pro-Tea Party tribunes of the common folk. “This is about the people,” as Palin repeatedly put it last weekend while pocketing $100,000 of the Tea Partiers’ money…
Her only concrete program for dealing with America’s pressing problems came in the question-and-answer session. “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country,” she said, “so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.” That pretty much sums up her party’s economic program, at least: divine intervention will achieve what government intervention cannot. That the G.O.P. may actually be winning this argument is less an indictment of Palin than of Washington Democrats too busy reading the writing on her hand to see or respond to the ominous political writing on the wall.


2/14/10