[Peace-discuss] Cockburn on President Palin

[C. G. Estabrook]

 From <http://www.counterpunch.org/>:

"[Sarah Palin] will have a 40 per cent  chance to take over as President, 
according to the statistical index established by Prof John F. Banzaff of George 
Washington University Law School. According to Banzaff, McCain would have only 
80 per cent odds of living out his presidency and a much higher risk of becoming 
disabled from a variety of conditions, including a stroke or Alzheimer’s. Of 
course Reagan was so gaga as he neared the end of his term that his aides 
apparently considered invoking the 25th Amendment, to have him wheeled out of 
the Oval Office.

"I’m sure we’d survive a Palin presidency, perhaps more surely than a McCain 
one, given his uncontrollable temper. Here at CounterPunch we’ve had plenty of 
emails from progressive types worrying that Palin represents the footfall of 
fascism, as though the fascist instinct thrives with especial vigor on a diet of 
mooseburger and faith in the verities of the Holy Bible. This seems to me to 
stem from snobbery and class prejudice. Mencken would have had a high old time 
lampooning Palin as a linthead and a creationist treading in the spoor of 
William Jennings Bryan. Give me Bryan over McKinley any day. Bryan was the one 
who opposed eugenics, the secular scientific fantasy of its era, espoused by the 
rationalist academic Woodrow Wilson and the cream of the liberal intellectual 
establishment at that time."

Full disclosure: a classic pro-eugenics study of the era was Arthur H. 
Estabrook, "The Jukes in 1915"; Estabrook contributed to the Supreme Court 
decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in Buck v. Bell (1927), 
which justified sterilization on the grounds that "Three generations of 
imbeciles are enough" -- a precedent invoked by the government of Germany for a 
similar program in the 1930s. --CGE