In the past week or so, a lot has been made of Gov. Sarah Palin’s fitness for being John McCain’s running mate. The discussion so far has been banal and merely regurgitates arguments from the media and political elites who assume the positions of right and left in the popular discourse.

It has been a conversation ranging from the preposterous topic of whether America is ready for a female vice president — especially because, dearie me, John McCain could buy the farm any minute now — to the boring, normative points touching on gun laws, the fetus’ right to life, whether Darwin was right or not, and so on.

It’s a discussion worth ignoring.

Instead, the area of focus should be shifted to a more fundamental point: Sarah Palin is wretchedly unintelligent, and therefore is not worthy of any public office in a democratic society which values freedom.

Is America ready for a woman vice president? Naturally, but only if she is not a fool.

But since Palin has barely enough brain cells to grin and do as she’s told, she is not worth our consideration.

Where is this all coming from? A friend recently showed me a video — easily found on YouTube or through any major search engine, by the way — of Palin speaking before her church congregation at the Wasilla Assembly of God in Wasilla, Alaska.

Out of her mouth came the most putrid stream of drivel, it made me wonder whether she actually knows what the words she speaks mean.
Certainly, I decided, she is only vaguely familiar with the English language.

At one point in the speech, Palin asks the congregation to pray for a natural gas pipeline, and for God’s will to be done “in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built.” The church’s leaders revealed themselves as the hucksters they truly are by not raising a single word against this egregious breach of the Third Commandment, taking God’s name in vain.

But a childish image of the Almighty is to be expected of the religious right. Her theological views are not what make Palin unfit to be vice president — what I find most troubling of all is that Palin seems to have the linguistic competence of a newborn basset hound.

For example, take this passage I transcribed from the Wasilla speech. The punctuation, obviously, is mine, but I did my best to make the sentences — if you wish to call them so — as fluid as possible:

“The umbrella of this church here, where God is going to send you from this church; believe me, I know what I’m sayin’. Where God has sent me, from underneath the umbrella of this church throughout the state, and — Alaska is all over the world map right now.”

I assure you, reader, that the above words were spoken in the order I’ve transcribed them. Her audience applauded warmly.

Her apparent illiteracy, it is worth noting, is a point of embarrassment for Palin.

She is seemingly so ashamed of the fact that she can hardly read or compose an intelligible sentence that, in 1996, she asked a Wasilla librarian if suppressing certain books might be acceptable. Believe it or not, the librarian — whose name is Mary Emmons, and who I am penciling in on November 4 — declined.

Sarah Palin deserves our pity, not our votes.

I feel sorry for a woman so hollow that she effectively stands as an effigy for hackneyed right wing points of view — a person who, because she is so incapable of creative human thought, can only exist as a walking parody of conservative values, a living and breathing clown who mocks Christianity and patriotism at the same time she pretends to understand and embrace them.

Kevin is eagerly awaiting your e-mails. Send them to kevin.r.king@asu.edu.