Psycho sister, qu'est-ce c'est?

Miranda Devine was under pressure to get a story in by deadline. What with driving the kids to school in the 4-wheel drive and having her hair done, it wasn't as though she was not busy. So when the person from Fairfax hissed: "You don't want to go the way of Mike Carlton, do you?", she flinched. For years she had always threatened to go back to News Ltd, but Daddy doesn't work there any more and shrieks of "don't you know who I am?" would seem a trifle intemperate. From a Journalist of her standing.

This was the result. It is not the first article on the US Presidential race which focused more on Palin than McCain, but it is the first which failed to mention McCain at all. It takes as given a number of strange and ultimately unsustainable positions:

• The Vice Presidency is more powerful than the Presidency, to the point where Palin's Presidential running-mate is not worth mentioning.


• All feminists everywhere have to vote for any woman running for any office over any man. Feminists are therefore 'useful idiots' in getting any woman elected to anything.


• If only those lefty feminists had gotten behind Palin ... what Palin needs right now is a punster from Cronulla & Islington, a pretty-boy actor, a standup comic and an editor of a radical-feminist magazine (but I repeat myself - no really, I call on the editors of Jezebel to disprove my thesis that their readership is largely comprised of conservatives fishing for outrage).

Then, there are the lies:

[Palin] had five attractive, seemingly well-adjusted children and was successful in her career.

Lucky she isn't a leftwing politician or the idea of a 17-year-old daughter getting pregnant would be condemned by someone like Miranda Devine. Is there any way anyone could produce proof to the contrary of this without being sinisterly political? This belies the first sentence in the next paragraph:

If she made any sacrifices or compromises they were not apparent. And she had won the marriage jackpot: a hunky house-husband who is able to take a back seat without losing his cojones.

The fact that Todd Palin didn't take a backseat in Alaskan politics is the reason why his wife is in trouble over the "Troopergate" scandal, a cover-up that failed because the small-town politician ovverreached by lunging for a wider stage for which she was not skilled or prepared. Sarah Palin is also a "surrendered wife" under her religion, which is why she can't and won't put her husband in the back seat - that's where Miranda is, waiting for him.

Did you think you were clever by omitting this? Does anyone think that "surrendered wives" ought to be feminist icons or something?

There is even a bumper sticker, "Abort Sarah Palin", and no diatribe against her fails to mention abortion.

All those Republicans chanting for Obama to be killed - not worth mentioning for our Miranda. The fact that this post won't mention abortion means it is obviously not a diatribe.

That a virtually single-issue lobby group could have seized power in one of Australia's two main parties is what's really scary, not Sarah Palin.

No more scary than having right-to-lifers own the other main party, Miranda. Not too clever being silent on that: perhaps because it doesn't feed into your high-school jealousy thing, you'll need to grow up to fully appreciate that. Part of growing up means we leave behind Kathy Lette and movie stars and undergraduate-shock mags.

The only way to save Fairfax is to lift the quality of the writing. We all have to make sacrifices, and Miranda of all people will understand if you axe her. Someone this silly has no business using the politics of another, more powerful land as a mirror-pool for her own protracted adolescence.