Opinion: In today’s pages: admiring Sarah Palin, killing Afghan civilians, and paying for failure
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Let’s see, where to start? A gleefully inappropriate take on Sarah Palin’s attractiveness, or a weighty editorial about redistricting in California.... No contest! Columnist Joel Stein writes a mash note of sorts to the GOP vice presidential nominee, saying she’s hot enough to be in a Robert Palmer music video. Don’t be haters, read the piece. He mixes more than a little feminism in with his usual doses of adolescent male hormones and irreverence:
It seems as if the prudent thing to do would be to ignore Palin’s hotness -- to refrain, unlike Rush Limbaugh, from calling her ‘a babe’ or, unlike Joe Biden, from saying she’s ‘good-looking.’ Sexualizing Palin is dangerous because it shifts the focus away from her leadership skills, diminishes her from a subject to an object and could anger that insane-looking, snowmobile-racing husband of hers.
As if to make you feel bad for laughing at Stein, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation offer a blistering take on the high civilian death toll from NATO airstrikes, which they say is damaging the war effort. They blame the shortage of NATO troops, which has led to an overreliance on air power, and the Taliban’s ‘execrable tactic’ of hiding operatives amid villagers.
The editorial board throws its support behind Prop. 11, which would create a balanced 14-member commission to draw the boundaries of the state’s Senate and Assembly districts. Hey, if Willie Brown’s against it, we’re for it! The measure isn’t perfect, but it’s a marked improvement over the status quo:
Voters are supposed to choose their representatives, but in California, political parties select their voters. That kind of power is destructive and inherently anti-democratic. It must end, and Proposition 11 will help end it.
Finally, the editorial board opines that the golden parachutes for Fannie Mae’s Daniel Mudd and Freddie Mac’s Richard Syron reflect the poor corporate governance that’s widespread in this country:
What’s lost amid the din of protest is that Mudd and Syron secured their fabulous parting gifts on the way in, not on the way out. That’s a common practice in corporate America, where chief executives often persuade compliant directors to insulate them from the financial pain of an ignominious exit. And no matter how many angry statements lawmakers crank out, executives will continue to be rewarded for failure until public companies’ boards and shareholders insist that it stop.
Oh and yes -- Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles offers his take on the lipstick-on-a-pig controversy. Sooo-eee!