KEY POINTS:
I awoke last Sunday to find my inbox a hotbed of anti-Thomas sentiment.
The emails from places like Topeka, Kansas, and Woodland, California, as well as from closer to home, were like letter bombs. When I opened them, they practically blew up in my face.
The senders were
on the warpath over last week's column in which I extrapolated from the McCain campaign advert portraying Barack Obama as a political Britney Spears, a vacuous celebrity, to suggest that this comparison could more justifiably be applied to McCain's running mate (or is it the other way around?) Overnight Sarah Palin has gone from nonentity to phenomenon on the basis of her photogenic appearance and vivacious personality.
Clearly none of those doing the huffing and puffing had paused to consider whether it was rather childish of McCain to have brought Britney into the argument in the first place. Conservatives, it seems, can dish it out but they can't take it.
Kevin Hardy, a St Paul, Minnesota, resident who used to live in Auckland, made several interesting points. American voters, he said, "understand leadership but, more importantly, who shares their values".
What people like me don't understand is that for decades now ordinary Americans have been fighting back against the non-Christian values unleashed by Roe versus Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that effectively upheld a woman's right to choose.
It's hard to reconcile this view of Christian values under systematic attack with the fact that Republicans have occupied the White House for 20 of the past 28 years. That includes the two-term Reagan and Bush Jnr presidencies, virtual political extensions of the religious right.
If social conservatives haven't had it all their own way, that's probably because there's a roughly equal number of Americans who don't want other people's values rammed down their throats. Democracy can be a bugger like that.
Hardy claims Helen Clark's beliefs would make her unelectable anywhere in the US outside of San Francisco. Allowing for polemic licence, he has a point, but it says more about his country than ours.
This week Australia's Liberal Party (the equivalent of our National) chose Malcolm Turnbull of Spycatcher fame as its new leader. Turnbull is a social progressive who backed a formal apology to the Aboriginal people and advocates Australia becoming a republic, ratification of the Kyoto treaty and a better deal for gays.
If Turnbull was American he'd be a Democrat. In fact, once they got past the label, American conservatives would be profoundly disappointed by many of the Western world's so-called conservative leaders - the likes of Britain's David Cameron, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany's Angela Merkel, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, even our own John Key.
While religious-based social conservatism remains a powerful force in America, it has waned - for the time being at least - in most other Western countries, to the point that mainstream parties of the right broadly accept what could be called the liberal consensus.
While abortion remains a hotly contentious issue in the US 35 years after Roe versus Wade, other societies have largely acknowledged the practical and philosophical logic of a woman's right to choose, and moved on.
Or to put it another way, in most Western countries a candidate holding Palin's views on abortion, evolution, scientific research, the role of religion in public affairs, sex education, the environment, global warming and gun ownership wouldn't get within a bull's roar of the highest office in the land.
Perhaps the critics were right. People like me might think we understand Palinmania but maybe we don't really "get" it. I certainly don't understand why she happily compares herself to a pit bull ("What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick"), but took umbrage when Obama used the term "pig in lipstick", not that he was even talking about her.
Certain religions have a thing about pigs but that's clearly not the issue here. To summarise the debate between the hit-men in Pulp Fiction, pigs mightn't have the sense to disregard their own faeces but pork tastes good. They're also intelligent creatures whose ancestors ruled the world some 250 million years ago.
What, on the other hand, is there to like about pit bills? This week's pit bull horror story concerned two family pets in Las Vegas that burst in through a screen door to maul a 4-month-old baby to death and hospitalise the grandmother who tried to save her.
Perhaps my correspondents could explain why - sassiness and boldly applied lipstick aside - we should look forward to the prospect of a self-styled pit bull a heartbeat away from the leadership of the free world.
