Karl Rove is predicting that Sarah Palin will run. I'm not convinced that she will, but that's besides the point. She quit on Alaska to become a very well paid talking head with a lot of star appeal. She's been making the headlines for the past two years for a variety of reasons.
Sarah Palin's tweets, Facebook notes and Fox News appearances have guaranteed exposure in the media, perhaps because they've been kept at arm's length. It's a very clever strategy.
She has achieved a great deal for her masters. Coming from anybody else, her statements would have been taken apart, rebutted and eventually dismissed. But this intriguing, unconventional myth of a person gets a pass. She sells copy. Love her or hate her, people can't resist reading her latest tidbit. And she plodded on, publishing ghostwritten notes, tweeting idiotic, snarky attacks on the President and indulging in her usual word salad on Fox News. In a process of repetition, repetition, repetition, she made the outrageous sound normal.
Now a number of GOP candidates feel free to say the most ludicrous things and manage not to get laughed off the stage.
The most notorious candidates are as bad as each other and definitely as bad as Sarah Palin. They're radical and divisive, but it seems that this is exactly what's expected of whoever emerges as the winner in the primaries. Moderates need not apply. Sarah Palin set the tone over these two years, helped the teabaggers win seats in Congress, derailed a few serious debates with her rhetoric and achieved a radical shift to the extreme right.
Most people know that Sarah Palin is profoundly ignorant and incredibly shallow. People laughed at her reality show, her tweets, her choice of clothes, hair, pedicure, you name it. The tabloids go on overdirve about her dysfunctional family. She appears to be harmless, a mere sideshow.
But has any other rightwing talking head had as much influence on the political discourse as she had in the past two years? Sarah Palin was paid to do a job and she did it, under a cloak of innocence, because she's too stupid, too tabloidy, too vulgar.
Ridiculous as she is, her fridge magnet philosophy became mainstream and her idiotic talking points incorporated in everyday political jargon.
Outrageous is the new normal and the declared GOP candidates are banking on it.
Thank you, Sarah Palin.
(There she goes, laughing all the way to the bank...)
Sarah Palin had a spat with a reporter from the Daily Caller and another, from the American Spectator, who had previously defended her, came to the defense of of his colleague on this occasion:
... Alex Pappas of The Daily Caller, one of the rising stars among political scribes and a meticulously careful and wonderfully polite, fair-minded young man (an aside: I've known him since he was in junior high school), wrote a perfectly fine story about Palin's current stances vis-a-vis the presidential race. In it, one of the things she said was that if Mitt Romney is the nominee, well, of course she would endorse him over Barack Obama.
Fox Nation picked up the story and, in its own headline (not Pappas', not the Daily Caller's, but its own headline completely apart from anything Pappas ever wrote) played up the "Romney endorse" angle in a way that apparently did not make it clear that the endorsement might be in the general election, rather than the primary campaign. (The headline is no longer available at Fox Nation, so I can't say exactly what the wording was.)
Anyway, the Palin team pounced. Specifically inviting over reporter Kasie Hunt from Politico so she could hear the exchange, Palin called Pappas' cell phone and began berating him in a very scolding manner for writing a headline suggesting she supports Romney. Pappas didn't even know what she was talking about. When he tried to say that neither he nor his editors had written such a headline, she said she didn't have time for this, that she needed to go back to the "real people" at the State Fair, and hung up on him.
Fox Nation distorted what Pappas had actually written. The headline had nothing to do with Palin endorsing Romney:
Swarmed by media and supporters at the Iowa State Fair, the former governor of Alaska told The Daily Caller that she’s not concerned that Mitt Romney is considered the frontrunner at this time.
“No, nothing worries me at this point,” Palin told TheDC. “Could I support somebody like Mitt Romney? Yeah.”
When TheDC pointed out that some tea partiers have pledged to make sure Romney doesn’t get the nomination, Palin said, “I’m of the mind of ABO — Anybody But Obama, at this time.”
It's not surprising that Sarah Palin has such a poor relationship with the media. Her style of "putting the record straight" is far from dignified, it's downright disrespectful.
Sarah Palin not only dresses and accessorizes like a 15-year-old, but also thinks and acts like a vindictive one.
How very presidential! Sarah could wear this for her "inauguration."
I'm having a serious bout of Palin fatigue. I feel uninspired, with a knot in my stomach at the mere mention of her name.
It's a sad state of affairs when a person who can't string a couple of sentences together, misuses and invents words, gets her facts wrong, makes a ridiculous reality show and prostitutes her family for fame and money becomes a loud and influential voice in American politics.
How could this woman, who gave us the classic Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric episodes be taken seriously? How could a woman so easily pranked by a couple of comedians (who compared her to Britney Spears) have her every burp and fart reported by the media as if they had any relevance?
Sarah Palin herself is a myth. Somebody banked on her sex appeal to get their warped message out. She's being paid handsomely by her puppet masters to poison American politics and she's doing a very good job.
The media can't have enough of her, even though she avoids them like the plague. This elaborate cat-and-mouse game led the media to follow her One Nation bus tour like dogs chasing a bitch in heat.
Sarah Palin derailed the healthcare debate with her death panels, brought out the ugly with her crosshairs and now she has posted veiled threats to the teabaggers in Congress, urging them to sabotage any attempt to solve the debt ceiling crisis.
Her poisonous voice is given a lot of undeserved weight by the media she so despises.
Perhaps we're all to blame for keeping this toxic flame alive. I wish I could stop writing about Sarah Palin. The bloggers find themselves in a kind of catch-22: Article upon article appear in the media without any fact checking, so it falls to the bloggers to set the record straight. We have to keep writing about her. It's a vicious circle.
And the political landscape in America continues to get uglier by the minute...
“Much of the mainstream media is already becoming so irrelevant because there is not balance,” she told CBN’s David Brody. “There is not truth coming out of mainstream media. And I know that first hand. I live with it every day.”
So do we, Sarah Palin, so do we. The truth about you is not coming out of the mainstream media, that's correct.
“I want to help them,” she added. “I have a journalism degree. That is what I studied.”
Did they teach you to write phony letters to newspapers to boost your own image and manipulate the discussions? Is that how the truth comes out?
Sarah Palin is fond of saying how much she knows about journalism: "I studied journalism - who, what, where, when, and why -- of reporting."
Here she tells Hannity about it:
Dear Sarah, you certainly stuck to the five Ws in your extensive journalistic career: Reading scores full of truth from a teleprompter. As a matter of fact, the only thing you know about journalism are those five Ws. You didn't need a college degree to learn about them...
It's hard to stay awake watching this video:
If you're such an accomplished journalist, why do you need ghostwriters to write your books and Facebook notes?
Sarah has mixed opinions about Twitter:
“I’m so thankful for the 140 characters, I’m going to use every single one of them. If you go back and you look at my tweets for the most part, it's 140 characters on the nose. I want that space. I want to get that thought across. But really it's ridiculous.
We’ve been griping about it for years in the world of media, that a politician, any person cannot get a real idea across in a ten second soundbite. Why do you think we can get anything across in 140 characters? A lot of times, our tweets just create more confusion and more problems than they provide solutions.”
Which is which, Sarah? Are tweets something to be thankful for, 140 characters on the nose, or are they ridiculous, create more confusion and cause problems?
The Quitter feed is very interesting (H/T to Brian for "Quitter feed"):
Great stuff! Right on the nose. New words come so easily to Sarah Palin...
Oops! The next tweet was still incorrect...
Yes, I see why they're confusing.
Sarah, your command of the English language is startling. Your degree in journalism has been immensely useful: It has helped to you articulate clear thoughts and to use words appropriately (when they exist). Here are a couple of examples:
State of the Union
VAN SUSTEREN: And Governor Palin, in terms of the speech, do you think he managed to reach across the aisle, even though you used the word "lecture," are any Republicans persuaded, let's try to work together?
PALIN: Not necessarily Greta, because the remembrance here has got to be that he and the Democrats, they've been in charge of Washington this last year. So the common sense reforms that he is looking to Republicans to join him on, he could have implemented many of those "common sense," as he calls them, reforms all along. Nothing has stopped him from doing that.
Healthcare
"I tell ya, this is why people are disenchanted and becoming more and more disengaged really from what their government is doing because when we see an issue like this, words spoken that may not be true, coming from our president, and embarrassing our Supreme Court and not respecting the separation of powers... Since August more Americans have paid more attention to the (health care) bill and more Americans are becoming more concerned. It hadn’t been a matter of he not being able to explain his policy with government take over and mandation of health care, but Americans understanding what is in there not liking it."
I'm sure the media will be eternally grateful for your help, Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin decorated a bus to embark on a tour, but doesn't want to disrupt people's vacations. She's playing hide-and-seek with the media, which guarantees maximum coverage, as nobody knows where the circus is going to turn up next. The stupid media fell for it and are all scrambling from one place to another, asking her idiotic questions about her record and her prospects. The media should have done some homework about her record and ask some decent questions instead of letting her frame the narrative.
Yesterday she told reporters that she quit as governor because of all the frivolous ethics complaints:
In 2009 she told Bill O'Reilly something completely different.
The media lets Sarah Palin get away with changing her stories time and time again, as long as they get some face time with her. She stated that a possible campaign will be unconventional and has made it very clear that she won't have a proper interview with a proper journalist. Whether she talks to the media or not, she sells copy, she generates hits and keeps the media bosses happy and their bank accounts healthy.
It's seems easy to dismiss Sarah Palin, she looks ridiculous and talks gibberish, but there's a serious side to all this.
We're all too familiar with Sarah Palin's real story on this blog and can't take her seriously as a candidate for anything. But the US is a big country, there are too many low information people out there who are entitled to vote. There are still too many racist people who can't stomach the idea of having a black president. There are the dreaded Diebold machines and corrupt politicians who will manipulate elections. George W Bush was elected twice... The majority of the media don't take their job seriously anymore and treat a profoundly ignorant celebrity as a serious politician. Sarah Palin as a candidate is a real possibility.
The political discourse in the US has deteriorated quite considerably in the past two years and the deciding factors for who gets chosen to run and who will ultimately win has become a third rate talent show, just the kind of competition the likes of Sarah Palin could win. She created an attractive act, where politics is reduced to slogans and her colourful personality shines through. What people see are her clothes, her hair, her hunting, fishing, climbing and biker stunts, her "Real American" persona, her family, the regular mother and housewife with a fire in her belly. Her opponent is boring in comparison. He's serious and talks in complete sentences, uses too many long words, dresses and behaves appropriately.
The possibility that the election of the president of the most powerful and influential country in the world could be decided in an inane talent show frightens and disgusts me.
Politicians tend to protect their children from media intrusion. Sarah Palin sounds like she would like to do the same. But... who put her children out there? Who took them out of school to campaign around the country? Who did it again to sell books? Who invited the cameras into their lives to record an abysmal "reality" show?
Sarah Palin has a hotline to TMZ and People magazine. Were Sarah Palin's daughters dragged into this shoot kicking and screaming?
Who made her children part of the narrative, each with a particular role? Who are Track the soldier, Bristol the brave, Willow the wise, Piper the cute and Trig the ultimate pro-life prop? Who assigned them these roles?
Who linked her daughters to tales of perversion and rape?
Most people don't know the names of other politicians' children. In some cases, we don't even know whether they have children at all.
Greta didn't say anything about children, but Sarah more or less jumped on her neck when she said they were going to question the candidates aggressively. Again, Sarah herself brought the children into the conversation.
The tabloids have an interest in running explosive stories about celebrities' families, but they don't do political interviews. When was the last time the National Enquirer ran a story about energy issues? When did TMZ run a article about unions or healthcare? Did People magazine discuss the economy recently?
Is Sarah Palin really implying that the tabloids are the important sources of information on candidates' political records?
She only answers pre-screened questions on Fox News and when she spots real journalists, she runs a mile. Failing that, she labels them as perverts who have an unhealthy interest in her... daughters.
Politicians' children should be off-limits, I agree. But it's the parent's job to set these limits. Sarah Palin made her children part of her record. She made them into state officials to justify free travel around the great state of Alaska. She paraded them around the country, used her daughter's pregnancy to squash the rumours about her own strange pregnancy. She encouraged Bristol to become an ambassador for a foundation that uses sexual images as a marketing tool and to stomp, shake her stuff and writhe on the dance floor.
If her children had stayed in Alaska during the 2008 campaign, if Sarah had based her narrative on her record alone, we wouldn't know anything about her precious children.
Sarah Palin won't answer questions about her record and invariably uses her children as shields.
"What do you read?" is a gotcha question. What would she call probing questions about a certain dairy, her church, Alaska Natives, mining, ethics, special needs or any other topic? Would she answer them or somehow bring the children into it as a diversion?
Here are some screenshots of the interview with Greta. Sarah Palin became very excited when she started talking about her children and the media.
Sarah Palin's son Track got married. Who broke the news? The Washington Post? The New York Times? No, it was People magazine.
The Palins are a tabloid family. Sarah Palin is tabloid material. It makes sense that the tabloids will the ones to vet her on her political record...
Prof Scharlott remarked that the ADN has little room for independent journalism, as they receive a considerable amount of money from the state of Alaska as part of their revenue.
Sarah Palin had a "shrine" on the ADN when she was governor. Readers could follow their hot governor as one would a film star, they could send in their own photos with Sarah, it was really neat. Sometime after Sarah quit on Alaska, the shrine became redundant, but it made a comeback after she turned into a national celebrity. The state already contributed to the ADN's revenue when the shrine first appeared, so it was paid for. Now it generates hits and the state is still paying for sympathetic coverage of Sarah Palin. Plus ça change...
The so-called journalists who recovered their memories after three years and are now offering their first hand testimonies of the existence of Sarah Palin's pregnant belly appear to have been made an offer they couldn't refuse, a nudge they couldn't ignore...
Other journalists jumped on the anti-truther bandwagon, including the very liberal Guardian, from the UK. I can't work out what went on there, but the author of the article (a woman) accused Trig truthers of misogyny. This woman didn't look into any of the material offered by the bloggers who have been discussing the story for the past three years, or she would have noticed that the female contingent is very strong. Women were the first to doubt Sarah Palin's account of her pregnancy and labour with Trig. Is she accusing a vast number of women of misogyny?
It seems that the liberal media bias is a myth. They're not biased at all. It's matter of not being independent, of having to take their orders from those who have the power to jeopardize their livelihoods. It's a form of subtle, disguised censorship.
Or perhaps they're just lazy.
There are notable exceptions, of course. All is not lost and the truly independent thinkers will continue to ask awkward questions...
[The illustration above used to mean "See no evil, ear no evil, speak no evil." These days, not wishing to see, hear or speak the inconvenient truth seems more appropriate.]
The comments on the post "Sarah Palin Strikes Again," published yesterday, made me reflect on why I still write about her. I don't think she's going to run for the presidency, she's not a viable candidate.
But Sarah Palin is dangerous. She may be an idiot, prone to word salad, bad sartorial choices and a questionable taste in hairstyles, all the things that make her an object of ridicule around the world. She's not dangerous on her own, the danger comes from the fact that she has strong allies in the media.
What? The "lamestream media?" Yes, the very same lamestream media she whines about all the time are her strongest allies.
They gave her a voice when they reported her every tweet, every Facebook note and discussed her TV appearances as if they had come from somebody who had something substantial to say. They not only allowed, but actively inserted her "death panels" into the healthcare reform debate. If they had ignored her and allowed her idiotic pronouncements to fall into a void, she wouldn't be a danger at all. Sarah Palin is a mouthpiece, a poster girl doing somebody else's bidding. She's the "pretty" face of a very ugly movement.
Do the media do it for the ratings, do they do it out of greed? Or are they part of the movement to discredit the president? There are honorouble members of the media who do call her out on her most egregious statements, who ridicule her because they find her ridiculous indeed. But their attempts get mixed with all the rest, with all the reports that don't question her idiocy, that validate her views by presenting them as having substance.
Sarah Palin has poisoned the political dialogue and has shifted the political debate to a very ugly place. The media gave her the power to do so. They have empowered her puppetmasters in the process and that's the real danger.
When Obama was elected, I thought the ugly face of America would become a thing of the past. America had elected a black president in a country where not so long ago black people were sent to the back of the bus.
I don't agree with every decision president Obama makes and I don't consider him to be left wing, not by any stretch of the imagination. But Obama is a compassionate man who believes in society, who believes that government exists to serve the people.
What do Sarah Palin and her bosses believe in? They believe that government should be small, that taxes and services should be cut, that programs to which people have paid into all their working lives are entitlement programs. They believe that healthcare is for the rich, that the insurance companies can play god and determine who lives and who dies, based on money alone. They believe that the mega rich are more worthy of reward than the less well-off hard working people. Taxes are for the poor, the middle class, not for the people who can afford to pay them. The only sacred thing is the military: "We win, they lose."
America leads the world, but it's still a country where the religious right calls the shots, where the rich have more rights than the poor and where there's a misguided belief that America should spread its wings and dictate to other countries how they should conduct themselves. It reminds me of society in the Dark Ages. The poor had to pay their dues to the Church to go to heaven and to the nobility in return for protection against invading hordes from other kingdoms.
It's inconceivable (in this day and age) for a first world country to have a tiny number of "haves" and a vast majority of "have-nots." It's truly unbelievable that in a modern society many people could be left to die or to go without healthcare because it's considered an privilege. It's obscene to have a first world country allowing profit-making insurance companies to play with people's lives, extracting every last cent from a hard working population while denying them the services they paid for at the drop of a hat. It's inhumane to treat the poor as an inconvenient nuisance.
President Obama tried to address this. He tried to take America out of the dark ages and bring the country to more equitable conditions, in line with the rest of the developed world. Here is a man who believes in a civilized, modern society.
The America Sarah Palin would like to see would not be a civilized, modern country. It would be a barbaric society, without compassion, without regard for other human beings, without regard for nature, where the only regard would be for money and power. Countries would be invaded and God would be invoked to give the powerful an aura of righteousness.
The media gave power to her violent rhetoric, to her vitriolic attacks on the president, they gave her words a weight they do not deserve.
I despise certain aspects of America as a country, I despise the cult of money and the religious lunacy, I fear her military might and the tendency to shove "democracy" down the throats of people in other countries, but I've learned to love Americans. That's why I will still write about Sarah Palin and try to counter her poisonous barbs agaisnt those who believe society should be better for all. I will continue to expose her phony political record.
I will also continue to denounce the media that have neglected their duty to investigate Sarah Palin's lies: Her record as well as the faked pregnancy. They have given her too much power and she feels free to derail any attempt at civilized political debate.
I would like to share a glimpse into the the minds of two people I admire. Both believe that asking questions is more valuable than accepting things without further thought.
Stephen Fry
People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. 'Stephen,' they say, accusingly, 'you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand attached to him that he owns too much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existence we have never even guessed at, let alone visited.
It's the ones who think they know what there is to be known we have to look out for. 'All is explained in this text - there is nothing else you need to know,' they tell us.
We are perhaps now more in danger of thinking we know everything than in those dark times of religious superstition (if indeed they have gone away). Today we have the whole store of human knowledge a mouse-click away, which is all fine and dandy, but it's in danger of becoming just another sacred text. What we need is a treasure house, not of knowledge, but of ignorance. Something that gives not answers but questions. Something that shines light, not on garish facts, but into the dark, damp corners of ignorance.
The greatest scientist have been wrong on this point or that - Newton on the nature of light, Einstein in his views of the uncertainty of principle - and it does not lessen respect for their achievements. Scientists expect to be improved and corrected; they hope to be.
The Moral Majority, however, speaks, it would seem, with the voice of God. How do they know what they know? Why, they themselves say so; and, since they speak with the voice of God, the Moral Minority is never wrong and cannot be wrong.
And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would tell us what books to read and what not, what thoughts to think and what not, what conclusions to accept and what not.
And what does the Bible say? "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch" (Matthew 15:14).
(Excerpts from the essay "The Blind Who Would Lead" - The Roving Mind)
Stephen Fry celebrates ignorance as the gateway to acquiring knowledge and Asimov doesn't close the door to accepted principles being challenged and corrected. Both men believe in curiosity as a motivating factor for expanding the mind.
Many prominent politicians and talking heads have their minds closed to the possiblity of other viewpoints being valid at all. Their truth is absolute and should be imposed on the rest of the country. Hey, let's not stop there - their truth should be imposed on the rest of the world!
The list of such holders of absolute truth is long, but the ones that irritate and dismay reasonable, thinking people the most are Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck.
Two of them have ambitions to achieve higher office, so Stephen Fry's "Something that shines light, not on garish facts, but into the dark, damp corners of ignorance" would be good advice for the MSM: They should stop being dazzled by shiny objects and start shining a light on the dark, damp corners of Palin's and Bachmann's lives in order to deliver the electorate from ignorance.
The media has a duty to prevent the US from falling into the ditch.
In October 2008 Jans was more than critical of Sarah Palin’s small world view when he criticised her as someone “who believes that climate change isn't our fault; is dead set against a woman's right to choose; has supported creationism in the schools; and was prayed over by a visiting minister at her church to shield her against witchcraft.” In the Salon article he describes Palin as a...
“...poseur, a genuine Alaskan -- of a kind. The kind that flowed north in the wake of the '70s oil boom, Bible Belt politics and attitudes under arm, and transformed this state from a free-thinking, independent bastion of genuine libertarianism and individuality into a reactionary fundamentalist enclave with dollar signs in its eyes and an all-for-me mentality.”
Above all, Jans believes that Palin does not represent all Alaskans – characterising the typical people who voted for her as the people who...
“...forage at McDonald's and Safeway in their hunter camouflage, and make regular wilderness forays up and down the state's limited highway grid with ATVs, snowmobiles and airboats in tow behind their oversize trucks. Sometimes I imagine I can hear the roar echoing across the state, all the way to the upper Kobuk, where easements for the highways of tomorrow are already staked out across the tundra.”
In the 2008 article Jans exposes Palin for what she is, an opportunist who adapts and changes herself according to the winds of change. He pokes at her affected change of accent during the election campaign and ponders that the McCain campaign “has hijacked our state for political purposes, much to the chagrin of the tens of thousands of Alaskans who loathe what she stands for.” I would say that he has her pegged and clearly knows her well. Be sure to read the entire article.
Yesterday Nick Jans wrote an article for USA Today titled “What Palin’s show says about us” in which he claims that “the Palin that emerges just doesn’t live up to her backdrop. You don’t have to be a mountain man to see past the thin veil of smoke and mirrors.” He confirms that the series presents Palin as something that she is not and that as far as many Alaskans are concerned Sarah Palin’s Alaska is not the success that it has been touted to be. It is true that Palin, as many have noted, is all rhetoric and no substance, but mainly Jans astutely observes:
His point is that Palin, despite the “comedy or errors”...
...displayed by her in the show, is being offered up as an “Alaskan frontierswoman” in much the same way as she was presented as a “hockeymom” during the election and that this factor is a charge against American politics today. He closes with the thought:
“This would all be laughable, harmless television if that's where this story ended. Yet this show and its veneered presentation of Palin is sadly emblematic of American politics today.
Sarah Palin's Alaska is just back story rather than substance. But when our candidates can also produce poll-tested commercials, trot out ghost-written websites and deliver telepromptered speeches — all financed by unlimited special interest money — Americans are essentially casting votes for fictional characters. This is not an indictment of one Sarah Palin. It's an indictment of the system.”
We live in an era of mass communications; information can be found easily and readily. It’s almost too simple and as a result we can become bogged down in images and sounds which ultimately may lead to confusion as we struggle to make sense of “what it all means” and essentially what impact the information we have available to us has on our own well being. Politicians understand and frequently manipulate this confusion. Some, like Sarah Palin, (or more likely the people pulling her strings) are more shrewd and adept at using media to even further conflate this confusion and as a result they are free to construct their own narratives, regardless of whether they are true portrayals or not.
As a former Governor, who may or may not have Presidential ambitions, Palin’s entry into the reality TV field has further muddied the waters between what is real and what is fabrication or mere embroidery. The message seems to be that it doesn’t matter that she is not a policy wonk because coming from Alaska she is not a part of the Washington elite and so substance of that kind does not matter.
Television and the internet have largely replaced newspapers as the go to sources for information and entertainment. Politicians know that their designed and tested commercials which influence public opinion play a significant role in the outcome of elections.
Americans during an election cycle are bombarded by political soundbites on a constant, seemingly endless basis, paid for by special interest groups who have the most money and can vie for the most coveted spots during the most watched programmes. Sarah Palin’s Alaska recorded against the sublime and magnificent backdrop that is Alaska is littered with her political mashings which are discharged at regular intervals and seem to last for approximately twenty seconds – just like a commercial for her political view. Those twenty second fragments are important as Palin understands that she has just that amount of time in which to get her point across without losing her viewers attention.
That she is as subtle as a proverbial sledgehammer does not matter because her aim is to be controversial. To guarantee her views are discussed. In part, Palin employed her reality TV series as a free political commercial. The series may have won just as many floating people to her cause as it has isolated others but in the end I doubt whether such new support can be translated into effective votes as such people are fickle and not likely to expand Palin’s support base.
Sarah Palin's "twenty second soundbites" are missing the mark as the public becomes more tired of her "proverbial sledgehammer" and her frequent gaffes. The concept employing a "fictional" reality show for political gain may be an "innovation", but it's a failure for Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin wrote (cough cough) an op-ed for Usa Today, explaining her reasons for speaking at the Teabaggers convention in Nashville. Some sections didn't go unnoticed:
Later this week I'll head to Nashville, where I'll have the honor of speaking with members of the Tea Party movement. I look forward to meeting many Americans who share a commitment to limited government, common sense and personal responsibility. This movement is truly a grassroots, organic effort. It's not a top-down organization; it's a ground-up call to action that already has both political parties rethinking the way they do business.
Recently, some have tried to portray this movement as a commercial endeavor rather than the grassroots uprising that it is. Those who do so don't understand the frustration everyday Americans feel when they see their government mortgaging their children's future with reckless spending. The spark of patriotic indignation that inspired those who fought for our independence and those who marched peacefully for civil rights has ignited once again. You can't buy such a sentiment. You can't AstroTurf it. It springs from love of country and the knowledge that we can make a difference if we just stand up and stand together.
I thought long and hard about my participation in this weekend's event. At the end of the day, my decision came down to this: It's important to keep faith with people who put a little bit of their faith in you. Everyone attending this event is a soldier in the cause. Some of them will be driving hundreds of miles to Nashville. I made a commitment to them to be there, and I am going to honor it.
But participation won't be limited to those in Nashville who have a ticket. It's much bigger than that. Because the Tea Party movement is spread out across the country — with no central offices or annual events — this is an opportunity to connect with like-minded folks. Yes, there will be speeches given in a room in Nashville. But we'll also be speaking with thousands of Americans watching online at twitter.com/SarahPalinUSA, or through various news outlets. And the conversation will continue on my Facebook page.
I will not benefit financially from speaking at this event. My only goal is to support the grassroots activists who are fighting for responsible, limited government — and our Constitution. In that spirit, any compensation for my appearance will go right back to the cause.
Sarah says she's committed to the cause and will speak because she's keeping faith with people who put faith in her, that the faithful are going to travel hundreds of miles to drink from her fountain of knowledge. It's not the money, nooo...
How will the compensation go right back to the cause? There is a maximum that can be donated to PACs, provided she is allowed to make contributions to SarahPac herself. FEC rules are very difficult to search and somewhat confusing. Will she put her hand in her pocket (God forbid!) and donate directly to various teabagging candidates? Will we have to check each candidate's disclosures to spot her name as a donor and add them all up until the total reaches $115,000 less the Washington Speakers bureau cut?
Sarah knows nobody will check. (The SarahPac financial disclosure alone is migraine inducing and points to some dodgy dealings. The majority of donations to candidates were made almost as an afterthought, at the last possible minute.)
Words are cheap, Ms Palin. We want to see the deeds.
I love how Sarah changed her tune on the rules about broadcasting her speech. It started with the usual proviso of no cameras or other recording devices allowed. Then it was open to friendly media only. Now it's a free for all and all about Sarah... her twitter, her Facebook page. At least she included other media outlets. So far, the broadcasting of the event is been negotiated with PJTV, FOX News, CNN and Reuters TV.
Sarah Palin's greed and ego match each other in their monumental proportions. Her mendacity is in a category all by itself... .
Sarah Palin is very contradictory regarding what she calls the "elite". Her definition of elite is simplistic, as expected.
She says she's fighting for the little man, for the struggling middle class and her fight is against those who believe they are better than everybody else. As usual, she didn't really address the question, her answer was trite and childish.
Ironically, taking into account Sarah Palin's own definition of elite, in "Going Rogue" she blows her own trumpet from beginning to end. She was a fantastic basketball player, a gifted fisherwoman, moose hunter extraordinaire, an insightful, ethical politician who took on the establishment and single handedly put them in their place. She had the courage to ruffle the feathers of the big oil corporations. (This is a no-brainer, what are they going to do? Take their oil and go somewhere else?) She speaks of God as if she was chosen as his pet project.
How are all these self-descriptions not indicative of Sarah Palin's belief that she's better than everybody else? Oh well, she paints herself as little old me from Wasilla, the outsider, the underdog, so she's really humble, you see?
Sarah Palin has a servant's heart. She's concerned about the have-nots.
But she chooses which elites she despises very carefully. Some elites are perfectly acceptable.
Fat cats in the health insurance industry? They rented Sarah Palin's Facebook page at the height of the healthcare reform debate. They are a "good" elite. (I wonder if their "contribution" to their mouthpice will show up in her tax returns or the SarahPac accounts...)
She's all for giving the rest of the fat cats in any industry tax breaks, Reagan style, so their wealth trickles down, blah blah.
The economic elite is ok with her. Now she's one of their members, but as she would say, she worked her butt off to get there.
Sarah Palin's main beef is with the intellectual elite. She has no hope of entering it, and in order to distance herself from them even further, she maintains a tabloid image. Mother and daughter bringing up their babies together, bathing babies in the kitchen sink, party guests wearing hoodies and track suits were all part of the In Touch magazine spread. The Palins no doubt set up the domestic scene themselves or went along with whoever came up with it and approved the content of the article as it appeared in the magazine.
The message seems to be that although she's now very rich, her family is still the same as other "real" American families. Her supporters are definitely not part of any elite. So that they don't feel threatened by her new found wealth, she gives them the opportunity to identify with her on a personal level. She's still valley trash and proud of it.
The "Going Rogue" book tour counted on her mom and dad, her younger kids and an aunt, in a most convincing tour-de-force to reinforce the "I'm one of you" image. Her supporters couldn't get enough of it and were thrilled to bits to shake Chuck Heath's hand or have a moment with her mom. They're so normal, so real!
One branch of the intellectual elite is the liberal media. They make Sarah Palin foam at the mouth.
The McCain/Palin campaign had a big problem with them.
As the second woman ever nominated as a candidate for vice president, Alaska governor Sarah Palin became an instant phenomenon. Americans were enthralled by a woman with charm, ambition, natural political talent, and a passion for conservative values.
But the fascination of ordinary people quickly drew an unprecedented attack from the media elite and liberal activists. Far beyond the normal bounds of tough questions and challenges, Palin's enemies decided that nothing was too personal to attack-including her marriage, her children, her faith, and her wardrobe. The media distorted Palin's positions and beliefs beyond recognition. And almost every word out of her mouth was spun as a "flub."
Weekly Standard writer Matthew Continetti reveals the true story of the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee and her persecution by the elites who tried to hide their bias with solemn declarations of objectivity. Continetti offers fresh examples of malicious spin and deceit and shows how liberal snobbery has become a driving force in American politics.
Palin's ordeal has become a rallying cry for the GOP in the Obama era. This perceptive book is a must-read for conservatives who want to understand what really happened-and how to avoid a repeat.
The media was actually very kind to Sarah Palin and continues to give her a pass to this day. She is their cash cow. It's not in their interest to bring her down for good. If they really reported the truth, after the initial spike in interest, she would become a non-person, a hasbeen, not the best subject to attract readers and juicy revenue for media outlets. So they report her Facebook and Twitter rantings as if she should be taken seriously. They report her family scandals without going deep enough, always relegating them to the tabloid, sensationalist media. Why kill the goose that lays golden eggs?
Sarah Palin appears to have survived the revelations that emerged with the publication of "Game Change" and is now a political comentator on Fox News, a million miles away from the liberal media, where she's going to give a "fair and balanced" view of everything.
Tabloids, Fox News, teabagging... she's not part of the elite, that's for sure. Sarah Palin is just a filthy rich opportunist, without an ounce of class and monumentally ignorant.
Dictionary definition of elite:
"A group or class of persons or a member of such a group or class, enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status." .
Sarah Palin announced Thursday night that she ended a Hawaii vacation early because of the ruckus raised after she blacked out "McCain" on her sun visor in an effort to elude paparazzi.
After the former Alaska governor was photographed on the beach earlier this week, TMZ.com portrayed the visor marking as a slight of Sen. John McCain, her running mate last year.
"In an attempt to 'go incognito,' I Sharpied the logo out on my sun visor so photographers would be less likely to recognize me and bother my kids or other vacationers.
"Todd and I have since cut our vacation short because the incognito attempts didn't work and fellow vacationers were bothered for the two days we spent in the sun. So much for trying to go incognito."
She twits:
AK has18"new powder!So cut sunny vacation short(thanks, desperate paparazzi)Back early2enjoy AK snow&sparkle&Christmas prep!It all works out about 1 hour ago from TwitterBerry
Here we go again: she's a victim of the media. First we had the "gotcha" questions, now we have "gotcha" photos...
Some interesting signs I photographed in Australia... (click to enlarge)
November 2009 was some month! Going Rogue was a gift to palingates in so many ways... We have yet another account of the wild ride from Sarah's own pen (so to speak) and that bizarre story of an abortion turned into a miscarriage courtesy of wite-out on a medical bill!
Thanks to a call-to-action by our no longer resident troll, we (and Celtic Diva) were singled out by Harper Collins for copyright infrigement. Our traffic went through the roof as a result. But the whole thing made me wonder why these two blogs were targeted by HC while all others doing the same thing were left alone. Babygate and ethics violations seem to bother our Sarah more than anything else...
Then came the remarkable team effort that led to a mention on msnbc and links from major MSM players when the fake bus tour was exposed. We even got an oblique reference on Sarah's Facebook page. Not bad, eh? Thanks, Snowbilly.
Another gift to palingates is our very own Patrick. Before he came along, I offered fairly well researched posts with my own commentary on various issues. Patrick is great at breaking news and has put palingates on the larger map. It's a good combination and we have more readers than ever, hopefully going through all the gates and finding the darker side of the quitter governor.
Sarah Palin is very entertaining, there's no question about it. But she left a trail of destruction throughout Alaska, not to mention the damage she inflicts on her own family. On a larger scale, she has become the queen of the teabaggers and helps their racist rants appear legitimate.
Sarah Palin is not intelligent enough to do any of it by herself. But just as in Alaska she had very powerful people calling the shots, now she has other powerful groups using her image and celebrity status to further their own agenda.
Our job is to take their beauty queen away from them. Sarah Palin is much more attractive than GWB and draws very emotional reactions from her followers. But if we show them that saint Sarah is not who they think she is, her puppetmasters will have to start again from scratch and find another muse at short notice.
I believe Sarah Palin will eventually bring herself down because she's a loose cannon and doesn't know when to sit down and shut up.
