Palin's End

I've long said that Sarah Palin isn't running for president and would be crushed like a beer can if she did. She might be the single most unserious political figure of my lifetime, on a par with people like Alvin Green. Actually, I take that back. Green was at lest funny and more than a little adept at the pitching of the woo.

I simply don't see a primary path for her to win the nomination and no one has ever pointed one out to me. In fact, recent polling has shown that even most Republicans wouldn't support her if she ran. The political folks in the Obama White House wish that wasn't the case, because they see her as an opportunity to win in a landslide in less than two years, and they aren't wrong.

The former governor was pulled out of obscurity by a helpless and desperate John McCain who couldn't make the reasonable governing choice of nominating his friend Joe Lieberman for the vice-presidency. Instead of losing with honor, he chose to lose with Palin. And ever since then watching Sarah Palin hasn't been unlike seeing white trash win the lottery. She hasn't done anything to better herself or her country with her new found fame and wealth other than to become more famous and wealthy. However, I must say that seeing her go on Fox News and butcher even the most ordinary sentences is one of the great joys of my life.

A certain segment of the American people love Governor Palin because she's attractive and represents the final triumph of ignorance in political discourse. She speaks almost entirely in bumper sticker sized soundbites, which is fine with them because they have no desire to even think in anything more complicated than slogans.

She's often compared to Reagan, which is profoundly unfair to the late president. While Ronald Reagan mastered the soundbite, if you asked him to explain why he believed what he did, he could. For most of his career, Reagan wrote his own speeches and syndicated a political column in the years between his being governor and president. Sarah Palin wrote a powderpuff of a book who's main hypothesis was that nothing is ever her fault.

I think we saw, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of the end of Sarah Palin yesterday afternoon with her videotaped response to this past weekend's shooting in Tucson.

Granted, the first half of it was as close to a substantive address as Palin has ever come. But the second half of it reverted to her usual practise of finger-pointing and psychotic hyperbole. At one point she said that attributing


Editor's Note: I somehow just lost half of this post and I have no idea why. And guess what? I'm not rewriting the fucking thing. That's too bad because it was one of my better ones, with a few funny lines near the end, which I can't remember now. I also addressed the "blood libel" which I'm too lazy to do again.

Sucks to be me, I guess.