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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Run Sarah Run

Bible Spice takes her unique gift and keeps on givin'. It's the usual boilerplate and nonsense, but a couple things ring loud and clear.

Alaska’s projects are going to be in the nation’s best interests. They will be infrastructure that will build gas lines and build that infrastructure up that will lead to energy production to allow us to become energy independent. We aren’t asking for things like “Bridges to Nowhere.”

....

In Alaska, we’re fortunate. We have a surplus. We have money put aside for the last few years, waiting for a ‘rainy day’ when the economy wasn’t as strong. We are in a good position, so we are not asking for, nor should we ask for, a bailout from the ‘feds.’


She just never gives up with that big lie, does she? She did ask for a Bridge to Nowhere in her campaign, repudiated when it became unpopular, and kept the money anyway.

Which, gee, might have something to with why they have a surplus. Alaska is the biggest recipient of federal money per capita, while California gets about 77¢ back for every dollar it sends to the feds. Management is the least of our worries, sweet cheeks; it's sponge states like your'n that suck up our tax dollars for a $15 million hockey rink in a town of 7,000 tweakers.

Hell, her state's continued solvency is an ongoing bailout. Of course she's not going to ask -- we're footing the bill anyway.

But this is the part that really got me:

GIZZI: What was the biggest mistake made in the ’08 campaign?

PALIN: The biggest mistake made was that I could have called more shots on this: the opportunities that were not seized to speak to more Americans via media. I was not allowed to do very many interviews, and the interviews that I did were not necessarily those I would have chosen.


That's what it comes down to: she still thinks it was all about her. True, the campaign was run abysmally from the outset; bereft of any coherent message, McCain's braintrust insanely decided to remove his primary asset, his cozy relationship with the media. (Of course, this was at least in part because of internal recognition of a lack of message or genuine base appeal.)

I'm not sure exactly how many more interview fiascos Miss Thang feels she should have had in order to get her story straight, and no doubt we all would have gotten more bang for our entertainment buck. But as it was, she overshadowed her own running mate, first with plastering the excruciating minutiƦ of her life, then with the unintentional hilarity of her lie-filled stump speeches and gaffe-riddled, utterly nonsensical interview responses.

She had plenty of opportunities to tell her side of the story, indeed much more so than any veep candidate I can recall. And the more we all got to her know her, the more of us reached the same conclusion -- that while the Palins are probably perfectly good neighbors, she was and is way out of her depth to a dangerous and irresponsible extent, and served merely as a vessel for the usual goofballs and yahoos. But she's convinced that if she had just had one more chance....

Kinda like when she tried to cock-block the old man on his concession speech, breaking a pretty obvious protocol, or her peremptory warning before her debate with Biden that she wasn't going to play by the rules, man. No, don't trouble yourself to learn the expectations and guidelines of these fairly straightforward procedures. It's all about you thinkin' outside them stiflin' boxes, baby, and we'll all just learn how to deal, even if it means stepping on toes that have been at this game decades longer than you.

Well. Anything's possible, I suppose; the media are already vacillating between tying Obama to Rod Blagojevich and Rick Warren, and poring through the stool samples of celebricriminals (the latest reality craze, perhaps) like Drew Peterson and Casey Anthony. They're already bored with their shiny new Obama toy; they'll start loving it to death by the first of February.

Come '11 and '12, they'll jump at the chance to scrawl stupid "comeback" puff pieces. And it might work, especially if Obama's Wall Street benefactors fail to hold up their end of the bailout bargain and leave a lot of broke, resentful people. Stranger things have happened.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oil is currently trading at 37 bucks a barrel. Her fucked-up national park of a state barely breaks even at 67 dollars/barrel. Soon she'll be in Washington, cap in hand, begging for more federal welfare for her inbreds. I wish this Obama dude would stop being so goddamn nice and conciliatory, and start fucking these assholes up. Maybe he'll let Rahm Emanuel do that for him.

Anyway, fuck this festering cunt. Merry Festivus, y'all.

Heywood J. said...

Damn. Nicely done, man. Of course we're all tired of talking and reading about this person and her media-induced "phenomenon", but the whole thing is that car wreck you just can't help rubbernecking. She's a liar and a moralizing hypocrite, and a snotty pain in the ass as well.

One thing that fascinates me is the sheer juxtaposition between her utter lack of self-awareness, as shown by her functional ignorance on virtually every topic, and her grossly inflated sense of self-regard, the way she acts as if her ignorance and disregard of even basic standards of event protocol somehow exempt her from those things.

The other, more serious issue with her is the way she so quickly resonated with the yahoo vote, how powerfully that pseudo-populist chord was struck with that bloc. I think the economy is going to get a lot worse in general before it truly bottoms out, and in any event will be fundamentally changed in a way that will leave millions of people out, perhaps permanently.

The Republicans will never help them, and the Democrats will be too little too late. Those are the people who will be susceptible to the cheap, arrogant demagoguery of the likes of Palin. Obama really has his work cut out for him, trying to undo Fredo's many fuckups.

Anonymous said...

Now that she's a grandma, they can't even fantasize about her as a political milf anymore -- even Rich Lowry's fapping has got to get a little less frenetic when he realizes that Tripp is Trig and Track's nephew, not brother. And while you're right about that juxtaposition in her character, we ought to remember that these traits are better put to use on, say, The Late Autumn Rock of Love, not the second-highest office of the land. For someone who cares about living in a republic (as opposed to a banana republic), the fact that she still gets any attention at all is deeply dispiriting.