Fifteen Minutes of Lame

So at least one (1) intrepid media herd animal is starting to have some, erm, misgivings about the veracity of some of the things Miss Wasilla pulls out of her bumptious ass with disturbing regularity:

Has Sarah Palin learned anything since she was plucked from obscurity almost two years ago? Not that I can tell.

Nonsense. Palin has clearly learned that she can fabricate virtually anything, and there will be plenty of people out there not only eager to believe it, but more importantly, willing to pay her handsomely for the privilege. There is no accountability for just making shit up.

This is one of the more valuable lessons young entrepreneurs can learn in a heavily addled, easily rattled, reality teevee saddled, hyper-consumerist culture -- there is almost literally nothing you can say that is so stupid or so easily disprovable, that someone won't buy into it, if only for a while. Has Ruth Marcus never heard of P.T. Barnum, or L. Ron Hubbard?

I've started to write this column several times and put it aside. I worried: Was I being harder on Palin because I disagree with her politically? Was I being harder on Palin than I would be on a man spouting similar pablum? In a world where everyone already has firm opinions about Palin, pro or con, is there a value in pointing out that the empress has no clothes?

Palin's appearance on "Fox News Sunday" pushed me over the edge.

Let's see if we have this straight -- Palin has been slithering her way around the country for nearly two full fucking years now, making shit up every step of the way, and only now Marcus is having her come-to-Jebus moment. Seriously?

Let's put it in a way that Ruth Marcus and her ilk, no matter how far "over the edge" they are "pushed", will never have the sack to put it:

Every word out of Sarah Palin's mouth, including "and" and "the", is a goddamned lie.

Hopefully this helps, because they really don't seem to get it. Palin's by-now routine schtick about the (oh ho ho) "lamestream media" is perhaps the only thing she's ever said that even has a ring of truth to it. But that is only because of the corporate media's own diffident, gutless, yet maddeningly constant coverage of her nonsense.

Now, some folks will simply write off Palin as a dunce, while others will mutter about how she plays fast and/or loose with "the facts", that is, verifiable data points regarding the people and/or events she talks about at her various rubber-chicken stops.

I submit that the problem is deeper, more pernicious. The problem is no longer whether or not Palin knows what she's talking about. The problem is that she doesn't care what "the facts" are. It doesn't matter that Big Oil donated more than twice as much money to her and her doddering running mate than to the Kenyan-born communist Moooslim Barry Soetoro; she says otherwise, and by divinely ordained fiat, it is so.

It doesn't matter that this is about the umpteenth time she's been caught inventing facts to suit her tired-ass talking points; she'll do it again and again, for as long as there's the opening of an envelope for her to show up at. And her drooling retard fans will never hold her accountable for it, anymore than they can actually explain a single policy of hers that they endorse or agree with.

It is not enough to merely write Palin off as a garden-variety "liar", with which Washington is obviously overrun. What Palin really is -- and this oughta bear some weight with people who at least pretend to be good Christians -- is a calumniator, a bearer of false witness, a person who deliberately invents or misrepresents things about their opponents in order to slander or defame them. That is really all she's done since day one, since she proclaimed that Obama was "pallin' around with terrorists" while she, brave Saint Sarah, devoutly said "no" to the Bridge to Nowhere before taking the money anyway.

You'd think someone with such a high fatuous-boilerplate-to-pseudofactual-talking-point public-speaking ratio would be more discriminating about their opportunities to zap an opponent with an inconvenient truth. Palin's advantage is that neither she nor her fans care about the factuality of her charges.

Incidentally, this theme of hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness applies not only to Palin's professional life and her trenchant political observations. Palin famously (and tediously) characterizes herself over and over again as some tough cookie, utilizing fearsome, marauding beasts such as pit bulls and grizzly bears as totems with which to compare herself.

Yet the opposite is patently observable -- she is notoriously thin-skinned, about people rejoindering her falsehoods, or mentioning word one about any of the various kids she trots out as convenient props. She dishes it out with relish, yet flies into a hissy fit if anyone dares to respond. There is always an equilibrium point where you start running into the law of diminishing returns, and Palin's tedious stunt-jabber, her insufferable nonsense and empty-calorie schtick is finally getting her as much attention as her brain-dead ankle-biting.

It will be a fine day when she finally takes her ill-gotten pelf and heads back home by way of Neiman-Marcus, but until then, it would not kill the media folk to simply and sharply identify a spade as an entrenching implement. Let's stop pussyfooting around this -- Palin is a pathological liar, full stop, when she bothers at all to get past her usual hokum. Start hammering on that, and watch the whole façade crumble. One supposes it will have to be a media entity without any attachments or agreements with whatever incestuous publishing consortium bankrolling her upcoming two-ply opus.

Lately Palin seems to have finally bought into a little too much of her own hype, and may have overstepped. Two of her most famous endorsements this election year are Senate candidates Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina. One is a card-carrying moron way out of their depth, and the other is Rand Paul. Paul can ride his daddy's coattails and excite the Paultards to some extent, but so far he has yet to open his mouth without risking a serious case of asshole'sathlete's foot. Both Democratic primary candidates got more votes. As for Fiorina, she may have the money (ask E-Meg Whitman, aka Griff Harsh V's mom, how that's worked out), but she is widely disliked in California, and people will be less than whelmed at her (one assumes in advance) whimsically creative version of how she lawn-darted Hewlett-Packard.

These are high-profile, but also high-risk endorsements for Miss Thang, and the more she runs her mouth about the only entity that keeps her name in play -- that stupid, stupid librul media -- the likelier it is that they actually take their gloves off at some point and give her the fisking she's been begging for.


Update: OK, this is pretty good. She really does make Dubya look like a Rhodes scholar.