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Thursday, January 29, 2015

I'm With Stupid

Forgive me if I'm enjoying the gradually-then-suddenly decline and fall of Meth Valley Barbie a little too much, but this broad's glass-breaking jabber has simply gone on so far past its sell-by date, so we're not just gonna let it go. It needs to be hammered into 'murka's seeping lizard brain just how corrosive her nonsense has been to what's left of a national political body, to allow this person to hang around as long as she has.

Especially when people pull out these ham-fisted "I'm not defending her, but...." pieces that are really just intended to highlight the lamestream media's manifold hypocrisies and inconsistencies.

I'll grant him one point, at least:

And as for all of the attention paid to Palin's supposed white trash brood, remember that Joe Biden's son Hunter was given a special waiver to join the Navy at age 43 only to be kicked out for doing cocaine at age 44. This is the same son who had rather questionable ties to a Ukrainian gas company.

Absolutely. Hunter Biden's appointment to the board (as legal advisor) of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma does and should raise eyebrows and questions, especially since it just came months after Putin's annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and our subsequent saber-rattling.

I mean, it's not quite as questionable as, say, Dick Cheney making a metric fuckton of money from a war that he pushed like Ron Jeremy for, but sure, at the very least, Hunter Biden's journey over the last twelve months should remove all doubt that there are at minimum two Americas.

But impressively, the author manages to undermine his own point in the very next sentences:

Despite being far more consequential problems than whether or not Palin's kids got in a scrape at a snowmobile kegger, these scandals barely registered and media sure as hell hasn't pointed many fingers at the Vice President for the decisions of his kids. With all the tabloid coverage of Palin and her family since 2008 her critics certainly act like they're vindicated, but it's telling they don't even try to make the argument that Joe Biden was a superior man for the job.

A few things here. One is the obvious, that Palin has spent the last few years repositioning herself in the eyes of the American public. No, I don't mean "she was asking for it", but she has become an entertainment figure at least as much as a political figure. She was smart enough to realize that there's far more money and less actual work being the former than the latter. But she forgot that the reward for being a celebrity is that journos rummage through your trash and hang on every stupid thing you say. And when your reputation is for saying stupid shit, well, don't be too surprised when they look at you like a dog looks at a T-bone.

Secondly, Palin has made a bad habit of padding her ascent to reality teevee queen with plenty of social conservative red meat, such as advocating abstinence -- for your kids anyway, not hers. This is not a reflection of Palin as a parent; teenage girls get knocked up, although that number is indeed declining, except of course in abstinence-only states. But even if you're an ordinary mom in the supermarket, if you have a teenage daughter who got knocked up, you kinda have a moral obligation to STFU about the choices of other females. If you hold or have held or are pretending to try to attain in the future some sort of political office where your words might have actual influence over those choices, you definitely have a moral obligation to stay out of it, or at least not insist on the opposite of what your own children did. It's worse than hypocritical, it just makes you look like a buffoon whose words mean nothing at all.

And finally, while Diamond Joe Biden has certainly had his share of WTF moments before and since becoming vice-president, the fact of the matter is that Biden has spoken eloquently and extemporaneously on a variety of subjects, especially foreign policy, has written about those subjects, and has never given a speech like these drunken word-salad moments that have long been routine with Palin. Even if you leave out last fall's drunken snowbillies crashing someone's party and starting a brawl, and just pit Palin against Biden, qual for qual, brain cell for brain cell, quote for quote, there's just no contest.

You know and I know and Mark Hemingway certainly knows that if we all got in a room with Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, and talked about serious issues of foreign and domestic policy -- not some bullshit formatted show-pony debate, but a deep-level detailed multi-point discussion on issues, causes, and possible solutions -- Biden would mop the floor with Palin. Hell, you or I or Hemingway could do that.

It's too bad, because there was a time when Palin could have been seen as someone who understood the travails of the working class, how the elites really have screwed them over, and used that as a basis for proposed policy changes. Instead she chose to turn that opportunity into random sequences of memorized catch-phrases, props, and insults.

In other words, just another blogger.

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