Stupid Sarah Palin
Maybe it's the internet culture of "firsties" or something, but I feel compelled to place my bet on the motive for Palin's abrupt and seemingly idiotic -- even for her -- resignation. In a nutshell: she is currently under investigation, she has already been deemed unethical as a public official, she and her husband are deeply weird and dishonest, and she has an apparently unlimited supply of skeletons and closets and a penchant for combining the two and then displaying them herself for all to see. Right now (that being the key) she is a cancer and, aside from the crazy base of the GOP that will salute in the Third Reich style just about anything that repulses 70% of the rest of the voting public, Sarah Palin could not get elected dog catcher in 2012 on the path she's headed. She tried to stay low, that didn't work. Then she came back, all "remember me? I'm back atcha!" and that flopped, too. Then she basically went nutso on David Letterman and never came to the point -- look, the last few months have been a fun stroll down last year's memory lane, but Palin has just reminded us all why we hated her so much and confirmed that, yes, we still hate her and wish her harm. Immediate and permanent harm.
So, today. Did she sound stupid? Check. Was the whole thing a little more than very crazy? Oh yeah it was. Did she manage that most daring of political-crazy feats, the so-stupid-it-turned-into-positive-exposure stunt? No. No, in fact, most of us are still chuckling at her and tossing out random guesses as to her real motive. So strike three!
But let's say she just disappears from politics for two years, starting now. What would happen in 2012 in the run-up to the campaign? I will go ahead and go all in on "GOP candidate X asks Palin to be an advisor and then, if nominated, makes her his VP choice." The outcry won't be nearly so loud or large then. She'll have already been there once. What's more, for a dumb dickhead like Mitt Romney, say, Palin is hillbilly heroin he can flood the South with and, like McCain but without all the pesky "is he crazy?" stories (because nobody thinks that highly of Romney), get an instant boost with that ol' crazy GOP base (unless it inbreeds itself out of existence by then, but I consider that unlikely). The general idea sounds plausible to me.
Probably sounded plausible to Sarah Palin, too. She doesn't like to work, is what it boils down to. She didn't have to do very much to become governor of Shitsville, USA, AKA Alaska, and then Old Man McCain plucked her out of Dog Patch to be his running mate and she didn't do much work on that, either. And now she'd like to be president or close to it but she hasn't ever actually done anything difficult in her life. So, time to retire! 2012 is still coming. All she has to do is wait. She has the name and, in fact, if you think about it she's basically freezing whatever is left of that name now, before it erodes further under the spotlight of an investigation of a sitting governor. Now she has a year or two to settle everything and then, I think, some Republican clown virtually has got to come begging for her endorsement.
I don't think she or her circle are very intelligent. But I think they understand that she can only go downhill between now and 2012 unless she gets out of office, Now she has. My guess is she gets a reality show or some other harmless, ridiculous gig to pay the bills, does her book tour, and surreptitiously works on growing her legend as a gone-too-soon leader in exile in advance of her return in a few years. The Republicans will be begging her to come back! Oh, and it'll destroy whatever vomitous dregs are left of the GOP, and blah blah blah whatever.
3 Comments:
I have, along with everyone else, tried to figure out what Palin is doing here, and what she's doing it (whatever it is) for.
Here's what I've come up with: She's cashing out.
Palin has never attempted anything on her own or for her own reasons. She has no actual identity or agency that can be called her own. Everything she's done has been at someone else's behest. She is, in that sense, another George W. Bush. But unlike Bush she has reached the limit of her stamina, ambition and drive early on. She isn't going anywhere very soon, and there are no more money making opportunities in sight now that the "Payola Politics" she has exploited as Mayor and Governor are subject to real investigations.
All she ever wanted was to be rich. That alone defines sucess in the trailer park. So she's decided to make the Spring 2010 deadline for her book deal, take the 11 million from Harper Collins and run like a thief.
Is this theory too simplistic? No. That's just the problem with our parsing of Palin, and before her Bush -- we keep attaching our own motivations to their actions as if they were somehow normal, comprehensible personalities. Palin is not the same as you, me, the man on the street or other politicians. She's really really simple.
When we try to understand her we should think down -- the simplest and yes, the dumbest explaination is probably the correct one. We would have done better years ago had we realized this about Bush as well.
I think you have hit it exactly. In fact, one of the head-slapping boners of my recent life is probably that I failed to realize that everything Palin says is a lie, and thus there is no real scandal around her at all -- it's just that everything she says is untrue. Take the "water broke/gave a speech/got on a plane/amniotic fluid leaking/8 hour trip/back to Alaska/drove 2 hours/went to the doctor/only then did I deliver my wonderful, retarded baby" story. It is a fucking bald-faced lie, told only to prove that Sarah Palin is tougher than everyone else, by God!, and nothing more. There is no "secret pregnancy," there is also no "Bristol had 2 babies" cover-up. It's just a goddamn liar doing what she does: lie. For no good reason, that's what Palin does.
Um, at the behest of whom has she been doing everything so far? It's always for her, it seems to me. She's not a follower or a puppet, like Bush. Quite the opposite -- she's a ruthless arriviste. It's just that she's too fucking lazy and stupid to achieve what she wants. She's got the low cunning of East European peasants, which some mistake for intelligence. It's actually just pig-headed, self-regarded scheming.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home