I just watched Chris Wallace interview Sarah Palin from her Arizona home (apparently the bus tour is over?), and her poor grasp of Paul Revere’s ride is the least of her problems:
- She said that she “tried as much as possible” to get the government out of healthcare in Alaska. Here’s the Anchorage Daily News two weeks before she quit:
State programs intended to help disabled and elderly Alaskans with daily life — taking a bath, eating dinner, getting to the bathroom — are so poorly managed, the state cannot assure the health and well-being of the people they are supposed to serve, a new federal review found.
The situation is so bad the federal government has forbidden the state to sign up new people until the state makes necessary improvements.
No other state in the nation is under such a moratorium, according to a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
- When asked about the 250,000 emails that are about to be released, and about Frank Bailey’s book based on 50,000+ emails he has, she said that nobody can understand the context of the first set of emails, and that Bailey was a bad, bad man. One reviewer:
“Blind Allegiance” is so full of Palin’s pettiness and incompetence that it defines her as little more than a small-town politician at a loss on the larger stage.
- She referenced her “years” of executive experience.
Wallace is playing under Fox rules, so he just asks the initial question and moves on, but none of Palin’s answers would have lasted past a well-informed follow-up. Since she has Mitt Romney in her sights, he at least will provide those follow-ups if this diva ever participates in a debate. But she won’t — her line is that she’s going to spend the next “weeks and months” deciding about a run for President. The nominee will be decided well before her charade ends.
cleek
well, she did what she said she would. success!
WereBear
Maybe I should just start a PAC. Any money that stumbles into it can be spent on whatever I want as long as I don’t run for anything, right?
And I can guarantee I’m not running for anything. Is this the answer to our economic woes?
r€nato
yeah what cleek said. Just another instance of Republicans saying government doesn’t work, then getting elected and proving it.
By the way… hasn’t Arizona suffered enough? Isn’t there a mercy rule that demands that people quit bringing up that Sarah Failin’ lives in Scottsdale now? There should be.
Davis X. Machina
Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin….
It rings a bell, but I can’t quite place it. It’s the answer to a trivia question, I know that…
Sorry, can’t help you. After 50, the memory starts to go.
Was she an Olympic athlete? Or was she the woman who took the subway in the Boston Marathon?
Dr. Squid
The followup question for Republican interviewees was originally killed by Tim Russert.
r€nato
Like just about everything else we know about Snooki Palin, this comes as not much of a surprise.
The fact is, Snooki has run for exactly two offices in her illustrious career chock-full of ‘executive experience’. The first was as mayor of Wasilla, with a population below 8000. The second was as governor of Alaska, which should really be considered mayor of Alaska seeing as there are 18 US cities with a greater population than the entire state.
If Snooki ever actually enters the race, she won’t be able to stay in the right-wing propaganda bubble forever. Doubly (triply, quadruply, billionply) so if she were to actually get the nomination. At which point she will inevitably fall flat on her face, making GW Bush look like a Rhodes scholar with daily media gaffes.
David
Aren’t Palin-supporters going to be very sorely disappointed (massive riots, looting, mayhem, etc) when she inevitably declares that she’s not officially entering the race or starting a new political party?
gex
@David: People who get conned that badly are usually too embarrassed to make a stink about it.
ETA: Oh, and as we learned during Katrina, white people don’t loot. At most they scavenge in a very Galtian manner.
r€nato
@David: I will bet real money that it will be blamed on the leftist-biased media that has the gall to quote her verbatim.
Davis X. Machina
@David: Hard to do when you get winded walking from the recliner to the gun cupboard…
bkny
what dr squid said … there will be no follow-up questions for sarah!palin. look at the faces of the reporters crowding around her eager for an interview. they are loving them some sarah!
r€nato
Seriously, I will predict right here and now that Snooki’s decision not to enter the race will be blamed on the media’s campaign to ‘get’ her. How dare the lamestream media not help cover up or deflect attention from Snooki’s ignorance and incompetence, like the fair and balanced Fixed News Channel does. Don’t those Marxists know a sacred cow when they see one?
Villago Delenda Est
Palin will never actually enter the race.
She’s in this to get her two sets of marks…the teabaggers and the media…to shower her with money and media attention, respectively.
Palin will never actually, formally run. Because at that point, she’ll need to, by law, start accounting for a lot of things she doesn’t want to account for. Just like Donald Trump.
Linda Featheringill
Way off topic but think about me anyway.
My oldest cat, Mojii of the orange-and-multi-digit fame, has been gone 3.5 days. He came home this morning with a wound that HAS TO HAVE attention.
I went online to borrow money to pay the vet but if it is more than that, euthanasia is the next option because the injury would kill him anyway, just slower and with more misery.
Off to the vets now. Have to go to the next town to find an animal hospital this is open on Sunday.
Okay, you can go back to your Sarah baiting.
[I’m worried.]
harlana
@Linda Featheringill: Best of luck Linda
gex
@Davis X. Machina: That’s what those Medicare scooters are for. Just put a gun rack on ’em and you’re good to riot.
WereBear
Blind Allegiance is actually a far better book that I expected; one of the co-writers is from the Alaskan political blog The Mudflats. So while the man the book is about is a great source of information, he had help to make it quite readable and interesting.
The portrait it paints of Palin is never a contradiction from what I’ve seen for myself, and read about in publicly reported stories. So I feel it is quite accurate.
From this, one can conclude that Palin regards every endeavor as an outgrowth of her pageant experience: Everything is about the optics, not the substance. Looking good is what’s required. Speak with a lot of those phrases everyone uses and most people will be fine with that.
Most telling is the experience of the man himself: Sarah seems to think:
Someone will be coming along to hitch their wagon to your star; and they can do the hard work.
danimal
I’ve believed for a year, and nothing has convinced me otherwise, that Sarah! will enter the race very late in the game. Kind of like a Tea Party savior to rescue the GOP from the relative sanity of Mitt. (relative is a very, um, relative word in this context).
She’s test driving some campaign concepts and increasing her pocket change this summer, but her play is much later in the game.
Davis X. Machina
@gex: Unlike the core Romney voter, who has a wine rack in the back window of his Ford F-150….
r€nato
@WereBear:
that’s because you are brainwashed by ‘facts’ which have a well-known liberal bias, and the lamestream media that reports them.
In order to know the truth about Snooki Palin, you must join the cult and be willing to defend anything Snooki says or does. Everyone else is the Enemy. If Snooki says 2+2 make 5, then you must be willing to explain how Snooki was right when she said that.
Mark S.
@Linda Featheringill:
Oh god, sorry to hear that.
bkny
@gex: i swear those scooters must be one of the biggest scams going. the cable channels run those commercials constantly — ‘with no cost to you!’ and what kills me are the olds featured all appear to be fairly well-off people.
dmsilev
@danimal: I’d have to agree. She’s behaving like someone who wants to run, but doesn’t want to officially declare that yet. All that icky financial disclosure stuff, and having to quit the Fox money train and everything. Besides, once she is actually running, the oppo research that I’m sure is cluttering up hard drives in every actual campaign is going to start leaking out. Fast.
Really, her best strategy is to wait as long as possible before announcing, then blitz the primaries relying on her name and what would be a three-week media orgasm following the announcement.
r€nato
@dmsilev: she has the potential to wreck the primary race. Run Snooki Run!
PurpleGirl
@Linda Featheringill: I hope that your cat pulls through; hope that you can find comfort today and peace whatever is decided and done.
sloan
The GOP has had it so good for so long that they’ve been able to wing it with shitty candidates like this for decades.
The painfully slow demographic and social changes that are finally leveling the playing field for Democrats have forced wingnuts to step up their game, but who can hell can play at this level? They’ve got an entire generation of spoon fed Limbaugh babies who can do little more than recite bullshit talking points.
So we end up with jackasses like Rick Scott and John Kasich being swept into office because of the lingering Bush Recession only to find out that they don’t know or care how to do the job. Surprise! And they suck so bad they’re hideously unpopular within weeks, even more unpopular than George W. Bush in 2008!
And what do Republicans have on deck for 2012? Their selective inbreeding has reduced the field to a few 2008 retreads, Herman Cain and Donald Trump. I worked on the Obama campaign in 2008. Sarah Palin brought in a flood of volunteers who weren’t O-bots by any stretch of the imagination but so appalled at the thought of her in power they felt they had no choice but to work like hell to elect a Democrat and defeat her. They basically applied Dick Cheney’s one percent doctrine to domestic politics.
I can see the GOP selecting a safe Romney/Timmeh!/Huntsman for the top of the ticket but they’ll have to go Palin 2.0 for VP to appease the teabaggers again.
Ghanima Atreides
@danimal: she is running right now.
For the VP slot. whoever the conservative elites pick will be forced to take her onboard.
Or she will torpedo the GOP with a third party run.
She has the gripping hand, and she’s learned enough about the old wide boiz operation by now. They won’t be able to use her and discard her ever again.
Hill Dweller
Over at Washington Monthly, Steve Benen has her quotes on the economy from this interview, and they are equally hilarious. She claims debt is the reason the economy is bad(completely ignoring the financial meltdown and the republicans’ culpability in said debt), which that stooge Wallace didn’t bother to follow up on. She also made a bizarre Titanic analogy. The woman is certifiably stupid.
This country is fucked if people like Boehner can run around saying the recovery is slow because taxes are too high without any push back. Even the NY Times let that bullshit stand with no correction.
bkny
she doesn’t want to be prez — too much work; but i definitely see her taking the vp slot. i wonder how those gop boyz in congress would appreciate her stealing their thunder.
r€nato
@Hill Dweller: anybody who thinks taxes in the US are too high, should try living in Europe for a while.
Either that, or fucking move to Somalia where there is no government and no taxes.
AliceBlue
@Linda Featheringill:
I’m so sorry, Linda. I wish the best for you and Mojii.
Steve
@Linda Featheringill: Best of luck Linda.
dmsilev
@Ghanima Atreides: Bullshit. Even assuming that she’d want another go at being number two, after the trainwreck of 2008, no sane Presidential candidate would touch her with a 10 foot pole. If the candidate needs to throw a bone to the Tea Party types, they’ll go with someone who isn’t already damaged goods on a national scale. Someone like Rubio perhaps.
r€nato
@dmsilev: agreed. Snooki as VP will NEVER happen. Not unless every last board member and lobbyist for the US Chamber of Commerce is killed in some tragic accident.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear:
This helps explain why our utterly airheaded “visuals are more important than substance” broadcast/cable media is the way it is.
It’s all about the optics (and what attracts eyeballs). Substance might happen, but it’s vanishingly unlikeley to.
Contrast this to the period in the 60’s when the three major networks deliberately ran their news divisions at a loss because they were trying to burnish up their images…by presenting actual news and information, as opposed to infotainment.
r€nato
That book review is a hoot. The authorship of the book should be credited to Captain Obvious.
cat48
@Linda Featheringill:
I’m thinking of you and Mojii and wishing both of you well.
r€nato
@Villago Delenda Est: The truth is that Snooki’s popularity boils down to exactly two things:
She’s the “President I’d Like to Fuck” and she says mean things about Democrats and liberals, which appeals to the sociopath faction of the GOP.
If Snooki looked like Susan Boyle, she would have not had any political career whatsoever.
dmsilev
@r€nato:
Fixed that for you…
r€nato
@dmsilev: “ironically hilarious”… yeah LOL like maybe their charter plane crashes due to shoddy maintenance work that was done in a facility in El Salvador to where American jobs were outsourced…
WereBear
@Linda Featheringill: Ah, man. My best wishes to you.
SIA
@Linda Featheringill: same as yesterday, a lot of people throwing in a few dollars can save a kitteh/puppeh. Can’t we get a running fund going here? I definitely would contribute. Kind of like sosha lism for pet owners.
I’m in but have no idea how to go about it. In the meantime, white light around you both Linda.
cckids
@Linda Featheringill: I’m so sorry. Like others here, I’d be able to chip in a bit; together we could make a real dent in the bill. Best wishes for you & Mojii.
buckydoc
@WereBear: I was also pleasently surprised by the book. It avoided the temptation to take her down by throwing wild haymakers, choosing instead to win on points by documenting dozens of small, petty atrocities.
After reading that book, I no longer saw her as a dimwitted beauty queen, but rather as woman with a personality disorder. And it is the sort of personality disorder that casts a powerful spell over people in search of a savior.
WereBear
Yes, she seemed highly borderline/narcissist to me.
Ghanima Atreides
@dmsilev: you would be right if this was Sarah 1.0. But i don’t think they will have a choice. i think the conservative elites will be forced to choose between taking her on and her taking the base for a third party run a la Ross Perot.
And its not bulshytt….like always i am supporting my hypothesis with data and analysis.
There is less work in being the VP candidate, and she will get material for another book if she fails. And being on the ticket will legitimize her. She wants people to stop laffing at her. And I don’t think she will let the old wide boiz use her again for free.
;)
pablo
Imagine the field day daddy Mike Wallace would have had doing that interview.
Amir_Khalid
After George Walker Bush, the least you Americans owe your own country, not to mention the rest of the planet, is to make sure no one as deficient as he gets anywhere near the Presidency again. Luckily, Sarah Palin has repeatedly outed herself as ignorant, lazy, stupid, petty, vindictive, avaricious and dishonest. So despite the media’s effort to preset her as a serious candidate (and they’re just throwing away their credibility if they keep at it), most Americans know what she is and don’t want her to be President. Or even VP.
Deep down she knows all this, even if she won’t admit it to herself; and you know, I suspect that maybe she hasn’t. She is, in effect,just faking a run so she can keep on milking her fans for money. That’s why there’s no real campaign organization behind her. I think we’re all pretty much safe from her.
sb
Linda, my thoughts are with you and yours. And second on the chipping in. All the best.
Also, too. Sarah Palin is an inspiration to grifters everywhere.
Gretchen
I too think she’ll stay on the sidelines, hinting that she’ll run but not giving up her Fox slot. But when the slate is set, she’ll say it’s not conservative enough and do a Facebook-based third party run. She’ll say she won’t debate because the lamestream media isn’t fair to her, and just make noise from the sidelines. Splitting the Republican vote won’t worry her – she’s not really a Republican, she’s whatever’s good for Sarah.
boss bitch
No he won’t. He’s too afraid of her supporters to do that.
Admiral_Komack
Sarah Palin WILL NOT run for President OR Vice-President on the Republican ticket (or any third-party ticket) in 2012, I don’t care how many tweets the twit posts.
ericblair
@gex:
Put a .50 cal on the back, and I think that’s called a “Kentucky technical.”
quaint irene
Well, that was fast. She hit Gettysburg, State of Liberty, and Boston and that’s it? So much for America’s great wealth of historic sites.
Ghanima Atreides
@Amir_Khalid: no. She hears voices in her head. You cannot predict what she is going to do based on analysis of what a rational actor would do.
Linda Featheringill
Thanks to everyone for your good wishes for Mojii, the cat. It looks like he’s going to live and will probably be fully functional eventually.
Ah hell. He walks like John Wayne anyway. How will we know if his has a hitch in his get-along? :-)
Again, thanks.
r€nato
@quaint irene: let me guess: Snooki had to cut her bus tour short due to Obama’s high gas prices.
maya
@quaint irene:
No. She’s back in Az to visit that most famous American landmark of all – Boot Hill.
SiubhanDuinne
Linda Featheringill. I’m so glad to hear he’ll be okay. Poor little guy.
Amir_Khalid
@Ghanima Atreides:
She says she hears voices in her head. But I don’t believe that for one second. She’s not crazy; it’s the crowd she’s pandering to that actually believes this bullshit. It’s all part of her con.
Ghanima Atreides
@Amir_Khalid: perhaps. But it still gives her an excuse to jump whichever way she wants.
/shrug
i think she is out for revenge.
and bucks.
;)
Ghanima Atreides
@WereBear: i think its classic dementia praecox. paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur.
Lojasmo
@Linda Featheringill:
Linda: do you have cat-pay pal?.
RobNYNY1957
I understand that in “Blind Allegiance,” the author accuses her of wearing non-prescription glasses (post lasik surgery) in an attempt to look more intelligent. A vile falsehood!! If she wanted to appear more intelligent, she would just stop talking.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Linda Featheringill: Good thoughts for both of you.