Chewed up to the tune of a million dollars a year, 15 bucks a word. Plus all the money she made from her book and reality show. Don’t cry for me, Wasilla.
Reader Interactions
170Comments
Comments are closed.
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!
Bark louder, little dog.
Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.
Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.
Not all heroes wear capes.
Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.
“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”
If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.
“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickle?”
Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.
In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.
Usually wrong but never in doubt
I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.
Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll
Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?
We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.
The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.
Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.
“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.
You can’t love your country only when you win.
That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.
Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL
Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?
Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.
You are here: Home / Economics / Grifters Gonna Grift / I wanna spread the news that if it feels this good getting used
redshirt
At 15 bucks a word I offer myself up as the media’s chew toy.
Have at it, MSM
(payment due in advance)
Culture of Truth
You did your best, Chris.
Comrade Mary
For the kidz: the other Withers.
Loneoak
To be fair, words are very hard for her. And at $1M/year, she made $500k per coherent, grammatically correct sentence.
grandpa john
She means about as much to politics as Cillizza does to journalism.They both fall into the hand in bucket of water illustration. Once the hand is removed, the hole left indicates how much either would be missed in their respective categories.
Chris
“Her journey shows how the process can chew up those who are too lazy to work at it.”
FTFY. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are/were blasted daily with every possible slur in the book – in Clinton’s case, despite the noise machine being pushed all the way to a farcical attempt at impeachment. They managed to stick it out. Hell, even George W. Bush had a lot of nasty shit said about him (though in his case most of it was true) and it didn’t keep him out of the Oval Office for eight years.
It’s what politicians do. It’s what they have to put up with. Palin isn’t the first politician who’s had to deal with crap; she certainly had no problem dishing out that kind of viciousness; and she was treated with fucking kid gloves by the entire establishment from start to finish (it really says something about how easy they’re going on you when you have to use “they asked me what kind of papers I read!” as proof that the “liberal media” is going too hard on you). She quit because she was either too lazy to do the work, not interested in it, or both.
Bubblegum Tate
She meant that conspicuous stupidity can be a legit ticket to fame and fortune.
Um, yay?
Butch
Chewed up? The woman needed 3 weeks coaching to recite the damn alphabet. I’ll take half that amount and be twice as incoherent. Deal?
ruemara
If I could say neocon bullshit with a straight face, I’d totally get on the gravy train. I mean, eventually, I’d snap and slaughter an entire AFP dinner group with a sharpened butter knife and my filed weasel teeth, but who could really blame me?
BGinCHI
This says as much about Fox News and Bill Kristol as about the Grifter Queen herself.
An index to how smart they really are.
FlipYrWhig
Politics chewed up Sarah Palin the way beauty pageants chewed up Honey Boo Boo.
MattF
The low-information journalist informs the low-information voter about the low-information politician. If the bottom of the barrel learned how to scrape itself, they’d all be out of business.
low-tech cyclist
Cillizza can be a real idiot sometimes, can’t he?
Thing is, she coulda shoulda been ready. She’d been governor of a state for a year and a half, and had already been the subject of some veep speculation, when McCain turned her into a household word.
What killed her was her laziness. She didn’t seem to think she had to work at anything, and she didn’t have the brains to wing it.
Life chews up slackers with no brains. As Doug says, she hasn’t been chewed up, though – she’s got whatever part of that million a year she had the sense to save or invest. She’s just been embarrassed a bit, but the price should have been right. Hell, for a million a year, I’ll walk down Pennsylvania Avenue naked every day, with pornographic messages painted on my body.
Tokyokie
Sarah Pallin is like a contestant who doesn’t win on American Idol but makes it to the last five or six. She got as far as she did because she was sorta cute, not because she could sing, and now that she’s off the show, nobody outside her family, friends and neighbors will long remember what she could do. But she’ll always think that she should have been a star, not because she had the talent and put in the work, but because she thinks it should have been so.
Josie
She was not chewed up. The entire MSM covered for her by not stating that she was dumb as a rock and totally unprepared to be student body president, much less vice-president of the United States. The whole thing was the biggest farce I have ever seen in politics, and I’ve been watching for a very long time.
srv
Leave Sarah Alone! Think of all the comedic enjoyment she selflessly gave, also too, you all.
evodevo
@MattF: +1 !!!111!!!
replicnt6
I’m just thankful to have been given “In what respect, Charlie?”
Roger Moore
@Loneoak:
Not at all! Words are very easy for her; she can speak words as well as you and I. It’s putting them together to express meaning that’s the problem.
Culture of Truth
“Name a newspaper”
Violet
If she had made even a tiny bit of effort at looking like she was interested in policy instead of being a reality show star she’d probably be a leading contender for the 2106 Republican nomination. That’s just how dumb the Republicans are.
She wasn’t chewed up and spit out. She chewed off her own leg.
General Stuck
After the George Bush disaster, Sarah Palin was the first act of desperation from a dying and diseased political party. Or at least as a political movement it had been that ended the day Hank Paulson begged congress to save what conservative philosophy nearly destroyed.
Her ascension to stardom, at once marked the truly goofy wingnut whinging to some kind of imagined perfection for the essential wingnut that would overcome past failures. And also too, exposed our press and their political reporting for the shallow ‘Dancing With the Stars ‘ like cotton candy unfit for the 4th estate, that probly had Thomas J spinning in his grave.
The wingnuts had nothing left but some kind of deranged hype blasted out to the country via the Mighty Wurlitzer with Palin as the marquee act on a right wing Vegas Strip.
And jeebus be told, we reached a new base camp on the way to Peak Wingnut, as Sarah and Mitt and the whole schizo clown show enlightened enough voters for some sanity to win. And judging from polls in a seeming permanent basement of approval for the GOP brand, that nationally, the memo reads – change or else GOP.
mai naem
Next up for the Wasilla Snowbillies : out of lock grandchild, one child in a playboy spread this year, second child in penthouse spread next year, sarah in a hustler spread in three years when she’s needs more meth $$$. Also too, a stint in the Dr Drew Rehab show on MTV. Mommie Dearest books from three children. Finally,a stint on Celebrity Survivor with Anthony Weiner, the upstate NY rep who was caught for horseplay with his aides, Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff,William Jefferson,Tom Delay and Mark Sanford.
Marc
If there is a just and loving God she’ll burn the bonanza on a Ponzi scheme, a collection of vintage snowmobiles, and an exurban Phoenix theme park that’s found to be on top of an abandoned toxic waste dump.
Chris
@ruemara:
I would be tempted to go “undercover” and become one of their stars just so that years in the future, once I’d salted away enough money, I could go on the air and say “I’d like to announce that I never believed a fucking word I said, I just wanted your money. And I got it, thanks!”
(Plus all the opportunities for pranks. “Remember that time I told them all to third-party Chris Christie because he was an Islamo-fascist plant? AND THEY ACTUALLY WENT AND DID IT?”)
Wouldn’t work, though, because I couldn’t dive into their world and keep interacting with them for any amount of time. Think Christoph Waltz’ character in “Django Unchained.” Nice thought though.
reflectionephemeral
The entire Bill Withers Live at Carnegie Hall album is fantastic, but the version of “Use Me” might be my favorite track. Or maybe “Ain’t No Sunshine”– hearing it in that different context made me appreciate a tune that I’d grown up hearing & kinda regarded as background.
Obviously Palin wasn’t “chewed up”, as you point out. Also too, when it mattered, folks like Cillizza were pleased to offer article after article praising her savvy. IIRC, Jay Newton Small at Time wrote about 30 breathless “will she or won’t she run in 2012?!?!” articles. It’s the same old, “No, no, no, no, no, no, OK yeah, but it’s old news” thing that we see all the time with whatever nonsense the right wing is pushing, whether the prowess of Palin, popularity of the Tea people, or the wisdom of invading Iraq.
Edited to put in some edits I felt like putting in.
Scott Supak
Shorter Caribou Barbie:
mdblanche
With all the money she’s made playing a politician on TV, Miss Alaska Second Runner-up should be fine. Unless she blew through it all developing expensive tastes instead of investing some of it for the inevitable day that her act wore too thin and her former fans moved on to the next big craze. Because in that case she’s screwed.
redshirt
@mdblanche: The odds of the Palin’s wisely investing all this grift money is about 1%. Near nil.
However, Todd’s got a bunch of sweet new “Snow Machines”.
beltane
@MattF:
This is the best comment I have read in a long time. Someone give this man an award.
Calouste
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, words aren’t Sarah’s problem, sentences are.
trollhattan
@redshirt:
Am SO there, and I can be veddy, veddy wordy.
kindness
What is the deal? Sarah has been a non-entity for some time now. There was hardly any mocking during the whole last election cycle. So now that Fox has finally figured that that flame went out long ago….what’s the deal?
Mock Fox now. Sarah has her own karma to live down. She just isn’t worth my energy.
22over7
From what I can glean from the funny pages that comprise the internet, Sarah’s main problem isn’t her base, it’s that the Fox folks hate her guts. Rove thinks she’s an embarrassment. And that’s the answer that I’ve been looking for in all these articles about Republicans trying new lipstick colors for their brand.
Sarah can sell the scam to the rubes, but the important guys in the party need to sell the scam to the money, and the money needs to hear prettier words and, more importantly, words that sound like success. We now know that the Sheldon Adelsons of the world actually watch Fox, and actually listen to what Newt and Karl tells them.
See the post below on the republican summit. They’re not trying to come up with words to convince the American people that they’re worthy of election. They’re trying to come up with words to convince the money guys, so that the grift can continue unabated. The money guys won’t listen to Sarah. So they cut her loose.
That’s my story, anyway.
trollhattan
@redshirt:
Confess that one thing I done learned from Sarah and Tawd is that snowmobiles are now called snow machines.
Zounds.
Heliopause
I think both Doug and Cilliza are right. Palin was chewed up by the national political process because she didn’t have the skills for it. She also grifted a ton of money. To her credit she had a Plan B and it worked.
Bruce S
Is Cilliza referring to Levi Johnston?
John O
Her main political accomplishment will be the historical and reasonable trashing of John McCain as a serious man.
trollhattan
@22over7:
Jeez, it wasn’t Sarah clawing at Megyn Kelly’s ankles at the Fox Bwaaain Room on election night. Karl can embarrass Fox all by himself, wiffout no help.
Suffern ACE
IMHO, its the media establishment that gave her the heave ho and chewed her up. She left politics when she resigned as governor. She only played the part of a politican-to-be for the cameras and her worldnetdaily fans. She ended her own political career by foolishly resigning from office. You do that, and even your own state citizens aren’t going to vote for you and if they won’t, why should anyone else?
Higgs Boson's Mate
Palin got the VP nod because McCain wanted to give her an antique organ.
22over7
@trollhattan:
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I think Karl is the devil. But he’s back on Fox, and Sarah isn’t. I’m guessing Karl is still listened to by people who count.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@22over7:
Karl is listened to by people who can count. Palin is listened to by those who can not.
SatanicPanic
@Chris: You’d get busted at some point too. Make an offhand reference to lattes and they’ll know.
trollhattan
@22over7:
Sadly, you’re probably right. But after Karl cratered so badly in November, it’ll be fascinating whether
the bamboozledhis funders still keep the taps flowing.How can his brand not have been severely damaged?
Chris
@22over7:
@Suffern ACE:
You both make good points (and I’m sure 22over’s is the one the movement conservative crowd will go with, phrased as “the elites kneecapped her because they’re really all a bunch of RINOs who FEAR her awesomeness!”).
But… would it be enormously shallow of me to suggest that at least part of the reason she was dropped is that she’s just not so hot anymore?
Chris
@SatanicPanic:
Oh, I’d probably get kneecapped all the way at the beginning of the admissions process when they found out I’m half-French.
ETA: maybe not, if I double-downed on the wingnuttiness by pretending to be a Front National voter. But even then they’d probably raise an eyebrow and go “Fro Nassio what?” and kick me out for attempting to confuse them with additional Frenchness.
22over7
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Precisely.
Bruce S
@John O:
Somebody tell David Gregory…
trollhattan
@Chris:
Coldhouse flower.
For sure, the buzzsaw voice lingers in the memory far longer than the latest tight outfit.
SatanicPanic
@Chris: You’d be a prime candidate to flub the mustard question.
mdblanche
@redshirt: Boo hoo. You’re breaking my heart.
pat
Thank pasta for Sarah!! With a non-idiot running mate, Ole Gramps might have been able to pull it off.
Thnik about that for a minute.
22over7
@Chris:
Are you saying that rich white guys would get rid of a woman of a certain age, who’s become perhaps a bit tedious, for something more, well, exciting?
Unpossible. I mean, Newt would never…oh, wait.
Chris
@22over7:
I am not saying anything, in a definitive sense, except that it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
danielx
@Comrade Mary:
But my answer yeah to all that use me stuff
Is I want to spread the news that if it feels this good getting used
Oh you just keep on using me until you use me up
Until you use me up
At a mil per annum, I shouldn’t wonder.
Jay in Oregon
@trollhattan:
“Now”, nothing; I grew up calling them that, about 30 years ago. Heck, I still call them that (when I have occasion to refer to them).
eemom
The phrase “fish in a barrel” comes to mind.
MariedeGournay
@Calouste: Aye, verily, a win.
General Stuck
@22over7:
These are the captains of industry, youngin. There is money in the Stepford plan without all that commie regulation. Low maintenance, and dinner is never late.
grandpa john
@SatanicPanic: @trollhattan: Grifters always seem to have another grift, look at Ralph Reed
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
Accountability is for the little people.
Litlebritdifrnt
Just today I went over to C4P for grins and giggles and checked out the comments on the story of Sarah leaving Fox. They were gushing over there “finally Sarah is unleashed” “this proves she is running in 2016, she doesn’t want to be shackled to Fox” “Yeah Sarah 2016! I can’t wait, she will be the female Regan”
The delusion is really, really strong over there.
West of the Rockies
@Tokyokie: I agree with your assessment. She’s always been about self-promotion: showing up at a rally on the back of a motorcycle, dressing in all-black leather like some sort of aging dominatrix, her crappy reality show.
I hope this turn of events hurts. I hope she is worried about paying the bills (or is at least pissed off because now she won’t be able to buy that mansion in La Jolla). I hope she is using the moment to actually gaze into the mirror and wonder if she might have done things differently — with honor and honesty. (Okay, I am sure she ain’t doing that.) Mostly, I hope our long national nightmare is now over and she can pursue a marginal career as the celebrity spokesperson for E-direct foods, gold-coin companies, Spam, and the like.
Roger Moore
@Calouste:
Which makes her ability to spout so many words in some bizarre way more impressive.
Cacti
The Palin family is fine example of the most American of dreams…
Making a quick and undeserved fortune out of accidental celebrity.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@22over7: You’re right, and that’s the most terrifying thought I’ve read all year. You’d think these guys could afford gold-plated news, good high-quality news, you know, that actually told ’em what was going on, instead of Fox’s bullshit mythmaking.
We’re all going to die at the hands of really bad storytellers. Man, I did not see that coming.
grandpa john
@Litlebritdifrnt: I think it goes beyond delusion, more like insanity
Mandalay
@grandpa john:
Not according to the Christian Science Monitor:
So Sarah Palin will stand out ahead of George Bush when the history of US politics in the early 21st century is written.
If you need evidence for the abysmal state of political journalism that is Exhibit A.
shortstop
@Violet: She chewed off three legs and left the one that was caught in the trap.
shortstop
@trollhattan: And why are they? Was there something unmanly and nonrugged and antifrontier about the word “mobile?” I still don’t know! Tell me!
22over7
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Yeah, it scares me too. But it explains a lot of what happened in 2012, and why the outcome of the election was such a shocker to them.
Spaghetti Lee
@West of the Rockies:
Not that she wouldn’t deserve it, but that kind of fate would be somewhat depressing even for me. An ex-vice-presidential candidate doing commercials for Goldline or Liberty Medical. It’s like something out of Americathon or Idiocracy. Not exactly the sort of Art I want Life to imitate.
TS
Not only did she bring down John McCain – she is close to bringing down the Republican party. Not being able to handle the win of Barack Obama (a blah person) and having no vision of reality, Sarah tried anything and everything to bring the President down. Her major achievement seems to have been an increase in violent political behavior resulting in splitting the republican party asunder.
eemom
I always found this concept utterly ludicrous when it came to Palin — i.e., the implication that she ever would be “ready” for national office in any sane meaning of that word.
Typical of that little insect Cilizza, a veritable platonic form of the Beltway hack.
redshirt
@Jay in Oregon: Wha? A “Snowmobile” clearly conveys what the object is, like an automobile, except in the snow.
A “Snow Machine” could refer to any number of snow related items – a snow blower. A machine that makes snow. A snow plow.
For realz? Get that “Snow Machine” shit out of here!
Rick Massimo
“Her journey” = “Her grift.”
“Aren’t ready” = “Passed sixth-grade civics.”
trollhattan
@shortstop:
Beats me–probably the “less manly” thang, unless there’s some kind of trademark issue. If I asked any of the 99.9999% of my fellow non-snowmobile/mascheen-owning Californians, they’d say “snowmobile.” It’s pretty genericized by now.
At some point, they decided a jetski was the much more poetic personal watercraft, probably when they found out it was easier to drink beer while sitting down.
Brachiator
@Mandalay:
Aside from the idiocy, isn’t this a bit premature?
shortstop
@trollhattan: Clearly there’s a conspiracy to prevent libs from finding out the real story. All we need to know is that calling them snowmobiles marks us as nonrugged collectivists.
Chris
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
I think it’s a common mistake on our side of the aisle to assume that the elites who are spoon-feeding their audiences a bunch of bullshit, realize that it’s bullshit.
I was saying this a lot in the late stages of the 2012 election, mostly because that’s when I realized it myself. But when I heard about Karl Rove’s election night meltdown on Fox News, I knew it was true.
SiubhanDuinne
@mai naem:
Something’s missing, what could it be?
::searches, searches::
Oh yeah. A JAIL SENTENCE for someone in the family.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
Both.
The easy life of just tossin’ word salad around in front a of a camera appealed to her much more than actually doing the work of being the governor of a state.
trollhattan
@shortstop:
To the gulag with us all (by foot) where at least we know the beer is quite cold, nor called “lite” or “light” or “lyte.”
Davis X. Machina
Looked at from one angle, anything George W. and his career says about us, as a country, as a culture, Sarah says louder — and funnier, or scarier, depending on taste.
Ben Franklin
Rabble-rousing and red meat. Worked pretty well at Circus Maximus.
PurpleGirl
@West of the Rockies: Please do not associate her with Spam. Spam is food; weird food but food nonetheless. It’s more honest than she is about what it is.
shortstop
@Chris: I admit I didn’t see it coming and didn’t grasp it until Karl went to pieces and Mitt took an hour and a half to concede. I made the third baseman flip to Fox that night; he didn’t want to subject himself to the toxins, but I wanted to gloat. So glad we did: just think what we’d have missed. It really didn’t sink in till days later just how deluded the people who were supposed to be controlling the message really were.
22over7
@Chris:
I always assumed that the rich guys would have the best information (see Carlisle Group, Davos, etc.), but maybe that’s another part of the grift. Who knew that there could be stupid, uninformed billionaires?
That gravy train could be virtually endless…
Davis X. Machina
@Jay in Oregon: IIRC the Canadian firm Bombardier owns the word ‘snowmobile’. Someone owns ‘jetski’ too, which is why ‘personal watercraft’ is used in print.
shortstop
@trollhattan: Meet you there. I’m ridin’ my bike like some kind of unshaven, patchouli-scented hippie girl.
Mandalay
@Chris:
Unless she blew the many millions she made from speaking engagements after the 2008 election she doesn’t need to work ever again. I suspect that she has a happy financial situation that allows her to tell any unsatisfactory employer to shove it.
Fox News may not need Palin, but apart from getting her ego stroked she doesn’t need them either.
trollhattan
@Davis X. Machina:
Do you suppose without Dubya’s diligent lowering of the quals bar, we’d have been blessed with Sarah’s nom? My guess is no, but one wonders.
shortstop
@PurpleGirl: And as a favored product in Hawaii, it has much in common with our dear president.
shortstop
@Davis X. Machina:
Had never noticed, but damned if that doesn’t sound like something Mitt Romney would say in conversation without having the sense to be embarrassed.
trollhattan
@shortstop:
By god sir, you’ve outmaneuvered me! A sno-bike! [shakes fist]
Villago Delenda Est
@Culture of Truth:
That was indeed the quintessential Sarah Palin moment.
Good grief, it was a question I was asked in my late teens as I sat for jury duty.
Chris
@22over7:
Yeah, so did I. In retrospect, though, they seem to have been at least as much the grifters’ marks as the general public. Leaving only the question… who are the grifters? Wasn’t Karl Rove of the rest of the people running the campaign. I think somebody here suggested that they were being conned too, by the people lower down the ladder who were reporting that the campaign was going great – but that might not have been entirely a grift, it might’ve just been fear that they’d be blamed and fired on the spot if they reported the truth.
The entire machine seems to’ve become as broken and self-deluded at every level as the Soviet Communist Party.
Brachiator
A recent New York Review of Books piece about Obama contains this little nugget:
Obama’s comfortable re-election in the face of GOP stupidity and denial still has not quite shocked them back to their senses. But they cannot rationally deny that America made a defining choice.
And despite all the wingnut starbursts, Sarah Palin was the fluke, a minor player on the political stage, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
shortstop
@Mandalay:
Might not all be gone yet, but I’d be very surprised if we don’t eventually start hearing stories about how flat broke and down-and-out the Palins are.
Comrade Jake
She’s pretty much a rorschach test for the intelligence of any self-proclaimed conservative.
“So you’re a conservative, eh? What’d you think of Sarah Palin?”
The only acceptable responses are “She’s an idiot” or some variation of disgust.
scav
To a certain extent, if you’re not ready for your closeup by the time you’re a grandma, well, it is possible you’ll be taken out by the process of a solid gumming, rather than any actual chewing.
shortstop
@trollhattan: Hop on. It’s a tandem, because progressives are all about dependency and not pulling our own weight.
trollhattan
@shortstop:
Remember the bad old days when John Kerry was an elite because he sailboarded and rode a road bike, while man-o-the-people Dubya split wood and rode a mountain bike?
And, how quickly Dubya ditched the “ranch” after he termed out?
Comrade Jake
And oh yeah, don’t put it past the Palins to declare bankruptcy sometime in the near future. I suspect they’re perfectly capable of blowing their wad on snowmobiles too, also.
Baud
Her name is Sarah, she was a grifter,
But that was 30 years ago, when Fox used to have a show
Now it’s all wingnuts, but not with Sarah,
Still in dress she used to wear,
Faded feathers in her hair
She sits there so refined, and drinks herself half-blind
She lost her youth and she lost her Todd-y
Now she’s lost her mind
…
In Wasila, in Alaska
The coldest spot north of Havana
In Wasila, in Alaska
Moose and Russia were always in fashion
In Wasila…
Mandalay
@Davis X. Machina:
Maybe, but at least Bush really was president for 8 years. What the hell Palin did to make her “stand out” more than Bush escapes me, yet the journalist was apparently serious.
Twenty years from now everything Palin did will be forgotten. Fifty years from now what Bush did will not be forgotten…or forgiven.
Eric U.
I think conservatives thought Palin was great when she was scaring the crap out of us by potentially becoming VP. Now that she’s just a laughingstock, they are no longer amused
trollhattan
@shortstop:
I call stroker seat, ’cause you won’t see me slackin’. How many cupholders on it?
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
Yes, and they are relentless in beating anyone who dares to deviate from the dogma in any way back into line. This happened to Rove once when he put on his professional political consultant hat, said something mildly complimentary about Obama, and was beaten about the head and shoulders with great alacrity and put back into line.
shortstop
@trollhattan: Just what are you implying, sir? He ditched that ranch only because he’d succeeded in fully debrushing it.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
fixt
Davis X. Machina
@trollhattan: The bar was lowered a generation earlier. Palin is just Spiro Agnew with tits.
AA+ Bonds
All she has to do to assure a comeback is to make a Nixon reference. That will be enough to embed her inevitable rise in the minds of the media.
shortstop
@trollhattan: I had to look that up. It sounded intriguingly filthy and then did not deliver.
Chris
@shortstop:
I think the reason it took me so long to realize it is that I never assumed their delusions would go this far. Sure, delude yourselves about economics, science, how the wars are going, how abortion works – I can see all that, after all, it’ll never affect them.
But hanging onto power is one thing that actually does matter to them. So I always just assumed that campaigning was one of the few areas where they would still respect the facts – even if they’re as basic as “who’s winning.” It’s not until I started seeing them denying polls – polls from people who’d faithfully called the 2010 election – and started pulling “unskewed” ones out of their ass that it started dawning on me that they might, in fact, be that irredeemably delusional. Even then part of me kept thinking that maybe it was just something they were saying in public in order to motivate their voters, keep up the turnout, avoid demoralization, etc. But then election night rolled around, and no, no it wasn’t.
redshirt
@Chris: It’s Grifters all the way down.
God being the First Grifter, of course. Amen.
Suffern ACE
@Chris: I think even us liberal rabble have a tough time grasping just how awful and incompetent our elite are. We would like them to be cynical and saavy. But no, they are probably truly believing in ladder curves and confidence fairies.
trollhattan
@shortstop:
Hey now, I don’t do no nekked bike rallies in da schnoe–I’m not dat tuff! (Sounds like something they’d do in Seattle’s Fremont, though.)
Baud
@Chris:
I feel the same way. And now the so-called reasonable party elders are now trying to politely say, “Uh, guys, we were just kidding…” Too late.
AA+ Bonds
@Chris:
The media were lying and the people who consume it wanted to believe it. I watched the same thing happen in 2004. I spent it with a whole gang of people who were convinced to their bones that Kerry had turned it around in the debates and had it in the bag.
GregB
Mark Halperin told me Sarah Palin had more raw intelligence than Marilyn vos Savant.
He’s never seen anything like it.
Bruce S
Further data on the question of Joe Scarborough as “thoughtful conservative who wants to reform his party”:
Joe Scarborough is a fraud and a grifter whose intellectual and moral coherence is derived from holding his finger in the wind.
trollhattan
@Davis X. Machina:
And now, Vice President Palin: “Those Democrats, they’re nattering na…bob…nega…how’s that hopey changey thingie now, America?”
I do wonder how she’d keep out of jail in a gummint job where somebody actually paid attention.
shortstop
@Chris:
That’s what I believed right up until election night. It was puzzling, because the margin of Obama’s coming win was substantial and I knew at some point they’d have to ‘fess up to being wrong. I assumed some of them were just trolling for last-minute dollars and others were banking on that motivation creating a surprise win.
Chris
@Suffern ACE:
I’ve made the analogies to pop culture villains before. On some level we like to think of our enemies as diabolically brilliant masterminds (after all, how else could they become so powerful?) We leave brain-dead villains who act like overgrown babies for the kiddie shows like Kim Possible and sit back and laugh at how ridiculous they are – nobody that dumb could ever get very far in real life, could they?
Oh.
Shit.
SatanicPanic
@Chris: This is also why I laugh anytime someone says the Bilderbergers or the Rothschilds control the world.
22over7
@shortstop:
Well, Karl was certainly trolling for last-minute dollars. I really believe that his meltdown was due to his belief, not that Romney had honestly won, but that his Ohio voting-machine hack would work (Anonymous takes credit for hacking his hack). But who knows?
Now he needs more words, different words, soothing words, to keep the train rolling.
Fluke bucket
@Bruce S: agreed. Frauds and grifters both of them.
yutsano
@Brachiator:
Just out of curiosity, is the NY Review of Books that slack on the editing? One of those states did BOTH of those things thankyewverymuch.
(Yes I want WA to jump on the single payer bandwagon.)
Roger Moore
@Mandalay:
If it’s written by Conservative historians she definitely will be. Their history can’t possibly contain references to an unperson like GWB.
Brachiator
@Davis X. Machina:
Spiro never gave anybody starbursts.
But a good analogy.
The conservative faithful loved it when Agnew skewered liberals.
And ultimately, it was all a con job.
West of the Rockies
@Bruce S: I agree about Joe. Mika holds that show up. How she puts up with his loud, obnoxious personality, I don’t know. I hope she’s paid well. I do wish she’d challenge him more often though and not just stare down at her notes in seeming agreement with his nonsense.
Digital Amish
Now she can be available as the spokes-model for The Citadel.
Brachiator
@yutsano:
Yep.
And did I see something in another thread that you got some kind of instructor job?
Congrats.
Now, if you guys would fix this little thing with the Form 8863 late processing …
Or a guard on one of the towers.
JPL
Sarah can always campaign for tea party folk. She won’t be invited back to GA to campaign but other states might be friendlier. I still think she runs for Senate. You can’t keep a
goodthat woman down.lumpkin
Perhaps a little beat-sweetening going on here now that Greta Van Susteren is no longer in the job of “PR flack, masquerading as news person role.” What better way to audition for the position than to whine about how Palin was victimized.
Plus we have the dramatic framing of “her journey” and the subtle offer of help, with “those who aren’t ready”. Yep – he’s looking for a job interview.
yutsano
@Brachiator:
Call Martinsburg. I have no control over programming delays. And at this point I’m amazed we’re gonna get anything done. I have a feeling the system is gonna crash from overload come Wednesday night. The resulting phone calls will be hilarious.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
“As you can see, the genome of the said item is chimeric and shows signs of crude tampering, but it’s largely derived from Drosophila, Mus musculus, and a twenty-first-century situationist artist or politician called Sarah Palin. Large chunks of its genome appear to be wholly artificial, though, written entirely in Arabic, and there’s an aqueous-phase Turing machine partially derived from octopus ribosomes to interpret them. It looks as if something has been trying to use the sharia code as a platform for implementing a legal virtual machine. We’re not sure why, unless it’s an obscure joke.”
– from _Rapture of the Nerds_, Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross.
Fluke bucket
@West of the Rockies: yeah but since some of you guys posted the picture of Mika on the piano I will never to be able to respect her like I do Maddow
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Josie:
She was not chewed up. The entire MSM covered for her by not stating that she was dumb as a rock and totally unprepared to be student body president, much less vice-president of the United States. The whole thing was the biggest farce I have ever seen in politics, and I’ve been watching for a very long time.
Sarah Palin is, in fact, the quintessential 21st century American, and so far your country is not ready to be run by somebody who actually exemplifies its people.
Allan
Chris Cillizza has outsourced his column to Trig.
patrick II
@Josie:
Exactly.. She was the opposite of chewed up. she was a faux competent person passed off as an actual competent person by an entertainment industry masquerading as serious news industry.
. she was held up not knocked down
Brachiator
@yutsano:
Not from where I sit. And I just love coming to work on Monday, and hearing, “we were on a conference call with the IRS and there are some delays coming.” A lot of software developers are working their butts off to insulate the public from the impact of this stuff (for which ultimately Congress is to blame), and some states are having problems reacting as well.
SatanicPanic
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: I disagree, Americans are not that dumb. But our media is.
AliceBlue
@pat:
So true. And that’s what’s still grinding his shorts these days.
jake the snake
@Spaghetti Lee:
Don’t forget that Fred Thompson woke up from his nap long enough to do commercials for a reverse mortgage scammer.
West of the Rockies
@Fluke bucket: Well, I personally posted no such picture, nor have I seen it, but, yeah, that sounds like a pretty good way for a woman to undermine her professionalism — although Morning Joe features all of its chief contributors in those sort of trendy, “This Is Sports Center” comic promos. I sure can’t picture Uncle Walter reclining atop a baby grand.
dan
@Eric U.: She was never not a laughingstock.
normal liberal
@Spaghetti Lee:
It’s not as though anyone really wanted to know about Bob Dole’s fondness for a certain pharmaceutical product or to watch him leer at Britney Spears, but there he was. And it didn’t seem to threaten his rep as a Very, Very Serious Elder Statesman.
I get a certain satisfaction out of watching Fred Thompson hawk reverse mortgages, and emphasizing that the product is “government insured.” I remember him from the Watergate hearings, and I doubt this is where he thought he would end up.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@SatanicPanic:
I disagree, Americans are not that dumb.
Uh-huh.
jamick6000
Juxtapose how Cillizza et al. treat Palin vs. how they treat Condi Rice.
Condi’s unpreparedness/incompetence was ***way*** more destructive. I know it’s not news to anyone, but political reporters are really superficial.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
We will be paying for our first accountant-completed return this year instead of using TurboTax. Sounds like that may have been a good decision for more than one reason.
Ron Thompson
I’ll confess, I never saw much difference between her and the average Republican candidate. As Bill Maher said, “Tell me one area where Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin would disagree. I cannot find one area. So, somehow, he’s the smartest guy in the party and she’s the stupidest woman on earth but they agree on everything.”
jamick6000
@Ron Thompson: amen.
jonas
@shortstop: Do any of her [grown] kids actually work or go to school? I wouldn’t be surprised if mom’s fortune quickly disappears down a rabbit hole of houses, cars, travel, and other amenities for her little brood. A couple of million sounds like a lot, until you start having to pay an agent, a publicist, an extended family on your dole, etc.
Chris
@Ron Thompson:
One of the Republican defenses of George W. Bush was “he is not stupid, he’s inarticulate.” There’s a grain of truth there. Yes, he was a totally fucking stupid, but so are the “intellectuals” of the party like Jonah Goldberg, Dinesh D’Souza and the rest of these guys, even if they can speak in complete sentences.
But then, the media’s always graded them on a curve.
jc
McCain and the GOP thought they could fake it and get away with it, they thought they could foist Palin on the public and sell her like the cheap product she is, and they thought the public was dumbed down enough after eight years of W. to buy it.
David Koch
She was so hilarious – the best performance artist since Andy Kaufman.
Her routine on Paul Revere warning the British was comic genius.
Can’t wait for next comedic incarnation. Maybe, like Kaufman, she’ll take up wrestling.
Avedon
@Culture of Truth: I dunno. If, with everything else that’s going on that we should be talking about, we’re still talking about Sarah Palin instead, it looks to me like she was worth every penny to the GOP.
Eyes on the prize, guys.
Alex S.
Even though it’s a late reply, I needed to….Doug, you really go to dark places… Do I get smarter or do they get dumber? I used to think that Cillizza was at least semi-competent. When Nate Silver announced his switch to the NYT, I commented that “So you’re now the Chris Cillizza of the NYT?”. I’m so sorry for that comparison now. Cillizza belongs in the same category as Halperin or Scarborough, or those Politico guys. Shame, shame, shame…
Alex S.
@Mandalay:
Dumb, dumb, dumb, it’s like a Writer during Wilson’s presidency announcing “In a hundred years, two early 20th century politicians will stand out: Theodore Roosevelt and Taft!” Well, I guess in some ways, Taft really stands out.
NorthLeft12
@Davis X. Machina: But Dubya actually did something, while Palin……she was all talk and projection. She really never did anything.
As a Canadian, the fixation of a large number of Americans on Sarah Palin is completely baffling. That she was a candidate for Vice President is absolutely mind boggling.
NorthLeft12
@Brachiator:
Do Republicans not realize what their actions and policies are doing to their own base? They are grinding the working class down to nothing, yet they moan and cry about not getting enough support for a majority. Their hate for unions and their slavish idolization/subservience to the rich are exactly what is killing that white working class segment.
patrick
not really if you look at it from the context that the republican party is a bunch of dirty old men trying to appeal to the reptillian side of the brain. They all wanted to F*#k her…She’s eye candy….heck, if she never spoke, me, a married lifelong liberal in his late 30’s wouldn’t mind banging her if my wife wouldn’t castrate me if she found out….
Fred
@Marc:
Perfect. Thank you
Harry R. Sohl
“aren’t ready”? She entered the national political scene five fucking years ago.
I’m sure that her failure has exactly the same reason she herself felt qualified in the first place: “It’s God’s will.”
Ed Drone
@Calouste:
The problem is that she hasn’t been convicted yet, so it’s too early for sentencing. Though, given her penchant for channeling the Red Queen, “Sentence First, Verdict Later” might just be applicable.
Ed
Jebediah
@GregB:
That might not be as far off as it initially sounds – I recall reading one of her columns in which she argued that we should only provide legal representation for innocent defendants.
She is great with logic and number puzzles, but she is also proof that one can have a really high IQ and still be a total dumbass.
Susan
@low-tech cyclist: Her red Naughty Monkey shoes always worked for her in the past, no thinking required. It is disgusting how her looks got her to a place that her brain alone would forever be denied entry. What does this say about the state of “journalism” in this country? She never should have lasted as long as she did. She is a nasty piece of work.