CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Sarah Palin, and the Insanity of What She Represents

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

this entry brought to you by trail of dead, "stand in silence"





When Sarah Palin was first revealed to the center stage of the world in the summer of 2008 as then Presidential Nominee John McCain's choice for Vice Presidential candidate, she seemed instantly like the worst, most cynical kind of politics ever seen in the country, or at least in memory. She was pretty, she was a super-mom, she was down home, she was anti-abortion, pro-God, she even had a learning disabled child, like some sort of box filled in and underlined at the bottom of a list checked off that said "Other Qualifications For Sympathy Pull". She was like a giant, quadrupled-stacked nuclear power plant in terms of a blatant, cynical attempt to power up the base without any clear substance. Imagine, if you will, if Obama literally ran for President with a supermodel/actress/PETA/Greenpeace Spokesmodel who had spent a year living in a tree and walked onto the stage wearing a "Pro Life" t-shirt and was a single, pro-active, independent woman who drove around in an electric car as his running mate. Now imagine this person somehow being an idiot on top of all that, unable to stay on message, unable to deliver any real message at all.

Predictably, Sarah Palin did the job she was supposed to do, to work an already unstable and ravenous population into a fury. This was a shock to no one, because, well, there's a huge part of the population that is stupid. But as 2008 wound down to the election, McCain lost (and his loss probably had a lot to do with his running mate), the year turned into 2009, up until her unprecedented public fight with David Letterman, Sarah Palin very rapidly revealed herself as more than just a vapid creation of the conservative movement to build a base, she came out of the closet as being kind of an awful person to boot.

But again, that there would be a segment of the population still stubbornly supporting her shouldn't surprise anyone. There were and still are legions of Americans who wholeheartedly supported and worshiped Ronald Reagan, and that guy came right out and denied AIDs, one of the biggest epidemics in America in the 80s, and created the term "welfare queen", which was supposed to represent a fictional black woman driving around the American ghettos in a Cadillac with a squad of children in tow. No, seriously. The President of the United States actually said that, despite it being not true on its face, and despite the horrible latent racism in that statement. It wasn't just something he said in private, the way Dick Nixon accused America's evils on "the blacks and the Jews", it was a campaigning point. And America stood up and howled for four more years. So Sarah Palin's iron-clad support by a segment of the population-- stupid people-- shouldn't be a surprise.

What is most surprising, however, is that their hero, Sarah Palin, on the 3rd of July of this year, hastily announced her resignation amongst a growing count of ethics charges (one of which she was already found guilty of before the elections were even over-- Google "Troopergate" if you don't recall), and somehow, a majority of people polled who call themselves her supporters still say they would vote for her in 2012, and are proud of her decision. They honestly and truly think a person who did not even complete one single term as Governor in the least populous state in the country is fit for the most important job in the entire world. In fact, she is still her party's highest hope for the 2012 races, which obviously says a lot about her party in and of itself, but it also says something about our country.

Imagine, for example, if there were a very popular, yet disgraced Democrat. Just as an example, imagine if, John Edwards still had a rabid, vocal following waiting happily for 2012 and for him to run again-- and imagine John Edwards didn't even quit his job early for no reason, and remember, his disgrace had to do with a personal shame, and didn't have to do with a dozen rumors swarming around about job ethics. I myself was an Edwards supporter and would have voted for him in the primaries in 2008 had he still been a candidate by the time the Arizona Democratic caucus came around, yet I would not vote for him right now were he a Democratic candidate in 2012.

There is something fundamentally different about the portion of America that voted for Barack Obama, than the one who still insists they would support Sarah Palin who, somehow, isn't a quitter despite having actually quit. She is like a Pope of sorts. The Pope can make obviously idiotic and ill-advised decisions in public, such as re-communicating previously ex-communicated Priests who, among other things, denied the Holocaust, or telling Africa not to use condoms; decisions that even his millions of followers couldn't possibly agree with without severe deficiencies in quality of life, and yet the believers remain faithful. On the other side of the equation, to liberals, even Barack Hussein Obama, a man playfully referred to as "Black Jesus" for being, well, the most popular liberal in the history of America with the possible exceptions of William Jefferson Clinton, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, isn't good enough because he hasn't done all the things he campaigned on within the first six months of being on the job.

This isn't to say that liberals are being unfair to Barack Obama. Even I, a person who would say still supports the President, am annoyed at several things with him. But the point is people on my side expect different things from the people we adore. We want different things from them. We expect a relationship where both parties benefit from something. We want a give and take with our heroes, not just to line up and have beautiful long eyelashes batted our way while the person goes and behaves in a way completely opposite to the way they pretend to behave.

Up until this point Sarah Palin has represented a horrible, depressing aspect about politics. But the moment she resigned from her job without completing it, her supporters, in a rational world, should have resigned off on her. They should've said, I'm sorry, Sarah, but I just can't continue on this adventure with you. I supported John Edwards before the primary, and when he dropped out once it became apparent that he could not win, I would have supported future political endeavors. I don't hate John Edwards, but at this point, if I were to say that I would support John Edwards for a run for President of the United States in 2012, I would be laughably wrong.

Sarah Palin represents more than just a cartoonish, laughable attempt at mobilizing the lowest common denominator amongst your audience. She's more than just the "Titty Cam" for politics-- something for people to hoot and holler at but serves no purpose but to keep the attention of morons. She represents something awful about us as a people, something horrible, something scary. She represents a part of human beings that we should have evolved from as a species. Sarah Palin and the loud, frightening minority of people that support her despite her gross underqualifications as a politician and her resounding emptiness as a human being, is a quality in human beings that is the metaphorical equivalent to tonsils; useless, generally benign, but if left unwatched, will become inflamed and cause the whole to be infected. We've come so far on the scale of evolution. We've split the atom. We've put a man on the moon. We're in the task of decoding the human genome, and we literally get more news about our DNA and the way we're programmed week by week. We are about to spit particles at one another at almost the speed of light using the world's largest particle accelerator. Sarah Palin and the people she represents across the country, and in fact the world, should've stopped existing centuries ago.

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with love from CRS @ 9:56 AM 

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