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Tuesday, July 28. 2009
It’s Quittin’ Time!
So the quitter has officially quit. She gave quite a speech defending her decision to quit. It was the media’s fault. It was that damn Hollywood with its anti-2nd Amendment campaigns. She didn’t want to be a lame duck governor. Yadda, yadda, yadda.It was quite a mystifying speech and like all Palin speeches that are made extemporaneously, it left us scratching our heads. “It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.”
Ummm, okay. You sort of get the drift of what she’s saying. In the beginning of the speech it appeared she was trying to recite a poem as it came into her thoughts. Not a very good idea really, unless you’re a poet of great talent and not even those people try to recite poetry off the cuff.
But maybe that’s nitpicking. Without a script, Sarah Palin can be one of the worst speakers. Her vitriol got more pointed though, when she wanted to give us a little “straight talk,” for “just some” in the media: “…ya quit makin' things up.”
Now I’m baffled. What has the media “made up” about Sarah Palin that isn’t true? The fact that before she was picked to be John McCain’s running mate she was for earmarks and the “bridge to nowhere?” Then of course she was against it and even said in a campaign speech she told the federal government, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Or maybe it was the story about selling the state jet on E-Bay for a profit. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She listed it on E-Bay but it was ultimately sold by an aircraft broker for a significantly lower price than what Alaska paid for it.
She admonished the media to “leave his kids alone” when she spoke of the man taking over the governor’s office, Sean Parnell. Palin has often mentioned the double standard. Other politicians’ kids were off limits, but not hers. But no one in the news media spoke or wrote about her kids unless she brought them up, like when she let news people interview one of her daughters during the presidential campaign.
Actually, the news media didn’t mention her pregnant, unwed daughter Bristol until she mentioned it just days into the campaign. And she kept mentioning it at nearly every campaign stop. For some people, that dose of reality made her more believable as a candidate because she was dealing with life usually reserved for the hoi polloi.There were some internet bloggers who suggested Sarah Palin’s youngest child wasn’t really hers, but that of her eldest daughter, the aforementioned Bristol, but the news media didn’t run with that story and in fact knocked it down pretty quickly.
It was Sarah Palin herself who introduced her kids to the media, making them a part of the campaign process. You can’t have it both ways, quitter.
The person doing the most, if not all, the lying was Sarah Palin herself. The news media just reported it. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart had a great segment on Palin quitting, with Jason Jones reporting from Alaska. Jones was interviewing various residents of Alaska who had turned out for her speech (5,000 strong). One woman was castigating the press and Jason Jones replied, “Like when they right down everything she says verbatim and then repeat it, making her look idiotic?”
“Yes,” the woman replied!
Warning against receiving “government largess” was one of her funnier comments. Just three minutes before that she reminded her former constituents that last year, when gas prices were so high and the government coffers were swelled with money, the state government sent each of its citizens rebate checks.
It should also be noted that Alaska gets more federal dollars than just about any state in the union, thanks in no small part to their former senator, Ted Stevens. For every tax dollar Alaska sends to Washington, the state gets $1.87 in return. That’s a damn good investment.
Palin forgot to mention that in her speech when she warned about accepting government largess. Especially the little blip about her resisting money from the Obama stimulus package, and how Alaska needs to remain “self-sufficient.” Alaska has never been self-sufficient. One of the reasons they wanted statehood was to get a larger piece of the federal pie.
Like many Palin speeches from the past, it was full of all the “red meat” the die-hard Republican faithful love to hear, but it also had many contradictions, falsehoods and misrepresentations, the stuff Palin became famous for when she was campaigning to be vice president.
“Good riddance,” I’d say. But Palin isn’t gone. She’ll run for president in 2012, plus she’ll have a book published, worth millions and of course she will be traveling around the lower 48 giving speeches. Some of us were speculating about Palin on an Internet forum and one guy said he would “tap that,” meaning he’d have sex with her. Well, she is physically attractive, but my thought on it is this: once the sex was over she’d probably start talking and ruin the moment so no, I wouldn’t tap that.Well, I could put duct tape over her mouth …
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