Go home, Sarah. “Back to Alaska,” as the song says. We’re not going to elect Annie Oakley as President, and, besides, we’ve seen you hold a rifle. You ain’t no Annie Oakley, dearie.
Women of America, what does Sarah Palin have that you don’t have? What qualifies her to be considered for President rather than, say, the President of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, or Christie Whitman, who was EPA Director and governor of a real state or even Libby Dole? She was a Senator and a world-class executive, no matter whether you agreed with her politics or not.
Or how about Ann Dunwoody, ever heard of her? Maybe we should say Four-Star General Ann Dunwoody. You probably haven’t heard of her. She has merely been serving her country as her father, grandfather and great grandfather did, with no books to sell, no publicity stops in front of adoring crowds who may have missed a NASCAR race, a barbecue or a World Wrestling match to fawn over her lack of knowledge. And she can fire a real rifle and hit a real target.
Sarah Palin is a creation of the media. She is one of the new media “darlings,” like the women from “Survivor” or “The Biggest Loser” or “American Bachelor” or “Housewives of New Jersey” or the Kardashian group…whoever they are and whatever their game is.
It is all about filling up television time. As is Sarah Palin. When they are off the air for more than a month, the “reality” people disappear like smoke through an open door. When they are gone for six months even their fans forget their faces. After a few years, their only recognition is from close family members and as some punch line in a feeble, late-night joke.
Television is on the air, several hundred channels, every day, and in most places, 24 hours a day. Television, with literally only one or two exceptions, is a simple merchandising device for advertisers. For politicians and lobbyists, it is a straightforward publicity and propaganda device. Sarah was made for this era. Sarah will pass on, like the reality show participants, when the Right is through using her. In ten years or a hundred, people will remember the name Eleanor Roosevelt and even Hillary Clinton. Sarah Palin has written her name in the dust of temporary media popularity. If remembered at all it will be as opportunistic, dumb, ungracious, and unenlightened.
She has taken the same course as other “reality” participants, only her celebrity is for thoughtless, foolish, even reckless politics. She, like the reality people does it for the money. She could never make the same kind of money doing anything else and never will again. Sarah Palin was the mayor of a city of several thousands in the backwoods of Alaska, then the governor—for only 2 years–of the prototypical backwoods, Alaska itself, with a population the size of Omaha, Nebraska.
To say that she has no experience at all would be disingenuous. She was an administrator in government and a television news person for a small station at one time. But to say that she is qualified to be President is to say that anyone who can be elected to anything is qualified as a good candidate to run the still-most-powerful economic and military power on earth. We do not select our Presidents, but neither should we find them through a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, or on a touring, non-stop reality show.
Whether Sarah Palin told people to go out and shoot Gabrielle Giffords is a matter of conjecture. She put up gun sights (they were gun sights. Some of us have looked through enough to know.) on her web and said “reload.” What does that mean? People in Arizona, in the Tea Party whose emotions Palin’s web site stoked, were shouting and screaming at Gabrielle’s office door. Someone shot it to pieces. Eventually the right Tea Bagger creep came along and shot Gaby herself…and killed six others and wounded 12 more. Sarah Palin, no matter how she denies it, was too full of herself and gun-toting rhetoric. She bears part of the responsibility.
Wayne La Pierre of the National Rifle Association famously laid out the Neocon Republican position. “Those with the guns make the rules,” he said. In other words, LaPierre, standing before the Republican group CPAC, where Rush Limbaugh stood, and John McCain stood, was sending a message to the Middle Class Americans who simply want to live, have a job from which income they can survive, own a home, stay reasonably healthy, send a kid to college and retire with some sense of dignity.
LaPierre was speaking to the lower 99% of income earners, those out of his sphere…those who earn 400 to 500 times less than his billionaire and multi-millionaire corporate executives.
His message was: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Neocon Republicans support us. We want guns in homes, in schools, in churches and in every place a citizen can walk or talk or sit or stand. We have the political power. We have the guns. And obviously, we don’t care who uses them, especially if they are used against our political opponents.”
Sarah Palin has been a strong advocate of guns and aggressive policies surrounding threats of civil war. Her husband was part of a separatist group. That may be OK for whacked-out Alaska, but that isn’t the way we want our country to run.
In the Heartland, people people are pretty busy growing food for everyone else. In that part of the country, no one wants to secede from the Union. And you shoot at duck and pheasant…not at other people. Midwesterners don’t want to change that.
So, go home, Sarah. Take your stage-prop kids and your Iditarod-champion husband and your $25 million dollars with you. You made your pile. Get out of telling people to shoot other people. You’re not qualified to lead a “movement.” You haven’t the slightest knowledge of or faintest idea why people stormed palaces and ransacked mills and factories. You don’t understand simple sentences let alone the Russian Revolution or Jacobin France.
You’re not leading a movement. You’re leading a pack of roadies, people dumber than you are. You’re a huge hick leading little hicks. You wouldn’t last an hour with a six-pack of real revolutionaries. Danton would have you for breakfast.
You had your undeserved candidacy and your fifteen minutes of celebrity. Go home and let us focus on the real issues…jobs, education and how we may become a less violent nation.
And one more thing. Unsolicited advice, but here it is anyway. You chose to have a beautiful little down syndrome child. You decided to have the child and that child is your responsibility. It will need a lot of love and attention.
It should come from you…you decided to create this life, this damaged life that needs to have its chance at fulfillment, whatever that may be. It should have your attention and love…not the attention of some limousine driver or some new campaign volunteer or bookstore manager at your next “local appearance,” or pushed off onto your children…or even your husband.
Grow up. Drop your aspirations to be a “star.” You have no talent. You have a high-pitched, whiny voice and second-class legs. You appear anywhere only because you are willing to pitch Neocon propaganda to a bunch of hicks who don’t realize yet that you are selling them out while lying to them or groups of wealthy Neocon Republicans who want to hear you parrot their distorted values.
Go home and give the attention you are giving to yourself….to your child.
