Had circumstances been just a little bit different, Sarah Palin could have become an accidental president of these United States. We need to remember that. We can forget the Alamo, but that Sarah Palin was widely (?) considered presidential material by a sizable (?) chunk of the nation, and remains so to this day, needs to be tattooed on our national psyche from now until the distant day when the Yellowstone caldera ends all further need for writing stuff down. We need to remember it because, Christ Almighty, she is still around, and is still getting fawning attention, and there is still a large segment of one of the two dominant political parties in the United States that say golly gee, we wish we could be governed by someone the likes of
that. She is the downright moron the prophet H.L. Mencken famously foretold, which given past White House residencies is saying something.
So here's Sarah Palin, Gov. Halfterm, writing ostensibly on immigration via the virtual pages of Breitbart, an outlet that is to Republican news what Palin is to Republican ambition, the outlet that sees no discernible difference between James O'Keefe splicing tapes together and Reality, and the only possible question is why? Why is this grifter still a valued conservative presence?
Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president. His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, “no mas.”
See there? That right there? I am a personal fan of the mixed metaphor—as I always say, you can lead a horse to water, but a stopped camel will still be right twice a day—but a national border to straw-backed battered wife comparison is less a metaphor than a failed attempt at refrigerator magnet poetry. Those opening lines are, like the bold patterns on a poisonous fish, a sign to all rational people that they should stop reading now and save themselves a nasty outcome. The only possible reason for anyone to try to decipher what Sarah Palin has to say is if they are being paid to do it. Oh
crap, I am.
All right, fine, below the fold we go.
Without borders, there is no nation. Obama knows this. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate. This is his fundamental transformation of America.
Sez who? You and four of the seven voices in your head? Is there not one element of world affairs that cannot be instantly linked to a secret Obama plot to make that thing happen in order to something-something America? On the radio right now there is a report in which the United Nations is asking all nearby nations, not just the United States, to assist in taking in the new flood of refugees from Central American crime and violence—Obama destabilized those countries? To hurt America?
Discrediting the price paid for America’s exceptionalism over our history, he’s given false hope and taxpayer’s change to millions of foreign nationals who want to sneak into our country illegally.
WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS MEAN? I am not even joking, I defy anyone to parse out just what Palin means to say in this fish-in-a-blender mix of random words and phrases. Discrediting the price? The "price paid" for "America's exceptionalism"? This essay does not pass the Turing test.
So why has this issue been allowed to be turned upside down with our “leader” creating such unsafe conditions while at the same time obstructing any economic recovery by creating more dependents than he allows producers?
STOP SAYING WORDS. Dear God, just stop. It's like a dog ate a copy of
Atlas Shrugged and the conservative welfare circuit vowed to print whatever ended up on the lawn the next day.
It’s not going to get better, and in fact irreparable harm can be done in this lame-duck term as he continues to make up his own laws as he goes along, and, mark my words, will next meddle in the U.S. Court System with appointments that will forever change the basic interpretation of our Constitution’s role in protecting our rights.
I couldn't adequately
mark your words if I had a case of Sharpies and all the time in the world, but let's all marvel at the conservative warning, the week after we've established that American corporations can have
religious rights that trump that of the citizenry they employ, that some darn elected president may meddle in how the Constitution is interpreted by
appointing people. What sorcery is this?! There is only one solution, and for the sake of proving to the world just how empty headed an entire vast swath of the American body politic has become, let us make that solution as overtly stupid as possible.
It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.
Yeah, there we go. That'll do.
So there you have it. Intellectual giant of the party—screw you, anyone who gets paid as much as she does for speeches counts as an intellectual giant of the party, or at least as a Thought Leader, or at least as a Jesus Christ She Could Have Been Commander Of Our Armies—Sarah Palin says because children are flocking to America without the proper paperwork, battered-wife America should say no mas (in Spanish, presumably so the little brats will understand us?) and impeach the president that secretly plotted for this to happen, possibly while the rest of us were preoccupied with Benghazi!. Otherwise the price of our exceptionalism will be discredited.
I am professionally obliged to pay attention to Sarah Palin. I am obliged, possibly as direct result of some exceptionally glorious sins in a past life, ones I wish I at least had the satisfaction of remembering now, to pay attention to what Sarah Freaking Palin has to say just in case any of it, at some unknown future point, Matters. That day has not yet come, and yet she still gets invited to speak at all the big events, and invited on the teevee to opine on all the things, and is still considered a big cheese at the conservative cracker factory. And the reason for that? The reason she still gets all that attention? Because she is not a unique little flower of the movement. Not by a stretch. Not even a little bit.
Her cookie-cutter wisdom, little bits and phrases taken from movement fortune cookies and stirred together into an incongruous word mulch, is precisely what the wider movement wants to hear; that much, and no more. If she says impeach, it is because the conservative zeitgeist has gotten its collective undies in a bunch over the word impeach, and if she stumbles over the reasons it is because not one person in her audience truly cares what the reasons might be. If she is considered a wise owl of the movement, it is because all the people clapping are that much dumber. Paul Ryan is the Budget Wonk, because he once wrote some numbers down. They didn't add up, but by God he wrote them. John McCain is the serious foreign policy wonk, because John McCain demands we alternately bomb or arm every last faction he hears about, which are the only two serious foreign policies that the entire vast sweep of conservative think tanks have ever been able to come up with. The CPAC crowd and the NRA crowd are entirely indistinguishable because both define "freedom" to be something you get by taking it from the other guy.
And Sarah Palin is their prophet because the job was open, and the cash is good, and because it is a requirement of the movement that you dispense a soylent mush of symbols and shibboleths and angry exclamation points to your audience without ever saying anything that would be too specific, thus causing conflict, or too moderate, thus implying weakness, or giving a general flying damn about the law, or recent history, or what you said last week. She is their prophet because she is perfect at this job. She represents the id that has overtaken the party and swallowed it up whole, the id that has given us the Scott Walkers and the Chris McDaniels and the All of Texas. She is the painted clown at the entrance to the great conservative roller coaster, the one that grins and points out a finger and says you must be no smarter than this to enter.