Yo! Mama Ursus Horribilis!
What’s up with that tepid tweet rebuttal to the Michael Joseph Gross Vanity Fair cover story so overlooked by your "enemies" in the "lame stream" press?
You tweeted: "When yellow journalism gets ratcheted up for a period of time over an individual or an issue it makes u wonder what’s up? What’s the threat?"
For an article that included all manner of sordid inside accounts with more F-bombs being dropped before the family breakfast hour than the whole first season of Jersey Shore, where is the Palin self-righteous, victimized outrage? The signature lock-n-load combative denial? The retweet round the world?
While Palin’s inadequacies to serve as a vice-presidential candidate were revealed during a handful of interviews during the campaign, the inside scoop on Palin bad behavior has migrated from a trickle to a torrent with Heilemann-Halperin’s Game Change and the October Vanity Fair cover story. What the Palin’s unwelcome summer next door neighbor, Joe McGinniss, will reveal in his book about the Palin’s remains to be seen.
Flying under the radar, Christian publishing house, Zondervan, suddenly announced in July that it would be "holding off" publication of Palin bio, Speaking Up, focusing on the 9-12 children’s market. Strange given Going Rogue was the best selling book of 2009. Interestingly, all Palin family references have been excluded from the book, an extraordinarily odd omission given it's a biography about a mama grizzly with cubs of ages being targeted by the book.
Surely part of the Speaking Up gap in the family story and publishing delay might have much to do with the antics of Teen Abstinence Role Model, Bristol Palin, turning 20 and ready to dance with the stars. Ms. Palin has not been shy about declaring her independence from her mother, turning testy when asked by Jay Leno what her mother thinks of anything.
Right in line with the Michael Joseph Gross account of familial discord, it is difficult to imagine a more defiantly unfamily-friendly act than to announce your on-again, off-again engagement to your baby daddy in a national weekly without telling your parents beforehand.
The Palins appear to have a similar wide stance between public and private family values that made the Reagan’s public vitriol in the 1980′s so compelling. Who can forget daughter, Patti, appearing on The Phil Donahue Show promoting her thinly veiled novels of familial dysfunction, or son, Michael, calling out the President and First Lady for touting their foster grandparent program while not having bothered to foster a first meeting with their own two grandchildren.
For Palin, most telling is her deep distrust of all but a small inner circle. A meeting with her baby grandson’s daddy as described in Vanity Fair stated, "Levi met with Sarah Palin in June in hopes of burying the hatchet. Palin opened the meeting with two questions: "Are you recording this?" and "Are you wearing a wire?"
One would doubt that Palin’s "prayer warriors" would be at all deterred by respected journalists’ written portraits of a greedy, vicious, power-hungry crusader. But Palin appears to be well aware that a potential downfall could come from a hidden flip cam or an unnoticed cell phone capture. How ironic if one of her reported tirades or errant rants would be forever immortalized on the very social media that have been so key in allowing her near absolute control of her largely hidden political universe.