This feels a little like defending an evil serial-killer clown from a raging, sulfurous hellmouth demon who tries to steal his balloons, but here goes: Sarah Palin didn’t deserve this. And Roger Ailes (may he wallow in peace) is still, with apologies to Arnold Ziffel, a gross pig.
Ailes, who was famously bounced from his thingmaker role at Fox News following a raft of sexual harassment allegations against him, plays a significant role in New York Times political reporter Jeremy Peters’ new book Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted. And one of the book’s revelations is that former conservative media darling Sarah Palin—who, during the 2000s and 2010s, served as a sort of John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s Cheddar Cheesus—was super creeped out by the perpetually inappropriate Ailes.
Peters also writes that, for his part, Ailes “expressed concern” about some of the seven-layer banana nut casseroles Palin was serving up in public. And this tension between them, the author notes, would eventually “help open the door” for Trump.
An excerpt from The New York Times:
She told people close to her at the time that Mr. Ailes made her uncomfortable, especially the way he commented on her looks. “He’s always telling me to eat more cheeseburgers,” she told one member of her staff.
Once, after a private meeting in Mr. Ailes’s office at the network’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan in 2010, she came out looking white as a ghost.
Mr. Ailes’s assistant had asked that the aides and family members traveling with her wait outside so the two of them could meet alone. And when she emerged, according to the former staff member who was there, she said, “I’m never meeting with him alone again.”
The rift between Ailes and Palin only widened, writes Peters, after she announced on Mark Levin’s radio show—instead of Fox News, which was paying her $1 million a year for her shambolic “regular-folks” takes—that she wouldn’t be running against President Obama in 2012. According to Peters, Ailes had paid Palin in anticipation of the publicity and ratings a 2012 presidential announcement might generate and was angry when she gave the interview to Levin.
As Palin slowly fell out of favor, Donald Trump “was starting to fill the void in Fox’s coverage — and in conservative politics — that would exist without Ms. Palin center stage,” writes Peters. Specifically, he got elbows deep in the Obama birther conspiracy, and his abject dishonesty was soon rewarded with a regular weekly Fox News segment called “Mondays With Trump.” And the rest, as we know all too well, is history.
Coincidentally, former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, who did more than anyone else to bring Ailes’ grotesqueries out into the open, recently spoke with CNN’s Jim Acosta about the precarious state of the Republican Party, which is currently little more than a steaming berm of bullshit with a tiny novelty American flag planted unceremoniously on top. And Ailes, who started us down this road and didn’t even have the common decency to live long enough to help clear the rubble from our upcoming, GOP-enabled fascist hellscape, is as guilty as anyone else for making America the pestiferous paella we smell before us today.
Reacting to Tucker Carlson’s pro-Putin cheerleading and Fox News’ general embrace of fake news, Gretchen Carlson described the perilous state of affairs our country now finds itself in after Ailes, et al., played footsie with fascists and bad-faith propagandists for years:
GRETCHEN CARLSON: “Slowly but surely, this has morphed into eradicating any other point of view since the Trump era that is not just opinion. It’s gone from an opinion, which was fine, to completely devolving into non-fact-based conspiracy theories and outright dangerous rhetoric, in my mind, and I think it’s a complete disservice to our country.”
ACOSTA: “Totally, and there have been these bizarre moments where we’ve seen top Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz groveling on Tucker’s show. I mean, did you ever think that day would come?”
GRETCHEN CARLSON: “No, and, you know, I think that this is very upsetting to Republicans also, to be quite honest. I wish more of them would have the courage to do what I did, quite honestly, and then come forward and take on a behemoth. But, listen, for the safety of the Republican Party and for our democracy, I wish more would, because this is not going to end well, in my mind.”
Hey, maybe—just maybe—people who harass and abuse women (even awful women like Sarah Palin, who despite her many obvious flaws still deserves to be treated with a modicum of dignity) don’t have their hearts in the right place when it comes to, well, pretty much anything. And maybe people like Palin—and nearly every current elected GOP official—should warn us when monsters are in our midst instead of, you know, kowtowing to them to help advance their careers.
But that would require courage, and as we all now know, that’s a virtue that gets you censured in today’s GOP.
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