theCLog

And the Palin Parade marches on. Not content with Oprah, Barbara Walters and 70 million interviews on FauxNews, Gov. Snowjob Squareglasses had to go bother poor old Billy Graham yesterday at his home near Asheville. Granted, Rev. Billy, 91, seemed glad to see her, from all reports — and even seemed to remember the visit later, which is always a good sign. Graham’s son Franklin, a fellow ultra-conservative, arranged Palin’s visit.

Caribou Barbie had the time of her life last week and although she really p.o.’d one crowd by leaving before she’d finished signing books, the overall reaction from the Tea Party cult that is her base was wildly enthusiastic. For those in the reality-based community who listen to Gov. Mooselini and wince at her sub-poor grasp of the issues and Valley Girl speech patterns, her popularity with a solid minority of gripy conservatives remains a total mystery. Political writer Matt Taibbi says conservatives love her “because she never stops whining … We’ve now got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. … Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming’s sake generation.” Taibbi may be right, but we suspect some sort of deeper derangement is at work. Maybe, just maybe, Saturday Night Live was on to something when they broadcast this remixed movie preview:

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It’s amazing, but I’ve found myself agreeing with Sarah Palin twice in the past couple of days. At first I thought I might be coming down with something, but on reflection, I see that she that no, I’m not sick — Palin was actually right, for once. Or twice. First, there was her complaint about the current cover of Newsweek, which used a photo of Palin, originally taken for Runner’s World, in running shorts. She said the magazine’s decision to run the photo to accompany a story about her politics was “sexist and degrading,” and she’s right. The magazine is being blasted by critics from both the right and the left, and deservedly so.

Today, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Palin’s sentiments about N.C.’s own Sen. Richard Burr. Atlantic magazine is running a story on tensions within the McCain-Palin campaign. In it, an October 26, 2008 e-mail from Palin’s staff to the McCain campaign declares that Palin had voiced “her displeasure” that, after a long day of campaigning in North Carolina, “U.S. Senator Richard Burr was allowed to ride the [Straight Talk Express II bus] with her.” Hell, who can blame her? After an exhausting day, would you want to spend your downtime with Richard Burr? Or, for that matter, any other time? Didn’t think so.

Burr and Palin in happier times

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What a bitch.

Besides, “nice T & A,” what was McCain thinking when he chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate?

In her new book, former Alaska Gov.. Sarah Palin describes the push-and-pull between John McCain’s campaign headquarters and her plucky “B” team on the road. As Palin recounts it, her natural instincts to reach real voters and reach out to the press were frequently foiled by an overprotective senior staff, led by strategist Steve Schmidt, that did not trust her.

…

Palin would wake up that morning in New York. A few days before the trip, Palin decided that she wanted to slough off some of the local interviews and spend the morning cooking with Rachel Ray, the host of a popular syndicated television program.

She instructed a top aide to inform headquarters that the Dover rally would have to be canceled.

The response from McCain’s headquarters was firm: absolutely not.

“She says she wanted interviews [with the press], but pushed back against the interviews that were scheduled,” a campaign aide who worked with Palin said.

…

Palin’s team balked at allowing former Massachusetts governor Paul Cellucci to shake Palin’s hand as she exited the campaign bus.

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Palin wasn’t fond of letting outsiders on her campaign bus, and Recher reportedly vetoed a ride-along with Schonda Schilling, the wife of Boston Red Sox player Curt Schilling. Carla Eudy, the campaign’s scheduler, had added Schilling on the passenger manifest for the ride from Laconia to Salem.  But at the last minute, Schilling was told that she wouldn’t be able to ride the bus and had to find her own transpiration to Salem.

…

On October 26, after a long day of stumping in North Carolina, Palin issued an edict to her traveling staff.

“We were informed today that she no longer wishes to do talk radio interviews in the car. It’s too distracting,” wrote a senior Palin adviser, in an e-mail to senior headquarters staffers.  ”We were informed today that she no longer wishes to do TV or print interviews post-rally. She’s drained. We were informed of her displeasure that her host and US Senator Richard Burr was allowed to ride the [Straight Talk Express II] with her.”

He ended the e-mail: “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Read the entire article from The Atlantic here.

Hilarious:

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God knows there were plenty of events and people to choose from for the weekly Stupid Thing of the Week. Locally, the school board went along with Supt. Gorman’s idea to gut one of CMS’ most successful programs – and did it at the last meeting of the board’s current line-up; needless to say, the new board will start reconsidering the moves at their first meeting. Nationally, Carrie Prejean got all pissy on Larry King Live; singer Fergie let everyone know she’s bi but her husband is well-endowed; Lou Dobbs quit his job at CNN and said he’d been hounded by a mob mentality, “similar to what we saw in Italy in the 1930s” (you might want to re-read your history, Lou, and maybe stop the pity party); a beaver on CBS’ The Early Show peed in the announcer’s face; Sarah Palin went on Oprah and dissed the people who’d chosen her to run for VP in the first place; and Sammy Sosa revealed he’s been using a skin lightener for some damned reason.

But for sheer tone-deaf cluelessness – which is always a plus when you’re vying for Stupid Thing of the Week – you can’t beat our winner, Ian Campbell, a re-enactor and tour guide at Latta Plantation Park. Campbell, an African-American history buff who has devoted a lot of time to bringing history to life at the park, was giving a tour to about 60 fifth-graders from Rea View Elementary in Waxhaw when who did he pick to represent plantation slaves? Why, the only three African American students in the group, of course! Kids were humiliated (and in fifth grade, that’s huge), parents were enraged, and school administrators vowed never to send their kids back to Latta. It doesn’t appear that Campbell meant any harm, but again, a history buff being that clueless about race relations is kind of mind-boggling.

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Sarah Palin didn’t want anyone to bring recording devices or cellphones to her big speech Friday night at a Wisconsin Right to Life fundraising banquet. No wonder. The Politico Web site bought tickets to the event, and their report is a showcase of Palin’s, er, limited vocabulary, tortured sentences, and, more troubling, her goofball conspiratorial view of government and all those evil liberals. Besides going off on a factually challenged rant about the “In God We Trust” motto being moved to the edge of new dollar coins (a Bush era episode which was reversed two years ago), “Palin … frequently wandered off-script to make a point, offering audience members a casual ‘awesome’ or ‘bogus’ in discussing otherwise weighty topics,” according to the account by Politico’s Jonathan Martin.

Here’s our favorite quote from Palin’s Friday speech (see if you can make sense of it): “It is so bogus that society is sending a message right now and has been for probably the last 40 years that a woman isn’t strong enough or smart enough to be able to pursue an education, a career and her rights and still let her baby live.” Quick question: Who in hell is telling women this? Anyone you’ve heard of? Didn’t think so.

Don’t forget, Ms. Eloquence has a book coming out soon. In case you missed it, author and columnist Carl Hiaasen wrote a hilarious column, posing as Palin’s book editor, for last Sunday’s Miami Herald. Don’t miss it.

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Oprah needs viewers. Sarah needs more conservative groups to buy her book in bulk so they can give it away for free or sell it at a discount.

Ah, capitalism. As long as everyone’s making money, anyone can jump under the fiscal sheets together.

But, don’t feel pressured to run out and pre-order a copy of Palin’s book. If you’re patient, you can pick a copy up on the Conservative Book Club’s one cent list in a couple months.

And before you get excited about how much Palin’s grammar has improved over the last year, don’t forget that Lynn Vincent actually wrote her book.

Oprah Winfrey, on a campaign to climb back from last season’s ratings slump, will attempt to kiss and make up with conservative viewers on Nov. 16 when she has Sarah Palin on her syndicated talk show .

You may have noticed that the appearance by the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate is happening smack dab in the middle of the November ratings derby.

It’s also the day before Palin’s new book, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” is scheduled to hit bookstores.

Oprah’s production company, Harpo, claims it will be Palin’s first interview about the book. We’ll see about that.

…

Oprah has largely abandoned her whole aspirational programming mantra this season and gone in for the more purely commercial.

That has translated into the longest-two-day-interview-ever with Whitney Houston to kick off Houston’s latest comeback attempt; Oprah’s deliciously detailed interview with Erin Andrews, the ESPN reporter who was unknowingly videotaped nude in a hotel room by some stalker guy; and her highly touted, things-could-get-rough, face-to-face meeting between former world champion boxers Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield — their first meeting since Tyson bit off part of Holyfield’s ear during a 1997 WBA heavyweight title fight.

And now, add to that list Palin, whose book was No. 2 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list Tuesday afternoon.

Read more from The Washington Post.

Conservatives don’t seem too excited about Palin’s interview with Oprah, either:

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The entire article about Sarah Palin’s inability to secure speaking engagements, as it appears in The New York Post, is pasted below.

A note: The fact that this is in The Post is amazing since this is a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper. Murdoch, of course, also owns the Palin fan club (aka Faux News). Of course, depending on who you ask, it’s nothing more than a tabloid. Still, this is one amusing article from a paper known to have a conservative bias.

Did you catch that last part? Palin didn’t write her own book (most celebrities don’t, by the way). Just want to clear that up before it drops and everyone’s like, “See, she can write a non-run-on sentence.”

Maybe Palin’s reps would have better luck booking Tina Fey:

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Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin gave a speech on … mmpphh . . . excuse me. Sarah Palin gave a speech yesterday in Hong Kong on … mmphh, hahahahahahaha … foreign policy. Sorry, but can you believe this stuff? Sarah Palin, Caribou Barbie, the hick who didn’t even know Africa was a continent and, according to John McCain’s aides, couldn’t name the three nations of North America, was paid beaucoup money to speak to an international trade organization in Hong Kong. What’s even more priceless is that she didn’t even stick to matters of foreign policy or foreign trade. Instead, she blamed the economic downturn on — what else? — too much government interference in business (I know. Hey, I’m just reporting this), and even brought up her current favorite subject, death panels.

Yep, now that even strong opponents of health care reform have admitted that no one is proposing anything even resembling death panels, Palin is still aligning herself with the true crazies in the ongoing national debate. And of course, there’s not even a hint that she realizes that when health insurance companies won’t pay for, say, cancer treatments, they are, in effect, a genuine “death panel.” But that’s our Sarah — what a national treasure, huh?

Hey, commies, take your death panels and get outta here

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Bill Maher was on the Tonight Show last night and brought his politics with him. Talking about the “birthers,” those people who’ve been spending way too much time worrying about Pres. Obama’s birth certificate, Maher summed up our current moment in history: “I will show you Obama’s birth certificate if you show me Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.”

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Was Sarah Palin’s latest communiqué to the world an abrupt about-face? Or did she finally hire someone literate to write for her? Palin made headlines late last week — surprise — by spewing nonsense. The former Alaska governor, whose resignation and farewell speeches garnered rave reviews from fans of manic incoherence, made a Facebook entry last week in which she accused Pres. Obama of wanting to set up “death panels.” She denounced a future situation “in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

That statement, based on, well, nothing contained in any bill before Congress, created yet another shitstorm for Palin, even from several prominent conservatives (although, Newt Gingrich defended her).

Wasilla’s wonder woman has now released another message: “We must stick to a discussion of the issues and not get sidetracked by tactics … leading to intimidation or harassment. Such tactics diminish our nation’s civil discourse … Let’s not give the proponents of nationalized health care any reason to criticize us.” Reasons like, umm, say, spreading outrageous, ignorant lies about a critical national issue?

Kind of makes you wonder whether whether the articulate person she hired to write the new message had read the Facebook entry. Or whether she just now realized she doesn’t have a personal security detail anymore. Personally, it makes me wonder whether American politics has entered a new, surreal, Alice in Wonderland phase, in which an ill-educated, inarticulate show-horse like Palin can sound like a crazy person ranting before a city council meeting and still be considered Presidential material by a major political party.

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