Saradise Lost - Book 5 - Chapter 20 - More Thoughts on Toast

Jane Hamsher's outstanding essay (reprinted below this one) on Sarah Palin's current predicament is one of Hamsher's best recent articles, probably her best on Palin, and is well worth a full read.

Hamsher observed:

Sarah Palin’s political career is probably toast, due in large part to the fact that the GOP doesn’t want her messing up their plans for the next Presidential election like she did the 2010 Senate races. And the person who will regret her retreat from the political landscape more than anyone will be Barack Obama, who dreams nightly of a race against Palin in 2012. Gone will be the bright shiny object distraction of “look over there, it’s Sarah Palin!” from the broken promises of the Democratic establishment.

Today the New York Times suggests Palin is hiding inside her new media box:

By managing her image almost exclusively through Twitter, Facebook, a reality television show and appearances on Fox News, Ms. Palin has managed to become both ubiquitous and insulated, and to emerge as one of the most formidable Republicans considering a presidential run next year.

But on Monday, she and her aides were facing questions about whether the strategy that had served her so well since she resigned as Alaska’s governor 18 months ago was the right one to counter the criticism that she had helped encourage a potentially dangerous strain of antigovernment sentiment.

Her brief bursts of communication on the Internet — encouraging supporters with phrases like “Don’t retreat, reload!” — have kept her band of devotees behind her.

Hamsher made similar, perhaps more trenchant points on this:

Everyone makes mistakes. But anyone waiting for Sarah Palin to acknowledge she might have made one here is going to have some time on their hands. Following the Tucson shooting, Palin’s aide disingenuously claimed that the crosshairs were meant to represent a “surveyor’s symbol,” nothing more “We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights. It was simply cross-hairs like you’d see on maps,” she told Tammy Bruce.

Come on. I think we all know what the word “reload” means. Palin herself has referred to the map targets as “bulls eye[s].” She’s keenly aware of what she said and what she meant when she said it, and has been scrubbing her internet presence of such references ever since the shooting.

Instead of taking responsibility an exercising leadership, however, she’s pushing aides into the media to tell whoppers to paint herself as the supreme victim. The “obscene” and “appalling” part of the shooting, apparently, is that Sarah Palin — a national political figure who ran for the Vice Presidency in 2008 — should be asked to address the fact that she literally painted Gabby Giffords in the crosshairs last year.

If Palin didn’t recognize the volatility of the situation at the time, Giffords certainly did. As she told MSNBC:

Community leaders, figures in our community need to say “look, we can’t stand for this.” …[W]e’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list…the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. And when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there’s consequences to that action.

I won’t speculate on the role Palin played in motivating the actions of Jared Loughner — nobody can know that for sure, probably not even him. But the irresponsible nature of Palin’s actions speak for themselves, and don’t need the affirmation of outside events to qualify as alarming and foolhardy. You want to act recklessly? Fine, drive a race car. Put out oil fires. Climb the Himalayas. You do not have the maturity or the judgment to be President of the United States.

Further, Palin’s retreat into self-pity and victimization in the wake of the shooting demonstrates that she is utterly devoid of self-reflection, completely unable to acknowledge her failure to gauge the dangers inherent in the situation at the time, or learn from her mistakes.

She acts like a sneaky teenager.

She lies.

She pushes others out there to take the hits for her, incapable of even acknowledging her role as a political leader who consciously exerts influence over how her followers should interpret and respond to events.

Yesterday evening, recently defeated U.S. Congressman Alan Grayson, himself the target of numerous physical threats in 2009 and 2010, was on the Ed Show:


Book Five of Saradise Lost was intended to encompass:

The [Palin] book tour, and the time between now and when Palin announces her exploratory campaign for the 2012 presidential race.

Palin is probably now in a deeper state of denial than she has been since she was informed in late June 2009 that her legal trust fund was undoubtedly illegal. That was probably when she chose to quit. But, at the time, she continued to have a higher goal.

Currently, her brand may be permanently tarnished, as Hamsher writes - "if it's not, it should be."

I agree, and sense that when Palin emerges from behind the skirts of her kids, Rebecca Mansour, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, to speak to the public directly (she has to), it simply will not be enough.

The Anchorage Daily News has played a particularly egregious role in the rise, support, commercial promoton and further enabling of Palin. They had an opportunity to redeem themselves somewhat in their first opportunity to address or assess Palin's role in the rising climate of hatred, bigotry and fear in our country. Yesterday, in an editors' editorial on Tucson, they failed so utterly, I cried reading their cowardly, mealy-mouthed words.