One Last “Is Palin Running?” Book Boomlet Piece

ComPost – Can Palin win? Is that halibut she clubbed completely deceased?

Still, viewed as an electability audition, Palin’s series is not going particularly well. Nearly every moment of the second episode’s Commercial Halibut Fishing Trip was — to any other politician, a career-ending photo-bomb. Here’s Sarah Palin clubbing a fish to death. Here’s Sarah Palin encouraging Bristol to club a fish to death. Here’s Sarah Palin playfully elbowing a “Professional Fish-Petter” in the ribs, clearly sensing that this is some sort of double entendre but not quite clear on what it might mean. Here’s Sarah Palin holding the still-beating heart of a deceased halibut.

All Palin’s attempted banter is unabashedly awkward. She tells her kayak guide, “Eric, you look like Jesus. We’re in good hands,” only to provoke the withering deadpan response, “I’ve heard that before.” She waxes profound about life, noting that it’s nice to be outdoors, away from “those things that are kind of on the periphery of our lives that seem to consume it.” This could mean anything! Plato, in his dialogue Theaetetus, likens the process of hitting upon an idea to a hunter seeking a fluttering knowledge bird who sometimes happens to seize upon a fluttering ignorance bird instead. This is similar to what I imagine the process of coming up with a Palin speech or tweet is. Sarah Palin knows a lot of four-syllable words! More than the dictionary knows, sometimes.

So far, she’s gotten a 5 million-strong audience, a rally full of people on the Mall, a book that everyone’s buzzing about, and more Twitter followers than you can shake a stick at — at least more than I have. She actually seems to be hunting for campaign real estate in Iowa. Palin 2012? It’s happening!

But this is where I stop making snide remarks and start legitimately worrying. I have to ask: America, is this a bluff?

 

On-line poll:  “Do you think Sarah Palin is qualified to run for president?”

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By CK MacLeod

Writing since ancient times, blogging, e-commercing, and site installing-designing-maintaining since 2001; WordPress theme and plugin configuring and developing since 2004 or so; a lifelong freelancer, not associated nor to be associated with any company, publication, party, university, church, or other institution. 

26 comments

  2. @ fuster:
    If, as seems to me quite possible, we are now skidding down the other side of the Palin peak, she may need to work in something like that to goose declining ratings. Probly not on the Alaska show, though, since it’s on tape.

    Reply

  3. Based on her guest appearances on Fox News, Palin has convinced my wife and I that she’s only marginally more competent and intelligent than Obama. We haven’t watched the Alaska thing; but I take it as a sign she’s not serious about running. Same thing goes for her daughter’s appearance on Dancing with the stars.

    Having seen what a shallow, flighty, inexperienced poseur can do since 2008 the country will go for someone with actual credentials in 2012, or at least I hope it will.

    Reply

  4. It means exactly what it says, she and her husband ran a fishing business before she got into politics, in her neck of the woods, they hunt so they can eat, I know the PETA folks, god knows what they
    think. In the event of the glorious green energy revolution, one won’t
    even have be carry the food home, We can always chose the one who saddled his state with Masscare, which like barnacles are increasingly
    hard to remove, or commuted the sentence of three killers, other fine
    folk, like that

    Reply

  5. Yet she was right on the death panels, on the GZ Mosque, on QE 2,
    (she enlisted a Dutch reporter, for the last particular insight) Whittaker
    Chambers may have been correct, in the end, when he thought he joined the losing side) The whole Soros/Fenton network proves that point rather clearly

    Reply

  6. miguel cervantes wrote:

    Yet she was right on the death panels, on the GZ Mosque, on QE 2,

    You mean she was “Right.” She’s darn near 100% predictably “Right” about you-name-it. If you begin with the assumption that Right = right, then, sure, she’s right. Otherwise, not so much.

    I can only imagine what bizarre language her speech-processor would produce if she ever strayed from pure “common sense.”

    Reply

  7. miguel cervantes wrote:

    she was right on the death panels

    Sorry, miggy. she was flamin far from right about that. Whoever wrote whatever Palin was spreading either hadn’t a clue or preferred flinging fertilizer for fun and profit to coming within a parsec of honesty and truth.

    Reply

  9. @ miguel cervantes:

    Doing that googling gives me links to miguel cervantes on Zombie Contentions and to pajamasmedia.

    Not good.

    how about you take two or three long sentence fragments to guide me in how to best understand what you’re getting at?

    Reply

  10. @ fuster:
    Add Glenn Beck and Ezekiel Emanuel to your a-googlin and you’ll see what he means.

    Essentially, and I confess that I found the position at least tenable once upon a time, it’s just the usual combined anti-government, anti-academic drama. The idea of a state bureaucrat “rationing” care according to an explicitly stated and criticized theory is SCARY. The idea of a corporate bureaucrat or the invisible hand – possibly God’s – doing so by mysterious means is comforting.

    Typically, the Palinist sees her words having been proven “right” because other Palinists see the same thing. What’s important is that the opinion is inter-reflected, voiced by the oracle and then declared valid by the acolyte, not that it’s verified by some systematic, well-defined objective standard. That would be evil academic elitism , not “common sense.” If God meant the poor to be healthy, they wouldn’t get sick in the first place, now would they?

    Similarly, the notion that there’s some standard available according to which anyone can now declare a position against quantitative easing proven right or wrong is absurd. Pure ideology, if not idolatry.

    Reply

  11. @ CK MacLeod: If the hoopla is over the article that Ezekiel Emanuel published, the one that discussed different criteria for allocating resources that aren’t adequate to cover demand, I know of it.
    It’s not anything new or unusual. It’s stuff that we kicked around when I was a freshman, many centuries back. And it’s stuff that’s discussed at all levels in every hospital and healthcare facility around the nation and the world.

    But it doesn’t really have a danged thing to do with provisions of the HCR bills that were being batted about.
    Talking about how best to do what’s always been done in an article in a medical journal is far from attempting to pass a law authorizing “death panels”.

    Reply

  12. Actually that little instrumentality was passed in the stimulus bill, one would ask what does that have to do with the price of escargot in Brookyn, Emmanuel for a doctor, has some serious qualms with the hippocratic oath, Berwick, the medicare administrator seems to share it

    Reply

  13. @ fuster:
    You don’t have to persuade me, Mr. Cluck. I always knew what you’re saying. Anyone who thinks about the situation honestly knows what you’re saying. The issue was always really whether you preferred to give the administrative state more direct influence, through regulation and funding, than it already has in such decision-making. Palin’s term fed reflexive anti-statism. Supposedly, under Republican initiatives, the whole negotiation would be more personalized or, as Palin likes to say, “patient-centered.”

    Reply

  14. miguel cervantes wrote:

    Actually that little instrumentality was passed in the stimulus bill,

    Another one of those self-validating conclusions.A rightwing hack or Palin herself chooses to construe one or another measure as a “death panel,” and it’s good enough for a Palinophile to declare the Holy Palinism a realized prophecy.

    Reply

  15. @ miguel cervantes: How about attempting to actually write what your problem with Emanuel is, migs, instead of just repeating that he’s got a problem.
    I flatly fail to understand how a discussion of the ethical basis for allocating resources that are scarce is a problem. It’s something that every hospital and every medical organization faces, and attempts to deal with, every day.
    It’s also no big secret that the way scarce resources are distributed is, at present, not really well ordered.
    Far too many decisions are made based on the self-interest of parties that are neither physician nor patient.

    Reply

  16. Sarah Palin Responds to Bristol’s Loss On ‘Dancing With The Stars’

    Asked if she was disappointed that the girl lost…

    “She’s had the journey of, you know the challenge and the improvement and the work ethic. This has been all about work ethic and perseverance and, no, I couldn’t be prouder. She’s happy. She’s very happy,” the former Alaska governor said.

    Palin later added, that had she known that Bristol might not win, she would have advised her to resign or fake an injury or blame the Judge Panel’s undue Bush bias and Eastern elitism.

    Reply

  22. @ miguel cervantes:
    South Korea is too frightened to attack us, fang, and our allies, the ChiComs will keep them bound by prudence.

    She was but begging for bucks and goading Gates to give up the grease, one or two of her skillz.

    Reply

  23. Monetary policy: check. A common sense political strategy for the new Congress: check. An energy policy that would actually move us toward energy independence: check. Iraq: check. Taxes: check. Union thuggery: check. Obama’s hypocrisy and incompetence: check and check. Media bias: check. Racism: check. Obamacare, check: Cap and Tax: check. Peace through strength: check. Israel: check. Securing the border: check. Financial reform: check. The ticking time bomb of lavish tax-payer financed pensions for state employee unions: check.

    Reply

  24. Give speeches: check.
    Sign name to books: check.
    Appear on TV: check.
    Quit real job being a real civil servant to rake it in, showing the lack of moral underpinnings beneath the blizzard of bullspit and telling the waiter to give it to someone else: check.

    Reply

  25. The problem with North Korea is 60 years in the making, part of the price of ‘bobbling the ball’ during the last war, the Russians and later
    the Chinese, built up Yong Byon, for forty plus years, Carter gave them
    even more breathing space, at least another decade. The military establishment has grown exponentially over that same interim period.
    Now back last spring, the Kim fiefdom, rattled it’s swords so much so that the radars were pulled out of Hawaii, and the interceptors at Ft. Greeley were put on alert. This is coincidentally a similar problem that
    a nuclear Iran would pose, with even larger consequences

    Reply
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