Hot Dogging It

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Before serving hot dogs under her mean little tent and otherwise acting as if she was running for political office instead of abdicating one, Sarah Palin had given her farewell address to the people of Alaska. It will not be remembered as being on a par with Washington's or Eisenhower's farewell addresses and it contained no surprises at all. In his farewell address, the father of our country warned against, among other things, a two party system, permanent foreign alliances, an overly powerful military establishment and public indebtedness. Eisenhower famously warned us about the rise of the military industrial complex.

The outgoing Governor's own farewell address was a typical Palin pity party, with the Klondike's Karen Valentine piously acknowledging the virtue of the First Amendment before saying in the next breath to just not be truthful when it comes to me and my own or my successor and his own. Or any Republicans, while you're at it.

Firing verbal panic shots at unnamed people, Palin lambasted the press that has only elevated and kept her on a national level regardless of her countless idiocies and certain Hollywood "starlets" like Ashley Judd. And nowhere in the mainstream media was it brought up that her all-too-obvious hypocrisy was made screamingly obvious by her still playing the part of the Ultimate Alaskan (Channeling some backwoods version of Descartes, she said, "We eat, therefore we hunt" as if the only meat she and her children eat was killed with her bare hands) while scuttling out of office to pursue bigger, better and greener pastures far beyond the Bering Strait.

Likewise, the mainstream media never bothered picking up on her even more glaring hypocrisy in calling out those who “seem to just be hell-bent on maybe tearing down our nation, perpetuating some pessimism and suggesting American apologetics.”

How soon Palin and the liberal MSM have forgotten the days when Palin and the First Dude belonged to a radical fringe organization called the Alaskan Independence Party, a group of America-separatist lunatics with which Palin and her husband didn't sever the final ties until after John McCain tapped her to be his running mate. But this is the same Blue Meanie press that's responsible for the partisan bitterness that led to her leaving office so she wouldn't be a lame duck Governor.

Barring some Svengali signal that's amplified by about a half a dozen communications satellites orbiting earth and beamed back down 24/7 to Wingnuttia, it's impossible to fathom Palin's appeal to an alarmingly large segment of the population. Ignorance alone offers few answers as well as the cult of personality. Cults are eventually discredited by their former acolytes when the truth comes out. Yet the MSM still follows this woman and every member of her immediate and extended family as if they're some Republican version of the Grateful Dead.

Part of the answer to her sick enduring popularity and illusion of relevance is that Palin, as during the McCain campaign, appealed to those xenophobic, gun-toting freakazoids and Christopaths from whom every major politician that's come down the pike can't seem to wean themselves. Fearful of incurring the wrath of the NRA and snake-charmers lobbies, McCain, Romney, Clinton and to an extent even Obama gingerly sucked up to these psychopaths and tried to present themselves as gun-toting Jesus lovers.

But these two lunatic fringes aren't as stupid as they look and they realized they weren't getting the real deal. Then Sarah Palin came shuffling out of Wasilla early last September and the minute she opened her lipsticked mouth, thirty odd sixes and twelves gauges were getting fired into the air and the canvas tent dwelling religious reformers knew they were getting the genuine article.

Little did they know way back last fall, however, that Palin would cut and run when it was politically expedient for her to do so after the press would yeast her up into this conservative superstar. While mealy-mouthing about the "Real America", Palin was busy plastering her well-toned, postpartum physique with designer outfits and shoes and cosmetics that would run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in the mercifully brief time she was actually attached to McCain's camp.

She's plainly a smalltown girl with more than Big City ambitions and the crowning irony is that her supporters who had seen her govern their state for barely two and a half years will be lucky to catch a glimpse of her while she pretends to promote Alaska and its interests, something she had a much better shot at doing while she was still its Chief Executive.

Essentially, she's a political Mary Tyler Moore, flinging her tuque in the streets of a bustling Washington, DC and singing how she'll make it, after all while being ignored by the passersby. And the local yokels who showed up to support her yesterday still haven't caught on that they're supporting someone who would've loved nothing more than to see Alaska secede from the Union and, failing her overarching ambitions, publicly scraped right under their noses the moose shit of Wasilla for good off her snow shoes.