The Official superBadGirl Sarah Palin Rant

Unabashed hypocrisy. Lying. Entitlement. Ethics scandals. Idiocy. Abuse of power. Abuse of budget. Tax dodging. Sarah Palin makes me sick. She also makes me angry. So many things about her are worthy of my contempt, but it’s hard to even talk about them without wanting to punch someone. I will try.

The abridged version, for those who don’t have this kind of time, is that the Repugs have tried to make this election about character rather than issues. Ominous “Who is Barack Obama?” BS everywhere. But when you look at Sarah Palin’s character, as evinced by her past actions, you rapidly get a picture of someone who will bend the rules for herself, her friends and family. She espouses convictions that she doesn’t seem to hold (or at least live by) and is not interested in the world outside her narrow view of it. She holds other women in contempt, she lies and distorts facts that can be easily disproven, and it seems like she might also be a greedy, aspirational, lying tax cheat too. So… if this race is about character – that makes it way easier, right?

Unabashed Hypocrisy & Lying: This week it was revealed that the RNC has paid for a $150,000 image upgrade for the backwoods Palins.

So, she’s one of the people, part of the “Real America” and her-n-Todd are struggling like everyone else. She only feels at home in a sea of Carharts and steel-toed boots. While she’s wearing $2,000 boots from Saks? Riiiiight. She now has the nerve to categorically deny the expenditure to the Chicago Tribune (after McCain already confirmed it with a terse “she needed clothes“). In the meantime, even her kids have gotten in on the action, as HuffPo has this slideshow of 2nd-grader Piper Palin wearing some pretty sassy outfits. In this one she’s even seen carrying a Louis Vuitton bag. Please baby Jesus, let that be her Mom’s bag? Please don’t say that ANYONE is boneheaded enough to buy a $1,000 purse for a 2nd grader? Although why SPalin or anyone in her down-home, one-of-the-people retinue would need a $1,000 bag I can also not explain. Are world leaders now judging their peers by their taste in handbags? Was she planning on carrying this in her next Katie Couric interview? In addition her makeup artist apparently charged the RNC $22k in the first two weeks of October, making her the highest-paid campaign staffer for that period. Because Sarah is so natural, and one of the folks, and just like us. I mean, I only paid my own makeup artist $2k in that time frame so that I could look my best at hockey games and dog sled races and whatnot, but still… oh wait, no I don’t have a makeup artist. Nevermind.

Question for Sarah: “Just how much lipstick does that pitbull need, anyhow?”

Lying & Entitlement: The Palin family has done quite a bit of traveling on Alaska’s dime. Sarah has lugged her daughters along to events they were not invited to attend, she’s had them staying with her at $700+ luxury suites, she’s used Alaska money to cart them to some kind of dog sled race their dad was in, then went back to edit the expense reports to claim they were on “official state business.” The people throwing these events say the girls had no official role, and they were shocked in some cases to see them show up. This is BEFORE SPalin was tapped for the VP. This gaming of the system, this abuse of taxpayer monies, this sickening attitude of entitlement for herself and her family, this all has been her standard operating procedure for years, apparently.

She also charged the state “per diem” fees for staying at her own house, when she had an official residence as Governor. Now, maybe my counting skills are off, but that seems to me that in a time when many Americans are facing foreclosure and struggling to maintain roofs over their heads, she had not one but TWO houses available to her, and she chose to stay at the one which would allow her to charge taxpayers for its upkeep. You know, I don’t think most Americans have housing provided to them by their employer, and if they do I don’t think they have the option of rejecting that housing and then charging their employer to stay in their own home. I mean, I may just be some kind of elite thinking person, but I don’t recall many of my own friends in similar situations.

So basically Sarah Palin thinks that her position entitles her and her family to a shedload of freebies and perks on our dime.

Question for Sarah: “Do you think the American taxpayers should continue to pay for your kids’ travel costs if you and McCain are ‘so privileged as to serve’? If so, don’t you think it would be more fiscally conservative of us to choose a candidate who has fewer kids that we the taxpayers are apparently going to have to support?”

Idiocy: Sarah Palin is not an intellectually curious person. In a world somewhat inured to idiotic statements from US leaders (after 12 total years of Bushisms) she still manages to come across as uneducated, and proud of it. This arrogant, prideful ignorance is such a Bushie hallmark that I can hardly believe they think it will play well, but she still has the attitude that people who know stuff are “elite” and think they’re better than other people. (In her Brian Williams interview this week that’s how she defines the elite – as people who think they’re better than other people. A nice follow-up question to that would have been “Do you think you’re better than Senator Obama?” Force that a-hole to say something nice about the man, or else look as douchebaggy as she really is.) She’s ignorant of “small” things, like thinking that New Hampshire is in the northwest of the country, not being able to name any news source she actually follows, not being able to name a single Supreme Court case, not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is, not knowing that most VP candidates in recent history have had extensive foreign policy experience, and she’s ignorant of major things too, like what the role of the vice president actually is, and how a bill becomes a law. There’s a cartoon for that, for Christ’s sake. Note that the VP does not feature in the cartoon. She’s also incapable of forming coherent sentences on almost any topic, and has a strange word-salad manner of interrupting herself so often as she speaks.

Question for Sarah: “What is it about Obama’s 12 years as a professor of constitutional law plus his time in state and federal government that makes him less knowledgeable and less prepared to lead the country than you?”

More Hypocrisy and Abuse of Power: Seriously, what’s going on with her and the tax situation? There’s some shadiness there. (Latest = the $150k of clothing you just know she’s not going to pay taxes on. Probably she left the tags on and will be returning it, after. You know, Wasilla-style.) And what’s with her husband Todd being in that Alaska secessionist party? Isn’t that kinda treason-esque? And even if it isn’t (my belief is that people can espouse whatever beliefs they want as long as they keep their mitts off my rights) it still should prevent her from throwing stones at Obama’s supposed “imperfect” view of America. Hey, your husband apparently doesn’t think America’s all that great either, Sarah. Maybe you and he should have a chat? And as a reformer who takes on special interests, and fiscal conservative who slashes budgets, why do you hire nothing but unqualified cronies for plum jobs, and why did you leave the city of Wasilla in $20 million of long-term debt?

Ethics scandals: She let her husband and her staff use undue pressure on state employees to try to get them to fire someone for personal reasons. When he wouldn’t, she fired him. Technically that’s legal, she can hire and fire who she wants. But letting her husband and staff exert influence in her name to get someone fired over a personal grudge was unethical, it was found to be unethical, and she’s now lying about it.

Question for Sarah: “Will you please read aloud the section of the report that I have highlighted?

Hypocrisy, again (noticing a theme?): She supports abstinence-only sex education, and is on a big high horse about the moral superiority of her small-town values, but has a pregnant teenage daughter, and was also apparently pregnant when she married, herself. (Track was born 8 months after she and Todd eloped.) Irrespective of her own experience, she slashed the budget for a teen pregnancy center in Alaska. Gee thanks. You have to have the kid, but no resources for you!

She would love abortion to be illegal in all cases, ostensibly even in cases like  those described by Bill Napoli, conservative religious South Dakota fucktard:

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

She tried to dodge questions about her views on abortion by saying that she wouldn’t have any influence on policy decision in that area, then turned around to claim that the VP runs the Senate and gets in there and makes good legislation.

She says she will be a champion of families with special-needs children. She claims to be an expert on special-needs families, but has had a Down Syndrome child for only 5 months. Seriously, WTF does she know?

Bashing those who don’t agree with her as anti-American or unpatriotic: Over and over she’s talked about how her followers are the real Americans, the real patriots. Apparently real part of America is only the small towns, and anyone who doesn’t feel like her does not count as an American. Seriously. That’s the rhetoric she’s spouting. These NYC folks who just don’t get it, they’re not real America. Well, as Jon Stewart said the other night  – Osama Bin Laden is going to be PISSED that he bombed the wrong America!

Seriously though, The Daily Show showed just a seconds-long clip of NYC firefighters in the aftermath of 9/11 and I cried for half an hour. The idea that this hateful, horrible woman could stand on a dais and claim that some people in this country are less American than others – it’s sickening. How dare she say such a thing? How dare she imply that her views are the only views, and the rest of us don’t count? Our sacrifices, our struggles, the things we go through every day do not count, because we’re not like her, and don’t like her? Bullshit. How dare she question the way I feel about this country? Apparently she can’t seem to grasp that America is a country of people with vastly divergent views, beliefs and ways of being. We were founded in a way which would incorporate all those views. There’s no “right” way to be an American, there’s no correct way to be patriotic. She needs to change her thinking and realize that America is made up of a lot of people who share none of her values. It’s her and her party’s inability to grasp that concept that makes them such epic failures. I would never accuse her of being un-American for her views, but she would say that I am the “wrong” kind of American for mine.

Question for Sarah: “Which of your opponent’s views do you think Jesus would share?” And BTW, can someone please fill me in on the longstanding question “How many preemptive wars would Jesus start?”

So – is she criminally stupid, or criminally greedy and corrupt? Or all three? I don’t know, and I don’t care. I just want her to go away already.