Just What is This Obsession With Sarah Palin?

Just what is this obsession with Sarah Palin?

If anyone saw her interview with CBS' Katie Couric, during the campaign in 2008 where Palin showed she was clearly out of her depth, unable to respond to simple questions such as, "What do you read"?, saw for themselves she was not ready for any elected office, much less the vice presidency (and a heart beat away from a would be presidency of a 72 year old John McCain).

McCain now knows he made a colossal blunder in picking Palin to run beside him (reportedly in a snit with powerful Republican insiders who nixed his desire to have Senator Joe Lieberman (I- Conn.) on the ticket; not that he would have made any difference in the outcome against Obama).

But "Sarah" was elevated to a status that would never have occurred without McCain's fit of pique.

Now with Palin's best selling book, "Going Rogue: An American Life", (ghost written), apparently containing fast and loose facts, innuendo's, gossip, (almost all of it denied as "total fiction" and "pure fiction", by McCain campaign staffers, respectively, Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace who are raked over the coals for "handling her" during the campaign [1]and the current flap over her "sleight of hand" cheat sheet (written on her palm) she glanced to during her $100,000 keynote speech (performance) at the inaugural "Tea Party" convention, things are getting pretty "weird" out there concerning the soap opera that is Sarah Palin.

Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times, Sunday February 14, 2010 stated, "You had to wonder if Palin, who is nothing if not cunning, had sprung a trap." That the crib notes on her hand --may not have been speaking aids but bait", intentionally done so that her detractors would ridicule her and this would further endear her with her adoring supporters. She is cunning and has a vindictive streak (this according to the Wasilla, Alaska Town Librarian Palin had fired, but who was later reinstalled [after a public outcry] by the Town Counsel). This, in apparent retaliation over the librarian's disparaging remarks about Palin's candidacy during her campaign for mayor in 1996.

Next comes White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs who playfully disparaged her "crib noted" palm at a news briefing thus giving her added legitimacy by the Obama administration. Such snickering only adds fuel to the fire of her adoring throng of fans.

Lest we forget, she is after all, a political phenomenon of our celebrity obsessed culture. Thus a woman of little intellectual substance garners media attention like a Hollywood starlet, further blurring the lines of celebrity and politics, inter twining the two and making for little distinction.

The more attention given her by the main stream media (beyond Fox News and her adoring fans), the more popular she becomes as an icon of American pop culture. With today's 24/7 news cycle, desperate as it is to fill air time with innocuous drivel and gossip laden foolishness, it seems impossible to ignore her or the nostrums she espouses. After all, everything that happens isn't news as evidenced by "balloon boy", which was nothing, more than trumped up faux news. Yet we were forced to endure this hoax (if we watched the "news") in that contrived theatre of the absurd.

Palin is a public figure and former elected public official. She is therefore an appropriate subject for ridicule, a perfect foil for the likes of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and the satire of "Saturday Night Live," not a subject of legitimate news.

She is like a bad dream. And like a bad dream, you ignore and dismiss it (and she) as something that doesn't comport to the reality as it truly exists.