It’s Sarah Week
Regardless of how you feel about Sarah Palin, there’s going to be a lot of news about her this week. The much-hyped Oprah interview is this afternoon, and segments of the Barbara Walters interview begin airing on Good Morning America today.
I’m still amused by those who claim she’s irrelevant. If she was not a player in today’s political and media environment, why on earth is Newsweek devoting a cover to her one year after a failed campaign? Palin is a media force that’s unlike anything else ever seen before. As Mark Steyn noted in a post at NRO’s The Corner, the AP tasked eleven reporters with fact-checking her under-500 page book. With understaffed newsrooms and international bureaus shut down, there was no work for 10 reporters?
I doubt that it’s even possible to say anything original about Palin any more. Those on the left have a visceral hatred towards her and the mere mention of her name makes them go apoplectic. Those on the right either love her or just wish she would go away. It’s evenly split. As much as I love her, I do not want her to run for president in 2012. I think we need a new candidate who has not gone up against Obama. Perhaps she could run in 2016 or 2020, but Palin needs time to re-establish herself. She’s young, smart and momentum is on her side. I think she could do it.
She has a magical appeal to the grassrootiest of conservatives, the Tea Party types, that most politicians dream of achieving. Her Facebook page is a testament to that. Within five minutes of posting a note last week, I saw her have around 1,500 “likes” and 300 comments. However that just makes her haters even more desperate and angry. We, the stupid masses, are’t listening to the intellectual elite. We refuse to follow their orders to not support this woman, as evidenced in Newsweek’s cover of “How do you stop a problem like Sarah?” It’s not like they should go with an investigation into Ft. Hood or a story on Obama’s controversial decision to move Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for a trial. Come to think about it, keeping Palin in the news gives the media plausible cover for not actually questioning troubling the actions of the current administration.
I am surprised that Newsweek waited until the second paragraph until making a sexist comment in their cover story. Evan Thomas, you couldn’t fit this skirt comment into the lede?
Obama knows the long odds against a right-wing populist winning the presidency, no matter how good she looks in a skirt (or running clothes), brandishing a gun. He shouldn’t be too cocky, however, because the death of the center is ultimately a problem for him and the whole country. If the Palinistas seize the GOP, they probably cannot take the White House. But their brand of no-prisoners partisanship sure can tie up Congress.
The hit pieces won’t end there. Last week, MSNBC used photos that are widely known to be fake. Come’on MSNBC. Don’t you even have an intern that can see the “blur” line on her neck in the photo? Are you that desperate to get a hit on her? Maybe the AP could spare a few fact checkers.
So despite the media haters, I look forward to Sarah Week. Grab some mooseburgers, watch the circus unfold and take a shot of your beverage of choice, everytime a reporter makes references beauty queens, Levi Johnston or “you betcha!”
Update: Hot Air pretty much says the same thing.
November 16th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
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