Sarah Palin Is Bugfuck Crazy

This is really weird. Palin's statement was virtually incomprehensible, riddled with self-contradiction. To stay in office would be the path of a quitter? Huh? A point guard dribbles through the press with her head up? Huh? Her presence in office wastes the taxpayers' money? Huh? "The world needs more children like Trig." WuzzafuckHUH?

I agree with Sasha who has not, as of this second, published this theory (and who, to my unbounded giggling delight, has finally renounced the savior I worked so hard to get her to reject, failing because, as best I could tell, Bill Clinton gave her herpes), but seems pretty convinced that Palin's getting indicted on Tuesday, or that the other shoe is otherwise going to drop hard, soon. The content of Palin's attempt at coherence certainly supports this notion; her tone was unbelievably paranoid and defensive, in addition to just plain weird. It sounded like the sort of thing that will click into place as a point-by-point defense in a few days. Sorta like Mrs. Cake forgetting to turn off her precognition. Except less charming. Okay, except not-at-all charming.

While I do favor major scandal as the most likely option I maintain that, given Palin's nearly complete disconnection from reality, it's possible that she actually thinks that this utterly bizarre behavior will help her preznitential bid. That's loonier than a barrel of Canadian dollars, but that's really never stopped her before.

It's also a little weird that someone so determined to pick fights was so clearly determined to back away from them. A subtext of her rambling statement was that she thinks that her continued ventures into public ridicule (every one of them self-triggered and self-exacerbated) are some sort of a distraction, that as the governor of one of our smallest states, she was drawing fire. Uhm...no. As a self-marketed national political spokesperson for an opposition party that just got its ass kicked and seems to be doing its best to self-destruct, Palin will remain a target for as long as she chooses to do anything public as a profession.

And she'll deserve it. Her behavior has been shameless, self-promoting, detrimental to her family, and a disservice to her state. She's an intellectual lightweight and a paranoid bully who has wasted unquantifiable energy taking revenge on real and perceived enemies, and on every perceived slight. Guess who was thinking about pedophilia in relation to a talk-show host's joke about one of her daughters getting knocked up in Yankee Stadium? It wasn't David Letterman. Palin chose to ignore the obvious about her daughter, the unwed teenage babymama, and hold up her younger daughter in connection with the concept. Any suggestion to the contrary is either idiotic or contrived.

Palin's every bit as unconcerned about the welfare of her state as she is about the welfare of her family. She fought a losing battle to reject federal stimulus money for her state (that alone should've gotten her impeached, or shot from a helicopter, or whatever it is they do to inept state officials in Alaska), did psychotic pinwheels in her positioning over former Senator Ted Stevens and his legal issues, and attempted to appoint a Republican to a seat that, under state law, had to go to a Democrat. LGM, with a Juneau-based contributor, has done a fabulous up-close job of covering Palin's ineptitude as governor.

Of course, it's all mightily entertaining. Watching Palin flail away in public appearances is like watching her struggle with a Chinese finger puzzle. The only way for her to beat the thing is to destroy it. The same applies to her political career. Had she simply stayed in place, shut the fuck up, done a little studying, and waited for every one of her potential rivals other than Pawlenty and Huckabee to ejaculate themselves out of contention, she'd have had a really good chance to beat Mitt Romney for the 2012 Republican nomination and lose in a 1972esque landslide to Barack Obama. It's actually a shame; the lunatic fringe of the right wing needs to be led by a crazy person (which Huckabee isn't--quite--and we'll have to hold out for the continuing emergence of Bobby Jindal). It's potentially bad for our side, since pushing the extreme right's head under water and holding it there for 4 years is the only chance the Republicans have of reclaiming the White House for a very long time. But all that needs to ripen.

Thanks, Sarah. And just like my wife's former colleagues at Yes, I'm Packing, So What? High School were grateful to the other county school that had a stabbing incident a week later, Mark "I Finally Bagged A Chick That Likes Sex" Sanford thanks you, too.

Update: It's possible that, in my fascination with the bizarre, I overlooked the simple. The Anchorage Daily News, which has long been one of the best news sources in the world for Palinalia, quoted Mike Hawker, a Republican state senator from Anchorage as stating that the resignation "gives her unfettered ability to pursue her economic interests, whether it be a book deal or speeches, that type of thing, without being cluttered by state ethics law."

If it's that simple--and I'd opine that it seems as likely as any of the other possibilities bandied about so far--it's less bugfuck crazy than I thought, which makes her statement's rambling incoherence all the more bizarre. But that may just be a reflection of her utter discomfort inside her own skin. The manic urgency of her narcissism has, since her rise to national attention, seemed to drive that sort of scary pseudopositive blather, that transparent and inept attempt to portray ignorance as wisdom, to portray deep, all-consuming paranoia and outright crazy behavior as serving the public interest.

It also doesn't do her political ambition (assuming she still has some--she's been acting pretty desperately defeated) any service. Y'know, I try not to revel in other peoples' mental illness, but this person really challenges my principles.