I should have smelled a rat with this woman when her political backstory came to light after John McCain named her his 2008 running mate and we learned that she rose to the governorship of Alaska primarily by tearing down her own party. I should have smelled a rat with this woman from the repulsive "populism" she wore on her sleeve like snot freshly wiped from her nose. But I didn't know any better, never having encountered such phenomena outside of history texts. I just thought, "Yay, she's a 'feisty' conservative, and Sailor is an insufferable Republiphobic quisling, so now I have an excuse not to sit out this election". Little did I know how cut from the same despicable cloth the two were.
Another clue was the cowardly and hypocritical way she ran away from Alaska Democrats' abuse of the State "ethics" process against her. Rather than stay, stand, and "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!", she just quit barely more than halfway through her gubernatorial term. At the time I noted that hypocrisy, but cut her slack on the grounds that it would be easy for me to demand that she resist to the bitter end since it wasn't me and my family that were getting financially ruined with an avalanche of legal fees. I should have known better.
Then there was how she instantly vaulted to icon status with the embryonic Tea Party movement, another phenomenon that looked and sounded so ostensibly "conservative" at the time - or maybe it genuinely was, and she just poisoned it with her "populist" perfidy - but has long since proved to be a de facto third party Trojan horse inside the GOP's gates that claims to "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!" for constitutionalism but in practice only ever seems to act for the electoral benefit of what are supposed to be their Democrat opponents. "United we stand, divided we fall," and all that.
Finally, there is the fact that her celebrity has long obscured but it is inescapable: Mrs. Palin has been politically irrelevant ever since she moved out of the governor's mansion in Juneau almost seven years ago. In fact, the truth is even more fundamental than that: Sarah Palin was ALWAYS politically irrelevant. Her drooling groupies only thought she mattered because she was the "reality television" star of politics.
Once you connect all of those dots, her enthusiastically smarmy flackery for Donald Trump becomes inevitable. It's a match made in celebrity hell.
Which does much to help explain why she's trying to fark Paul Ryan out of the Speakership for daring not to immediately bow the knee to his YUUUUUGE-ity:
Sarah Palin will work to defeat House Speaker Paul Ryan by backing his primary opponent in Wisconsin, the former Alaska governor told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Palin said in an interview that airs Sunday on State of the Union that her decision was sparked by Ryan’s bombshell announcement to Tapper last week that he wasn’t yet ready to support Donald Trump, the Republican presumptive nominee. Palin endorsed Trump back in January.
“I think Paul Ryan is soon to be ‘Cantored,’ as in Eric Cantor,” Palin said, referring to the former Republican House majority leader who was ousted in a shocking upset in 2014 when challenger Dave Brat ran to his right in a Virginia primary.
I think that's her legendarily bad political analysis skills on display yet again that - ironically, now - got her bounced from Fox News Channel a year or two ago. Cantor got successfully "primaried" because he was pushing like crazy for the House version of the Schumer-Rubio "comprehensive immigration reform" bill that then-Speaker John Boehner was lucid enough to not suicidally bring to the floor for a vote in the 2014 midterm campaign home stretch. If Ryan was doing anything similar or even equivalent in policy terms, the parallel would be contextually relevant, but he's not going to be ousted for playing hard to get to a liberal interloper who's systematically laying waste to the party - just like she's been attempting ever since she was introduced to the nation in Dayton, Ohio, nearly eight years ago. Or, put another way, just because 'cuda is a cheap date does not require Ryan to be one.
Just to shove her raised middle fingers deeper in the Speaker's face, she witlessly tacked on this empty speculation:
Palin speculated that Ryan’s announcement was driven out by a desire to seek the White House in 2020.
“If the GOP were to win now, that wouldn’t bode well for his chances in 2020, and that’s what he’s shooting for,” Palin said.
First, Trump's nomination leaves the 2020 GOP primaries wide open, if you follow my meaning. Second, if Ryan had been aspiring to run for POTUS, why would he not have done so this cycle, when he had the heightened name recognition from having been Mitt Romney's running mate four years ago, instead of accepting the Speakership instead? Besides, the last sitting House Speaker to be elected POTUS was James K. Polk in 1844. It's not, historically, the path to the presidency.
Although I do have to admit, his heroic stand for the GOP and conservatism by refusing - for now, anyway - to symbolically unzip The Donald's fly would earn him a lot of political capital with true conservatives - a category in which it is clear that Sarah Palin has never truly resided.
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