Business As Usual

Watch the whole thing...

Quit? You betcha!

I stopped giving a rat's ass about Sarah Palin last November 5th. I don't think she'll ever be able to resurrect her image enough to have any serious chance at national politics. Since her surprise resignation as Governor of Alaska Friday, the bobble-heads on TV have been foaming at the mouth about what it means. Is she making some big political move? Is she getting a show on Fox? Is she pregnant? Is there a scandal? The scandal is that anyone still aims a camera at this blathering, incoherent twit.

I don't care why she quit, but the fact that she made the announcement on the Friday before a holiday weekend suggests - at least - that there's something she wants to avoid dealing with. And that would be consistent with her character - having quit as mayor of Wasilla before her term was up, refused to be coached on national and international issues during the campaign, and famously avoided as many interviews as possible while on the presidential ticket.

Maybe she read this (or had it read to her), and in a rare moment of clarity decided to spare the people of Alaska, and the Republican Party, any further embarrassments. After this one, anyway.

What's kind of entertaining is that very few Democrats have said much about this, leaving the Republicans to publicly shrug their shoulders in a collective, prime-time "What the fuck?"

And yes, that's a real, undoctored photo. Truth in advertising, I say.

Alas, poor Mark...

I honestly think S.C. Governor Mark Sanford should not lose his job because of his affair with Argentinian news-hottie Maria Belen Chapur. Nor should he lose it because he may have misused a few thousand dollars of taxpayer money. No, he should lose his job because he is TOO FUCKING STUPID to be in charge of anything.

How stupid is he? Let us count the ways:

1. He had the cash to fly to Argentina for a long weekend, but it never occurred to him, apparently, to use that cash to bring his mistress to South Carolina instead, thus avoiding the suspicious absence from his job. He could probably have trumped up some ridiculous "journalism exchange program," put her up at the nearest Hilton on the taxpayer's dime, and banged her between interviews.

2. He didn't check his voicemail for three days. He didn't even call a junior staffer to say, "Hey, I needed some down time - lots of personal shit going on - I'm camping out on the trail - call me if there's an emergency." No, he just disappeared, thus causing half the state government, and hence the PRESS, to start asking questions about his whereabouts.

3. He admitted to other "indiscretions" in the same breath as he expressed his intentions to keep his job.

4. He then added that those indiscretions were not sexual and expected the public to believe it. If they weren't sexual, why did he feel compelled to confess them? Having a drink too many and a dance with a strange woman is an indiscretion in Syria, not The United States, not even in the conservative state of South Carolina.

5. In front of the cameras, he says, "I owe it too much to my boys and to the last 20 years with Jenny to not try this larger walk of faith." The thinly veiled message being that he thinks of his situation as a personal - and spiritual - challenge to be overcome and that the public is naive enough to buy that whole "I'm really a good Christian" bullshit. Worse - he might actually believe it himself.

6. In front of the cameras, he says, "This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day."

Man. Wow. I don't know whether to laugh or call a suicide hotline on his behalf. Or both. I don't think it takes a psychiatrist to see just how loaded this sentence is. He obviously sees himself as a character in some poor man's version of Hamlet, the doomed lover and all that. He is completely dissociated, out-of-body...I don't know what the right term is, but he is GONE. Infatuated. Baby batter on the brain. And whether he's conscious of it or not, he sees himself as a kind of victim in all this. With the exception of the proper grammar and spelling, this is a text message from a drunk, recently-dumped high school boy. Maybe it's just a mid-life crisis thing, but then again, most men in that situation just buy a Harley. This guy sees himself as a Shakespearean tragic hero, and as Shakespeare himself made clear more than once, guys like that don't do well in government.

No Shit

Here's one of the few sensible things uttered in the last 24 hours.

Beyond the obvious fact that the guy could dance, I was never a fan of Jacko. That said, I think the media have a lot of balls to be exploiting his death to the degree they have been these past 2 days. Yes, he was huge. Yes, people want to know what happened. But for the past 2 decades, they took every opportunity to highlight every freakish event in his life - the dangling baby, the ranch, the monkey, the children, every nose job, every rumor, every sighting, - all for the ratings, of course. And now they're trotting out every fawning cultural mouthpiece to talk about what an "icon" he was, what a legend, what an inspiration, all in those treacly, reverent tones usually employed by Garrison Keillor. How the talking heads can look into a camera and do it without embarrassment is amazing to me.

Politician Caught in Affair (yawn)

I know Republicans aren't the only folks who cheat, but since they've spent the past few decades insisting they are the party of "family values," it's all the more hilarious when they get caught. Gay marriage is a threat to the institution of marriage? No, your fake marriage is. Kudos to the wife for kicking this hypocrite's ass out of the house.