Sarah Palin’s GOP

Sarah Palin’s general attitude seems to be that their shit don’t stink up there in Alaska. After flirting with an Alaskan secessionist movement (apparently that’s what “real” Americans do up there), she became governor. As governor, she treated the lower 48 to a an endless recitation of pseudo-folksiness, extolling Alaska’s many virtues. One would have thought, arriving from an alien world, that Alaska was the last refuge of some mythical “real” America, a last bastion of family values (one of these is apparently mom selling drugs from your basement), and that Alaskans had a grip on virtue that was unmatched. The only people in the lower 48 who came close were the uneducated, ignorant white voters in the rural deep south.

It’s a shame, when Palin lost, that all these virtuous people did not pack up and, like the Beverly Hillbillies, head to greener pastures. North to Alaska! should have been the cry encouraged by the rest of us.

Instead, we’re stuck with them, and Alaska is stuck with…Sarah Palin. She just won’t go away. She won’t actually DO anything that resembles governance. Rather than Alaska, from her perspective the only person worth serving at this point seems to be Sarah Palin herself. She has as tenacious a grip on her 15 minutes as any fleeting star in history. We don’t have to wait long to find out what she will do for an encore; we can be certain that every few days or so she will find a way to get back into the news.

Sometimes, this is unintentional, as the most recent flop shows: “two of her top aides– Communications Director and Press Secretary, Bill McAllister, and Palin’s Anchorage office director, Kris Perry–are being hit with new ethics charges, to be filed with the state Attorney General on Monday” reveals the Huffington Post.

This on the heels of revelations that law enforcement officials were forced to suspend an investigation into the mother of her daughter’s fiance during the presidential campaign – you can imagine how it would have looked to have that come out at the wrong moment. It’s not as if Palin’s reputation was as pure as snow to begin with. But now it seems as if that last bastion of virtue – Sarah Palin, the one who alone embodies the purity of the American spirit, is just as tarnished as any other politician. The same scandals–drugs, sex, ethics–that governors of the tarnished lower 48 experience.

Whither now, America? To whom will the unwashed Republican base turn in 2012? Or, like Dubya, will Palin shrug off any suggestion of impropriety by pretending it never happened? She’s already told us her shit don’t stink. Can she make the rising clouds of steam invisible? Stay tuned…