Oh, shut up

It is now over one week since the election that has left us all stunned at the sight of an actual future. Many people are still too dazzled to speak. Except…are you shocked…Sarah Palin.

The election did not change the fact that we still are faced with a dying economy, a sickly planet, a failed healthcare system, two impossible wars, Rush Limbaugh’s failure to develop chronic laryngitis, etc. etc. etc.

But all this is lost on the pit bull. All she can do is talk about herself. And talk about herself. And talk about herself.

Now mind you, if I were being attacked as she is, no matter how accurate the attacks, my knee-jerk reaction would be self-defense. But apparently this creature has learned nothing from the ticket that defeated hers: that being that sometimes the best defense is little or no defense. And so she yammers on and on about her clothes and her attackers’ immaturity and nasty child bloggers who live in basements, and God, and blah, blah, blah. All this tells me is what she would have done if she had become Vice President — or worse, if McCain passed away, and she were President: “Stop being so MEAN to me while I’m doing my nails!”

“Kisses for my President,” indeed.

Irritatingly, however, some Republican wags are speculating on the pit bull’s supposedly bright future as “the leader of the Republican party.” Others, such as Frank Shaeffer (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/sarah-palin-will-never-be_b_143036.html), a former Republican himself, offer what I view as overly narrow and optimistic pessimism about her prospects. (As much as some would like to believe it, the supporters of the McCain/Palin ticket were likely not all racist rural Southerners who didn’t go to college. Further, I’m not convinced that college is a universal remedy for ignorance.)

I believe it’s too early to tell what will happen to the pit bull. She may end up being the next Dan Quayle if present trends continue and Fox News continues to be discredited long enough for it to stick in people’s minds and outweigh the fact that a lot of people have been, and still are, tuning in to this network for “news” as they have for a decade now. Why does Fox News matter? Because they are attempting to orchestrate the apparently endless saga of Sarah Palin: they are evidently the ones who broke the news about McCain campaign insiders attacking the pit bull (and apparently not all of the attacks originated with the fictional Eisenstadt blog), and they are the ones currently conducting some very fluffy interviews with that same pit bull, allowing her to defend her nine-inch nails and three-inch stilettos with a wink and a pretty smile. They are, to put it bluntly, in for forefront of the attempt to ram her down our throats.

I have not watched the interviews (I don’t have cable or satellite), but from what I gather, nothing of substance is being covered — unless you count the expensive clothing that covered the pit bull during the campaign. Judging from present circumstances — and let’s face it: those circumstances have only been in place a few months — she seems set to become a sort of political equivalent of Britney Spears rather than any truly serious force in public life in years to come. Certainly her public appearances in the 10 days following the election have proven that she is still incoherent and ill-informed, and operating in a sort of princessey bubble. For me that’s pretty hard to overlook, and it will be hard to forget even if she does eventually manage to pull together a few coherent sentences.

If public memory turns out to be short, however, we may be stuck with Palin in the long run. At worst, she may actually make a serious bid for the Presidency in 2012, and we may have enough hungover lunacy from the last 30 years to elect her. Think it’s not possible? Read http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/what-doesnt-kill-the-far_b_143398.html, and start shivering now.

All that aside, what I suspect will really happen is something in the wide margin between Britney Spears/Dan Quayle and President Palin: I think the pit bull will end up like Phyllis Schlafly. She’ll be a bubble-headed irritant constantly mumbling from the right side of her mouth, the realization never dawning on her that if the country were so perfectly conservative as she envisions, no one would be listening to her. The media will run to her every time they need a right-wing opinion on a “liberal” matter, just like they have at times with Schlafly and more often with the late Jerry Falwell, who never failed to show up on any talk show where the subject concerned women’s rights, which was a subject he knew as much about as does the pit bull about anything at all except for clothes, the ‘immaturity’ of people who are mean to her, nasty child bloggers who live in basements, God, and blah, blah, blah.

I believe this is her most likely fate because I think that while the pit bull attracts far too many protectors who really ought to know better, she may actually have too much baggage to become President. Because of this, she may not be able to attract enough bullies (including Fox News, which as I said appears weakened at the moment) to shield her, as George Bush did. She is, in many ways, Bush’s female equivalent — but being female, and seeming to exist now in a post-conservative environment, she has extra problems he never had to deal with. They may never be able to build a proper wall to surround her; they’d need one as thick as her skull and as big as her mouth, which at the moment no longer seems possible.

Time will tell. I’m still holding my breath until Bush is actually out of Washington for good, just because I am so afraid of what his administration might engineer in the next few months. Until then, this is the best guess I can make.

In the meantime, however, I sure do wish Sarah Palin would shut up. For crying out loud, hearing from her over and over — almost every friggin day of the week — is like being pecked to death by a chicken while you’re trying to run away from a tornado. Enough, already.