Sarah Palin in the Aquarium

Even when I was still a Voldemort Republican, I was not a fan of Sarah Palin. She may have some conservative juice, but she does not have the political chops nor the finesse to accomplish anything of lasting value on the national scene. She may have the capacity to do a lot of damage, but she is not alone in that.

I think of Sarah Palin as a kind of seahorse—fascinating to watch, beautiful even, but what on earth to make of her? The seahorse is of the genus hippocampus, from the Greek roots hippos, or horse, and kampos, or sea monster. There you have Sara Palin—the noble lines, supple grace, and flowing mane of a thoroughbred mare coupled with a kraken.

The kraken is mostly mythical—probably based on giant squid, but not nearly so scary in reality as it is in legend. This too fits Palin, who is not nearly so evil and conniving as her detractors would have us believe. Really, the only thing that would make her scary is if you were afraid that you might vote for her even though you didn't want to, like she had some power over your mind and could force you to do her bidding.


           For all her charm, she is just not that persuasive. They have apparently canceled her TV show because no on can stand the sound of her voice for more that 15 – 20 minutes at a time. Or maybe it was because it took her seven shots to hit a caribou that apparently stood still through all the commotion waiting to be killed. Sarah Palin does not loom large on the horizon of things we need to be frightened about, even if we happen to be big game animals.

It is ludicrous then to suggest that she is somehow responsible for the tragic events in Tucson last week. You can blame the political vitriol if you like, but the vitriol did not start with Palin, nor, in the grand scheme of things, has she contributed very much to it.

The most amazing thing to me about all this controversy—Palin failed to show compassion for the victims of the shootings, Palin made it all about herself, Palin tainted her response with an ill-chosen phrase that is disrespectful to Jews and the legacy of the Holocaust—is that the people who say these things fail to recognize the irony in their saying them. These are divisive statements. These are vitriol. These are wholly self-serving. These are in fact exactly the things of which they are accusing Palin.

Palin may be an idiot when you think of her in terms of a bid for the presidency, but when you think of her in terms of what she is, a soccer mom who got accidentally slotted into the national political arena because the Republicans needed a female vice presidential candidate to make Obama look bad for passing over Hilary, she's just exactly as smart as she needs to be. Anyone who says out loud that Palin is guilty of complicity in the Tucson murders is guilty of the same offense against Palin. If Palin's offense was to spread overblown aspersions about Democrats, how is characterizing that as complicity in murder any different?