JOE McGINNISS

Now we can all spend the weekend asking “will she?” or “won’t she?” for the umpteenth time.

The new video released by SarahPAC looks, smells, and quacks like a full-fledged campaign spot.

Shushannah Walshe, writing for ABC’s “The Note” is convinced.

“It sure looks like she’s running,” Walshe writes.

Round and round and round she goes, where she’ll stop, nobody knows.

But by releasing the video on the quietest Friday afternoon of the summer, Sarah assures that once again she’ll be the talk of cable and the blogs through the weekend.

UPDATE: Rachel Maddow tweets:

@maddowRachel Maddow MSNBC

A Pennsylvania father and son, Craig and Shawn Christy, have been arrested for making repeated obscene and threatening phone calls to Sarah Palin and her parents.

And none too soon.

I hope these disturbed and dangerous men are prosecuted to the full extent of the law. (Incidentally, that’s Shawn Christy, of McAdoo, PA, pictured at left.)

No one in public life should be subjected to this sort of abuse and personal threat.

The harassment of Sarah Palin’s parents is even more despicable.

See also Reuters.

I have personal feelings about this because my family and I were subjected to telephoned and emailed threats and harassment from Palin supporters last summer, simply I because I temporarily moved into a house next door to hers.

It’s ugly and sick, no matter who is on the receiving end of the abuse and threats of violence.

As we saw in Tucson, murderous acts of violence occur in an atmosphere that encourages or permits threatening rhetoric.

Both Craig and Shawn Christy will be entitled to the presumption of innocence if and when they stand trial for the crimes of which they are accused.

The legal “presumption of innocence,” however, is not a constitutional impediment that prevents those of us not sworn as jurors from exercising our common sense.

Mine tells me that the Heath and Palin families were subjected to the very sort of sick and oppressive intrusion that Sarah implied–and that Glenn Beck and Greta Van Susteren actually stated–I deserved a year ago, simply because I’d moved in next door to her for the months during which I needed to be in Wasilla to conduct my research for THE ROGUE.

Sarah’s words last summer created a climate that led to my receiving protection from both the Wasilla Police Department and the Alaska State Troopers. The threats that came from Sarah’s supporters forced me to change both my email address and home phone number.

But now it’s a year later. To coin a phrase Todd likes to use, I could say, “What goes around, comes around,” but I’d prefer to say that my difficulties then are water under the bridge.

In any case, I write about last summer in THE ROGUE.

So all I can say at this point to Chuck and Sally Heath–and to Sarah and Todd and their children and grandchildren–is that I’m sorry you, too, have been victimized by deranged behavior.

Threats by crazies have nothing to do with politics.

They have everything to do with mental health, with mass media (including the internet), with incitement to violence, and with the sorry state of the laws in this country that not only permit, but seem to encourage private citizens to acquire, own and use firearms.

And Shawn Christy will now argue in court that he shouldn’t be punished for his crimes because his mother suffered from Lyme Disease while she was pregnant with him?

I know all about the “Twinkies” defense.

But the “pre-natal Lyme Disease” defense?

Note to whatever poor lawyer winds up defending the Christys in Alaska: that ain’t gonna wash, my friend.

Whatever we might think of Sarah, and of Chuck and Sally Heath, please, let’s hope that neither she nor her husband, nor her parents, nor her children or grandchildren are ever again subjected to this sort of abuse.

UPDATE:

Courtesy of TPM, here is the FBI affidavit that led to the arrest of Craig and Shawn Christy.

Sarah has moved her September 3 Iowa Tea Party appearance from the tractor field to the launching pad for the national Hot Air Balloon Classic.

You’ll have to make your own jokes about this.

I’m simply not going to take the bait.

Those who once worshiped her are not just abandoning her sinking ship, they’re detonating explosives on board as they jump.

The latest is former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum.

In a new column in The Week, titled “Lessons Learned from the Palin debacle”, Frum writes:

Over the past three years, Palin has systematically laid waste to the basis for a presidential campaign. By her own words and actions, she has discredited herself and alienated her one-time supporters.

But before Palin vanishes into her hard-earned obscurity, Republicans need an assessment and an accounting. Had John McCain won in 2008, we would have put an incompetent, deceitful, and vengeful person second in line to the presidency.

And here’s how David Frum describes himself, on his Wikipedia page:

“I’m a conservative Republican, have been all my adult life. I volunteered for the Reagan campaign in 1980. I’ve attended every Republican convention since 1988. I was president of the Federalist Society chapter at my law school, worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and wrote speeches for President Bush—not the “Read My Lips” Bush, the “Axis of Evil” Bush. I served on the Giuliani campaign in 2008 and voted for John McCain.”

So David Frum, who voted for Sarah for vice president now calls her “incompetent, deceitful, and vengeful.”

With friends like those, Sarah, you don’t need to worry about THE ROGUE or me.

The truth is that Sarah has no friends any more. She has no political allies. She has no supporters.

Her greed, her blatant stupidity and her malevolent personality have driven them all away.

She’s painted herself into a corner from which she cannot escape. The poison she’s spewed throughout her public and private adult life is now seeping back into that corner, and poor little Sarah has nowhere to hide.

Karl Rove said today he still thinks Sarah will enter the race.

I thought so myself until quite recently, when I realized she was too cowardly to do so.

THE ROGUE will be published on Sept. 20, not much more than a month from now.

For months, the people at Crown Publishing and I have been preparing for what we viewed as the inevitable attacks on the book and on me from the right.

Now it seems as if we didn’t need to make the effort.

As David Frum’s column emphasizes, even right wing Republicans have now seen through the rhinestone glitter to the emptiness that lies at the core of Sarah Palin.

THE ROGUE, nonetheless, should remain required reading for generations of political leaders from both parties, just as THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT has been since 1969.

The message: read the ingredients before you buy, or sell.

Sarah Palin was the most artificial concoction that the political hucksters ever tried to sell to the American people.

And were it not for Barack Obama’s dignity and skill and integrity as a presidential candidate, we might now have a spiteful, demented Christian dominionist within a heartbeat of the leadership of our country.

THE ROGUE will show you what a bullet we dodged.

Let’s hope we never come that close to losing our democracy again.

UPDATE:

I have found someone who still worships Sarah.  His name is Eric Golub, and he describes himself as “a politically conservative Jewish blogger, author, public speaker, and comedian.”

The Washington Times has just published his account of “Meeting Sarah Palin–live and in the flesh.”

You really have to read it to believe it.

Only a year ago, Sarah Palin touched the hearts and minds of all Californians when she said, during a speech at Cal State Stanislaus (yes, there really is a college by that name):

“This is Reagan country.  And perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California’s Eureka College would become so woven within and interlinked to the Gold State.”

Today, however, her bus driver dropped off her and Todd and Piper and Piper’s cousin, McKinley, at Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, where Reagan actually attended college.

As you can see from the above photo, Sarah and the kids looked suitably impressed by Reagan memorabilia, even though it wasn’t from what she calls the “Gold State.”

Earlier, she dragged Piper and McKinley and Todd to Reagan’s childhood home in Dixon, Illinois.

There, she uttered yet more words that will ring out as long as there are grammarians left in this great land of ours to try to separate the ingredients of  word salad:

“I think the home was absolutely beautiful and so appreciative, speaking on behalf of I think a lot of Americans, that this town has put such effort into the restoration.”

Speaking of restorations, I may be back in Wasilla this fall to do interviews from the porch of the Lake Lucille house in which I lived last summer.

September 20–publication date for THE ROGUE–is almost upon us.

I’ve been told that Todd’s cheap fence blew down in the first strong winds of last fall.

But I certainly wouldn’t want an unscrupulous cameraman from one of the networks to surreptitiously film the Palin property during an upcoming interview, notwithstanding that Sarah’s TLC cameras sneakily filmed me minding my own business (i.e. reading a book) on my own porch last summer, and she used the footage on her show

After all, two wrongs don’t make a right.

See you in September, Sarah.

I’m still waiting for that blueberry pie you promised me on Facebook last summer.

POLITICO describes the effect of Sarah’s personal magnetism at the Iowa State Fair today:

“If there’s any weariness among Iowa voters about Palin’s months-long “will-she-or-won’t-she” dance in which Friday was the latest tease, it wasn’t visible at the fair on Friday. As soon as people noticed her enter the agricultural pavilion to see the famous butter cow — and boy, did they notice — Palin was mobbed.

“She took two hours to walk from that pavilion, past the food stalls about a hundred yards away, and back up to finally exit the fair. The mob grew so big that aides at one point directed her back the way they had come instead of pushing onward, fearing for her safety.”

Let’s face facts:  however we feel about her, Sarah remains the biggest elephant in the GOP 2012 tent.

Neither the scorn, snark, ridicule and contempt expressed by so many commenters here, nor the scorn, snark, ridicule and contempt expressed by other bloggers, or by MSMers such as Jonathan Capeheart of the Washington Post, or Lawrence O’Donnell or Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, add up to so much as a straw in the wind.

Sarah will do as Sarah wants to do.

And she has the ersatz charisma and political acumen to make it matter.

Within 24 hours of the eight-candidate Iowa GOP debate, Sarah has captured national media attention simply by showing up to eat fried butter on a stick and pet a cow.

We may doubt it, we may disdain it, we may denounce it, but here’s the fact:

Sarah Palin has clout.

She remains a potent force in behalf of all that could destroy our country from within.

And smug, snarky, ridicule from the self-satisfied left will only make her stronger.

She’s easy to laugh at.     I do it myself.

But she who laughs last may laugh best.

That scares me.

I hope it scares you.

Reuters reports:

Republican Sarah Palin rolled into Iowa’s state fair Friday, stealing the spotlight from the party’s presidential contenders and sparking a new round of speculation about her plans for 2012.

Palin’s visit to the cattle barn at the fair attracted a wild crush of photographers, reporters, fans and onlookers who swarmed the former Alaska governor, alarming the cows and bringing activity in the barn to a halt.

 

All she has to do is show up and the pretenders are thrown back into the shadows.

Love her or loathe her, you can’t write her out of the script.

Sarah makes her own metaphors, which saves me some work.

But this one? Honestly, at first I thought it was a parody.

Someone sent me a link to a post, allegedly by Sarah Palin, that said, in regard to her upcoming visit to the Iowa State Fair:

I’m excited to try some of that famous fried butter-on-a-stick, fried cheesecake-on-a-stick, fried twinkies, etc. I’ll enjoy them in honor of those who’d rather make us just “eat our peas”!

Surely, this wasn’t real.  Not even Sarah herself would say she was eager to eat fried butter on a stick.

But the line about “eat our peas” made me wonder.  Yes, Sarah is so resentful of Michelle Obama that she could take a cheap shot at the First Lady’s concern with improving the dietary habits of Americans in order to rein in our current epidemic of obesity.

So I went to SarahPAC and saw it was true–unless somebody hacked their account.

Then I started reading about the Iowa State Fair and saw that, yes, vendors really are offering fried butter on a stick.

And then I realized that Sarah has created her own perfect metaphor for herself.

She is fried butter on a stick.

She’s a grotesque novelty appropriate for a brief run on a carnival midway.

She offers only empty calories, no nutritional value.

She melts away to nothing when exposed to heat and light, leaving us looking for the nearest trash can, into which we can deposit the stick.

But Sarah’s carnival came and went in 2008.

Now she’s like a 1920’s vaudeville act in the age of talking pictures.

Her every attempt to recapture center stage becomes an exercise in self-humiliation.

Next stop on her bus tour?

Coney Island.

UPDATE: Report from the Fairgrounds

“Asked if she was ‘looking for votes,’ she told CBS News: ‘Looking for votes? I’m looking for hands to shake, and I’m looking for fried butter on a stick…'”

I sure hope the swarming media at the Iowa State Fair doesn’t blow the photo opp.