It’s hard to think of any public figure I dislike more, or have less sympathy for, than Sarah Palin. Elevated in a weak moment by former Republican presidential nominee John McCain to become the most manifestly unqualified running mate this side of Tom Eagleton in 2008, after losing the election Palin then resigned as governor of Alaska and leveraged her name recognition, political experience, and cheekbones to move into the lucrative world of television punditry, appearing as a Fox News contributor and star of a couple of TLC reality shows.
Though she still pops up now and again to complain about “the lamestream media” (her favorite phrase), her star has fallen considerably: she has no influence on Republican Party policy, no one is clamoring for her endorsement, much less floating her name for any office above PTA secretary, and the only TV coverage she got last year was when her entire brood piled out of a stretch Hummer limo to start a yard brawl at a backyard barbecue. No longer pulling the big checks from Fox News or TLC, she’s been reduced to starting her own Internet channel, where she’s seldom heard from, which is just the way I like her.
But she’s back in the news this week because she posted a photo of her son using the family dog as a stepstool, and people are outraged, claiming animal abuse and poor parenting. Palin quickly fired back at her critics, pointing to a nearly identical photo Ellen Degeneres posted of a little girl standing on a Golden Retriever that won warm applause when Degeneres showed it on her talk show and calling PETA, who denounced Palin and had named Degeneres Woman of the Year in 2009, hypocrites along with everyone else who was piling on.
I strongly dislike everything about Sarah Palin, from her victim routine to her empty-headed demagoguery to her uninformed policy prescriptions to her ignorant fearmongering to the faux-folksy, condescending, snarky tone she uses for nearly everything, including her statement. Even her famously good looks are eroding much faster than can be blamed on Father Time; the hate and ugliness she so tirelessly pumps into the world seems to be reflected on her face, looking more and more like an involuntary, permanent scowl. This person is contributing nothing but negativity to our society and is provably, empirically wrong almost every time she opens her stupid yap.
Which is why it so pains me to say she’s absolutely right about this.
A week or two back I saw a story about how President Obama wanted to play golf at a certain course in Hawaii during his Christmas vacation, and a military wedding that was scheduled to be held there had to be relocated at the last minute. The story was picked up by all the right-wing blogs and Fox News as yet another example of how Obama is selfish, and elitist, and hates the troops, and behaves like a king, or something. When it emerged that the couple in question was told before booking the wedding venue that this was a distinct possibility that the couple had agreed to, and that Obama never knew about it till after the fact anyway, nobody seemed to care, they just went on calling Obama names and the Canceled Wedding joined a long tradition of non-scandals like The Coffee Salute and The Mandela Selfie.
I hate this kind of story, because it almost never has any basis in reality. It’s usually some kind of half-truth massaged to fit an agenda, and the agenda is to paint Obama — or Hillary Clinton, or Bill Clinton, or Al Gore, or anyone on The Other Side — as a bad person, to keep us angry at them, to dehumanize them, to make their every thought, word and deed Evil and Suspect.
This story about Sarah Palin is no different. There are plenty of reasons, even more than I’ve already mentioned, to rag on Sarah Palin. But abusing her dog (whose name, bizarrely, is “Jill Hadassah”) is not one of them.
In my experience, when you are doing something to (or even in the vicinity of) a dog and the dog doesn’t like it, the dog either a) leaves immediately b) barks or growls and then leaves or c) barks, growls, bites you, then leaves. Jill Hadassah (Jill Hadassah? Seriously, WTF?) did none of those things, so I think it’s fair to say she was cool with it.
Palin’s response to this non-scandal, posted to her Facebook page, opens with some of her typical mean-spiritedness: “Dear PETA: Chill. At least Trig didn’t eat the dog.” Because Obama is a Muslim from Africa where they eat dogs, GET IT?
But here’s the thing: by seizing on this photo in the first place, people on the left are willingly lowering themselves into the mud-wrestling ring; Palin is really just responding in kind. There’s not much difference.
It’s probably clear to anyone reading this that my politics lie left of center, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to identify with the team as my social media feeds increasingly fill with evidence that rather than keeping our arguments rooted in fact and logic, we are resorting to the same hyperbolic clickbait crap as Palin and Glenn Beck and Fox News and Matt Drudge.
You might argue that that’s just what one has to do to be heard these days. And maybe that’s true But the problem is that when you start posting stories like “Keystone XL Pipeline is Game Over For The Planet” — something that is a clear exaggeration of the truth — people are going to stop believing anything you say, or post, or forward. It’s like the boy who cried wolf.
When my son was at his most difficult part of toddlerhood, in the 3-4 year-old range, when he resisted any and every idea that did not come from him, my wife used to say, “When you get into an argument with him, you’ve already lost.” That’s what I feel like is happening here. When you start an argument with Sarah Palin, you’ve already lost.
There are plenty of reasons not to listen to anything Sarah Palin says. We don’t need to manufacture any more. If we do, are we really any better than her?