I’m going with a combo of 1 and 2. The whole thing was so rushed and bizarre (even for SarAmerica) that it reeks of a coming scandal. Of course, this won’t deter Fox from giving her a show and allowing her to lob bombs at her real and imagined enemies.

What am I going to tell my daughter?

Perhaps that you dodged a bullet if you want to see women take high office.

When Thatcher won over here, it was initially seen as a great boon to feminism. The shame was that she wasn’t a feminist - certainly not in terms of promoting other women to cabinet posts, and not in terms of the traditional Tory values she espoused (which could well be termed “neanderthal”).

Thatcher was at least as competent as any man around at the time, and the last thing you could call her was a quitter (they practically had to butterfly-net her in the end).

What she did do was show that a woman could be as tough as a man in that job. What she also did was make us over here very suspicious of the idea that just because a politician is a woman, she’s going to be any different or better than a man on any issues, including “women’s ones.”

Palin screwing up in and out of office does nothing to improve the perception of women’s abilities in the political sphere. Her rhetoric - such as it is - cheapens issues rather than furthering them, and her conduct plays into the old stereotypes of petty flightiness etc. She doesn’t have a monopoly on that among politicians of either gender, but don’t pretend she’s things she’s blatantly not.

If she’s out of the way (I’m taking no bets), and the misguided twits who’ve championed her finally get a grip, maybe we can then talk about why the political systems both here and in the UK (and elsewhere) tend to produce certain types of politician - both male and female - and what can be done about it.

More and more, it makes sense to me why the PUMAs embraced Palin, and it’s not just the “lady parts.” Like Palin, most of the PUMAs are ignorant of larger political issues and tend to particularize everything to their hurt fee-fees, and use said damaged fee-fees as the sole yardstick by which to measure the world. They are never so articulate in discussing world affairs and domestic policy as they are dissecting just why they are so overwhelmingly angry at “the one.” They may not understand cap and trade, but by god, they know their emotions inside and out!

So if Hillary Clinton lost the nomination, and it hurts your fee-fees because you thought a vicarious female victory at the national level would somehow make up for all the indignities you have suffered in life at the hands of bad bosses and boyfriends and husbands and dismissive daddies, then of course it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that dark nefarious forces (ACORN, Rezko, Axelrove, the media, and the rest of the PUMA Bingo Squad) somehow “stole” the nomination for the Inadequate Dusky-Hued Interloper. Doesn’t matter if there is no coherent proof of such a narrative—your ladybits and fee-fees tell you it’s true and that’s all that matters! In fact, anyone questioning the logic and asking for evidence is just further injuring your fee-fees and insulting your pain! Rational proof? That’s sexist! Women’s intuition! Emotional intelligence! My ladybits tell me not to trust him so I don’t, and I’ll make up any half-assed reason to justify it afterward. And if that happens to take me into racist territory (i.e., dismissing a man with more legislative experience than Hillary Clinton as “unqualified”), well, then so be it. Fee-Fees First! Fee-Fees Forever!

And given that there is no proof, none whatsoever, that Obama “stole” the nomination, there was never a rational justification for PUMA from the get-go. It was never anything other than a primal-therapy outlet for people who didn’t understand how the DNC nominating process works, but were damn sure that they were “owed” a female candidate as salve for their lifetime of gender-based boo-boos, real or imagined.

Palin is a study in unearned privilege and narcissistic resentment who has walked away from everything in her life when it actually got hard. Her Pouting Spree reached its nadir in that speech, but like PUMA, she doesn’t need rational justifications for what she does and says. Her fee-fees hurt and she is gonna make sure the whole world knows, damn it! And now she is owed!

Good riddance to Palin. Good riddance to PUMA. Politics ain’t beanball. If you don’t have the spine for it, sit the fuck down. (And I say that as someone who would never ever want to run for office.)

[Reworked Rumper Room Post Alert]

Betty, my money is on a family intervention and a forced vacation at a “health spa” to work out some “nervous tension.”

The only other alternative is that she is at that point in the ballistic curve of drugged celebrity bravado where she is truly convinced that she’s bigger than the system, is completely unaware of how erratic and insane she appears to the public, and isn’t receiving more than token resistance from family and advisers who have no future without a marketable Sarah.

It’s primarily the timing and staging that say “rehab” to me. Making a sudden, grandiose, very weird announcement to a pile of lawn furniture and your groundskeeping staff is the sort of thing you do when Berlin is falling, not when you’re planning your victorious motorcade through occupied Paris.

Her speech on Friday was almost indistinguishable from a Dennis Hopper monologue in Apocalypse Now. The only reason nobody threw a net over her at the microphone is that two solid weeks of Michael Jackson coverage have made even batshit crazy speed-rapping seem like normal dinner conversation.

Oh, and Betty—your daughter sounds like a pistol! You and Mr. Cracker have obviously done a good job there.

What oblomova said. Also.

Thirded!

*I am aware that “melodramatic,” “flake,” “stupid” and “hysterical” can be used as slurs against women. They can also be earned labels for either sex. And in this case, they are.

Betty, I hope that just because we have the occasional kitty lurker that you don’t feel the need to explain the obvious.  If they can’t read for context, eff ‘em.

do a Huckabee-style Fox show rather than dealing with the nasty business of governing

This would be proof God loves us and wants us to be very happy.

My daughter looks at Sarah Palin and she sees herself.

I can see that. Palin does act like an 11 y.o. girl. A very stupid, shallow, vain 11 y.o. girl. Of course, if this girl is anything but stupid, shallow and vain she’s going to resent the hell out of the parental unit who blurted that out on the internons.

“What am I going to tell my daughter” indeed. Perhaps the head of the NAG could apologise for letting her fetishize a celebrity, or for raising her as a victim-in-training.

She takes agency away from two powerful women when she moans about a “dark day in America” or continues to bewail Hillary’s primary loss as having anything to do with sexism.

Sarah Palin made a decision, and threw her power away. Hillary Clinton made decisions that turned out to be wrong, and lost power.

Nobody has done as much to make these women appear helpless and hopeless as the PUMA/NAGs. Thank goodness nobody much remembers the PUMAs, but Siskind has a media presence, which is, in her case, a crying shame. Good take-down, Betty. The sooner people realize what a retrograde unfeminist she really is, the better.

Having given the matter some thought, I have come to the conclusion that Sarah quit because of $$$.

The governor of Alaska is apparently barred from earning any outside income while in office.  Her “legal defense fund” and book advance may violate this rule, and the publication of her book while she is still governor would be the smoking gun proving that she worked on non-state business for money while in office.

Follow the $$$.

Sarah is just like Thomas Jefferson!

Close, but no cheroot.

The PUMA analagy misses one key distinction: Jefferson died on July 4th. Sarah Palin departed this planet on the 3rd.

Sarah is just like Thomas Jefferson!

Since I’m not a Team Sarah member, I can’t check it out for sure, but either sistermoon3 cribbed that wholesale from there (so says Google, but our delightful blog software sometimes messes with search links so they don’t work), or it looks like she might be going to spam it around.

And, BTW, this post and comments have been phenomenal in pointing out why Palin is a loser and not a winner.  The Palin as Enigmatic Populist Shero meme is creeping past righties, PUMA and NAG into common discussion.

Her stomping off the job in a fit of pique over the mean bloggers and MSM while holding out the glimmer of hope that she’ll rescue both parties from elitism and socialist annhiliation, is the sign of a spoiled, egotistical little brat who came in 3rd in the baton-twirling competition.

Not doing us chicks ANY favors.

Oh, and has Rich Lowry removed his hand from his dick while perusing Runner’s World long enough to comment?

FYI: An “analagy” is an “analogy” that you pull out of your ass. I looked it up.

Comment by YAFB on 07/06/09 at 11:19 AM

Thanks for searching.  I certainly didn’t think PUMA sistermoon came up with that on her own.  Even a silly analogy as that takes more brain power that your average PUMApac member possesses.

Great post by Maha (as usual). Her point about people idealizing and demonizing politicians is a good one, and she’s right—everyone does it to an extent. I could understand HRC supporters’ idealizing her…to an extent. She shared their views—heck, she shares many of mine—and the points Oblomova and others made above about identification with HRC as a proxy in suffering and revenge was floridly illustrated throughout the primaries.

It’s the transference of that allegiance to Palin by so-called Democrats and feminists that I find so puzzling. Maha illuminates the reasons for that—the loss of perspective and the projection of idealized qualities—but it’s not simply because Palin is a woman: The same people who see her as the Platonic Ideal of Woman have no problem trashing women who disagree in the most retrograde terms imaginable.

I think PUMAdom is a necessary pre-condition of that particular pathology, which gives its expression a distinctly different cast than regular old wingnuts’ Palin-worship. Garden variety wingnuts will invoke sexism in defense of Palin (while referring to liberal women as “Feminazis” in the next breath), but it seems as cynical as their crocodile tears about Clarence Thomas’ “high tech lynching.”

Siskind and the out PUMAs are probably both more sincere and more deluded than common wingnuts on this score: Wingnuts had an ideology to fall back on when McFailin lost. TNA & PUMA had to invent one, especially when HRC did the unthinkable and joined the E-ville Empire and the Obama admin enacted policies (Ledbetter, for example) that these same people would have cheered on a sane planet.

Sexism was the handiest redoubt, and it has the advantage of being a real problem. But hitching their rickety old wagon to the Palin star ain’t gonna help matters, any more than clowns like Joe the Plumber actually advanced the conversation on the proper role of the government in the market.

What’s interesting to me is that, in the aggregate, black voters seem to have better bullshit detectors about candidates of color than some women do about female candidates. I don’t remember black Democrats touting the superiority of Alan Keyes over whichever white dude got the Dem nomination. Hell, despite Bill Clinton’s torturous attempts to make Obama “the black candidate” by citing the not-at-all-relevant-unless-you’re-playing-the-race-car d fact that Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twenty fucking years earlier, the really interesting thing is that Al Sharpton LOST South Carolina to John Edwards in 2004. Was there the PUMA equivalent of a pro-Sharpton group that turned around and demanded that John Kerry be “punished” by voting for George W. Bush?

Nope. Only the Damaged Fee-Fees Patrol is idiotic enough to put vicarious vengeance on an equal footing with political pragmatism, despite all their squawkings about how black voters were just voting for the black guy without giving it any deeper thought. (Which, come to think of it, goes right along with the ingrained racism of seeing a black man with a longer resume in public office as “unqualified”).

I’ve been looking at so much information about Palin’s step-down that I don’t remember where I saw this, but Mudflats and some of the regular Alaska bloggers are saying that they’ve never seen Palin sound so nervous while talking.  Kevin’s “Every Breath You Take” video definitely points that up.  I think something big is coming at her and she knows it.

I think something big is coming at her and she knows it.

Mar, this has me humming, a la West Side Story, “Something’s comin’, something bad!”

Another weird thing about Palin is that I’ve seen some footage of her being interviewed before there was any inkling she’d run for veep.

She was talking about subjects she obviously felt were well within her comfort zone, but if that Palin - who talked in joined-up sentences and had quite an engaging manner - had been running last year, I’d have been more concerned than when faced with the caricature that did end up running.

I’ve often wondered what happened to her in the mean time. Did she feel the need to act a role, and misjudged that what people would respond to best was what we saw - the most fatuous aspects of G.W. in drag - or was she just unwilling/unable to get up to speed on the issues that needed to be addressed on the trail because of McCain’s sudden “hospital pass,” while the advisers who evidently didn’t vet her assumed she was less of an ingenue than she turned out to be?

@marindenver—I haven’t been keeping track, either, but many people have noticed that she gave a 60-minute speech in about 25, punctuated by eyerolls, giggles and the sort of body-language “tells” that usually accompany an attempt to explain to a Highway Patrolman why your nostrils are bleeding and you were driving 80mph to deliver flour to your mother in small glass vials.

Not sure what the issue is. But there was nothing calm, confident or credible about her delivery.

Another weird thing about Palin is that I’ve seen some footage of her being interviewed before there was any inkling she’d run for veep.

She was talking about subjects she obviously felt were well within her comfort zone, but if that Palin - who talked in joined-up sentences and had quite an engaging manner - had been running last year, I’d have been more concerned than when faced with the caricature that did end up running.

Ditto. In fact, when McCain selected Palin, I was truly worried on the strength of her raw wingnut appeal and a short clip from an Alaska gubernatorial debate about local issues I’d seen (she seemed to know her stuff in that 60 second clip).

Was she overly managed? Playing to the lowest common denominator? Dumber than dirt about anything outside of Alaska? All of the above? I don’t know, but her national candidacy was a train-wreck by any objective standard, and it irritates the crap outta me when people try to ascribe that train-wreck entirely to sexism.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign was mismanaged too, but she’s in a different league than Palin altogether when it comes to political skill, policy knowledge, etc. Making Palin and Clinton out to be opposite sides of the same coin is an insult to Clinton. And coins. Also.

Maybe she just read “Atlas Shrugged” one too many times and decided to “go Galt”...

Did Amy Siskind or any of the other PUMAs or PUMA manques or PUMA sympathizers ever stop to think what a black person might have to tell their sons and daughters if the DNC had listened to Hillary Clinton’s balderdash about how “hardworking Americans, white Americans” count more than the Shiftless Coloreds vote and hence used the superdelegates to give her the nomination after Obama won more delegates through the caucuses and primaries? Or if blacks had looked at the fact that there have been far more white women in the U.S. Senate and in governorships in America than African Americans of either gender, and concluded that the two-party system was hopelessly biased in favor of white candidates and decided to bow out of being the reliable Democratic voting bloc they have always been in order to punish this lack of representation?

Of course not. The PUMAs wouldn’t have given a shit, and if any of those ungrateful darkies had dared to suggest that they might not get behind the Great White Goddess of Vicarious Vaginal Victories Who Will Kiss Our Wounded Fee-Fees and Make It All Better, they would have been aghast.

So: Explain to me again why it is wrong to say PUMA was racist from the get-go.

@G—You can’t “go Galt” unless you are producing something society wants or needs.

Palin has nothing to withhold from the world.

If soon-to-be Saint Sarah is aimin’ for a chat show on Fox it had better be tape-delayed, ‘cause it gonna be a Niagara of gaffe videos otherwise. Also.

I know that she thinks she’s glib and in command ‘n all, and surrounds herself with folks who reinforce the fantasy, but the unblinking camera can be a cruel equalizer.

Oh, please let it be so.

Was she overly managed? Playing to the lowest common denominator? Dumber than dirt about anything outside of Alaska? All of the above?

Mean ol’ John McCain wouldn’t let her run as often as she needed and he didn’t provide suitable praymates.

Although if she did replace Greta, that would be sweet justice.

@StrangeAppar8us -

LOL! I agree with you and points well taken. However, look at all the conservatives who have championed the “go Galt” meme over the past months - these are all people who only think they are important/productive in their own minds.  The rest of us would love nothing better than for them to actually do it and leave, as we can function better without them.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if Palin is productive or not for her to be inspired to “go Galt”.  No, it only requires her self-absorbed narcissistic mind to believe that she is and to do so as a result.

trollhattan, I can already see “The Devil Wore Flag Pins” from her disgruntled producer being both optioned and remaindered.

There is that little coil that goes into the cablehead’s ear, where the producer can whisper:

“Sarah, they don’t make coffee, it’s District of Colombia.”

“Sarah, ask him if he’s going to talk to the Uzbeki representative. Uzbeki. UZBEKI. No, NOT THE UZI, UZBEKI!”

“Sarah, Piper says she’s finished her Christian education workbook, and she’s tired of being locked in your dressing room. Didn’t you say you weren’t going to do that any more?”

I think she’s about to drop the sex tape and retire with about $200 million in her bank account.

At least that’s what I would do if I were her.

I don’t know why everyone is making such a big deal over this…  She does not stand a snowball’s chance of being president.  Period.

[cigarette spam links removed—buy ads, you cheap bastard—KK]

Wow. When even your spam agrees with you and offers you cheap cigarettes, life is golden.

Yeah. Shame about Joe’s link, though. ;)

As mentioned in the Rumper Room Palin quitting has at least resulted in the PUMAs dropping any pretence of being progressive. Some are objecting, but most are not.

One good aspect of this is that the winning faction of NOW have made it clear to Siskind that her group of haters had sod all to do with their victory and they have asked her to kindly get the fck away from NOW.

If these PUMAs think Hillary was hard done by in the Democratic Primaries, because Obama had the gall to win, then wait and see what the Republicans will do to Palin.

There will be no stage show “iron my shirt” placed demonstrators, those will be real and crying is not going to help her win a State.

Her record is as a failed VP candidate and as a quitter in Alaskan politics. Not much to stand on.  Huckabee went nuclear to destroy Mittens, (he did not care that it would give McCain a win) earning the nickname Bigotbee, he would not be afraid of that again.

BigotBasher, I’m not a fan of Huckabee’s, but I think if he chose to run against Palin (assuming she will try in 2012), he’d destroy her with the base. Why? Because he’s a man—and deep down, the Christian Rightists aren’t comfortable with female “usurpers” of the male role. And frankly, though his politics scare the shit out of me, Huckabee projects a much warmer persona than Palin does. He actually seems like he likes people, even the ones he thinks are going to hell for not being Christians, whereas she is obviously incapable of talking to anyone who isn’t kissing her feet and telling her how great she is.

Heard an interesting take on the Sarah Palin resignation this morning, I believe it was on “The View.” Palin needs MONEY, what with $500K in personal legal bills, and all that flying around she does, and a special needs child, and God knows what else she and Todd have going on that we don’t know about yet. And, at least in the near term, she can make more money while avoiding the political spotlight (and more lawsuits) by exiting now and going on the “talk” circuit, “writing” (and I use that term loosely) a book, and posing for Playboy than playing Governor of Alaska. (Okay, I made that bit about Playboy up. Though you never know. I just hope Tina Fey makes a re-appearance on SNL soon to address these pressing issues.)

I’m with Oblomova on this,Huckabee is a good campaigner(when it comes to the party base)and his bass playing also gives him a “rock n roll guy” image.  Hopefully, the dog-killing incident will kill his future political aspirations.  A conservative southern baptist minister president is a very scary prospect.

Well Huckabee when he was on the way down made sure he brought Mittens down with him. He would easily do that again. Republican Primaries make the Democratic Primaries look tame. The PUMAs will tear their hearts out watching what happens to Palin during those.