Glen Rice, NBA Baller in more ways than one.
To be perfectly frank, I couldn’t care less about some pornstar Palin look alike. I’m fascinated by the woman, who I am glad is not actually in politics any longer (she’s a Tea Party entertainer/cheerleader, which you might argue is still “in politics”, but thankfully, she’s not a policy maker). Part of that fascination is that I think she’s attractive. But her beliefs are utterly repugnant, her delivery is godawful, and a sad insecurity practically pours out of her. Have you guys seen Julianne Moore’s portrayal of her in the HBO movie? It captured so much of what I find fascinating about Sarah Palin.
You tell me, corsair. Do you think it’s cool to flash that picture that large on someone’s monitor when they’re browsing the forum at work?
Either way, stay classy!
-Tom
Would that be the passive-aggressive for “Too much!”? ;-)
Didn’t like her legs all that much, anyway. The real Sarah has much sexier legs. If only she could have a brain transplant.
Halperin/Heileman’s “Game Change” makes it very clear that from about 48 hours after the selection of Mrs. Palin to be the running mate was made, even GOP diehards knew it was a catastrophic mistake.
Some did. Others support her to this day.
There’s also a documentary about her time as mayor and governor in Alaska which is perhaps best summed up as equal parts incompetence and dictatorial. A through-and-through horrible woman.
Well, I suppose.
The people in political circles however, she’s dead to them. She’s a ridiculous Donald Trump caricature. When she resigned as governor of Alaska, it was a tacit admission that the Republican Party hierarchy would scuttle anything remotely officially political she tried. They might have even supported a candidate against her for governor in the primary had she run again. Accepting the running mate slot in 2008 had ruined her career, and she knew it and knew the only way she could make lemonade out of all of it was to turn herself into a female Rush Limbaugh cartoon, appealing to persons with IQs barely sufficient to operate motor vehicles.
Is attractive, or was attractive? Because after she quit the governorship and went on the wingnut welfare circuit, she lost a bunch of weight and she’s looked kind of withered ever since (You could practically shave with her elbows!).
Yeah, twice! (so one more time than i could manage for The Phantom Menace). Game Change was the one right:
It was decent if obviously biased in that nearly impossible to escape from Democrats vs Republicans way, at least from anything made in the usa itself (a polarised society etc). Julianne Moore was freakishly look-a-like as Palin, and also to some extent Ed Harris as John McCain. There was a strong ‘folk lore’ vibe of McCain = Good, Palin = Bad through out the film, which may be reasonably accurate on a certain scale. If you care to think of our political system as being able to foster actual ‘good’ people at all these days.
I saw this one, Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, which i think is the one you are referring to:
It was pretty good at exposing the probably reality of the type of personality disorder types that can fit into politics/large corporations these days? And that made for interesting viewing, although the deliberate lack of access the movie was given to Palin did kind of steal the show, even if the various comments from people that know Sarah Palin from Alaska was also interesting.
I also see there is this one, The Undefeated, which i have not had the pleasure of seeing yet:
For me the Big Story of Sarah Palin is the litmus test she provides on the health and stability of your Democracy, i.e it is in poor health and so corrupt/broken by corporate influence as to be less a democracy and more a Corporatocracy or Plutocracy (as that recent Harvard study looked into). That is what i find fascinating about Sarah Palin, and the truck load of popularism and out-right lies (to the electorate) that she is ok to go through with to ensure the Plutocracy gets what it wants.
And in the case of Sarah, even those interests soon realised her appeal was very narrow and focused. What they were really hoping for was a Saraobama, or more likely a SaraMcCain, but she is not intellectually ‘deep’ enough to manage the level to garner wide-spread support. She is good at the Tea Party level though, and that might be enough to give her the life she wants (fame, power etc)?
…She’s still repeating the myths about wages and immigrants.
Nice to know that even the republican party has standards, though.
That’s not a slam…the UKIP here does not. Some of the people they’ve dredged up for local council members… (And that’s ignoring the ones they who were deselected for other parties, usually due to poor performance…)
Well, she’s clearly an aging beauty queen, and I don’t get the sense that the years of public life are being kind to her. :( But we’ll always have the 2008 campaign!
Yep, Game Change. And, just to be clear, I couldn’t care less about the accuracy of it. It was a dramatization with a very clear opinion. My fascination is with Moore’s performance as a woman out of her depth struggling to understand what’s going on, lashing out from a sense of inadequacy, and eventually tearing down the structure she had been enlisted to help build. It plays like a sort of black comedy/tragedy.
-Tom
I was actually talking about the book Game Change.
The movie had to do what it had to do in a short period of time, which I get.
But no Zak, before it was a movie it was a very insightful and telling book. And all the Palin stuff is all sourced back to McCain and all of his lieutenants. Halperin and Heileman aren’t grinding axes at all in print. They have very uncomplimentary and very complimentary things to say about the three main players in the book–Obama, Hillary, and Senator McCain. The two characters who they take hatchets to are Palin and John Edwards.
The book goes far beyond caricature of Palin, and at times tries to make her sympathetic in a “This poor country bumpkin had no idea what she was getting herself into” kind of way…but when Palin decides to go completely off script to make things all about herself, she gets eviscerated.
Ah ok, the book does sound more interesting (as is nearly always the case). I agree on Tom’s points about what he liked about the film version, it was a pretty decent film about a not very decent person(s). But that’s politics for you these days, right?
Oghier
3914
The movie was good, and I agree that Julianne Moore did a fantastic job with Palin. She was both abhorrent and sympathetic.
The book, however, was one of the best pieces of non-fiction I had read in years. It’s fantastic. It covers all the campaigns, too, while the movie was heavily focused on Palin.
I’ll chime in with another recommendation for the book: a great piece of research and wonderful writing.
hepcat
3916
I haven’t read the book, but the movie seemed…well…kind of hard to believe. I’m the furthest thing from a Palin fan there is. But I have to wonder if some of that wasn’t embellished. If it wasn’t, then she’s even more self serving and idiotic than I thought. But I find it hard to believe that anyone could be that ridiculous.
Have you ever watched Palin? She really is that ridiculous.
hepcat
3918
Oh, I dislike her intensely. Of that there should be no doubt. I was just surprised at the depth of her self absorption and idiocy as portrayed in the movie. I found it hard to believe that someone suffering such a disconnect from the actual political process could be chosen as a vice presidential candidate in the first place.
I know she’s Rush Limbaugh in a skirt, but Rush Limbaugh would never make it as far into the political inner circles of power as she did at one point.
And just because I find it utterly abhorrent that anyone would think I support that person in any way, shape or form, I repeat: I dislike her intensely. :)
She’s not really comparable to Limbaugh, because hateful as he is, he’s never as incoherent as Palin. The reason “that ridiculous” seems plausible is the number of times she’s spewed random words in interviews and in speeches, as if she felt she got credit if the right terms were in there regardless of how they were strung together or what other things she said.
The thing is, she’s legendary for saying really idiotic stuff which demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the subject.
Quitting her term as governor halfway through is another tangible example. It was a completely self-absorbed move.
I’d hesitate to dismiss the way she’s portrayed in Game Change as well, mostly because her most notable meltdowns to crazytown happened in a roomful of people during the Biden debate prep. She essentially would go catatonic, and there were staffers who thought she was having a series of nervous breakdowns. They eventually debate prepped her by focusing on a couple of things, giving her some catch phrases to use, and telling her to steer all debate points BACK to the couple of things they focused on. Then they had to tell her to never use Biden’s last name, because she couldn’t not call him “Joe O’Biden”. That “Is it OK if I just call you Joe?” moment sounded disarming. It was actually part of the plan to reduce her fail states.
Throughout the campaign, staffers and her own family worried that she’d had some sort of mental break. She wasn’t eating and had really scary weightloss, would go off on tangents about nonsensical things, and just generally wigged out completely.
