Anyone Remember Sarah Palin?

Humpty Trumpty was and still is the natural heir to the she-snake fascist of 2008.

Does anyone remember the way Sarah Palin poured poison into the ears of so many Americans in the run-up to the 2008 election when she was, to the late John McCain’s rapid regret, his chosen running mate? The venom she spat at anyone who was prone to believing that Obama was America’s Castro or Chavez — a Socialist bogey-man? These days, she is doubtless enjoying the obscurity she so richly deserves.

But she left behind a legacy. A legacy which made so many Americans appear to accept that there is nothing wrong in watching the fundamentally unqualified and inappropriate stand for elective office, and then vote for them. A legacy which celebrates the tribal divide between people, and seeks to make that divide deeper and wider. A legacy which panders to the worst and meanest of those who carry racial hatred around with them, and guns with which to enforce it.

Palin went away, but the seeds she sowed were there, growing into poison plants which bore fruits called QAnon, Breitbart, Proud Boys and similar. I cannot imagine what John McCain was thinking, but some awful form of political desperation among his campaign team must have driven him towards the Numbskull from Nome, the Jester from Juneau, the Fiasco from Fairbanks.

Actually, I am being a bit unfair in that characterisation because Palin is no slouch, and a was a practised politician who fought her way through the Republican ranks to become governor of Alaska from 2006 to 2009. But that does not absolve her from beating the path that led to Trump, and even less does it absolve her from being some sort of role model for the bat-shit crazy religious White House staffer whose name I mercifully forget, and who did that St Vitus dance with fist-pumps, proclaiming that “God is where I am”. She was channelling Soccer-Mom Uber-Christian Palin, I am certain. God was not amused.

Obama, in his book, reminds us that well after his winning the 2009 election, Palin was still there in front of cameras spewing her alt-right nonsense, doing her best to undermine Obama’s massive package of federal assistance for those who were suffering after the 2008 financial/economic crash.

The Palin-Trump problem is one of legitimisation. If it’s OK for really wrong people to strut the national and international media firmament purely because they have put themselves up for election, then, think the gullible, it’s OK for them in their dangerous ignorance and prejudice, to root for those electoral wannabes.

And it helps, too in the case of the Trumps and Palins, that the voting populace does not usually want anyone in leading roles, who are smarter than they are. There are exceptions of course, and I hold Barack Obama to be first among them. Obama was and is hugely smarter, but he was so appealing and so much better a bet than McCain/Palin, that voters forgave him his intelligence and voted for him.

American democracy is described as an experiment. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for small and un-dangerous states to experiment all they like, but for the most powerful and influential nation on Earth still to be experimenting is just irresponsible.

The world cannot afford any more Trump-type experiments.