Sarah Palen is so desperate to remain in the minds of Americans that she’s taken to pimping her 14 year old daughter. She tried to do it by appearing to do the opposite, but is not nearly clever enough to pull off such semantics. It was she and her husband Todd the Clod who brought up the subject of older men wanting to rape or have sex with her youngest daughter. She was responding to topical jokes made by David Letterman on his late night talk show about her visit to New York City with her family. It seems that Letterman was one of the few people who knew or cared she was in town, and did her the service of giving her publicity, albeit not of the adoring variety she may have preferred.
The jokes in question made no mention at all of her 14 year old daughter and did not even hint at the desirability of raping her or having sex with her. The sexual escapades of her older daughter, the 19 year old Bristol, have been well documented and fully exploited by Ms. Palen and her “handlers.” The kid had a baby out of wedlock with her boyfriend, a common enough occurrence and no tragedy. Well, her and the boyfriend did not get married as the Palens vowed they would, also a common enough occurrence and probably a wise move, since most kid marriages wind up in divorce court.
The ensuing publicity has now run its course, with Bristol becoming an advocate for sexual abstinence among teenagers, a classic case of locking the barn door after the horse is gone. With no mileage left in that tale, the Palens have been pretty much marginalized outside of Republican Party commentaries comparing her with that other tower of idiocy, Rush Limbaugh. So, the question was, how to rekindle media interest in a shallow, dim bulb of a governor in order to keep her hopes alive of running for president in 2012. Well, she’s got another daughter, doesn’t she? Yes, that would be the 14 year old Willow!
Which posed another big problem for the governor and her Brain Trust, such as it is. There are few interesting things about young teenagers to anyone who is not in their family. That is an awkward and difficult time of life for even the most well adjusted among us, a time of raging hormones, increased expectations and entrance into a different social atmosphere of one sort or another; high school, new friends, new interests and activities. It is a time of life best experienced away from the scrutiny of public life, since no emotional pain is as acute as the psychic wounds perceived by vulnerable young teenagers. Whether real or imagined, they can’t yet tell the difference and their pain and mortification is as real as a physical wound to them.
This is the last person who needs to hear her mother start a national dialogue about older men wanting to have sex with her, or worse, raping her (rape and sex are 2 different activities). She’s 14! She’s text-messaging her girlfriend about boys, getting used to the idea of high school, playing sports, adjusting to a rapidly changing body while still having a foot firmly planted in childhood. She’s also the child of a national celebrity, one who’s not exactly revered either, and is the butt of every comedian’s jokes. Who needs Mom adding to this load by dragging your little insecure butt into the public spotlight? About sex and rape, no less!
But Mom has a history of exploiting her children in order to gain morality points, even though she failed her elder daughter miserably by refusing to provide her with any sex education beyond the word “don’t.” Were Letterman’s jokes in questionable taste? Sure they were. Did they come anywhere near advocation of what Sarah Palen says they did? Absolutely not. Will she succeed in painting David Letterman as an old pedophile? No. America likes and trusts him a lot more than her. So, what was her angle here? Why bring this up at the expense of her impressionable young daughter? Well, maybe because she’s a pimp who will use anyone to remain in the public eye, including her own children? There’s always that to consider.
Letterman sure doesn’t need the publicity, he’s on TV every night. While his humor is not everyone’s cup of tea, like all talk show hosts he generates thousands of topical jokes every year, and few have been as generous in providing the nation’s humorists with comic raw material as Sarah Palen. Mostly it was unintentional but in some instances very intentional, such as when she appeared on “Saturday Night Live” in the middle of last year’s presidential campaign. Being that her side lost the election and she didn’t get to be Vice President, she was instantly old news. Who remembers who lost the Presidency a dozen years ago, never mind the Vice Presidency? That’s just the way it goes in politics. You lose, we snooze.
It’s not like the election was close, either. It was an overwhelming landslide against the Republicans, who have since disintegrated into complete disarray. The fact that the opportunistic and idiotic Sarah Palen remains as one of their leading lights bears witness to this. And who else have they got? The drug-addled Rush Limbaugh, that aging men’s clothing catalog model Mitt Romney and the sleaze master of hypocrisy Newt Gingrich, all of them wishing failure on the president of our nation? No wonder the woman sees an opening, figuring she’s not quite as distasteful as the rest of the Republican leadership. Well, by pimping her 14 year old daughter, she’s proved she can dish with the big boys when it comes to disgracing herself. Her willingness to humiliate her loved ones proves she is truly one of today’s Republicans, a party that has succeeded in alienating all the smart people within their ranks. And another nail gets driven into the 2 party system.