Bristol Palin willing to dance with gay man

Dancing With the Stars and Bristol Palin

I want to start by saying it is grotesquely wonderful that America’s least deserving national figure has a daughter who is famous, too. Bristol Palin got pregnant during her mother’s run for the vice-presidency. Now she is a spokeswoman for teen abstinence, star of a reality show about herself, and a returning contestant on Dancing With the Stars. In other words, she is utterly irrelevant to a decent person’s life in America. Don’t think for a second that Bristol Palin is important. Yet although she is insignificant herself, she is instructive as an example of her species—like a termite. On Monday, she published this terrifyingly Orwellian argument on her blog which she apparently has. I think you’ll find its central theme gross and immediately recognizable, also like a termite.

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Sarah Palin, ironist

Sarah Palin does her impression of Alaska.

It’s been a while since we’ve discussed the perambulations of Sarah Palin through the American psyche, maybe because she seems to be fading, just a little, into the background insanity of contemporary discourse. Whenever someone brings her up I’m filled with fear and resentment, sure, but lately it’s rare that I find myself thinking about her on my own. She hasn’t made up a word or a fact about pending policy decisions in like ten weeks, and I almost started to forget about her. That’s exactly the kind of thing that at least one multimillion-dollar organization is designed to prevent, and now that the midterms are over, Sarah Palin has come roaring back. The original plan was to have her say “cunt” on national television—possibly to Gwen Ifill—but instead she wrote a book. And based on the passages leaked to Gawker and The Daily Beast, it’s a goddamn masterpiece of irony.

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