Yes: Sarah Palin drops out of 5k Turkey Trot

Sarah Palin, a couple of babies, a death panel interview and a kid who really needs to start running immediately

Sarah Palin, a couple of babies, a death panel interview and a kid who really needs to start running immediately

Last Thursday, while the rest of us were eating stuffing and probably violating the Constitution, Sarah Palin was participating in a 5k Turkey Trot in Kennewick, Washington. As is often the case with Palin, though, the word “participating” does not mean what you want it to mean. It turns out that the former Alaska governor dropped out of the race midway through, ostensibly to avoid the crowd of onlookers waiting for her at the finish line. See, she just wanted to run in the race and meet some Real Americans, not turn the Red Cross charity event into some sort of Going Rogue publicity spectacle. That’s why she announced her participation only two days before on her Twitter feed, and why her team was called the Rogue Runners. And shame on you for finding some cruel poetry in Palin’s decision to quit a charity race she had time to enter because she quit the governorship of Alaska. You try operating the complex assemblage of touch-screens and levers required to synchronize the Palin II‘s legs for 3.1 miles.

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Going roguish: Sarah Palin as vague alternative to everything

Completely natural

Completely natural

I know you guys are probably sick of Sarah Palin, particularly since our media-industrial complex—of which Combat! blog is now officially a part, with the addition of ads touting anti-health car propaganda and krav maga—has recently devoted itself to covering her full-time. But I remain fascinated by her, in part because it’s either that or the bafflingly long-legged story about the changes in mammogram recommendations, and in part because she is so aggressively stupid and yet so amazingly popular that she must be important. You know, like Uggs. The vague feeling that Sarah Palin signifies something, combined with the frustrating inability to articulate exactly what that something is, isn’t a phenomenon limited to her detractors. It also turns out to be a major impetus for her fans, who—at least until she announces for 2012 and the entire national cackles, half of us with sardonic glee—can’t be called “supporters” anymore. Palin is a politician now in the same sense that OJ Simpson is an athlete. She is an entity in the mediasphere, gossamer but still strangely endowed with the power to affect the material plane, and her fans don’t understand what Sarah Palin means any more than we do. Video evidence after the jump.

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Snake that operates Sarah Palin at risk of blowing its cover

Dude, be cool.

Dude, be cool.

Anyone who follows current events already knows that Sarah Palin was eaten by a grue during her tour of Cameron Cave in Hannibal, Missouri last June, and since then a replicant version of her body has been operated by a funny snake. That’s just something people who take politics seriously have come to accept. What you may not know is that, after nearly exposing his ruse at a fundraiser for Wisconsin Right to Life last week, Sarah Palin Mark II has been working extra-hard to remind us all that he is totally a human being, just like us, and definitely not a garter snake piloting an elaborate construction of tubes and servos designed to simulate human behavior. To that end, she’s written a book, in which she carefully explains that, despite being a millionaire, a former beauty queen and the 2008 Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States of America, plus eating a live rat every seven to ten days, Sarah Palin is an ordinary American just like us.

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