POLITICS: Sarah Palin Is Batshit Crazy

So much of the punditry surrounding Sarah Palin's recent announcement that she is cutting and running from her elected job as Alaska's Governor has been painful to watch and listen to because it seems most everyone, regardless of news outlet or political leanings, is talking around the most obvious fact: Sarah Palin is batshit crazy. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan had some choice critical words for Ms. Palin in a recent Wall Street Journal column, but even she stops short of stating it plainly: Palin is batshit crazy.

Listening to her resignation "speech" last week was both embarrassing and kind of depressing. I've heard more coherent ramblings from people well into day two of a sleepless coke jag. What the hell was she talking about? She starts out by listing all the mavericky accomplishments of her 2-plus years in office, of which she is very proud—so proud that she' going to quit. The bulk of the speech is rambling, illogical, frenetic at times, and completely non-sensical at other times. Palin said it's the quitters way to "milk it," so she's going to quit . . . which makes her a non-milk-er? Or just a plain ol' quitter? And is that what she means by no more "politics as usual"? Crazy people politics?

Because Palin the maverick is the FIRST and ONLY person to have been dragged through the media coals, she dollops out plenty of blame on the unfair treatment she has received from the press since being tapped by John McCain for his ill-fated presidential bid last year. Didn't Palin tell us last year that she found Hillary Clinton's whining about the media treatment she'd been receiving regrettable? Call me crazy, but I believe Ms. Clinton and our current President (called a terrorist sympathizer, socialist, Muslim, non-U.S. citizen) came under some pretty intense media scrutiny throughout the 2008 campaign. Only they didn't quit—or milk it.

When Palin debuted on the national stage last August, she gave the Republican ticket quite a bounce in the polls. She benefited greatly from the typical media feeding frenzy when someone first breaks onto the national scene. But the media is programmed to do what it does—both positive and negative—and it seems when Palin was treated no longer like a newcomer curio, and the media began to dig into the substance on Sarah Palin, she didn't care much for the scrutiny. And let's be honest: she didn't help her cause in the least. Once she was allowed to speak to the press directly, she sounded unqualified, incapable, and downright juvenile at times. It didn't take long for the American public to realize that, no matter her folksy charm and rough-hewn AlasKA (her pronunciation) style, Sarah Palin simply was not ready to be a 72-year old heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Since the election of 2008, Palin has continued to reveal her lack of competence and, frankly, her exceptionally thin political skin. The pundits on the Left take exceeding joy in the weird stuff she says and does, and the true believers on the Right try to justify her flaky behavior and convince themselves that there's real substance and potential behind those frosted glasses (note from Independent America: there's no potential. Really. Don't kid yourselves). And with this recent resignation, Palin has removed the one solid building block on which she could, possibly, maybe (but probably not), build a new political future for herself. Hard to run on being a 2/3rds-term governor of a state with barely 685 thousand people. Come to think of it, President Obama, who was demeaned for being a first term Senator running for the highest office in the land, served four of his six-year term. That's also 2/3rds of his term, but it's almost double the years Palin served as Governor, and let's face it: Obama was elected Senator in 2004 in the 5th largest state in America with 3.5 million votes, which is about 30 times more than the mere 114,000 people that voted for Palin in 2006.

The line in Palin's resignation ramble that I think most reveals her unbalanced mental state is this: "Some say things changed for me on August 29th last year—the day John McCain tapped me to be his running-mate. I say others changed."

Others changed? Like who? The rest of world?

I think this reveals how completely insulated Sarah Palin is within the parochial mind of Sarah Palin. In one day last August, she went from being the Governor of the third smallest state by population to the unforgiving klieg-light stage of national politics. Palin may not have changed, but neither did the national spotlight—it is an unrelenting, viciously scrutinizing microscope that is not for the weak, the squeamish, nor the quitters. If Palin's folksy incompetence didn't play on the national stage, it's not because the stage changed—it's because Palin wasn't, and thus far isn't, a credible player on that stage. For her to suggest that her problems are somehow the result of everyone else in the world "changing" suggests a person who is either A) so narcissistic that she is unable to perceive who she actually is in relation to the rest of the world; B) so paranoid that she must suffer from a severe persecution complex; or C) is batshit crazy.

I know the Palin apologists are only too happy to point the finger at the evil media and horrible partisan politics for Palin's embarrassing public unraveling, but consider the sources: Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Laura Ingram—these are the same numskulls who touted her as the future of the Republican party and "more experienced than Barack Obama" during last year's election. And Bill Kristol, Palin's own Henry Higgins, seems to think this a bold, wily political move on Palin's part. (Kristol is certifiable at this point. The same guy who pushed Palin as a VP candidate is also the same guy who claimed the Iraq war was going to be short, very inexpensive, and that the Iraqi people would greet America as liberators. Why does any respectable news outlet even give this man airtime or copy space anymore?) Crow as they all might, the American public weighed in on Sarah Palin eight months ago. And as every proud citizen of this country knows, America doesn't really care much for quitters. Especially crazy ones.