Sing along, boys and girls, to the tune of the "Beverly Hillbillies" theme song:
Come and listen to a story'bout a woman named Palin.At private-sector jobsshe was always a-failin',Then one dayshe got into the politics game,And up through the webcame a bubblin' fame. Celebrity that is, money for nothin', Tea Party! Well, the first thing you knowol' Palin's a millionaire,Alaska voters said, "Palin move away from there,"Said, "The screen's where you oughtta be."So they gassed up the snowmachine and moved onto TV. Reality that is: Bristol's Bayou, pay-per-view, cage match ...
Yes, for those of you who were out hunting and missed it, the 49th state's favorite, half-term, ex-governor and her clan are home for a spell and back at it again. This time it's a made-for-the-internet brawl in Oceanview, an upper middle-class Anchorage neighborhood.
Or at least an upper middle-class Anchorage suburb pre-Palin punchout. Who knows now. Property-value valuing homeowners on Harbor Circle may have joined the likes of American liberals hoping they never see Alaska's favorite reality TV clan again.
Korey Klingenmeyer was the host for the party. He's not talking. He has Iron Dog connections. Iron Doggers don't talk. They're the strong, silent type. The media's favorite nickname for Iron Dogger Todd Palin, Sarah's hubby, was "Grunt."
That's because no one ever got much more out of him in an interview than a grunt. Outside magazine sent a writer to Alaska in 2008, when Sarah was still governor, to profile Todd. The story was titled, "The First Dude in His Element."
It went on for thousands of words. It was mainly about people other than Todd, but that's understandable. Todd seldom has much to say. The good-guy take on the then-governor's strong, silent guy was, as writer Bill Donahue summed it, "quiet and stoical."
Todd, Donahue wrote, is "a sort of sphinx -- you keep trying to crack the enigma and glimpse the gears spinning away in his mind. You watch him.
"One afternoon in Nome, Palin comes out of his bedroom in the little apartment that he and (Scott) Davis are borrowing. Freshly showered, he lumbers toward the TV. 'Let's see what's on,' he says, twiddling at the remote. Grainy snow blasts onto the screen, so Palin flicks the thing off and just slumps on the couch. Silently, he stares out at the frozen Bering Sea, glittering in the sun, and you have to wonder: Is he thinking of what Herman Melville called the 'dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows,' or is he thinking of nothing at all?"
Many would go for "nothing at all."
If you've ever wondered why the Iron Dog snowmachine race -- arguably the world's toughest motorsport competition and among the longest -- is a two-bit affair, this ought to give you some idea.READ MORE AT ALASKA DISPATCH NEWS