Sarah Palin is now headlining the Blame The Media Tour, a popular circuit for defeated conservatives previously starring (insert name here), going after all those horrible pundits and comedians who conspired to ruin her reputation, trash her family, and on and on. It's their fault, not hers.
I'm sorry, but as a comedian, Palin is pure comedy gold, manna from Heaven, a God given treasure trove of instant material, and I hope she sticks around because I need said material. Just as George W. Bush is an endless font of malapropisms that induce howls merely upon repetition, Palin herself provided all the ammunition anyone needed, not the "media."
Any public figure is going to get made fun of by comics, provided they are funny enough. Anything about John McCain, other than his age, doesn't inspire gales of laughter. He served his country as honorably as anyone, doesn't make many stupid statements, and doesn't have scandals attached to him -- if he does, they're too hard to explain. Barack Obama hasn't yet been a laugh riot. Joe Biden has comedy potential since he's such a verbal loose cannon, and years ago I got a lot of mileage out of his plagiarism accusations, but since he wasn't that famous the jokes had a short shelf life. Comics who supported Bill Clinton still endlessly joked his problems keeping his pants on. The statute of limitations evidently hasn't run out on Ted Kennedy drinking jokes, especially from Ann Coulter, who couldn't write an actual joke if a gun was held to her head.
It's the same when joking about celebrities -- they have to give us something to joke about. Paris Hilton? Britney Spears? Funny. Anne Hathaway? Meryl Streep? Not funny. Tom Cruise? Funny. Brad Pitt? Not funny. Lauren Bacall? Not funny, but funny if you imagine her in a porn movie. "You just put your lips together and blow," etc.
But Palin blessed us with endless setups right from the get-go. She hunted moose and ate caribou stew (or the other way around, I can't remember). Her kids have bizarre names. She preached abstinence-only sex education and had an unmarried daughter impregnated by a guy who called himself a "fuckin' redneck," whose mother just got busted for drugs. She's a Miss Alaska runner-up, for God's sake, who packs heat. She was blessed at her church by a witch doctor, or someone casting out demons, or something. Hilarious.
Then she opened her mouth and it just got more golden. When she said she had foreign policy experience because Alaska was next to Russia, the jokes wrote themselves, and so many comics did a variation on it that it instantly became hack ("I live next to a hospital, so that must mean I'm a doctor," "I live next to a police station, so that means..." etc.) She answered most questions with sweeping generalities, like she was still answering the final question in the Miss Alaska pageant, and used shopworn clichés like "We have to fight them over there so we won't have to over here." She yammered on about "reform" while providing no specifics whatsoever. She's gorgeous and has considerable charm but has obviously has coasted on that, and you can see through it faster than a speeding snow machine.
If she had answered every question brilliantly and thoroughly, or even given the impression that she knew what she was talking about, there would have been a lot less comedy and she would have been a much more formidable figure. But when asked a tough question, she went moose in the headlights and poured forth a garbled circus of words, so much so that Tina Fey only had to quote her verbatim during the SNL Katie Couric interview spoof to bring the house down.
Now conservatives are rushing to her defense and joining in the media bashing, saying Palin was resented because she's "just like regular people" and the "media elites" can't stand it. Stand back while the moose manure piles up. And Palin has the gall to say that some look down on her because of her social class, which is nonsense, because what appeal she actually has is because the average American can relate to her experience. But what does she expect, opening stump speeches in the South with "Are there any rednecks here?"
I guess Palin really is just like regular people. We don't know anything, either. Ba-dum-bum.