Concerning the whack job from Wasilla

The new article all the cool kids are talking about is Todd Purdum’s new Vanity Fair piece on Sarah Palin. Which, despite Palin’s constant popularity, isn’t the obvious choice for the new hot piece. After her bullshit controversy with David Letterman, she hasn’t been in the news much, and it feels like well-trodden ground. It would be hard for any long-ish piece on Palin to break any new ground or sound fresh. But Purdum manages to do both, or at least come close.

There’s a lot in there to chew on, and other outlets like Politico are jumping on the piece because it contains new digs at Palin coming from former McCain campaign advisers, which is always fodder for the type of pseudo-news that Politico loves to cover. But two things stuck out to me:

One, Purdum dared even to mention a story that basically no one else would, that Palin was:

“…a woman, after all, who kept a pregnancy secret for seven months, flew all the way home from Texas to Alaska with a near-full-term baby while leaking amniotic fluid, and then finally drove the 45 minutes from Anchorage to a hospital in Wasilla.”

He doesn’t take it any further than that, though. And before you think otherwise, no, I am not one of those people like Andrew Sullivan who thought Palin might have been involved in a massive conspiracy in which her daughter actually gave birth to Trig. But that’s a red herring, anyway. Because you don’t need salacious conspiracy theories like that for this to be a fucking weird story. I mean, read over that quote again. Who would do such a thing? And what could explain such risky, idiotic, medically dangerous behavior? This isn’t rhetorical. I honestly have no idea. It remains the biggest Palin mystery to me. And despite her exploitation of Trig for shameless political gain, if you get too close to this story, the response is that you can’t ask such personal questions about her family. Right.

The other thing worth noting was from Palin’s speech in Evansville, IN (this was after the election). At one point, in discussing the circumstance of giving birth to Trig, she said:

“While out of state, there just for a fleeting moment, I thought, Nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, Wow, it is easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances and no one would know—no one would ever know.”

Purdum goes here, too, but however touching such thoughts on abortion might be, it’s hard not to call bullshit, since this is exactly the type of choice she wants to prevent everyone else from being able to make. But I’m not convinced she ever really felt this way. It seems too scripted to me. She’s pandering to her audience, who at this venue love her. She sets up a moment where she gets tested, and shows some very human doubt, only to emerge victorious with the “correct” decision. The crowd ate that shit up.

There’s some other good stuff in there, too. That being said, I doubt I will post much on Palin again on this blog, honestly. I don’t even care if she runs in 2012, because there’s no way she gets out of that primary.