America you are a bad boyfriend

That's kind of how I am interpreting the whole Sarah Palin love her her then leave her situation. My friend Victor got me all caught up on the latest pallywag and she's basically done. Check out this Huffington post piece Jack Cafferty: If Sarah Palin Being One Heartbeat Away "Doesn't Scare The Hell Out Of You, It Should" and then Get some interview clips from Palin's debacle with Katie Couric.

Finally watch Tina Fey's satire that is more or less imitation and be disturbed.

Here's why I say disturbed. While I was watching Fey do a dead-to-rights impersonation I realized Palin's gender/class origins are a big factor in her plummet from grace. Americans ( or maybe just the American media) do not like down-home ladies who get too big for their boots, Palin is basically a political Brittany Spears, a trailer-town ingenue who gets put on a pedestal and then pulled down by the same set of people who liked her initially for being 'one of them'. Politically it mimics the fate of so many down-home girls who get jilted by undependable irresponsible swains, Palin has gone from he object of media affection to the target of it's rage. The media should be focused on the strategists who cynically manipulated voter emotion by choosing an unprepared candidate on the virtue of her personality/gender and yes, class origins, not her qualifications. Once politics as marketing put an unprepared ill-equipped person in shotgun, I wonder whether the same factors made it easier for the media to justify their nasty reporting? There are so many prior models (Brittany, Roseanne Barr to name two) in celebrity culture after all.

This becomes more apparent when Palin is compared to Quayle, he was dumb as dirt but no-one suggested that the party should back-pedal and pull him off the ticket. So what is it about Palin? McCain should have picked someone competent instead of thinking he could pull some my fair lady act and get a female running mate from the sticks that wouldn't embarrass his party. Now that it's too late he has to do two things. Get her some serious edjicating, actually be supportive, and pretend like his choice wasn't the incredibly cynical, manipulative move it so clearly was.

Class-wise, it's easy to see why the down to earth (read poor) right wing voters view the liberal media with such a mixture of scorn and paranoia. When talking to or about Palin the media sound as erudite, arrogant and unkind as those private school kids I went to Hebrew classes with. These kids knew their own IQ and teased me for wearing no-name running shoes. I couldn't understand their moral code or why they felt that their education inherently made them better then me, but they sure did. The more the liberal media teases Palin for things she can't control like her accent, the more they contribute to a political system polarized along class lines instead of political beliefs.