Leave it to the quitter governor Sarah Palin -- she of the continued snake-oil peddling in American politics -- to pretend to come down in the middle of what is a very real and ugly schism in the Republican Party fueled by Donald Trump's shameful attack on former GOP presidential candidate John McCain.
It's another Palin con job: She's nowhere in the middle of the road on this one; she's in a ditch somewhere to the right side of demagoguery -- clearly siding with Trump and chastising McCain for his criticisms of Trump and those who support his racist rhetoric.
Trump's assault on McCain's military career over the weekend -- in which he derisively mocked McCain's five-and-half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam ("I prefer people who aren't captured)" -- marked one of the lower blows in what is a decidedly low-blow political career. Trump has been eviscerated by those across the political spectrum who have rightfully noted that the horrific conditions endured by McCain -- and others who were forced into similar fates -- make him an American hero. Many have called for Trump to pull out of the race.
Not so Palin. She used the controversy as a way to signal her support of Trump's candidacy by declaring that "Donald Trump is a hero in another arena."
"Trump is the candidate giving voice to untold millions of fed-up Americans witnessing a purposeful destruction of our economy and the equal opportunity for success that made America exceptional," Palin wrote in an email to CNN's resident Palin sycophant Jake Tapper (a mode which assured that she wouldn't have to face any open cross-examination of her views). "We're watching career politicians throw away our kids' future through bankrupting public budgets and ripping open our porous borders which, obvious to all us non-politicians, puts us at great risk."
The reference to "porous borders" represents a direct volley at McCain and an allegiance with Trump on the immigration issue -- and Trump's racist remarks about Mexicans -- that originally initiated tensions between El Donaldo and the Arizona Senator last week.
Anyone who has listened to Palin's incoherent gibberish or read her equally illiterate raw missives is well aware that this email was probably ghost written by one of her paid minions, more than likely Rebecca Mansour or Pam Pryor, both of whom, according to the latest FEC disclosures, remain on Palin's payroll at SarahPAC.
And then La Palin's ghost writer took it a step further:
"Everywhere I go, hard-working patriotic Americans -- not 'crazies' or 'wacko birds' -- ask me to pass on to Mr. Trump encouragement to keep educating the masses about true ramifications of illegal immigration, and in general the real state of our union."
The reference to "crazies" and "wacko birds" was a direct attack on McCain -- the man who thrust her into international celebrity seven years ago -- and who Palin first betrayed on the campaign trail little more than a month later. If Sarah Palin has been consistent about anything, it's that she's been a backstab artist her entire political career.
As predictably as the melting of Alaska's glaciers, Palin blamed the dust-up between Trump and McCain on "those on the Left and lazy media lapdogs." Now that's a stretch. As I noted in my book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, Palin lives in a parallel universe, one utterly divorced from reality. Or as McCain's former campaign manager Steve Schmidt once noted, in Palin World "down is up and up is down." There's some serious bad blood between McCain and Trump -- and the varied wings of the Republican Party they represent -- Palin's varied duplicities notwithstanding.
Let there be no mistake about it. Palin had already come down on the side of Trump before his latest assassination of McCain's character. In June, shortly after his announcement, she trumpeted his candidacy in one of her infamous Facebook postings. She's not fooling anyone with her latest pretext of neutrality.
For those of us who were critical from the get-go of McCain's selection of Palin as his running mate seven years ago, there's more than a little irony about the defecation storm in which he now finds himself. Palin was the first national politician since George Wallace to give body to the dark, underbelly of the American right. Once she betrayed McCain and went rogue on his campaign in October of 2008 (a fact that McCain to this day has failed to acknowledge), she unleashed the politics of anger, racism and violence into mainstream American presidential politics.
It's been a dark and ugly trail ever since. Palin's implicit criticism of McCain today and her continued support of Donald Trump only adds more fuel to the inferno raging in the feculent corners of the American polity. Hopefully someone with a spine in the Republican Party -- and the mainstream American media -- will say enough is enough -- not only about the ugliness that is Donald Trump, but that which is Sarah Palin as well.
_______________
Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn's best-selling The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power was published by Macmillan/St. Martin's in May of 2011.