Over the past month I’ve been keeping track of news about Sarah Palin in order to brief those people who had accepted the Dana Milbank challenge, so that they could catch up quickly & easily when February came to a close.
(All dates based on when it happened per Alaska time.)
Feb 1. Sarah Palin said something stupid and/or self-aggrandizing and/or vindictive and/or flying in the face of Consensual Reality.
Feb 2. Sarah Palin said something stupid and/or self-aggrandizing and/or vindictive and/or flying in the face of Consensual Reality.
Feb 3. Sarah Palin said something stupid and/or self-aggrandizing and/or vindictive and/or flying in the face of Consensual Reality.
Feb 4. ditto
Feb 5. ditto
Feb 6. ditto
Feb 7–20. ditto
Feb 21. Frank Bailey book leaked.
Feb 22. Secret “Lou Sarah” Facebook account. More from the Bailey book leakage.
Feb 23. Bailey book leakage. “Girly men don’t ride the Irondog.”
Feb 24. Bailey book leakage. Also too, see Feb 1–20.
Feb 25. Ditto also too.
Feb 26. Ditto also too.
Feb 27. Ditto also too. Todd Palin doesn’t win the Irondog.
Feb 28. Ditto also too.
Not that much different from any other month, really. A tiny minority of stuff related to Sarah Palin was genuinely newsworthy (mostly information from the unethically leaked Bailey book) — but most of it wasn’t. I hope those of you who return to writing news stories or blogging about Palin after a month’s moratorium will pay attention to the difference. After all, most of us who don’t blog or news-write all the time about Sarah Palin are even sicker of her & her family than you are. So please: be considerate.
See Wickersham’s Conscience for some an update of other real news about Palin from February, and Andrew Halco for some shots of Baileys.
* * *
Update: WaPo’s Dana Milbank reports on his Palin-free month:
The turning point came when I watched Fox News on Feb. 11. A banner flashed on the screen: “FOX NEWS ALERT.” Dramatic music played. Stuart Varney, in for Neil Cavuto, delivered the bulletin: “Sarah Palin has issued a tweet.”
This was news?
It was then that I realized I had nothing to worry about. Palin was not going to make real news in February, or, most likely, at any other time. At most, she was going to make noise – enough to earn that $1 million Fox pays her a year.
Exactly.
sad that you would act in hate – at same time you profess exemption from hate. It just isn’t right. Hate divides further, making Sarah Palin the “public enemy” is just a lie that people choose to buy. It is only when we work together for the common good of all that good can come. Sounds simple, doesn’t it!
Mer, I’ve found time and again — especially in discussions of Sarah Palin — hate has been conflated with all kinds of other emotional states. I don’t “hate” Sarah Palin. I do find her ridiculous, which is mainly what this post does: ridicules her. I also find that just about everything she says bears one or more of the characteristics I mentioned here, from the moment she took office as governor to the moment she quit that office & beyond, so I also feel that I’m telling the truth about her.
I also feel sick of her, & sickened by the overattention that many of my fellow bloggers spend on her to the point that on a slow Sarah Palin news day they’ll cast about for anything just so they can say mean things about her.
I suppose some will view this post as being like that. But there’s a reason I wrote that second to last paragraph. Now that the one-month moratorium has ended on writing about Sarah Palin that some journalist & bloggers chose to follow (after Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank challenged them to on Jan. 21), I’m asking that they just stick to writing about stuff that really is newsworthy, instead of jumping on every utterance or tweet she makes just because she’s the one who made it. The Sarah Palin-obsessed journalists/bloggers might not get it, but this post is also a poke at them.
The world would be a much nicer place if they all wrote about Michael Palin instead. Wish the Palins of Alaska were more like him, too. Because he’s genuinely kind & also very funny (in a good way).
P.S. I profess no exemption from hate. But there’s only three people I’ve unreservedly hated in my life — people I won’t name here because they were all people I knew personally, & for whom my hatred has (thankfully) long since died away.
Thanks for the round-up. This hiatus has been good for my soul, and I’m not even a blogger or journalist!
Feb 7-20, she was actually quite refreshingly silent.
It also marks the 10 days of breaking “news” about a prostitute.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the prostitution thing. But that’s more Todd’s sex scandal than Sarah’s, really. I’ll leave the lurid tabloid stuff to others. It’s part of what I’m sick of.
Good point.
@Meredith Galvan
Mer, I’m with Mel on this. There is no ‘hate’ involved.
There is however: ethical, moral and responsible civic duty to counteract Sarah Palin at all times. This important social responsibility remains so long as Sarah continues to spew lies.
‘Hate’ has nothing to do with it. And so long as Sarah continues with her unfounded, lying attacks on our duly elected President and Sarah’s continuing completely stupid and non-sensical attacks on our First Lady Michele Oboma, then our right and obligation to push back and point out Sarah’s divisive hate and retarded speech.
I don’t ‘hate’ Sarah Palin. Hate is a personal thing with me that she simply isn’t worthy to feature a place on my list of people worth hating. Sarah Palin is just a complete and total waste as a human being with no redeeming features whatsoever.
No Telling wrote:
Much as she’s not my favorite person, I can’t agree with that. Nobody has no redeeming features. Even [gack!] Muammar Gadaffi, whose done considerably more evil in his time than Sarah Palin, however poor a job she did as governor or however wrongheaded & often ludicrous her public statements are.
Still human. Problem is, there’s much ugliness to humanity. But to consign any human to some permanent “you are a complete and total waste who could never be redeemed” outer darkness is no more moral than is the abusive bully god who damns people for all eternity that people like Palin worship.
We need some perspective. As Dana Milbanks observed in the quote I added in my updated to this post, Sarah Palin isn’t making news these days, she’s just making noise — & she’s getting paid a heckuva lot of money for it, too. A few people are influenced by it, but interestingly most of them are just influenced to like her less & less & to consider her even less viable a leader than they did before (& remember: she & McCain lost). Some people are still influenced by her to act dangerously (such as the Palin follower who made written threats on Craigslist against Andree McLeod, such that McLeod got a restraining order recently) — but where are the real dangers in the political world right now?
The Middle East, obviously. And to my mind, the midwest. I updated this post earlier with a quote from today’s Washington Post column from Dana Milbank about his month-long moratorium on writing about Palin. Here’s another, to the point:
Yes. Instead of writing about Palin’s noise, he wrote about news. She’s just not that important, really. Not even when she says nasty shit about the Obamas. Not in the face of what really is important.
Which is really what my post was about.
Mel,
Thanks for setting the bar about this: if it’s genuine news (she committed a crime, she formed an exploratory committee, she got a real job), sure. Tell us what we need to know to take whatever action we might need to take, if any, about that. Other than that … please. It has been such a delightful month without her. And her star is fading so fast, much further attention to the random crazy shit she says and the weird politics around her long-over-now brief romp through state and not-even-close national office only drags it out and … even just a little bit … legitimizes her as a presence on the national stage. Whom does that benefit?
I especially don’t want to hear – never did – about what, if anything, sordid, sleazy or tabloid-ready is going on in her, or Todd’s, personal life. Even if it’s really, really juicy. She’s private citizen – which is a beautiful thing – and ever more likely to remain one. That makes whatever shenanigans there might or might not be or have been completely and blessedly none of our business, if they ever otherwise were. She and Todd have children, for heaven’s sake – three of them, Willow, Piper and Trig, still quite young – and a grandson. They’re going to have a rough enough go of it – are apparently already showing signs of that – growing up in Sarah Palin’s shadow. They don’t need to be reading, as they’re growing up, that some blogger said that their parents aren’t their parents, or walk through the halls in high school and hear that someone else claimed that one or the other of their parents did … whatever with whomever.
I don’t like her. I don’t want her for my president, I don’t watch her on TV, and I think she’s probably messed up in ways for which there’s some psychiatric diagnosis. But I don’t need to keep picking over her bones about it, and I hope no one else does either. She’s over. Let her go.
Thanks for the February update Mel!
Sounds like things just putted along with her per her norm.
I joined the Palin-free pledge mostly to have a break from folks talking about her endlessly .
It bothers me a great deal that so much energy goes into responding to, refuting of , whatever, her ignorant foolishness. It serves to keep our public conversation at the bottom of the barrel to let SP define the parameters of discussion. Issues of complexity are swept off the table if we can’t get past her 2 dimensional take on the world and America .
It is irritating that she lies , big and small and in between, and gets away with it but we have a lot more important things which call for real attention.
Yes, the situation in WI is much more newsworthy as is the tea free-for-all assault on social programs in the House in DC.
The events in the Mid East.
Inflation in food costs.
Inflation in fuel costs.
We already know whatzername’s tiny lil worldview is not adequate to the challenges any of these bundles of events and people present and ours will not be if we don’t pay attention.
Hey Alaska Pi, good to see you! Yes, in the context of the national & world political situations — for that matter the Alaska situation — she just doesn’t rate this much importance anymore.
Barb: I especially liked what you said here:
And also what you said about the kids. Thanks!
Meantime, I notice that with this post, my blog has experienced what one might call the Palin bump: a huge dramatic increase in hits… simply because Palin is in the post’s title. I’d noticed this effect a couple of years ago, & anyone else who ever mentions Palin notices too. Dana Milbank mentioned it in both his before & after columns about his February moratorium as being one of those things that keep a lot of people writing about her: just the increase in hits, in mouseclicks, which on newspaper websites can mean advertising & even jobs. (When Dan Froomkin was canned from WaPo in June 2009, some sources speculated it was because his excellent White House Briefing column wasn’t generating enough traffic.)
That’s why I write about Palin relatively seldom. I like when people read my blog, and I could have people reading it all the time if I wrote about Palin all the time. But I’d rather write about stuff that’s meaningful to me, especially the kind of stuff that feeds my spirit (which is really kinda what Henkimaa means in the first place)… & which I hope be meaningful to other people too. Whatever one might believe about life after death, this is the only life that any of us is living right now: let’s not waste our breaths on stuff that we aren’t nourished by, or at least that we don’t consider to be truly meaningful or important.
Even if it means that my blog won’t get as many hits.
Paradoxically, I found myself making my point by means of a post that, thanks to the “Palin bump,” was illustrative of the very thing I was criticizing.
Back to my normal blog traffic now.
(The kind of bump I’d really love to get is a Colbert bump.)