Until yesterday I hadn't seen Sarah Palin (former Governor of Alaska, Fox News opinion maker, MILF) for a long enough period that I forgot about her.  Yesterday I felt the lost contentment I'd lived through, not hearing her alarm clock voice for so many months, her viewpoints mashed together into lumpy balls of colorful mixed metaphors, pandering to the lowest common denominator of political thinkers, pandering even to herself.
     The event was organized by purveyor of paranoia, Senator Ted Cruz, who invited Donald Trump to speak as well, adding kitschy New York golden glamor to a humid brightly lit Tea Party gathering in front of the scaffold-covered Capitol dome in Washington.
     The main subject, the recently concluded Iran nuclear deal, headed the grievance list, with speakers tossing other dripping meats to the listeners.
     Palin's speech showed the enthusiasm we've been used to from 2008 onward.  She's a comfortable millionaire, her private contentment with life in Obama's America hasn't lapsed.  She didn't get the power, as did the McCain administration still fucking things up in an alternate universe; however, guns here are readily available, some Americans (including Ted Cruz) still think she's worth listening to, and griping about Obama, the news media (on which she often relies), and foreigners fits with the rising bile of isolationistic racist attitudes from those who once rooted for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but now ignore the Afghan and Arab civilians affected by the consequences.
     On U.S. cable news lately, we're seeing migrations of people from conflict zones.  The image of the dead little boy washed up on shore has been played a great deal in the U.S.  If American viewers would take the time in their imaginations to multiply that tragedy by millions, they might begin to make a connection between the snarling mouth of Dick Cheney and his neoconservative friends now warning about Iran waging nuclear war, as Iraq allegedly would have done.  Cheney's diabolical mind, and lobbying by like-minded men who have never been shot at, brought war and its damages in this century to the Middle East and Afghanistan, with resultant movements of innocent people who leave unbearable environments generated in the first place by first world powers.
     Sarah Palin, though, wouldn't agree with me.
     "Iran," she declared, "[is] the braggadocious number one state sponsor of terrorism."
     Someone shouted objections, the great lady paused while the obstacle to free speech (a dark brown man) was removed by uniformed cops.
     "Oh," she said, apparently off the cuff, "and you know, since our president won't say it, since he still hasn't called off the dogs, we'll say, police officers and first responders all across this great land, we've got your back, we salute you!  Thank you, police officers!"
     If Black (i.e. "dog") lives don't matter to this woman, then Iranian lives really don't.  Amid the Palinesque hard to follow clumped together word-putty, she spoke of Iraq and the "neighboring crazy-land Iran."  Her glib willingness to dehumanize tens of millions of Iranians puts her among those demagogues (like Trump, and some other dead foreign politicians America used to be at war with) who influence gullible listeners seeking reasons for economic and other troubles by latching onto hatred of massed enemies.
     I could see sweat on Sarah Palin's chest.  The crowd she spoke to, when shown in C-Span pans, looked small; attentive, polite, but also as if they were looking at a curio from a bygone time, like going to see William Jennings Bryan speak a year or two after his final presidential run.
     Her crowd appeal has diminished, perhaps--even the right wing faithful have heard her crap many times before and may find it uninspiring--even poetically mad--compared to the fiery blasts of the new Republican volcano god, Trump, who, predictably, shone brighter in news coverage than the event's organizer, Cruz.
     Ted Cruz, I think, seems to be positioning himself as Trump's 2016 running mate--does that feel good to think about?  Why else would Cruz be acting like Gary Busey trying to please Trump on Celebrity Apprentice?
     Trump Cruz 2016: two race-baiting alarmist demagogues with a combined history and diplomacy IQ of 33.
     About Carly Fiorina, Trump said in Rolling Stone, "Can you see that as president?"
     That, not her.
     He keeps insisting he "cherishes" women.  Rosie O'Donnell (who imitated his mannerisms), Megyn Kelly (who asked him a cogent question), Huma Abedin (who works for Trump's possible future Democratic political opponent), and now Fiorina (whose polls numbers have been steadily rising).
     If Trump feels threatened, he strikes back hard, or strikes preemptively.  If the perceived threat is a woman, he uses sexist language and displays misogynistic attitudes typical among alpha male baby boomers who learned those put-downs and attitudes from their greatest generation parents.  In spite of what news media journalists and pundits say about Trump's uniqueness, we have seen and heard some of this bullshit before.
     Sarah Palin's voice, her sweat, her brain, the elk she shot to death on her TLC reality show, her high school basketball dribbling, her strangely named children, her fans, her screwy foreign policy ideas, all combine in my view, having seen and heard her again for the first time in quite a while.
     She still just seems like a dumb housewife.

                                                                               Vic Neptune