Sarah Palin, Once the Queen of Crazy, Wants Her Throne Back, Teases Senate Run in AK

The former Alaska governor, 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, and reality TV star Sarah Palin is teasing the possibility of challenging Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska’s Republican Senate primary next year. “If God wants me to do it I will," she said recently. She must be a little miffed that Donald Trump stole her title as the "queen of crazy" and won the presidency.

There have always been suspicions that Trump watched the rise of Sarah Palin and modeled his presidential campaign on her run for the vice-presidency in 2008. Watching her probably taught the former president three important lessons:

1. You really don't have to know anything about public policy, law, history, or government to run for the Republican nomination.

Asked to name a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with other than Roe vs. Wade during an interview with Katie Couric in 2008, Palin couldn't name one so she just threw some words together.

Palin: "Well, let's see. There's ― of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but, um."

She might have mentioned the infamous Dred Scott or Korematsu opinions, but that would have entailed knowing something about the nation's history.

Trump often used Palin's word salad approach in answering questions that he was clueless about. Sarah Cooper has made a career parodying his answers to complex [or not so complex] policy questions.

My personal favorite is his answer to a Washington Post reporter about a government climate change report.

Illuminate, Washington Post: DAWSEY, Washington Post: You said yesterday when you were leaving that you were skeptical of a climate change report that the government had done. Can you just explain why you're skeptical of that report?

Trump: "One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers.You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including — just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with."

"Number two, if you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death, then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion. There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it — not nearly like it is. ..."

Very Palinesque.

2. You can just fabricate your attacks on your opponents and it's OK if they have no basis in fact.

After losing the election Palin posted her infamous "death panels" conspiracy theory on Facebook regarding Obama's health care plan, the Affordable Care Act.

Palin: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

There were no death panels in the Affordable Care Act, but that was never the point. She understood that fear can be a better motivator than logic or truth. And, she knew that right-wing news sources like talk radio and Fox News would amplify her lies.

Trump took Palin's love of wacky conspiracy theories to a much higher level, especially with his election fraud and deep state nonsense, and he understood that his supporters loved him for his lies no matter how ridiculous they were.

Illuminate: "Trump's fans "know he lies constantly and they still love him. They know Obama was born in America, and that Ted Cruz's dad didn't help kill President Kennedy, that Mexican immigrants aren't rapists, that Climate Change isn't a Chinese hoax or a plot by climate scientists, that the noise from windmills doesn't cause cancer, and that the FBI didn't insert a spy into his campaign to help Hillary, etc., etc., etc."

And, Trump, like Palin, realized that conservative media sources wouldn't hold him accountable for his falsehoods. Quite the contrary; the Trump Show brought them more viewers/listeners.

3. Questioning Obama's birth certificate and his "Americanism" were convenient vehicles to touch on the issue of race.

No one ever really questioned the authenticity of the former president's birth certificate. "Birtherism" attacks were, as former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell pointed out, always about racism, and Sarah Palin understood that before Trump. In December 2009, she called the birth certificate issue a "fair question" and "fair game" and said "the public rightfully is still making it an issue." And she went further by questioning Obama's "Americanism" because he supported efforts to obtain civil rights for people of color.

Chicago Tribune: "She justified her accusation that Obama "pals around with terrorists" by saying that Obama isn't "a man who sees America the way you and I see America" and that he "sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country."

Trump jumped on the birtherism train in 2011 when he said that he had sent investigators to Hawaii to prove that Obama's birth certificate was a forgery, and the positive reaction from some of the right-wing's tinfoil hat crowd may have been all the encouragement Trump needed to plan his 2016 campaign. Trump learned that outrageous race-tinted attacks without a shred of proof would fly with the Republican base.

And the rest is history.

#Trump #politics

By: Don Lam & Curated Content