As we continue to dig out from underneath the massive amount of snow left by Winter Storm Jonas, a relic of the past has also begun to thaw out. I am not talking about a long-frozen caveman or Woolly Mammoth, but Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska, and a onetime Vice-Presidential candidate.
She was in Iowa to give her endorsement to Donald Trump, who despite saying things at his rallies along the lines of “I could stand in the middle of fifth avenue, shoot someone, and not lose votes,” is still somehow inexplicably leading the polls.
It was quite the endorsement speech.
She bumbled incoherently from one point to the next, never really seeming to gain ground or footing on a single solid or coherent point. It looked to merely be a series of platitudes, joined together in a single configuration. It was a linguistic human centipede: not bad when you look at its individual parts, but terrifying when joined together.
It is not as if she makes a particularly savory endorsement. At about the same time she was endorsing Trump to try and help him secure the family values voters, her son Track was arrested on charges of domestic violence. She attempted to spin it as a reflection on Obama’s less than stellar record with the Veterans Affairs Bureau (VAB). She said that Obama’s failure to treat her son’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that many others also suffer from led to his criminal record.
While the VAB will undoubtedly be a far less than exemplary mark on the Obama administration, it has come to light that Track actually never saw true field combat. He doesn’t have PTSD in the traditional parameters that would be applied to servicemen. So here, we see a prime example of Palin deferring the blame for her family’s problems onto others. Track might be a discredit to the family name, but I am sure Mrs. Palin will have better luck with her next sons, Javelin and Shot Put.
It has become so bad in the Republican field as of late that some unconventional people are beginning to explore throwing their hats into the ring. One of those people is former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Word has it that he has formed a presidential exploratory committee, and is willing to invest up to one billion dollars of his own money on an independent presidential run.
But this is a nuclear scenario for the Republican Party. If an establishment candidate returns to the top of the field, or Trump begins to fade from the top of the race, then it won’t need to be deployed. With that being said, I certainly did not think this would ever be a possibility when he opened his campaign.
To sum it all up, it has been a topsy-turvy election season since Ted Cruz announced his campaign all the way back in May of last year. And while that has given me ample material to write about, it also shows how truly out-of-sorts the American political process has become in the last few years.
Palin, Trump, Bloomberg and all the rest are not the causes of what we are seeing, but symptoms of a civic disease in which flash and bombast seems to trump policy. And unless we stem the tide in this campaign, we might find out just how far down the political rabbit hole we are willing to go.
