Sorry….that upset me.

Have a good one.

The Governor has only herself to blame for the mess she finds herself in. She stepped onto the national stage hopeless unprepared for the role she campaigned for. In a very real way she volunteered for this abuse. As Harry Truman pointed out “if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

No one made Palin flub her national debut, the infamous “in what respect Charlie” interview. No one forced her to be hopelessly unprepared for Katy Curic’s softball question of reading choices. No one forced her inarticulate response of “Putin rearing his head” in Alaska. No one made her unethically harass a state trooper and fire the troopers boss. No one authorized her $150,000 shopping spree with RNC money.

More to the point no one forced her to recite the numerous distortions, spins and outright lies she has uttered to both the Alaska and National public. It started with her fib about the bridge to nowhere and never really stopped. The woman can’t even keep the story of whether she is a feminist or not straight.

You don’t have join Andrew Sullivan’s Sara Palin bashing club to be concerned about her behavior and her history with Trig. She was needlessly reckless with both her and Trig’s health during the delivery of her youngest son. Having a downs child on an Alaska Air flight at 20,000 feet is not the best of options for a delivery.

It is that episode that best illuminates the true issue with Palin, that of temperament. It is a thread that runs through her life; her lack of discipline. She seems to have a very hard time of keeping her colors within the lines. She seems to have a very hard time of separating the personal from the political. These attributes should be a non-starter for anyone in politics male or female.

Palin’s latest action only reinforces the contention that she is undisciplined. In short she bailed on the people of Alaska for purely personal reasons. Yes there were distractions brought about by the media but they were of her own creation. The post resignation fish boat interviews were willingly entered into by Ms Palin. All she had to do stop the foolishness was say “get out of here, shoo, you’re scaring away the fish.”

Sara Palin had a choice post McCain. She could have mended fences with Alaska politicians and done the hard grunt work of running the state. She chose to shirk her executive responsibility. She angered her fellow Alaska Republicans by leaving the state and chasing national Republican opportunities.

It matters not a whit if Sara is a good or bad mother. If she really is that hideous Alaska Child Protective Services will handle the issue. What is important is Palin’s incredibly thin skin about her family. She made the decision to drag them out in the lime light, to make them poster material for the National Republican Party. If she really wanted to protect them she should have have left the entire lot back in Wasilla. Some one in the family or multiple family members could have taken care of the children. As a matter of fact it would have been best for Sara to let her oddball secessionist hubby stay back on the frozen tundra with the children. Instead she brought the whole lot to the convention, even the idiot teen dad that impregnated Bristol. She forced that yahoo to make nice for the cameras and then she complains when the whole farce blew up in her face. It is a microcosmic slice of how she operates; with no consideration of the long term consequences, totally undisciplined. That is why she failed, not because the mean men of the media did her in.

My opinion is that she’s not a saint, she’s not the devil, and there’s way too much fear out there about her.

We are probably going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I don’t dislike Palin, I simply do not trust her yet. In a lot of ways, any women who manages four jobs (professional, mother, spouse and home manager) is a role model for women’s rights. A women’s rights advocate is someone, particularly if they hold a public office, that has spoken forcefully on the issue and has an established record of supporting policies, programs and legislation that advances women in all walks of life. This advocacy describes HRC, not Palin.

Also, while it is distant in our memory, HRC has been ridiculed for nearly two decades, ever since Bill broke his wedding vows and she attempted to implement health care reform. Palin has suffered the heat for 8 to 10 months – and it has been intense – but I still believe it pales in consideration to the sexist treatment HRC has suffered for such a long time.

I respect your opinion and hope the best for Palin.

Thanks for putting up those two statements.

I still think your original impression as you stated it, that Palin was “pretty critical of HRC when she complained of media bias and sexism.” is in my eyes not justified. She talked about it once, and I agree she was being unsympathetic to Hillary, and I feel her message to Hillary and other female politicians was that ideally you gotta be tough and don’t respond and don’t let it get to you.

In her latter statement, as I understand it, she was trying to distinguish between political potshots that are part of the game, and using these potshots as a campaign to destroy her ability to do her job.

There truly is a difference in scale and length of attacks and depth and indecency of attacks on her and on Hillary. I don’t think there has been any modern political figure, even George Bush that has had her appearance, intelligence, family, beliefs and everything eles about her as intensely maligned as much as Sarah Palin has. We cannot ignore that. And just like Hillary did, she is also complaining about it. It’s only human, don’t you think?! I mean if you believed she was being too critical of Hillary, then I hope you won’t be too critical of her.

And the ethics complaints have been used to inhibit her from carrying out her responsibilities as Governor.

I view her as a long-term women’s rights advocate not as someone who talks about rights but someone who models what it means to have rights as a woman, and to use those rights to pursue whatever life goals she sets for herself and do it her way.