The Wasillian Candidate

According to a report from Reuters (bolding mine):

“There is a time when it’s necessary to take the gloves off and that time is right now,” Palin told thousands of supporters at a rally in a sports arena in Carson, California.

Earlier at a fundraiser in Englewood, Colorado, she departed from her usual speech to question Obama’s character.

“Our opponent though is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,” Palin said of Obama, also calling him an embarrassment.

Palin cited a New York Times story on Saturday that examined Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Vietnam War-era militant Weather Underground organization who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Times concluded they were not close.

I’m now deeply regretting what I said earlier about Palin’s not being an idiot.

She should’ve stuck with the stereotype of the backwoods former newscaster who got in way over her head. Since the GOP is betraying its own supporters, rotting out the core of its platform in favor of Fox News-worthy talking points, you could feel some small degree of sympathy for her getting swept into that betrayal. And getting turned into a hot by horny conservative standards* mannequin parroting back the inflammatory nonsense the party orders her to.

But you have to be a special kind of idiot to be spreading crap like that. If she is actually “departing” from her usual speech, then she’s an idiot for believing that will fly. And if she’s not, but merely tossing in another attempt at muckraking her GOP handlers have given her to say, then she’s an idiot for not saying “I’m enough of a maverick to rattle off your prepared statements when they’re vague meaningless sound bites and empty promises, but not when it’s perpetuating a baseless smear, bless your hearts.”

This is the material of cowardly forwarded e-mails filled with the kind of stuff the GOP wants you to think, but they’re not allowed to say out loud. (“Hasn’t everyone noticed how he’s black? And his middle name is Hussein? How can we possibly be losing?!? Put our redneck uncertainty staff on full alert: give us everything you can to link him with Muslim extremists, stat!”) When somebody forwards you one of those e-mails, it’s kind of hard to get too angry, because they’re just gullible saps who’ve been horribly manipulated. But the person who writes the e-mail in the first place deserves your full scorn.

I think Governor Palin was better off just being an embarrassment.

* When considering the concept of “hot by horny conservative standards,” you have to remember that the desiccated husk that is Ann Coulter got all the attention she has by marketing herself as a “hot conservative,” and mysteriously, it worked.