Has it been seven years already?

Courtesy of The Decider: 

The great thing about the sketch that Fey and Amy Poehler delivered in the season premiere wasn’t just that it lived up to the hype (and think about that for a second: this sketch was so inevitable that there was hype for it) but that they did so much more than they could’ve gotten away with. Honestly, if they’d just trotted out to the stage, walked Tina through some easy punchlines about moose and Wasila (“Alaska’s crystal meth capital” is still how I think of that city, for better or worse, probably worse), the sketch would have killed. But pairing Palin with Poehler’s Hillary Clinton — something that wasn’t exactly intuitive, as Clinton had largely exited the political conversation by this point — was an act of pure genius. 

Suddenly, the sketch wasn’t just about putting all of Palin’s absurdities on display. It was also about sexism and ageism and double standards and the media’s fascination with sideshows over substance. In a very real way, it set a tone for Hillary just as effectively as it set a tone for Palin. In Poehler’s hands, Clinton was driven, overly intense, and unable to accept defeat, but she was also righteous. By the time she got to the part about offering to lend the media her balls, the audience was whooping their approval.

I still remember seeing this skit for the first time, exactly seven years go today, and realizing that Sarah Palin's chances of ever even get close to the White House had just taken a critical hit.

Because now EVERYBODY saw her as a joke. 

I was blogging about Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and the presidential campaigns everyday. And all of the sudden here came SNL, not only providing awesome material, but making the whole thing fun again.