Despite attempts to change her brand, Sarah Palin will forever simply be a kook.

Courtesy of Forbes: 

The previously unknown Alaska governor quickly became a new breed of working mother. A strong conservative woman. An unlikely but believable candidate to shatter the glass ceiling. A rallying force for the Tea Party and other right-wingers. A maverick, a rebel, a politician unafraid of speaking her mind—and who cared if it was uninformed or inappropriate? 

With John McCain (who is so not a kook that I can’t understand how his brand ever got commingled with Her Kookiness, because brands are judged by the company they keep), she tried her best to give Obama a run for his money and earn that erstwhile place a heartbeat away from the famous 3 a.m. phone call. When that didn’t work out, she traded politics for much-more-lucrative punditry and remained a force that shaped the American conversation, for better or worse. 

Last week she launched the online Sarah Palin Channel. “Join us as we discuss the great issues of the day and work toward solutions,” it says on the site, which includes posts ranging from her mother’s Word of the Day to a video called “The Truth About the War in Israel.” Even with this new development, Palin is in danger of becoming irrelevant, a punch line, a blooper in the historical record. 

That’s the danger of choosing kook as part of your personal brand. It gets attention, but it has an inherently limited shelf life. Eventually the novelty, controversy and “maverickness” of it wear off, then you have to amp it up and do something even kookier in order to remain in the public consciousness.

The author goes on to list a few of Palin's kookier moments, and then sums it up thusly:  

Thirty years ago, Geraldine Ferraro cracked the glass ceiling with dignity and grace, and she remains positively regarded by many Americans, whether or not they shared her politics. Her respectable brand endured, and she didn’t become a historical punch line. For 20 years, Hillary Clinton has been chipping away at it, making more cracks even as she endured scandals and cruel judgments. 

But the latest woman who was poised to reinvent American politics is now just coming off as cracked. Forget the ceiling. She needs a quick brand reinvention just to pick herself off the floor.

Oh yeah, I love reading things like this from what is ostensibly a conservative magazine about  Granny Grifter, and knowing that the rest of the world has finally come around to seeing Palin as most of us have all along. As a talentless political opportunist, with the ethics of a street hooker, and the intelligence of a garden slug.

At this point Palin really cannot do anything to repair her reputation, and the choices she IS making only further demonstrate her lack of credibility and her inability to participate in an actual conversations about politics or world events.

The woman has now become so frightened of being called out for her ignorance, that she is reduced to filming uninformed soliloquies where there is no one to correct, criticize, or request clarification from her. (And you know there is somebody who goes through those comments for her so that she is never confronted with a negative response to the stupid things that she says.)

She is like the woman who tries on a two piece bathing suit in the mirror, deems herself breathtaking, yet lacks the courage to wear it on the beach for fear of hearing a dissenting point of view.

Republican reformation is a fantasy.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:

As I’ve written many times, the conventional view of what’s wrong with the GOP gets at only a portion of the truth. When The New York Times or Politico does such a story, the story inevitably focuses on policy positions. Immigration. Same-sex marriage. Climate change. Tinker with these positions, several sages are quoted as saying, and the GOP will be back in the game. 

God knows, policy positions are a problem. But they are not the problem. The problem is that the party is fanatical—a machine of rage, hate, and resentment. People are free to scoff and pretend it isn’t so, but I don’t think honest people can deny that we’ve never seen anything like this in the modern history of our country. There’s a symbiosis of malevolence between the extreme parts of the GOP base and Washington lawmakers, and it is destroying the Republican Party. That’s fine with me, although I am constantly mystified as to why it’s all right with the people I’m talking about. But it’s also destroying the country and our democratic institutions and processes, which is not fine with me. 

The party can change all the positions it wants, but until people stand up and yell “Stop!” to this fanaticism, it won’t mean anything. In fact, the problems feed into each other, because the idea that today’s Republican Party can change its stripes on same-sex marriage or immigration is absurd, and it is absurd precisely because of the rage and fanaticism I’m talking about, much of which is directed at brown people and gay people. Such a party cannot change its stripes on these issues until the mindset and world view are changed. 

What Tomasky is saying should be obvious to just about anyone.

The Republicans are not about to REALLY change, because they don't see that anything is broken.

All they want to change is the PERCEPTION of who they are in order to attract more voters, but not the FACT of who they are, which has increasingly become a party of racists, misogynists, homophobes, and supporters of big business.

And the introduction of the Tea Party wing has certainly not helped them, in that now the inmates are actually attempting to take control of the asylum.

The Right Wing fringe was great when they could simply be agitated about gay rights, gun control laws, or Roe vs Wade and then flock to the polls, but now that they want to try their hand at steering the ship the establishment GOP is looking for a way to keelhaul them before the Republican party runs aground permanently.

I would offer some advice to help but I am too busy unpacking my new popcorn popper.