Editor’s Note8212;The below column is intended to be satirical and should in no way be taken seriously.
Sarah Palin, the surprise pick for vice president on the Republican ticket this year, has been the subject of much frantic digging in recent days. Reporters across the country have dredged up the short record of this previously obscure figure searching for the embarrassing gaffe, sketchy kickback or dark family secret that could make sensational news.
They have found quite a bit. While mayor of the hamlet Wasilla, she threatened to fire the town’s librarian after the librarian refused to censor books Palin disliked. Later on, she aggressively campaigned in favor of a bill that would overturn a ban on strafing wolves from airplanes. And most embarrassingly, her teenage daughter is pregnant, a fact that sets Palin’s support of abstinence-only education on awkward ground. The latest blemish on her record, however, has emerged not from a reporter deep in the archives, but from Palin’s hockey-mom peers.
Palin has made almost as much of her hockey mom status as John McCain has of his prisoner of war experience. In many ways, it forms the cornerstone of the things about her that appeal to the Republican base8212;deep commitment to family and middle-class, earthy roots.
A book slated to be released next week called The B**** of Wasilla alleges that Palin’s actual hockey-mom history was one of shrill, stubborn anger and vicious pettiness, and that in light of the fact that being a hockey mom is her main experiential asset, she is unfit for the vice presidency.
B**** was written by a coalition of Palin’s ex-neighbors who all had sons who played as Wasilla Badgers, the team that Palin’s son, Track, also played on when the family lived in a tiny suburb. The book details Palin’s obnoxious antics from the bench during games, her poorly prepared post-game cookies (vividly described as “cardboard”), and her megalomania as head of the league’s fundraising committee.
The fundraising anecdotes are particularly revealing, for their tangential connection to Palin’s ability to compromise and organize. She was described as a “domineering, hateful little Nazi” during her tenure and allegedly used extortionary tactics to extract the monies she thought necessary from the parents of the league. Laura Waller, one of the author moms, writes that on several occassions “Sarah sent her husband to the houses of those who hadn’t contributed enough and had him threaten to break their kneecaps with a baseball bat.”
The book has aroused Republican ire even in advance of its publication, as many commentators compare it to Unfit For Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, the book written by Republican John E. O’Neill, which smeared John Kerry’s record in Vietnam and was instrumental in denying Kerry the election. The fear among Republican party officers and the McCain campaign is that this book might well have a similar deleterious effect on Palin’s, and by extension, McCain’s chances at convincing the American public they can run the country well.
FOX News commentator, Sean Hannity, was among the first to take issue with the forthcoming book, and on his program “Hannity & Colmes,” drew connections between the Wasilla mothers and the Democratic Party, which he said had viciously smeared a person that “to my knowledge is not only qualified to be vice president but is very charming and considerate.” An official statement from the McCain campaign echoed Hannity’s words, claiming “this latest transgression by the Obama campaign indicates the hollowness of their promise to abandon “politics as usual’.” The Obama campaign, for their part, has denied any involvement in the book’s publication.
Editor’s Note8212;The above column is intended to be satirical and should in no way be taken seriously.