Palin exploits family to further career

A year ago, nobody would have thought that Sarah Palin, John McCain's failed pick for vice president, would still make headlines this long after their crushing electoral defeat. Of course, I would have never anticipated Scott Brown's election or the inability of the largest Democratic majorities since, um, Carter, to pass a health care bill, either. With anything possible now, maybe the ability of Palin to still exploit her family in order to make attention-grabbing headlines, this time in a spat over the word "retarded," should not come as a surprise either.

The whole spectacle began when Rahm Emanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff, used the word in a meeting. Obviously, if a man appointed by the Muslim Marxist from Kenya said the word "retarded," it meant a direct attack on the traditional American small-town family values of hunting and fishing upheld by the Palin family, which happens to include a child with Down syndrome.

Actually, I should say that other than Sarah, the kid is the Palin family, along with her "born-again virgin" daughter. Forget Track and Willow and Hummer—oops, made that last one up. They don't generate publicity for her, so they don't exist.

While I generally do agree that use of the word retarded is best left out of formal discussion and try to avoid using it myself, if Palin had actually paid attention to what Emanuel said, she would have probably agreed with him. After all, he was calling the few liberal Democrats who continue to have a spine "retarded" because they continued to fight for a health care plan with a public option. This is the guy who makes his party cave in to Joe Lieberman at every given opportunity, yet Palin took automatic offense in order to generate even more publicity for her failed political ambitions.

Of course, an apology was in order, and Palin's antics forced Emanuel to call the president of the Special Olympics, just as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to speak with Al Sharpton after the same Republican extremists took his non-racist comments on Obama's race—that Obama even agreed with—out of proportion.

Literally not more than a day later, Palin suddenly changed course. After all, there was one person who could get away with what she now called the "R-word:" Rush Limbaugh, the same man whom Michael Steele once had to apologize to and acknowledge as the true head of the Republican Party. Palin would not dare make the de facto leader of her party apologize for using such a word and, in fact, defended his use of it in a typically unintelligible Palin sentence.

The last part of the saga came later when an episode of Family Guy made an implicit joke about Trig, Palin's son with Down syndrome. Although Palin called the reference a "kick in the jaw," Andrea Jay Friedman, the actress who voiced the line, got the last word.
Friedman, who happens to have Down syndrome as well, said, "In my family, we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life." As a final punch, she added, "My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes." Ouch.

I have to give Friedman credit here, since she made it safe for the rest of us to say something that has been apparent for ages now. Since 2008, Palin and her conservative allies, including Limbaugh and John McCain, have flaunted her two attention-grabbing children as a means of political exploitation. If you paid close attention in one of the presidential debates, you would have noticed how McCain defended Palin's "special needs experience" because her child "had autism," an epidemic condition unrelated to Down Syndrome or Sarah Palin's family. In a similar vein, Palin used the child as an example of who her sensationalistic and delusional "death panels" in Obama's fascist communist government takeover of health care could possibly decide to kill.

While I generally agree that politician's families ought to remain off-limits, Palin crosses a line. Notice how "Amtrak Joe" Biden, a family man who traveled home every weekend to visit his children, has never exploited his family for political purposes, and nobody has ever even seen his kids in a political context. Barack Obama's family holds a more prominent position, since they reside in the White House, but he never uses his family as a threat or means of grabbing attention for himself.

Palin's motive, on the contrary, involves bizarrely exploiting her family to create a spectacle in support of her spineless political career, whether it involves speaking at the convention of a fake political party or, more importantly, justifying a run for president in 2012.