What Sarah Palin's 'Masked Singer' cameo says about the virus in our politics

[Zorro]

It’s poetic, really, that the cascade of events that finally sent the country into convulsions of panic this week began with the appearance of a onetime would-be vice president parading around on stage in a bright, fuzzy bear costume.

That’s what Sarah Palin was wearing when she appeared on a reality TV show called “The Masked Singer.” History will record that as the president was preparing to give the worst speech in the history of Oval Office addresses, Palin, the former Alaska governor and religious conservative, was singing “I like big butts, and I cannot lie.”

In that moment, and in the minutes that followed, the virus infecting our politics ― a decades-long drift into entertainment and triviality — collided in real time with the actual virus that’s now paralyzing our communities. The question is whether both might soon burn themselves out.

Palin, it turned out, was a minor figure in our politics; she came within shouting distance of the second-most powerful office in the land, then pivoted immediately to more lucrative forms of celebrity, such as writing tired right-wing screeds and dancing in bear suits. But she symbolized something much more profound in the American culture.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/13/virus-our-politics-exposed/

[Miguelito Loveless]

1. Ladies and gentlemen,

the Conservative ideal of a female Vice President.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

2. It says volumes about this past week that this is the first I've heard of Palin's appearance.

[Sneederbunk]

3. An enduring chink in John McCain's armor.

[Thunderbeast]

4. I disagree with the assertion that she was a "minor figure"

My recollection is that Palin's celebration of ignorant worship of guns, oil, evagelism, blind patriotism, and a thinly veiled dog whistle of racism mobilized a movement that morphed into the astroturf Tea Party phenomenon. Those voices morphed again into the red-hatted mob that begot the current pResident.

I believe that Palin was the spark that lit the wildfire of the willfully ignorant. FOX News fanned the flames. Before her, their voices were supressed by social and political norms that required a fact-based framework for policy conversations. She led a project that validated self-serving mythology and urban legend as pseudo fact.

[Nitram]

5. You are right, Thunderbeast. Palin inspired millions of conservative evangelicals ramp up their hate

and vote for people like Trump. She energized the right in spite of (or because of) her ignorance, incompetence, and greedy focus on her own profits. Now who does that remind you of?