Bad Reponse

I hate that I'm blogging about Palin today, but I feel I must.

I understand why Palin feels like she's being unfairly attacked by the media. She's got nothing to do with this nut in Arizona. She's never met him and if she did, I'm sure she'd have nothing good to say to him. Yet the broad brush being painted is that her and her ilk with their hyperbolic language have increased the level of violence out there.

She's a pundit who's now in the awkward position of trying to say her words mean something, but don't have any consequences. But the truth is as the language gets coarse, so do the actions that follow. It will always be impossible to assign any proximate causality between her words and these sort of random viiolent actions, but to say they are completely unrelated is probably not possible to.

So I get that she's in a bind, and Sarah does what she does best. She plays victim. She lashes out at the media. She throws more fuel out there. She's well within her right to do so.

But what she fails to grasp is that this is not how a President would or should act. A president needs to rise above us vs. them sometimes and reach for the broader us. This was a time to reach out to everyone, but she is just not capable of that. She'll continue to sell news, but I don't think she's ever going to get a serious shot now.

I'm actually a little sorry not to see her get a chance for the big ticket. I was waiting to see one of my favorites, Tina Fey, evicerate her in 2012.