It took a while, but I finally figured out what truly offends me about Sarah Palin. It's not her shameless greed, nor her stunning ignorance. It's not even her attitude that things like facts and proper English are for elitist intellectuals. Those are reasons to oppose her, even to dislike her, but not to be disgusted by her.
No, it's how she uses her kids. Publicly at least, she treats them merely as things to be exploited to further the brand name that is Sarah Palin™.
What finally did it was seeing Palin on Fox News (where else?) last week going on and on for the umpteenth time about "you touch my kids and this mama grizzly is going to rise up." She puts on this act all the time, and it generally takes three forms:
1. Hiding behind her children. Whenever Palin is criticized about anything, she uses her kids as human shields and shrieks that it's actually an attack on her offspring. For example, when she spoke at Glenn Beck's come-to-Jesus rally back in August, she invoked her son Track, back home after a tour in the Army: "I’ve been asked to speak as the mother of a soldier, and I am proud of that distinction. You know, say what you want to say about me, but I raised a combat vet, and you can’t take that away from me." Of course, no one said anything against her son. And when author Joe McGinniss rented the house next door to Palin's earlier this year, she (or rather, her Facebook ghostwriter) screamed that he was there to lust over her daughter Piper. (She was lucky he didn't sue her for defamation.)
2. Using her children as props. When she unveiled the "death panels" canard last year to scare people into opposing health-care reform, she used her youngest son Trig as a prop: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care." The claim was so egregiously false that the St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact blog named it "Lie of the Year." She again used Trig earlier this year in demanding then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's hide for calling liberal Democrats "f---ing retarded," calling it an attack on her son. She does stuff like this all the time. Even as mayor of Wasilla, she used to drag her kids door to door while campaigning, and her current reality show is just as much about showing off her kids as it is about her own ambition.
3. Pimping her children out for publicity. Let's face it, does anyone really think her daughter Bristol made it to the last round of that dancing show solely on talent? It's an open secret that the voting process was abused by Palin fans to keep her in the running. Whether it's faking an engagement between Bristol and the father of her out-of-wedlock child solely to mollify the religious right during the campaign, making the same daughter the voice of teen abstinence (opposite one of the Jersey Shore idiots, no less!) or making Piper a literal right-to-life poster girl, Palin has a long history of pushing her kids into the spotlight whether they like it or not.
It's all a shtick for her. She uses her kids to promote herself and her red-blooded God-fearing know-nothing Americanism, then uses them again to shield herself from disapproval. And if anyone mentions them outside the exploitative bubble in which she keeps them, she goes into her "mama grizzly" act. She's the Kate Gosselin of politics.
I don't pretend to know how Sarah Palin treats her kids in private, but if it's anything like how she treats them in public, I feel sorry for them. To have a mother who sees them only as objects to be exploited rather than as children to be loved must be an awful thing.
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