Charles P. Pierce on Sarah Palin at CPAC:

By now, and by god, it should have settled permanently in the consciousness of the nation what a huge and untoward gamble with the country John McCain and his campaign took in 2008 when they elevated Sarah Palin from her rightful place on the tundra to the political celebrity she currently enjoys. McCain should pay a heavy price for unleashing this ignorant, two-wheeled bilewagon on the country’s politics. If you think she’s a legitimate political leader, you’re an idiot and a sucker and I feel sorry for you.

Yesterday she gave a wildly received speech to ring down the curtain at CPAC. The applause, as far as I know, may still be going on. It was as singularly embarrassing a public address as any allegedly sentient primate ever has delivered. It was a disgrace to politics, to rhetoric, to the English language, and to seventh-grade slam books everywhere.

This ambulatiory bag of rank resentment pulled out all the tricks. The cheap shots; “Aw, John, why the long face?” to the Secretary of State. The sneering, wheedling playground taunting — “You can’t make a phone call without Michelle Obama knowing, ‘This is the third time this week you dialed Pizza Hut Delivery'” — and a full panoply of funny voices that are the trademark of dipshit comics in every two-drink minimum club in America. We got “hope and channng-ey,” and how “some members” of the GOP establishment are saying to us, “Hush, America. Go to sleep, little lambs.” And, in what is being celebrated as the piece de resistance , she turned Green Eggs And Ham into an extended taunt.

“I do not like this spyin’ man, I do not like ‘Oh, yes we can,’ I do not like this kind of hope, and we won’t take it nope, nope, nope.”

(Dr. Seuss, a noted progressive, was having dry heaves in the Void.)

If you laughed, you’re an idiot and I feel sorry for you.

[…]

A friend bailed on the speech, making the very plausible case that Palin is simply another political celebrity freakshow, like Donald Trump. I can see the point there but, with Palin, and watching the hysterical reception her puerile screed received, there is something more serious going on. She is the living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear, and hate and nonsense. She respects no standards but her own. She is in perpetual tantrum, railing against her betters, which is practically everyone, and volunteering for the job of avatar to the country’s reckless vandal of a political Id. It was the address of a malignant child delivered to an audience of malignant children. If you applauded, you’re an idiot and I feel sorry for you.

Dr. Seuss’s estate should sue just to cost Ms. Palin the trouble of hiring a lawyer to fend off charges of plagiarism.  And like her Senate counterpart Ted Cruz who read the actual book, she missed the point entirely: that the narrator doesn’t like green eggs and ham until he actually tries it.  Then he can’t get enough of it.

So why do we pay her any mind?  Why should we care about the railings of a has-been whose fifteen minutes were up five years ago?  Because, as Mr. Pierce notes, she is the icon of what our right-wingers have wrought out of their thinly veiled racism and resentment of Others getting a place at the table; of people actually demanding their equal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution, and fair treatment in hard times.  Ms. Palin and those who champion her need to be scorned because, as every exasperated parent will tell you, malignant children need to be punished.

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As a theatre person, I appreciate Josh Marshall’s take on the whole CPAC show: it’s less about politics and more about performance art.  That stuff closes out of town.