Sarah Palin is braced for the release of tens of thousands of emails sent when she was governor of Alaska and which opponents say could damage a potential run for the White House.I am quite looking forward to (and fully expect) information that will further discredit Palin, even among her waning numbers of supporters, as a serious contender for the presidency. I am not looking forward to the enormous heaploads of revolting misogyny and classism which will indubitably accompany that information and the subsequent discussion.
The emails, copies of which will be obtained by the Guardian, date from her inauguration as governor in 2006 through to being propelled to fame as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008. The controversial time saw her initial sky-high approval ratings plummet and ended up in a series of rows, including an ethics investigation and a falling-out with her running mate, John McCain.
...Her office is due on Friday to hand over six boxes containing 24,199 pages of printed emails to the Guardian and other media organisations that had applied for copies. Our reporters will immediately begin sifting the documents for stories but the Guardian plans to publish thousands of the raw mails as quickly as possible to allow readers to scan them for interesting material.
...Palin, in an interview last week with Fox, said she was relaxed about the emails because every rock that could be kicked over had been. But a note of caution crept in when she added that "a lot of those emails obviously weren't meant for public consumption".
...About 2,275 emails have been withheld and some of the 24,199 have been redacted.
Sarah Palin is totes the worst, but not because she's a woman, a beautiful woman, an ambitious woman, a mom, a mom to many children, a mom to a disabled child, a former beauty queen, an outdoorsy type with a middle-class background, nor even because she politicks with the mendacious, aw-shucks, insufferably affected demeanor that's been a central part of conservative identity politics since Ronald Reagan's carefully blushed cheeks.
She's the worst not because she says stupid things but because she says wrong things, because she's an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, anti-socialized healthcare, anti-social safety net, pro-social Darwinism conservative asshole, just another self-proclaimed bootstrapper who can be flippant about reproductive choice only because she has it, who fancies herself an anti-disability crusader despite laughable double-standards and routinely referring to US journalists as the "lamestream media," who belittles feminists and their advocacy for the programs and policies that help marginalized women and girls, and who trades on being a rightwing token while demeaning the very feminist activism that has afforded her the public platform on which she brazenly basks in the luxury of her disdain.
Those distinctions aren't all that hard, given a modicum of effort and the willingness to not lazily rely on misogynist and classist narratives as substitute for substantive critique of a terrible candidate.
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