MSNBC’s Countdown Pays Tribute to Sarah Palin’s Whack Job 2009

Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:05 pm

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You can call it a teaser for Countdown’s whack job of the year special, but if anyone needed a recap of the wild year that Sarah Palin had, the program delivered it tonight. The one thing you’ll probably notice about Palin’s year is that she quit her job, fought with the media, sold books, and did nothing productive in 2009.

Here is the video:

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Guest host Laurence O’Donnell introduced the video by saying, “In 2009 Sarah Palin quit her job, picked a fight with a late night talk show host, and fibbed everywhere from her Facebook page to her Going Rogue book tour.”

That introduction pretty much summed up Palin’s year. Think about this, the most active thing she did politically in 2009 was to quit her job as Alaska governor. Otherwise she spent the remainder of the year playing to her Facebook fans and Twitter followers, all the while pushing her book.

Does anyone beyond her followers understand what she was talking about in her resignation speech? The speech makes even less sense almost 6 months after she gave it on the Friday before the 4th of July. I am not willing to call Sarah Palin insane. I do think that she is an expert self promoter, and this is mainly where her interest is centered.

This is just my own hunch, but I don’t think Palin will be willing to stop making money long enough to take a serious run at the presidency. Sarah is the Paris Hilton of politics. She is famous simply for being famous. If Palin was unwilling to put in the work to finish her term as governor, then why does anyone think she is willing to work 100 times harder in a presidential campaign?

Palin is ambitious, but that ambition is not matched by a desire to engage in the mundane work that makes up day to day campaigning and governing. Palin will continue to sell books and pander to the right wing of the GOP, but as the Countdown video illustrates, she is more interesting in promoting her brand than being president.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association