Possibly, the biggest media whore and grifter in U.S. political history has made it official.

After much prayer and serious consideration, I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States. As always, my family comes first and obviously Todd and I put great consideration into family life before making this decision. When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country. My decision maintains this order.

No surprise there. Palin was never going to run and take a $10 million cut in earnings.  That stuff about God, family and country – pure Palin bullshit, of course.  Aside from the money factor, her handlers must have made it clear to her that she didn’t have a chance in hell of winning the nomination, let alone ever beating President Obama in a general election.

The only ones who still believed Palin might run were her rabid fans.  What is it with those people anyway?  Their naivety/stupidity is astonishing.  Palin’s been milking these saps for a couple of years through her PAC and they still don’t get it.  She’s been dangling a presidential run over her lunatic fans in much the way that a mother dazzles her tiny baby by holding up a shiny object in front of their face.  Over on her Facebook fan page, the idiots are slashing their wrists and shedding real tears as they agonize over Palin’s decision.  It’s a scream.

I am heartbroken. I do not believe anyone I’ve seen in this race so far has what it takes to be our next great president. And we NEED a great to break us out of this depression spiral. I have backed you, sent you money, prayed for you. I have Sarah Palin stickers all over our car. I believe this is the decision that will break America. You MUST reverse this decision. I pray GOD convince you.

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I”m so sad, but I support her decision and will pray for her and her family. She has been through so much already like no one else in this country. We knew the fight would be extremely vicious but we knew that if anyone could handle it, Sarah could. I believe she is doing what she feels is best for the country at this time.

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A dark day for us all :(

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i think Sarah just delivery Obama’s second Term, on my opinion she’s the only one could beat him, not only with her solid sensable policies but have the grits to take on a sordid-dictator.

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huge mistake….. you are the only one that can beat Obama…. It’s a sad sad sad day… you were my last hope America’s last hope and small businesses last hope

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Devastating! I trust and respect your decision, dearest Governor Sarah Palin, but I am beyond heartbroken. You are the strongest woman imaginable. There’s not a candidate I can get behind and I’m lost like millions of others who were waiting and praying for you. God bless and keep you and your precious family. The process will now have to play out and you will still lead the way! I’ll try very hard to keep the faith.

Nutty stuff and the crap goes on for pages.  Every now and then, one of these pops up.

Will you give back all the money you’ve been taking while stringing along your supporters? I didn’t think so. What a grifter.

Give back the money?  Of course not.  Palin’s going to dish out a few dollars to whomever she backs in the primary along with money for a few of her favorite conservatives running for office across the country.  But most of the money, I suspect, will be kept in her coffers as she prepares for her ‘I might run in 2016‘ campaign.

And when does that shtick begin?  It already has.

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There is something sadly revealing in this post by staunch conservative, Brad Schaeffer.

I used to be a fan of Sarah Palin, but even I can see that the best thing for her to do now is to step aside.

When Sarah Palin first exploded on the scene at the 2008 Republican convention as John McCain’s running-mate, I was enthralled.  Yes, I admit, I thought she was terrific.  Here was this attractive, confident governor from a state as far away from the Washington D.C. beltway as one could hope for.

She came to breathe new life into what was already a tired campaign. Finally, we had a vibrant GOP candidate who was not of the older white male variety to balance the ticket with the older white male.  [...]  She presented herself as a happily married woman who had welcomed into her world with open arms a Downs Syndrome baby while her son was being shipped off to war to serve his country.

What a story!

But that was then.  They say familiarity breeds contempt, and for me it has been a long and reluctant decline from genuine enthusiasm for this (if I may) ‘rogue’ breed of Republican to dismay, and then irritation.

Why so, Mr. Schaeffer?

I noticed that she often answered serious questions by reciting what sounded like hollow and rehearsed platitudes.

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…sound-bite answers to substantive questions have been her forte since 2008. I was patient at first since, in all fairness, she was a relatively unknown governor from the hinterland suddenly thrust front and center into the bewildering arena of a national election and thus she had to get her political sea legs.  But she’s been in said arena for over three years now. This is ample time for her to demonstrate that she can put forth coherent arguments that do not sound like they’re ripped from a handbook of pithy Tea Party slogans.  After so much time, my patience with fluff answers from someone demanding to be taken seriously as a potential occupant of the highest office in the land has run out.

Oh please. The only sad thing here is that it took Schaeffer three long years to come to the realization that Palin was, and is, a shallow, self-serving, know-nothing, moronic fraud who has ridden a pretty face and an uncanny ability to not feel shame or embarrassment all the way to fame and fortune.  Most of us understood who Palin was after the first three weeks. And if not then, then certainly after she quit her job as governor of Alaska in search of more riches.

What took conservatives like Schaeffer so long? Here’s a smart little analysis I found in the Comments section.

And now we get to the fundamental problem with emotions of allegiance to today’s Republican Party.

In the wake of Medicare Part D, the Bush deficits, the misleadingly sold and incompetently prosecuted invasion of Iraq, plus NCLB, Raich, etc., there’s no philosophical or ideological reason to be a Republican.

Instead, being a Republican is an emotional choice, like choosing to root for the Philadelphia Eagles. Like Eagles fans, Republicans are characterized by deep hostility toward other groups.

So when someone who’s not a member of the Republican tribe says, “gosh, Gov. Palin doesn’t seem to have done much as governor but violate government transparency laws, campaign for the “Bridge to Nowhere,” and raise taxes on oil companies; and she doesn’t seem to be all that insightful or well-prepared for interviews … ”

What a Republican/Eagles fan hears is: “COWBOYS RULE!!!!”

And the Republican responds in turn with, “E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!!!!”

Schaeffer’s deeply felt allegiance to his tribe and hostility to (mostly imaginary, but let’s leave that aside) other groups (“femi-Nazis hate her!”) led him to disable his brain’s critical thinking capacity about Gov. Palin until the interests of the Party permitted him to reactivate it.

But just wait– tomorrow, we’ll see a column from this guy about how Rick Perry’s comments about Ben Bernanke reflect a well-considered Burkean suspicion of government power.

Because that’s what it is to be a Republican, in their current, post-policy phase– you just have to be perceived to irritate liberals, and you’re good to go.

Exactly. I envision a column by Mr. Schaeffer a couple of years down the road, writing about a broken, hopeless and totally fragmented Republican party, lamenting the fact that the Tea Party was not the “rousing, feisty, roll-up-your sleeve” populist, grassroots entity he once believed them to be. How sad, he’ll tell us, to discover that the Tea Party was anything but a spontaneous uprising of angry, concerned citizens and was instead a carefully crafted idea fabricated in the smoky backrooms of millionaire, GOP operatives.

Pardon us, Mr. Schaeffer, if none of us shed a tear over your tragic loss of innocence, be it for Palin, the Tea Party or your beloved Republican party.

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I might be wrong but I’m thinking that Andrew Sullivan over at the DailyDish does not hold a high opinion of Sarah Palin.

One of the most pernicious and dangerous features of Palin is her clinical refusal to understand reality, to accept error, to acknowledge when the facts she has cited are not actually facts, but delusions. And her vanity and pathologies are so deep she will insist that black is white until her minions actually find a source to prove it.

She’s dangerous; she’s shrewd; she’s an exhibitionist. But she is also, we must keep reminding ourselves, a farce. What worries me about this political leader incapable of telling fantasy apart from fact is that, in a long and deep recession, someone who can lie that readily and manipulate religious and cultural resentment as well as she does is a danger. Not just to America, but to the world.

My thoughts concerning Palin have less to do with her and more to do with her followers.  Palin is a grifter who lacks the awareness skills and intellect to understand that she’s an idiot. I get that part, no problem. What is more troublesome, I think, is that there are literally millions of Americans who adore this cartoon character and who would go to no end to defend her against all criticism. What is wrong with these people?  Can there be that many fools in the country?

I imagine so.

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This stuff writes itself.

Fox stooge: “Do you have that fire in the belly [to run for president], do you have it?”

Sarah Palin: “I think my problem is that I do have the fire in my belly. I am so adamantly supportive of the good traditional things about America and our free enterprise system and I want to make sure that America is put back on the right track and we only do that by defeating Obama in 2012. I have that fire in my belly.”

“That’s kind of my problem is that it’s such a roaring fire in my belly to preserve and restore all that’s good about America that I struggle with that every single day.”

It would seem to me that Palin’s concern should be less about a fire roaring away in her belly and more about finding that brain she must surely have misplaced at some point in her illustrious life.  But hey, she’s a Fox News Analyst.  No prerequisite for a brain at that gig.

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Chef Jamie Oliver targets in on $arah Palin.

Improving what children eat at school alone can have a far-reaching, positive effect on their habits and health as adults, Oliver said at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival.

He said he doesn’t have much faith that government will lead the way, but said the administration of President Barack Obama is on the right track.

Mrs Palin, in contrast, “clearly on this issue is a Froot Loop”, he said in a reference to the highly sweetened breakfast cereal.

The president recently signed a bill that increases the federal reimbursement for free school lunches and expands the government’s nutrition requirements for the free and reduced meals it subsidises to cover all foods sold during school hours.

Palin has not been alone in her criticism of Michelle Obama on the issue of child obesity. For many in the conservative movement, blind hatred for this President has them criticizing anything and everything related to him, be it his administration’s policies or his family’s actions.  Scoring political points is more important to these shallow minded morons than battling child obesity and showing the least bit of concern for the health and welfare of American children. No surprise there. They really don’t care.

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Bristol Palin has written a book. I won’t ever criticize anyone for wanting to make a dollar.  It’s their absolute right.  What I do wonder about is the idiot who is going to purchase her book.  Why? For what possible reason would anyone dish out $20 and waste a couple of days of their lives reading the 304 page memoir of a 20 year old who by all indications has the intelligence level of her mother.

Is this what the Age of Stupid looks like?  Have we arrived…and if so, how long does it last?

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Yes, I know it’s Palin-free February and I will to do my best to follow along…but I could not resist passing along the following quote.

Palin, a strong proponent of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, explained what to say to a caribou bitching about the destruction to his stomping grounds.

“If a caribou needs to be sacrificed for the sake of energy independence, I say, ‘Mr. Caribou, maybe you need to take one for the team.’”

And she wants to be president of the United States.

(h/t: Foolocracy)

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Dana Milbank might have something going here.

Though it is embarrassing to admit this in public, I can no longer hide the truth. I have a Sarah Palin problem.

I have written about her in 42 columns since Sen. John McCain picked her as his vice-presidential running mate in 2008. I’ve mentioned her in dozens more blog posts, Web chats, and TV and radio appearances. I feel powerless to control my obsession, even though it cheapens and demeans me.

But today is the first day of the rest of my life. And so, I hereby pledge that, beginning on Feb. 1, 2011, I will not mention Sarah Palin — in print, online or on television — for one month. Furthermore, I call on others in the news media to join me in this pledge of a Palin-free February. With enough support, I believe we may even be able to extend the moratorium beyond one month, but we are up against a powerful compulsion, and we must take this struggle day by day.

That is a tempting challenge.  I’ve done my best to keep the likes of O’Reilly, Beck and Limbaugh down to minimum coverage on these pages, at least of late.  It takes some restraint to not jump all over each and every utterance from these clowns and rip their arguments to shred (not a difficult task) but I sense that this is precisely what they would want us to do. Limbaugh especially is a master hate-baiter whose thought out plan is to be as outrageous as he possibly can with the expressed purpose of pissing off liberals and increasing ratings.  He has been successful at both.

My decision is to now lay back a bit and mention Limbaugh and Beck only when I can accompany the story with an inspired imaginative humorous decent acceptable illustration.  Otherwise, I now prefer ignoring them.

Palin though, is a different kettle of fish. She is more than just a pundit expressing her twisted political views as a means to increase her riches.  Yes, money is a big part of what Palin does but it is not the entire story.  I am of the firm belief that her level of ignorance reaches such depth that it has her believing much of what she says.  It’s not an act.  Palin simply has no awareness of how truly ignorant she is.

Regardless of whether she decides to run in 2012 (probably not), I’m convinced that Sarah Palin views herself as a preeminently qualified candidate to be president of the United States.  And that being the case, it saddens me to write  that I am unable to join Mr. Milbank’s call for a Palin-free February even though, I am sure, it cheapens and demeans me beyond measure.  My apologies.

UPDATE:

After further reflection, I’m now considering the month-long Palin ban.  We’ll see how it works out.

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There’s been a ton of criticism over Palin’s ‘they’re-attacking-poor-little-me’ video she chose to release on Wednesday – the same day they held the memorial for the Tucson shooting victims, the same day President Obama gave one of the best speeches of his career.  The overriding sentiment can be summed up by this piece from First Read:

While Obama tried to uplift, Palin tried to settle scores. While the president called for more civility, the former Alaska governor talked about duels and “blood libel.” And while Obama’s message was, well, presidential, Palin’s was not. We’ll say this: If Palin has ambitions for the White House — and we’re still not sure she does — then her tone, message, and timing from her eight-minute video was a serious miscalculation.

Ah yes, and what about those presidential ambitions?  David Frum nails it with this this.

“She’s like a big melting iceberg in warm water, and I think a big chunk of ice just slipped off the side.”

See?  There is some positive effect to global warming.

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What do you think? Does Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) have the hots for Sarah Palin or is he just plain crazy?  Whichever it is, this guy has just moved the wingnut bar one notch higher.

“If every person in the world was like Sarah Palin, there probably wouldn’t even be need for government because no one would be in danger of any kind.  If every person were like Sarah Palin, this world would be a peaceful, beautiful world to live in.”

Actually, there would be all kinds of dangers in a Palin-cloned world, not the least one being the thrashing that common sense, honesty, intelligence and the English language would take.

Best line goes to the Politico reader who wrote of Franks:

Ooooooh. Another customer for my famous Sarah Palin Scratch and Sniff Calendar.

I’ve got a prize for the person coming up with the best ending to, “If every person in the world was like Sarah Palin, then [...]“.  Take your best shot.
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