Sarah Palin's Most Disastrous Year

Sarah Palin practices politics as lap dance, and we're the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred dollar bills into her g-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don't take her seriously.

~ JOE McGINNISS

In the greatest political anti-climax since Newt Gingrich's latest president run collapsed, the state of Alaska yesterday vomited up 24,199 pages of emails that half-term Governor Sarah Palin had sent and received through her statehouse and private email accounts. Another 2,353 pages that the state dubiously claimed were protected by executive privilege were withheld, as were many thousands of pages from personal email accounts that the couple used in an effort to hide their abuses of her office.

While I find the efforts of The New York Times and other media to solicit readers to cull the emails problematic, the timing of their release could not be better.

To riff off of Joe McGinniss's term, Palin has been lap dancing up a storm this month. She has moved to Arizona, where she unfortunately can no longer see Russia from her kitchen window, completed a bus tour of national historic sites that was notable for generating a media frenzy, not a scintilla of real news but more fodder for late-night comedians when she asserted that Paul Revere's famous ride was to warn the British, a contention that her supporters sought to bolster by trying to rewrite the American patriot's Wikipedia entry.

And she is about to debut a fawning biopic in what would seem to be an effort to jump start a presidential campaign that, for all intents and purposes, is deader than a doornail.

Palin has had two and a half years -- more or less the time span since the initial requests for the gubernatorial emails were submitted -- to shake the image that she is a vindictive red-meat ideologue who has neither the chops nor the patience to immerse herself in policy and the other requisites for running a national campaign, let along holding high public office.

Instead, we have gotten more of the same -- much more -- and taking the long view, 2012 has been something of a disaster for her.

Sarah Palin's Alaska, the television reality show that was going to keep her front and center, further revealed her as an opportunistic phony and the ratings quickly tanked. Then she injected herself into the Tuscon rampage with a video that yet again revealed her well-honed sense of victimhood. She she claimed that she was being blamed for the shootings and attacked the news media for its "blood libel" against her, an explosive term that she clearly failed to understand.

Palin's negative approval ratings are stratospheric, and only three presidential contenders since 2000 have come close to matching them -- Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and Al Sharpton. While she conceivably could win a bake-off with Michelle Bachmann in the Iowa caucuses, she shows no inclination of hiring the kind of professionals who could run a campaign and continues to surround herself with sycophants.

The feeling grows that like everything else Palin has done after quitting the governorship because the job was . . . well, not the way to become a wealthy woman, she's in it for the money, and 24,199 pages of emails will do nothing to change that.