is sarah palin a real person or is that just a persona she puts on?

[truebluegreen]

52. Thank you for letting me know.

I have fond memories of Alaska. I worked there several summers in the 80s--bartending in Dillingham, cooking at fishing lodges, salmon fishing in Bristol Bay. But I retain the opinion that many Alaskans have no idea about, or appreciation for, the nature of the Permanent Fund and how extremely socialistic their whole government is. It is just Accepted! by a bunch of rugged individualists--the most rugged, toughest, independent! etc etc etc in the country....

Sure, life in Alaska is a hard slog. To be fair, I didn't spend a lot of time in Anchorage, which I hear is only a half hour away. The isolation, the dark, the cold, the snow, the bugs...all of it is a challenge. But what gets me is every woman I met in Alaska had a more interesting, demanding and difficult life than Sarah Palin. They were the real deal--they actually hunted and fished and canned and dried and gave birth at home and coped with 70 below temps and tires that shattered in that kind of cold.... people got by, with support from their families and friends and neighbors...and the government. But the way she portrays herself as a mama grizzly/frontier's woman/whatever makes me crazy.

Like the people who want government hands off their Medicare, her stance is just mind-boggling, and only possible for the blatantly dishonest, or galactically stupid, or for someone with no self-awareness, no moral compass but ambition and/or no ties to reality.

I didn't know anything about her until the summer before Her Elevation when Troopergate emerged. It seems that ever since then her ambition has been channeled into more and more extreme rightwing paths...that's the only explanation that makes sense to me: ambition and competitiveness trumps all...certainly principle doesn't enter into it.