{"id":39348,"date":"2011-05-31T20:00:02","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T00:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=39348"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:52:30","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:52:30","slug":"the-valhalla-tour-begins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/the-valhalla-tour-begins\/","title":{"rendered":"The Valhalla Tour Begins"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Fe Bongolan<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Please forgive me.<\/p>\n

This is yet another article on Sarah Palin — the almost but not quite full term governor of Alaska who is now in pursuit of the Presidency in 2012 through an almost but not quite campaign. Alaska’s former half-term governor has been eyeing the 2012 Republican nomination for the Presidency long before it needed to be filled. After a\u00a0few gaffes out on the non-campaign campaign trail and a one-season\u00a0reality series\u00a0\u00a0covering Palin family life in Alaska on the Discovery Channel, Mrs. Palin has re-invented herself yet again.<\/p>\n

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Sarah began campaigning\u00a0on\u00a0Saturday\u00a0by launching her “One Nation” tour<\/a> — a gambit she refers to as a “family vacation”, wherein members of the Palin family are to\u00a0engage in a summer-long meet and greet with members of the American public along the eastern seaboard, making a left\u00a0turn towards Iowa — the first primary state in the presidential sweepstakes — sometime later\u00a0in the summer. Think of it as an extended family road trip, but instead of an Airstream trailer, its a fully-equipped passenger bus with the Constitution’s Bill of Rights painted on it. She therefore began her campaign\u00a0while, as Eric appropriately\u00a0wrote in his daily astrology report for last weekend<\/a>,\u00a0“three planets were aligned in what is called a T-square, which is behind much of the mischief and turmoil of the world right now. And in our current stretch of time, the Moon sweeps through that T-square, knocking all three of those planets like cue ball on a pool table, stirring up all kinds of deep feelings, past and present fears, insecurities and so on.”<\/p>\n

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She made her first non-campaign presence known at the Rolling Thunder review –\u00a0the primary fundraising event for\u00a0the non-profit organization\u00a0of the same name whose mission is to locate American military still missing in action\u00a0or\u00a0who are prisoners of war.\u00a0True to character, Mrs. Palin’s “mavericky” appearance created enough\u00a0pressure on the event’s security budget that they may\u00a0not have made the fundraising goals they had planned.\u00a0But hey, it’s Sarah!<\/p>\n

She is helped by\u00a0the current\u00a0enthusiasm gap\u00a0induced\u00a0by\u00a0the tepid spate of\u00a0potential Republican candidates\u00a0which include: a former U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives and serial adulterer (Newt Gingrich); “the rent is too damn high” candidate\u00a0for governor of New York\u00a0(Jimmy McMillan);\u00a0and a former\u00a0Alabama Supreme Court\u00a0Justice \u00a0who had\u00a0a monument of\u00a0the Ten Commandments\u00a0built into the foyer of Alabama’s Supreme Court building (Roy Moore). Also included in that list, supported mostly by the Club for Growth, the US Chamber of Commerce, the oil,\u00a0energy, banking, insurance\u00a0and pharmaceutical\u00a0industries\u00a0are former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty,\u00a0former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney, and former US Senator Rick Santorum, whose last name has been forever enshrined as\u00a0the colloquialism for the\u00a0physical remnants\u00a0of a gay male sexual encounter.<\/p>\n

As a political blogger, trying to avoid writing about Sarah Palin is like an ex-smoker\u00a0at\u00a0an\u00a0outdoor cafe where smoking is still allowed. You\u00a0inhale the second-hand smoke as it wafts towards\u00a0your nose for the vicarious experience. It’s toxic. You know its bad for you. But fuck it. You know you want to. Its too delicious not to get some. Just. One. More. Puff. Please. And to most political journalists with little to write about with that bland Republican field, and who are\u00a0hungry for the red meat that she brings to headlines and Twitter feeds, Sarah Palin = crack. There is just as much, if not more excitement speculating about her presidential campaign as there is about her actually running. And the excitement is not just political. Check this section from an op-ed by Michael Sean Winters<\/a> from the National Catholic Reporter<\/em>:<\/p>\n

[It is not just that she is a physically beautiful woman, although she is that too. It is that she knows how to treat a camera like a human being, how to caress it, how to engage it, how to own it. There is something slightly creepy about watching a person do this in person: Their eyes dart to and fro, their head moves forward and back, and then you realize they are speaking into a machine. I always thought the Al Gore\u2019s complete inability to treat a camera like a person spoke well of his character even while it crippled his career. Palin, like Clinton and Reagan, can engage a camera like no one else.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After her last run as candidate for Vice-President in 2008, Sarah\u00a0knows alot more about how you need sex to sell yourself for the big brass ring of November 2012. Even just the potential of\u00a0Mrs. Palin’s candidacy\u00a0has a “rock-star” cache amongst conservatives and the Tea Party base, who, after their 2010 midterm victories\u00a0may be down\u00a0in Congress right now, but not out. Begrudgingly, Karl Rove and the Club for Growth — the other faction of what appears to be a rift in the Republican Party between the Tea Party and big money conservatives, may have to accede to Sarah’s power either as a candidate or the shepherdess of\u00a0the Tea Party base to seriously take on President Obama in 2012\u00a0— particularly after\u00a0the capture and killing of Usama Bin-Laden under his watch.<\/p>\n

With Sarah looming on the political horizon, there is something of a perverse twist on Wagner’s\u00a0“Ring Cycle” going on.\u00a0 To recap, Wagner’s epic four-part\u00a0opera tells the tale of the quest for the Ring\u00a0of the Nibelung<\/a> — the ring of power giving one the\u00a0ability to rule the world. In the quest\u00a0for the ring, which kills villains and heroes who sacrifice spiritual and sensual love in order to attain it, it is love\u00a0in\u00a0the form of the Valkyrie Brunhilde who returns the ring to the\u00a0Rhinemaidens\u00a0and away from the hands of gods and mortals. It was Brunhilde’s hero and lover Siegfried who died because of the ring, and\u00a0Brunhilde’s grief and remorse for his loss which compelled her to bring it back to its source.\u00a0\u00a0Once the ring was returned, it instigated the process of destroying Valhalla, the realm of the gods.<\/p>\n

Could a Palin candidacy destroy the Republican Party or strengthen it?\u00a0Her\u00a0sexuality and sensuality is a high-value political commodity and will be used to her advantage and the advantage of her handlers — whoever they turn out to be. And she knows it. This is not about love. Its about buying and leveraging votes and money. This non-committal political campaign may, at the moment, be looking for just the right buyer to fuel her ambitions and theirs.\u00a0Aside from making sure she is first in the spotlight, this Venus in Aries girl knows exactly what it takes to turn the tables of political conversation from polite disagreement to all-out Gotterdammerung and the news media takes\u00a0this kind of red meat\u00a0all the way to the bank.<\/p>\n

Whoever her handlers may be will probably need a back-up forty-seater passenger bus to follow her “One Nation” tour. With her mouth, that bus better be full of fire extinguishers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Fe Bongolan Please forgive me. This is yet another article on Sarah Palin — the almost but not quite full term governor of Alaska who is now in pursuit of the Presidency in 2012 through an almost but not quite campaign. Alaska’s former half-term governor has been eyeing the 2012 Republican nomination for the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}