On the Rise of Sarah Palin

If you care to know how Ms. Palin got her start, Jane Mayer's 2008 piece in The New Yorker (which I happened to serendipitously come across in my daily researches) is a good place to start.  The extent to which personal ambition (as opposed to principle) drives her is evident, especially in the way she pitched herself to the same media "elite" she claims to despise.  And Mayer's quote from former Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd says it well about John McCain: "He put the country at risk" by selecting her, and he would have to live with that.
Palin's sex-appeal-based popularity (her biggest single bloc of support seems to come from white males aged 40 or older) continues to put the US at risk, if only because the policy nonsense and leather-jacketed "star quality" she peddles (and Mr. Limbaugh promotes) in her quest for political super-stardom and big bucks hinder the country from coming together to address the huge, frightening problems it now faces both at home and abroad.  Twenty years from now, we will look back on this era as one of America's lowest, and Palin's rise  will epitomize it - as will the fact that a war hero and self-proclaimed patriot like John McCain would have stooped so low in his quest for power that he became her most useful "enabler."