The political press has finally noticed that Sarah Palin's "mystery tour" has never been a mystery to those who first recalled her most fundamental personality: raging paranoia and a pathological hypersensitivity to scrutiny and legitimate criticism.
What's she doing? Where's she going? Is this the beginning? Is this it? -- is it really it? -- the grand blast-off to her much rumored, much anticipated presidential campaign? Oh, how exciting. Oh, how unorthodox. Oh, how Sarah!
Such has been the buzz.
Now before I go any farther I wish to remind you that there's one convention of commentary that I rarely tolerate: that of the "I told you so" variety. And I have this morning plied my mental creativity to think of another way of saying this, but there just isn't one that still conveys the essence of, quite simply, quite emphatically: I told you so.
Last Thursday I wrote:
[N]ow come flurries of anticipation, if not exactly expectations, however low, about a Palin presidential run after all. What a stunner that Palin's political stirrings just happen to coincide with the release of a former staffer's expose -- Blind Allegiance -- portraying the Harpy Queen as warm as a viper, as devout as Jimmy Swaggart, and nearly as functionally stupid as Sen. James Inhofe (politics' gold standard of stupidity, never to be out-valued).
Once the book is no longer a political sensation and literary cause celebre, Palin's stirrings will subside.
Today, observes Politico:
[I]n the days leading up to the bus tour, Palin’s team was focused on something completely different.
Frank Bailey, a former aide, finally got his tell-all published on Tuesday after unsuccessfully shopping it for more than a year. And though the many damaging anecdotes about Palin had already been reported months ago after a leaked manuscript reached the press, Palin’s staff made discrediting him their top priority.... [emphasis mine, see above]
And Bailey’s book? It’s barely cracked the top 100 on Amazon.
To any other politician -- strike that, entertainer -- not crawling with violent neuroses and severe personality disorders, another expose from a former staffer would be just another expose from a former staffer. A blip, a minor ruckus, a bit of gossipy distraction to be ignored. But for Sarah Palin, nothing short of a five-alarm counteroffensive, rolling thunder and Memorial Day fireworks could suffice.
She's a deeply disturbed woman. True, for now she is ill in an entertaining way, but this will soon deteriorate to a kind of William Jennings Bryan pitiability -- a raving, Scopes-trial kind of lunacy which even her followers will look on with sorrow and sympathy.