Sarah Palin's Dick Problem

"Mistake?  Maybe I'll have Tripp say some choice words about his family..."

"That one I don't think was well handled," Cheney recently told ABC News in regards to the selection of the former Alaska governor. "The test to get on that small list has to be, ‘Is this person capable of being president of the United States?’"

"I've met her," he continued. "I know her. She -- attractive candidate. But based on her background, she’d only been governor for, what, two years. I don't think she passed that test ... of being ready to take over. And I think that was a mistake."

As can be predicted, Palin crawled out of her cave in Wasilla to try and claw her way back into relevancy (Was she ever relevant?) by rebutting someone who actually served in the capacity of vice president.

Palin's response:

Well, seeing as how Dick -- excuse me, Vice President Cheney never misfires, then evidently, he's quite convinced that what he had evidently read about me by the lamestream media having been written what I believe is a false narrative over the last four years, evidently, Dick Cheney believed that stuff, and that's a shame. So he characterized me as being a mistake.

Here's where the mistake would have been, Greta, I believe. It's had I not answered the call -- I was honored to get to run for Vice President of the United States alongside Senator John McCain. I was honored to accept the nomination from the GOP.

And I think that the mistake would have been me just deciding that, Hey, I love my 86, 87 percent approval rating up there in Alaska as the governor, moving and shaking and watching corrupt politicians and businessmen go to prison for crony capitalism, working on 16 to 20 percent of domestic energy supplies being able to be increased via Alaska's resource development, ethics reform legislation that I was working on -- that led to that 86 percent approval rating.

I could have decided, you know, I don't want to be bloodied up. I don't want my family to go through what we will have to go through in order to put ourselves forward in the name of service to this country. But I did it. It would have been a mistake to have hunkered down, just lived that luxurious, if you will, comfortable lifestyle in Alaska.

Instead, we, like so many other people across this country, decided we will do all that we can in order to defend our republic, put America back on the right track. And I believe I did the right thing in accepting that call.

So essentially, Palin believes former Vice President Cheney has fallen victim to false narratives in the lamestream media and that is the reason he believes she was a mistake.  There couldn't have been any other reason!

Palin seems to believe that a former power player who held the position she could not get, and who some may consider a Washington insider and part of the party establishment, would formulate his opinions solely on what the likes of networks like ABC or NBC, or online publications like The Daily Kos or The Huffington Post.  Palin's has to realize that there is no possible way that that can be anywhere near the truth.

I also highlighted above in Palin's response her claim that she believed running as McCain's vice presidential pick was a service that she chose despite her immense popularity and the expected viciousness against her family.  Let's ignore the fact that since being picked by McCain Palin and her family have done nothing of substance, unless of course you were a fan of crappy reality programming.

And to cap this post off, I have decided to include a little fact check.  I wont deny that Palin was a popular governor and that she was able to achieve very high approval ratings but she seems to imply that at the time McCain called her on her cell phone and begged her to serve this great nation her approval ratings were in the high 80s.  This is simply not true.

It appears Palin is using numbers from a poll McCain's campaign released on September 3rd, 2008 that referenced an 86 percent approval rating.  Before that the most recent independent approval poll was conducted by Rasmussen on July 30th, 2008, that found Palin to have a 64 percent excellent or good rating, although an Alaskan polling company, Hays Research placed her a bit higher at 80 percent, but those numbers would never be seen again - by July of 2009 Hays Research conducted a poll finding Palin at 46.8 percent approval, and considering reports between the time she was introduced as McCain's running mate and the election regarding her ever-increasing negativity rating, I find the 86 percent figures a bit too high.

As a side note, I always criticize Rasmussen polls and so I will not stand by their low numbers in this review. I only use them to illustrate the point that Palin seemed to cherry pick her data, and in this case it came from her own camp and if the movie Game Change was any indication of the state of McCain's campaign and the deteriorating psychological state of Sarah Palin, I wouldn't put it past the McCain camp to put out a push poll to try and boost Palin's confidence so that she could get out of her funk and perform.