(Newser)
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Sarah Palin is America’s “first WWE politician,” barren of actual political ideas but on a crusade against “assholes,” Matt Taibbi writes. The governor-turned-author is “a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever.”
“Palin,” Taibbi continues for True/Slant, “is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment.” But if she’s the 2012 Republican nominee, it’ll kill the party for independent voters and pretty much everyone but the fringe, because “she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless horseshit.”