Palin Photoshops

You might notice that today's Comedy Goldmine is a bit on the short side. There are two reasons for that.

One is that though it was the funniest article I had on hand it was also very short. I tried to beef it up by researching and including links to a number of different examples of misdeeds by the companies. Some of the rebranding efforts are jokes in that they are humorous fabrications inspired by reality; others are "jokes" in that they are humorous restatements of what actually happened in reality. If it has a link, it (or something like it) happened; if not, it's probably just a joke about how the company would market some disaster or abomination.

The second is that I had been planning to write the Goldmine about the Sarah Palin Photoshops thread up until the last minute. I'd actually downloaded a lot of the pictures and begun writing it before I had second thoughts and decided against it.

Part of the reason that I decided to hold off is because it's already been covered exhaustively. Wonkette covered it, Mancouch covered it, HuffPo covered it, and so on. In his absolutely hilarious article apologizing on behalf of making Sarah Palin resign Zack linked to it, so I figured people who read the frontpage had already seen it. If you haven't, forum poster Oglethorpe put up a compilation here.

The other reason I held off was because I felt just the slightest tinge of discomfort reposting them. And I'll tell you why. My uncle Jim has Down Syndrome. He's the nicest, kindest, most unassuming, most goodhearted person I've ever met. I don't think he's ever done a single thing to harm another person. In fact, I think every thing he's ever done has been to try to make another person better.

I'm not drawing an equivalency between Jim and Trig. For starter's, Jim is probably that way in large part because my grandparents were good people too, whereas Trig's only moral compass will be a hellbent harpy. And I don't mean to moralize. But to me, I felt uncomfortable reposting those pictures again and again. It's funny to make fun of Trig at a certain level. It's funny to note that he's named after the math he'll never do. But it's a lazy and misdirected funny, because other than being born to someone who thought LOTS OF DOGS was sufficient political capital to justify serious consideration for the office of the vice president Trig never did anything wrong.

The ultimate reason, I guess, was that I was uncomfortable with anything that took the satirical spotlight off of Sarah Palin. Palin is the embodiment of the American political id. If Obama was the blank slate upon which people projected their aspirations, Palin is the morbidly cankerous detritus caked at the bottom of the tumbler when those dreams evaporate. She is the ultimate conclusion of the American dream: someone who holds with utmost certainty opinions on subjects about which they know nothing, who benefits from circumstances beyond their control but comes to view the fruits as their inviolable right, who trivializes matters of great importance and bellows frivolity from the rooftops. The problem with the Trig Palin photoshops is they made fun of Trig, not Sarah, and any attention devoted to Sarah Palin that is not spent trying to destroy her as an idea is attention wasted. 

– Chris "Petey" Peterson