How Palin Could Be Useful
Now, I loathe the woman as much as I loathe the Republican Party as a whole, which is a whole lot of loathin' goin' on.
However.
It occurs to me that there is one way that Palin can be actually useful in a big way and do her party a huge service: she can quit the party itself.
No, I'm not being rude. I mean it. If Palin quits and tries a ( Read more... )
I agree with you about McCain showing some form of dementia in choosing her, though I think it may have been induced by desperation more than senescence. Though on that topic, I'll say flat-out that senile or not, McCain was just plain too old and frail for the job of President, and that I would have said so even if he was my dream candidate in every other way. (But of course, he emphatically was not.)
The Vanity Fair writer, Todd Purdom, included this bit:
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”-and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
The last line doesn't offend me the way it sets off some people. I think it was genuine piety run amok; religious mania, not egomania. Or perhaps nothing more than a bad attack of the cutes. But that Purdom had DSM discussions with multiple informants I can easily believe, though at least one critic insists he must be making it up. There is something about Sarah (title for her biopic! dibs!) that makes people mutter and shake their heads and reach for medical tomes. She's more than half a bubble off, and most of the general public knows it, even without recourse to diagnostic manuals.The dx you chose (Borderline Personality Disorder) sounds just as likely as NPD, but no one who is close enough to her seems to think so, and who knows what an actual professional shrink would think, instead of us armchair amateurs. In any case, I don't expect the family to be bundling her off to an intervention. She's probably fine working the family's set-net site and doing other real-world work; mean and snasty, but seemingly sane. The truly peculiar stuff in her personality seems to be unleashed by power.
And if that's the problem, there's a quick and easy cure: don't give her any.
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