I just loved this description of defeated US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s reported $150,000 clothes shopping expedition:
"Wasilla hillbillies looting (department store) Neiman Marcus from coast to coast"
This reportedly comes as aides of unsuccessful presidential candidate John McCain’s aides dump some dirt on Palin. Among the gems to have been leaked, one aide estimated Ms Palin had spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $US150,000, and that $US20,000 to $US40,000 was spent buying clothes for her husband, snowmobile racer Todd Palin. Another is that two of Senator McCain’s senior advisers went to brief Ms Palin in her hotel room. It said "after a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel with another on her wet hair" and told them to chat to her husband while she got ready.
McCain’s aides also claim that Senator McCain rarely spoke to Ms Palin during the campaign, and his advisers deliberately kept him in the dark about the Alaskan Governor’s shopping sprees for fear of upsetting him. His advisers have previously accused Ms Palin of going "rogue" and acting like a "diva". One aide described her as a "whack job".
But the best of the claims by McCain’s aides are about her thickness. For example that she thought Africa was a country rather than a continent (how does one graduate high school lacking this sort of basic knowledge of the world, let alone become a state governor and potential vice-president/president?). And this, from the completely unbiased Fox News:
Well I wish I could have told you more at the time but all of it was put off the record until after the election. There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked the degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency. We are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries that were in NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement–that being the Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent rather than a … country just in itself. A whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability. She got very angry at staff, thought that she was mishandled, was particularly angry about the way the Katie Couric interview went. She didn’t accept preparation for that interview when the aides say that that was part of the problem. And that there were times that she was hard to control emotionally. There’s talk of temper tantrums at bad news clippings …
Palin has denounced the anonymous criticisms leveled at her as lies, and “out of context”, and “cowardly”. She said she found it frustrating trying to respond to false allegations when she didn’t know who was making them. She also said:
"That’s cruel. It’s mean-spirited. It’s immature. It’s unprofessional and those guys are jerks if they came away with it, taking things out of context, and then tried to spread something on national news. It’s not fair and it’s not right."
Happy campers then, McCain’s people think Palin is a “whack job” and she calls them “jerks”.
