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The Palin / Trump Interview: Fluff Piece Extraordinaire

The Palin / Trump Interview: Fluff Piece Extraordinaire

Last updated on: August 29, 2015 at 10:10 am by Nancy Qualls-Shehata

The Palin / Trump Interview: Fluff Piece Extraordinaire 2015-08-29T10:10:48-04:00 Nancy Qualls-Shehata

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So last night I took on the awesome responsibility of watching and live-tweeting former Governor Sarah Palin’s interview of presidential candidate Donald Trump. You’re welcome.

I put the kids to bed, brewed up a nice cup of decaf, told my husband to go do Netflix for an hour, and settled down with my iPhone and computer. I limbered up my fingers by scritching the cats under their chins for a few minutes, thought long and hard about an appropriate hashtag, and then started typing.

#therogueandtherug

When the broadcast began I realized that Sarah was offering up a triple play for the night. Before The Donald came on, she was to interview Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. Wow! I imagined an unending string of non sequiturs and bloviating that I could easily pick apart.

In this, I was disappointed. It’s like going to a club thinking your favorite comedian is performing and arriving and realizing it’s actually open mic poetry night. There was no “I can see Russia from my house” moment from Palin, and nothing newsworthy from any of the interviewees. Jeb Bush spoke mostly about his work in helping those with special needs. Somewhere in the middle of this segment Palin made a snide reference about playing fewer rounds of golf, which was actually apropos of nothing, but I suppose it was a veiled reference to President Obama taking to the links from time to time.

Now, it is true that President Obama has played more rounds of golf than Jeb’s brother, former president George W. Bush, since Bush stopped playing in 2003 because he felt it looked bad to be hitting out of sand traps while the men and women of the US military were living in sand traps in Iraq and Afghanistan. But if you go by vacation days, Obama has taken far fewer than his predecessor, according to information found here.

But that was just one little throwaway comment in an otherwise inoffensive fluff piece. The next interviewee was Senator Ted Cruz. It started out a little weird with Cruz forcefully stating that if he becomes president, his first order of business will be to make sure all the men and women of our military can worship freely. Uh, okay. I’m sure our military Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims and Wiccans and followers of John Oliver’s Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption will be thrilled. Or maybe you didn’t mean them….

The rest of the short interview covered 1. The Christian Church is being persecuted. 2. Planned Parenthood should be defunded. 3. The US has propped up nasty bad people in an effort to affect situations overseas (totally true, by the way), and 4. Moose chili.

After a short digression with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch about the IRS and what we need to do in order to fix it – investigations were suggested – we moved on to the meat of the night. The Main Event. The Donald.

Okay, I’ll warn you right away that he came across as intelligent, passionate yet composed, reasonable, even conciliatory. He did not rise to any (admittedly mild) bait about the dustup between him and Jorge Ramos. His intro mentioned the sorry state of this country’s infrastructure – true – and then he mentioned American job losses to China and Mexico – also a valid problem – and then he went on to talk about the IRS. Also a totally valid topic for a presidential candidate. He very strongly noted how this country does not take care of its military vets and said it’s a “disgrace” how they are treated. Totally true. And that was it, folks. A totally legit interview, probably more appropriate for some “what do I watch while the coffee is brewing” morning show rather than an evening broadcast, but normal in every regard.

Sarah Palin did one final segment where she chastised ESPN for deep-sixing one of their commentators due to his unfortunate tweet comparing Muslims to Nazis. She accused ESPN of being a left-wing liberal bastion with “a bunch of waterboys over there running the show”. Ouch. She also pointed quite correctly to the hypocrisy of them dealing so strongly with this issue while at the same time tolerating – celebrating? – a culture of misogyny at the network. So, one strike for being an Islamophobic bigot, one plus for supporting the ladies.

And that was the night. No fireworks, no faux pas worthy of the cold open on Saturday Night Live. Just a series of easy, lightweight interviews with well-known conservatives. This piece would have actually been out of place on Fox News because it did not have any teeth. It did not really raise my hackles. If I knew nothing about Sarah Palin and the candidates other than what I saw on this show, I would think they were viable candidates and normal human beings.

And THAT is what scares me. The basic low information voter is going to hear these men talking in banal generalities about taxes, infrastructure, and immigration (I left that Oxford comma in for you, Dilshad, to make up for all the double spaces after periods), and they are going to think that the Republican lineup is really viable. Normal. Good for our country. The idea that any one of these three could end up as Commander in Chief scares the bajeezus out of me and makes me run to look in the safe to ensure my family’s passports are all up to date.

I ask, I beg my fellow Americans to do your due diligence and not believe the up front fluff about these three and Trump in particular, since he is inexplicably the front runner right now in the crowded Republican presidential candidate field. For God’s sake, all you have to do is a simple google search and you will come up with a wealth of information that should send you scrambling to clear your internet search history like you would run for the Listerine after throwing up in your mouth.

Arrogance, misogyny, racism, warmongering. If you truly love this country, do your job as a citizen and read up on Trump and all the candidates, Republican, Democrat, Independent, Green Party, everyone. We cannot afford to let low information voters drive this election cycle.

If you want to go to war with Iran, build a fence between the US and Mexico that will not do anything to stop illegal immigration, if you want your wife back in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant and anyone named Juan delegated to his “rightful” place as the local gardener, if you want a sociopath narcissistic megalomaniac in the White House, well Trump’s your man.

If you want to see this country have a chance to repair some of the internal and external damage it has suffered over the decades, Trump is not your man. Now, I have not decided who I think I should vote for, (leaning towards Bernie Sanders), and ultimately we may be forced into a lesser of two evils situation, but if it comes to November 2016 and Trump is on one side of the ballot box entry, you damn sure better push the button for the other guy (gal).

Okay, tomorrow I’ll go back to Islamic stuff. Though, honestly, trying to ensure the country I live in is healthy is Islamic, though I’m sure there will be some brothers and sisters who disagree and don’t want me involving myself in the politics of the “kuffaar”.

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