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Twitter Is Sick And Tired Of Sarah Palin

by Melanie Schmitz

In a disjointed and uncomfortable interview on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gave a rousing performance as a politician who was in way over her head. Stumbling over questions about climate change, minorities, and the recent Denali name change, Palin looked more like a nervous hockey mom being interviewed on live television for the very first time than a seasoned politician and on-air journalist. It wasn’t just the way she answered host Jake Tapper’s questions either: From insisting that Republicans were the party of tolerance and inclusivity to claiming that she would, if given a spot in a potential Donald Trump cabinet, eliminate the department to which she had been assigned, social media’s response to the interview, under the viral hashtag #SarahPalinMovieNight, proved just how tired everyone was of hearing the former Vice Presidential candidate's confusing political arguments.

"The ability to maintain a neutral face when #sarahpalin speaks has to be a year long course in journalism school," wrote one Twitter user on Tapper's professionalism during Sunday’s interview, skewering Palin’s jumbled, stuttering answers.

More than anything else, Palin’s responses on Sunday night showed more than just a sincere misunderstanding of the facts behind so many of Tapper’s questions — they revealed a much deeper issue: Palin wasn’t just speaking from a place of ignorance, she was wholeheartedly drinking the Kool-Aid and trying to convince everyone else to take a big swig of the stuff themselves.

In just one of the segment’s awkward interchanges, for example, Palin insisted that climate change wasn’t real because "man's footprint [...] was not even near [the melting] glacier" that Tapper had referred to just moments earlier. Responding to Tapper’s question, "Do you take climate changes seriously?", Palin explained (I use the word "explained" very liberally here):

I take changes in the weather, the cyclical changes that the globe has undergone for — since the beginning of time, I take it seriously, but I'm not going blame these changes in the weather on man's footprint.

Obama was up here looking at, say, the glaciers and pointing out a glacier that was receding. Well, there are other glaciers, though, that are growing up here. And he didn't highlight that, but he used glaciers as an example. One of the markers, though, that they use to measure the glacier that he was talking about, they started measuring, supposedly, as per this marker, a physical marker, back in the early 1800s. And then they started showing from there how it shrunk, it's receded. Well, man's footprint… was not even near that glacier in the early 1800s, when it started melting. It was before the Industrial Revolution.

Thankfully, most of Twitter saw right through the ruse. Using the viral hashtag, #SarahPalinMovieNight, users began concocting their own fake movie titles, relentlessly mocking the absurdity the former governor’s logic:

Why Palin's star is suddenly rising again within the ranks of the Republican party is a mystery; Certainly, Sunday morning's State of the Union interview, if nothing else, dispelled the myth that she was prepared to take on any sort of political role in the near future — but you can't deny that, like her equally bold counterpart Trump, the former VP candidate has provided more than enough entertainment to keep the masses busy for the remainder of election season.