Our political Quote of the Day comes from the New York Daily News’ Mike Lupica, who has a column on Sarah Palin appearing at the NRA. Here’s his lede:
Sarah Palin showed up at the NRA convention the other day, which was merely perfect. She belonged there as much as anybody in the hall just because from the start, from the time John McCain picked her out of the chorus, Palin has most appealed to mean, dumb, angry crowds exactly like the one she found in Houston.
Palin should have worn a prom dress, but on this occasion wore a T-shirt that read “Women Hunt.” In her case, that means hunting for attention.
Or relevance.
AND:
LaPierre is nothing more than a cheap, dangerous demagogue, constantly trying to act as if he and an association that represents an amazingly small percentage of gun owners in this country are the ones who represent the heart and soul of America, when all they are doing is fronting for the big gun companies who help fund the NRA. LaPierre isn’t a patriot, he’s a pimp.
He ends it with this:
So now Sarah Palin, the real cheerleader in the room in Houston, desperate to remain famous, becomes as much a face of the NRA as she has ever been. She does it by sounding as mean and dumb and angry as anybody in her audience, calling parents of children lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School “backdrops” for anti-gun rallies. And then, just because unintended self-parody is another of her specialties — like a great basketball player’s go-to move — she accuses the majority of Americans who want better gun control of exploiting tragedy.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.