Sarah Palin: A Job in Heels with Cross-Eyes

If you find the Palin phenomenon fascinating, if alarmingly irrational, you will want to read the astounding rant on the subject from Matt Taibii, not published by Rolling Stone, but available via True/Slant. Here's a selection:

Palin’s paranoid ramblings and self-pitying tantrums on the way out
of office not only didn’t injure her chances for national office, they
actually appeared to help, as polls taken in the week after her
resignation showed that 71% of Republicans were now prepared to vote
for her for president in 2012. Just as she had during the campaign last
fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with
the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is
apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling
its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to
embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of
fucked-overness.

Nobody understands this political reality quite like Palin, even if
she doesn’t actually understand it in the sense of someone who thinks
her way to a conclusion, but merely lives it, unconsciously, with the
unerring instinct of a herd animal. Palin’s supporters don’t judge her
according to her almost completely nonexistent qualifications for
serious office, they perceive her as they would a character in a
Biblical narrative, a Job in heels with cross-eyes and a
mashed-potato-brained husband who happens to spend a lot of time
getting shat upon by Letterman and Maureen Dowd and the other
modern-day Enemies of Christ.

Here's Palin becoming famous, second by second, at the GOP convention, via an AP photo by Susan Walsh.