Not on Their Watch

Don't be surprised if, somewhere down the line, we start finding out that Sarah Palin felt slighted in some way by her new employer, Fox News, or -- more likely, she gets some sort of chip about Glenn Beck and, to a lesser extent, Bill O'Reilly. Or, she'll say, their people -- maybe try to get a producer fired.

I say this because I've watched a few minutes of her debut interview with O'Reilly and then a few minutes of her hour with Glenn Beck the last night, and thought it was pretty evident that these big dogs were protecting their turf quite a bit more than enhancing her star. They were essentially fitting her into their script and using her draw as a way to enhance their own power -- O'Reilly by nailing her in the first few minutes by saying they'd covered the ground she was starting to trod the night before, Beck by calling her out on her "Bull crap!" when she starting doing her "I love them all" schtick on the favorite Founding Father question -- as she had when Katie Couric asked her what publications she reads:



When all else fails, who doesn't know that George Washington was the first President (the only job she wants that pays less than a million bucks a year)? "He 's got to rise to the top," like cream, I guess, letting us not only watch but hear her think. Beck asked her the simplest of questions in that anyone who's spent any time reading American Revolutionary history can name at last three other guys, Adams, Jefferson and Franklin. Or maybe she missed the HBO series.

Andrew Sullivan has an correct view on how she's being positioned by the FNC party (now having defacto control of the RNC at this point in history), to be the Washington-type reluctant candidate. You know, the thing that happens with the hero for most of the first act of every movie, until he's forced into action. Like, by acclamation of a Teabagger convention.

So it's clear she was set up with the Washington line, as she has to be set up with everything, a shiny vessel for reactionary political positions, but if she doesn't know yet, she's not their final tool of choice yet. Maybe it's their traditional sexism, maybe it's that she really is an outsider and they only see use for her as a fundraising vessel so far, but I think it's that they will do and say anything necessary not to make their own careers submissive to hers. Especially the ones competing for the limelight, for the television camera.

Not on their watch.