Tina Fey is making a career of impersonating Sarah on "Saturday Night Live," and the real Palin says she's a fan of the fake. Well, why not? George H.W. Bush became a fan of Dana Carvey's impersonations on the iconic show that has become a rite of passage for presidential candidates. When a local television interviewer in Jacksonville, Fla., asked her: "Does that bother you, watching those? Or do you get amused?" The irrepressible governor replied: "No, she's a hoot; she is very talented. And you know what, looking up (at her image) on the studio monitor, I'm like, 'Dang it, I look just like her.'"
She has her feminist admirers, to be very sure. Camille Paglia, the columnist and author, says nothing will sway her vote for Barack Obama, but she applauds the governor's spirited performance in the face of widespread mockery and ridicule.
"The mountain of rubbish poured out about (Gov.) Palin ... would rival Everest," she wrote in Salon, the Internet magazine. "What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place.
"As for (Gov.) Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best has ended up on the cutting room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-fruitti to a quivering Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality."
Sarah Palin infuriates the stale feminists far past their sell-by date because she has it all: a robust man with a steelworker's union card, a championship athlete with the scars to prove it, a man who's proud to cradle their baby, care for the children, cook the family meals, and all the while reveling in the accomplishments of a wife who could be the next vice president of the United States.
You betcha there's nothing trite about that.