WHAT ABOUT SARAH?

The National Enquirer, a rag omnipresent at supermarket checkout lines, is now reportedly a possibility for a Pulitzer prize in journalism.

The Enquirer has been sued now and again; but when it announces something, you have to figure it's at least a maybe.

Among other things, the Enquirer played a role in bringing down presidential candidates Gary Hart and John Edwards, in both cases over their escapades with females. Where Edwards was concerned, you'll recall that the mainstream media didn't follow the Enquirer's lead and lived to regret it.

And that brings up a curious topic. Seems that some months back the Enquirer had a page-one story about rightist glamourpuss Sarah Palin, very much a married lady, having herself a boyfriend. It showed the guy's picture - he looked a fair bit like her hubby - and gave his name. He is or was a family friend.

Now again, even after the example of Edwards, the respectable media ignored this. How come, you may be asking yourself? I don't know, but one could suspect that Queen Sarah is just too fanatically popular with a wealthy segment of our society for the newsies to feel safe in writing about her peccadillos.

Now, Hart and Edwards are intelligent people and could have been president. They would have been better than some we've had in recent years. Hart is a national defense expert whose advice is sought by those high up. Edwards ran a serious campaign on good and somewhat different issues, as I may one day discuss in this blog. Palin, once a beauty queen and now queen of the old (tea) bags, is a remarkably ignorant airhead who should never have been on a national ticket. Yet Palin survived the Enquirer treatment while the other two went under.

Since the Enquirer wrote about her love life, The Malign Sarah has chucked her governorship and become a professional political celebrity. She's showing up everywhere these days, commenting on everything and raking in the long green from sales of her book and speaking fees and her Fox News salary.

I don't think she's running for president, however. I'd bet she isn't. She has a kind of native shrewdness that has served her well, and she has to figure that the Enquirer and others will be sifting her life and her dealings.

(And maybe she fears that one of those healthcare death panels she believes in will take her out as a public mental health measure?)

What I think she's doing is accumulating all the wealth she can, while there's still a market for her.

Yes, I have a definite feeling that the end of the Palin phenomenon is not far off, and that she knows that Enquirer headline was the dead canary in her political gold mine.