Sarah Palin's new acting career in works

Ever since Sarah Palin's stunning Big Gulp comedy act at CPAC, rumors have raised  the possibility of a new acting career to replace a waning political role.  Some insiders are suggesting  that she would be a perfect Annie Oakley in  a Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun inasmuch as she could provide her own arsenal of guns. And a grizzly or two.

Other ideas would have her playing Eleanor
Roosevelt,  Mother Teresa (Sarah's not getting any younger!)  or Kate Smith reprising God Bless America in a TV series scripted just for her.  (Kate Smith would be a perfect fit for Sarah  if the former Alaska governor insists on gulping  sugary soda for her comedy routines.)

My choice is the  gossip that she is already in rehearsal to play Tina Fey on Broadway.  Go ahead and gulp, if you like. Just one won't hurt you.

Tina Fey is back; Puerto Rico to Santorum: No mas!

SARAH PALIN, UNDAUNTED BY a movie that casts her as a dope, says she will go to the Republican convention in Tampa because she's "not closing the door" on anything. That can only mean that she has more fame and misfortune in her summer vacation plans, and that (1) she can see the White House from the convention stage or (2) she is, in fact, a winking dope.

At this point, my problem with her is that she always seems to be Sarah Palin playing Tina Fey who played Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. And now to complicate matters, she may start playing Julianne Moore who plays Sarah Palin in Game Change. If that happens, Katie Couric will have her hands full asking all three of them which newspapers they read, don't you think?

But we'll know for sure when she arrives in Tampa that she freakin' well is serious when she tells the media that, of course, she can clearly see the White House from her perch in Florida.

As she tells it like it never was, there will be other dopes in the crowd who will nod in approval.

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WILLARD ROMNEY said this week end that he "can't take a stand" on U.S. troop withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan because he doesn't have enough information!. But he did opine that things don't seem to be going very well in the decade-long conflict and that President Obama must share the blame for his "lack of leadership".

He said what?/?/?

Among Obama's failures is lack of experience in running a business, Romney said, insisting that even though the economy is improving Obama made it worse. Finally, he says he's quite wealthy and won't apologize for it. And he tells us that Obama is a "lightweight?

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Finally the week-end brought McRick Santorum bad news from Puerto Rico, where he was clobbered by the voters in the wake of of his decree on English-spoken statehood. Did I hear them say, "No mas!" ?

His latest fervent crusade is against what he calls a "pandemic" of pornography. Like Romney, he blames Obama for an absence of leadership, accuses the president of being soft on porn by his "refusal to enforce obscenity laws."

We recall a day when Mayor Ralph Perk staged an anti-porn conference in Cleveland and went on endlessly about men who bed down with inflated rubber dolls. My hunch is that some still do, and will continue to so long after Santorum moves on to his very own monastery.

President Palin: Doing a great Tina Fey at convention

WHEN I CHECKED IN to the Tea Party convention Saturday night it appeared that President Sarah Palin was doing her Tina Fey impersonation, which she does so well. There was no letup in her personal amusement from her zingers, her arm gestures, her chirps that sought out high C. The audience loved it and she walked away with $100,000 or more for an hour or so of friendly political advice. She has risen above the presidency, which she said she would be willing to seek, to being a celebrity of biblical proportions. When she was asked during the Q. & A. what she would do to fix America's most serious problems, she conceded nothing about her own ascendancy when she declaredwe would be wise to seek "divine intervention." As she has so often said, she is waiting for God to open another door for her.

Actually, the narrative was fairly mild rhetoric as convention speeches go. She spent a lot of time attacking Obama as a "professor of law" instead of a commander- in-chief leading the war against terrorism. I think that was quite intentional for her to dwell on international terrorism to demonstrate that she is now qualified to deal with the real world - a deficit that plagued her during the last presidential campaign. She is pressing all of the red-meat conservative buttons: patriotism, elitists who don't appreciate the pain of the oppressed, the heavy hand of government, the love of America, Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan gambit reminds me of the time in Sicily when I told my guide that although I understood Italian I didn't understand a word he was saying. "That's because," he explained in English, "I put an r in the middle of my words to make them sound prettier." So it is with those conservatives who never stop breaking up their sentences by inserting the iconic Reagan in the middle of them, as in: "We need to - Reagan - cut taxes and reduce the - Reagan - size of government. Quite conveniently subliminal, don't you think?

I don't have the slightest idea where all of this will go. There are so many moving parts. But it is now quite apparent that the first targets are Republicans who are being challenged in the primaries, thus draining the GOP of some of its resources. I'm sure that the realpolitik of the Tea Party Revolution is frightful for such guys as Mitt Romney and other presidential hopefuls who are reduced to whispering about the arrival of Lady Gaga in their party.

She will have a voice, whether as a falling dwarf star or a supernova. Fox is expediting her claim to national prominence by installing a TV studio in her Alaskan home. Imagine that! A national news network fashioning the candidacy of its own choice.

This much I can say: Palin was garden variety loyal opposition compared to Tom Tancredo, a mess of a person who gave the most outrageous racist speech at a political gathering since the days of George Wallace. Still, since the Tea Party delegates were 99.44 pct. Ivory Soap pure, his words must have resonated with more than a few of them. And therein lies a bigger problem ahead for not only the Tea Party but also for the nation when such forces again become players.