Time Marches On

Tuesday Jan. 25, 2011 may be remembered as the date of Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. But it also marked the ascendance of a new Queen of Bufoonery. Sarah Palin has been dethroned. I view this with mixed emotions. But then nothing lasts forever.

The new Queen is Michelle Bachman who arrived on the scene about the same time. Sarah, as a relatively unknown Vice Presidential nominee and potential president, had to demonstrate her qualifications by answering questions. This set the stage for her greatest laugh lines, some of which might have made Gracie Allen envious. Among her most notable quotations are “I’ll get back to ya,” “I can see Russia (Siberia) from my house” and “all of them” (twice). Her reference during the campaign to the “Palin McCain ticket” was a nice touch.

At this point she had peaked, but held the throne for two more years. Her decline began with her resignation after a half term as Alaska’s governor. By leaving elective office she shed any obligation to answer questions, the fountainhead of her previous gems.  The “dialogue” evolved into a monologue consisting of right wing clichés which had long ceased being funny. No questions please, only answers.

Michelle Bachman on the other hand started slowly. She was just another obscure right wing kook until Chris Mathews had her on his show, after which she became a well known right wing kook. While Sarah cleaned up her act a bit, possibly on the advice of cooler heads with visions of a presidential nomination, Michelle slowly but surely picked up steam. Her verbal slapstick is more rambling than Sarah’s and not as conducive to one liners. But in the last month she has refined her act and added some real zingers. Her call for the “repeal” of the President and the Senate is an interesting new concept.

Michelle’s most recent display, which I feel this puts her over the top, is her claim that the Founding Fathers eliminated slavery when they wrote the Constitution. This means that all those Civil War documentaries are fiction rather than history. If she has advisors, which isn’t a foregone conclusion, they have to be as removed from reality as she.

If there were any remaining doubts as to Michelle’s new sovereignty they should have been ended by her response, as a self appointed spokesperson for the Tea Party, to Obama’s State of the Union speech. It was aired after the Republican response and obligingly televised live by CNN, the only network to do so. Even Fox limited its coverage to a running written transcript, so we now have a new Fox in our hen house. The high point was her looking at the Tea Party camera rather than CNN’s as though she were addressing someone in the balcony. Maybe the teleprompter had been misplaced.

I consider myself a fan of humor that includes writers such as Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman. Not all humor is intentional like theirs. In its accidental context I admit to having experienced more pleasure than pain from Sarah Palin, at least until now. So it is with some sadness that I figuratively paraphrase a medieval expression. The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen!