Today on Fox News Sunday ever-erring conservative columnist Bill Kristol tried to defend his personal pet project, Sarah Palin, on the subject of her scandal-of-the-week, Clothesgate. As usual, he was completely clueless.
In typical Republican fashion he deflected the blame away from the important people like Palin or himself and onto unnamed "staffers:"
I think Governor Palin has been ill-served by some of the staff and she's particularly ill-served now that they're shooting at her on background, saying things that I don't believe are true.
And what's amazing--You showed the clip of her defending herself on the clothing. She didn't go to Neiman Marcus to buy the clothing. She didn't tell someone to go to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis. She was just nominated and she needed some clothes, they show up with these clothes. Why wasn't the staffer out there, saying, 'You know what, I made a mistake?' Since when do the staffers go into hiding and let Governor Palin be the one who has to explain it?
It's a total disgrace the way the staff has ducked responsibility for this mistake--which was not her mistake. No one thinks, whatever people's criticisms of Governor Palin, no one thinks she lived high off the hog in Alaska and used to go to Neiman Marcus.
Kristol maintains his perfect record: he's wrong once again.
Had Kristol bothered to properly vet his own little Eliza Doolittle--or if he just read Daily Kos--he'd know that if Palin didn't live high off the hog in Alaska, it wasn't from lack of trying on Palin's part.
We're talking about a woman who happily spent more than $50,000 of taxpayer money to redecorate her office and built an expensive boondoggle as her monument as mayor of Wasilla. We're talking about woman who charges the state to put her family up in NYC for five days while she goes to a five hour conference. (She also charges the state of Alaska for sleeping in her own house.) We're talking about someone who as one of her first acts as governor installed a tanning bed in the executive mansion. (Though she didn't have the nerve to charge the state for that.)
Perhaps the reason no staffer has been willing to take the blame for getting the clothes is that Palin did ask for them? After all, we're talking about a woman who once drove two hours to see Ivana Trump because she represented "glamour"
Sarah Palin, a commercial fisherman from Wasilla, told her husband on Tuesday she was driving to Anchorage to shop at Costco. Instead, she headed straight for Ivana.
And there, at J.C. Penney's cosmetic department, was Ivana, the former Mrs. Donald Trump, sitting at a table next to a photograph of herself. She wore a light-colored pantsuit and pink fingernail polish. Her blonde hair was coiffed in a bouffant French twist.
''We want to see Ivana,'' said Palin, who admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer, ''because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.''
Palin had her two months to strut her stuff in the designer clothes she's always craved. Next summer she'll be back to smelling like salmon.
Video here.