Emboldened by her victory over late night luminary David Letterman, Sarah Palin and her staff have found another straw man to skewer into a news cycle.  At issue is a photo a left leaning Alaskan blogger writing under the pseudonym “Celtic Diva” photoshopped the head of a local conservative talk show host over the face of Palin’s grandson Trig.  Claiming the photo “desecrates” her special needs son, the Alaskan governor’s press office put out a release framing the photo as an affront to all children born with an impairment.

Photo: Celtic Diva

We ask that special needs children be loved, respected and accepted and that this type of degeneracy be condemned.

The superimposed photo is part of a fundraising campaign the blogger (whose real name is Linda Biegel) has been waging to compel the release of records of “potentially questionable conversations between [Palin and] ‘preferred’ members of the media.”  While Sarah Palin playing favorites with press outlets is well, Biegel’s claim – and impetus for creating the controversial photo – is that her preferential treatment may include ethics violations of taxpayer concern.

The continued outrage Palin’s office is manufacturing to remain in the spotlight is patently and politically immature.  The context of the blogger’s post as well as the photo itself clearly indicates the target of the satire is Sarah Palin and radio host Eddie Burke, not the child with Downs Syndrome.  This photo is not as ambiguous as David Letterman’s joke.  With words like “open,” “transparent” and “accountable” right next to the superimposed head, the intent is evident.

Further, the move is bad politics.  “Celtic Diva” is not an editor for Politico or the Huffington Post; Biegel’s site is an occasionally political, personal Blogger account filled with terrible writing and pictures from her family fishing trips.  The site has no primary sources and abuses exclamation points like they made fun of her mother, but by condemning the hackjob photo, Palin elevates her perceived enemy.  The only credibility this woman has was given to her in Palin’s press release.

The real person who should be insulted here is Eddie Burke, who the entire world now knows is uglier than a retarded baby. A professional politician with White House aspirations should know better than to take these things seriously.  The Internet is cess pool of poor taste and bad manners only made to look sophisticated by the crude world of A level politics.  As someone who knows, just reacting to trolls makes them more vociferous – no one outside of “Celtic Diva’s” small network of Internet friends would have known about this photo had Palin not handed her 15 minutes of fame.

If some crazy lady on the Internet is able to inflict this kind of personal distress, maybe Sarah Palin needs to reconsider her line of work.

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