Sarah Palin's Alaska

Sarah Palin has been in the news for all the wrong reasons this week, and, no, I'm not talking about the fact that her political campaign ad disguised as a reality show was not picked up for a second season by TLC. The former Alaskan governor indirectly played a role in the tragedy that took place in Tucson over the weekend, as the armed madman that shot 20 people including a congresswoman and 9 year-old girl is said to have been inspired by Sarah's violent hate-speak. I'm sure he wasn't the first (and sadly, will likely not be the last) gun-toting lunatic to identify with Sarah Palin but he's the first to commit an act of terrorism, thinking that he was carrying out Mama Grizzly's wishes. Not exactly the kind of publicity that you want in the week leading up to the season finale of your family-friendly TV show. Naturally, it's sad that 6 innocent people are dead because some crazy person decided to actually take what Sarah Palin says seriously, but if you ask me, the real tragedy of the week is that Sarah decided to end her career as a reality star with a 2 freakin' hour season series finale. Oh, the humanity!

Thankfully, Sarah has stopped even trying to sound like she's not reading from cue cards when she says things like, "All the adventures my dad took me on as a kid taught me to think for myself, work hard, and embrace challenges." Fortunately, her 9 year-old daughter Piper didn't get the memo that this whole reality show thing is a scripted bid to get mommy elected president. When asked where all the oil that's drilled in Valdez eventually ends up, Piper says, "In the water." Umm...she's not far off. The adults laugh, Sarah restrains herself from smacking the kid on camera, and liberals everywhere realize that the Palin family may not be all bad after all.

After those three seconds of controversy that somehow didn't wind up on the cutting room floor, it was more of the same boring bullsh!t that got this show the axe despite its somehow respectable ratings. As usual, the Palin clan packed up and headed to a different part of Alaska. (Because, ya know, Alaska's totally different from one part to the next. Sarcasm.) To celebrate the proud Alaskan tradition of heading into nature and totally f*cking the place up, Sarah and her family decided to follow the trail of the Alaskan gold miners. "Dig, baby, dig," Sarah says, reminding us all that she's part of the drill crazy nature-hater movement that led to fun stuff like the BP disaster and that other big oil spill that happened in...where was it? Oh yeah...Valdez, Alaska! It's not her fault, though, they don't get newspapers up there.

After roughly 14 hours of gold mining (man, they're running out of outdoor activities to pretend to enjoy), the Palin clan go and hang out with some muskox, for some reason. Sarah mutters some bullsh!t about how the muskox are "how we should be as a society." Of course, she never explains any further, because that's just not how S-Pain rolls. I don't know, Sarah, I'm actually OK with society not turning into a pack of wild animals that's named for the fact that it smells really bad, but I'm weird like that. Then they go and watch an airshow, and the audience realizes this show has become so boring we've reached the point of watching the Palins watch other stuff. Is it over yet?...

With a deal for season 2 reportedly in the works and Oprah issuing her royal decree that the Mama Grizzly shall never be president of Oprahland (also known as America), there's a lot at stake as the first season of Sarah Palin's Alaska draws to a close. With the White House out of the picture (you don't defy the Big O) and uneven ratings throughout the season, Sarah needs to deliver big drama to ensure her future as a reality TV star and omnipresent shrill dumb @ss. I was thinking a "Who Shot Mr. Burns"-style cliffhanger in which someone mistakes Sarah for a deadly caribou and fills her with buck shot might draw viewers in for next week's finale. But instead, what do we get? An hour of Willow Palin. Basically the equivalent of a Maggie-heavy Simpsons episode.

"Raising teenagers, that's a great challenge," Sarah tells us at the start of the episode. "You're not your teenager's friend, you're her parent." Fun fact of the day: Because there are no schools in Alaska, Sarah Palin learned to speak by reading dumb crap off of bumper stickers. True story. This week, as always, the Palin clan is bound for the middle of goddam nowhere where they'll be able to show their love of nature by destroying a small chunk of it. Willow, who - unlike the rest of her family - is 16 and not completely insane, is worried about the lack of cell phone service in whatever part of icy hell the family is going to this week. Sheesh! Teenagers! "There's no cell phone service!" "Where can I check my Facebook?!" "I can't text because I cut off my thumbs skinning that giant grizzly you killed!" Suck it up and go slaughter something like a normal 16 year-old girl!

"Willow's a normal teenager," Sarah says. "What 16 year-old doesn't know what they want to do in life? Well, one way you can help them find that path is you let them experience as much as they possibly can." One of the downsides of Sarah's slogan-speak is she sometimes lumps together multiple inspirational sayings and stupid one-liners into nuggets of folksy "wisdom" that don't actually mean anything when you think about them for more then 10 seconds.  And people wonder how she got so far in politics. "The english language is a living, breathing, evolving art" Sarah says a few seconds later. "I can invent a word." No, dude. No you can't.

After reading something from a cue card about how the timber industry is totally green - just like them east coast hippies like - Sarah and her family arrive in a logging camp, for some reason. Despite claiming that this whole outing was "all about Willow" the Todd and Sarah ditch that whiny b!tch with the quickness and take off for a homoerotic weekend of sweat, sawdust and flannel.

Then it happens, Sarah gets the opportunity to cut down a tree herself, and for a second I was sure this episode would end with her trapped under a 30-foot pine, Blackberry messaging Bill O'Reilly to come save her. Would he get there in time? Would the liberal elite stand in his way? Would Obama finally admit he was born on Neptune? The cliffhanger potential was huge...

Since Sarah Pailn quit her job as the Governor of Alaska, she has earned over $12 million, according to an ABC news report. Mama Grizzly made $7 million from her ghost writer books and $2 million from the TLC network, not to mention that she earns $100k per speaking engagement. Still, she wants more money.

Popeater reports that there may be a 2nd season of Sarah Palin's Alaska, a show about Sarah doing things she's never done before in Alaska as she tries to convince us that she's a veteran of outdoorsy crap that clearly terrifies her. Mama Grizzly allegedly wants $1 million per episode for another season.

"Sarah started talking about season two right after the show debuted to huge numbers. She knows that celebrities get millions of dollars for each episode of their shows and thinks she's worth it too. Jennifer Aniston took home millions from 'Friends' and in Sarah's eyes, she's no different."

Y'all know this is true cause Sarah would put herself in the same category as Jennifer Aniston, who starred on a show with over 20 million viewers a week.

I think the most surprising thing about Sarah Palin's Alaska is how stupid Sarah is willing to look week after week. Of course, the show is designed to make her look like she should be the next person to run our country, but in every episode, she looks like the only thing she's fit to run is a church bake sale. And that's only if the other four women in Wasilla were eaten by bears at last year's sale. I mean, it's not like the show's friggin' live. Why does she consistently look so dumb? Who's editing this thing, Michelle Obama?

For example, this week's episode started with Sarah at her home in Alaska, preparing to do a television interview via satellite with, of course, Fox News, because they're the only ones who won't ask her any tough questions like, "Can you name a newspaper?" But before she can share her trenchant insights about our nation's divisive political climate and current economic woes...she has to dick around with a wooden fish. By having her husband lower the fish hanging on the wall behind her so that it can be seen by the Fox News audience, Sarah is basically admitting that her whole public persona is a fraud, carefully calculated to make the more gullible rubes in this country think she's just a regular gal with dumb sh!t hanging on her wall, instead of a power-hungry millionaire with designs on global domination. The sad thing is, even after seeing this charade get gradually exposed over the last six weeks, millions of people likely still believe she's a real live gun lovin' hick like them. Sigh. Anyway, on to the part of the show where everyone freezes their @sses off for your amusement:

Following her Fox appearance, Sarah feeds us some crap about how much she can't wait to "get away from the press" (which, of course, is why she holds live satellite interviews from her home in the middle of nowhere), so it's time to "load up the RV...get outdoors and have some fun" (which, if this show is to be believed, is all the Palin family ever goddam does). Everyone piles into the RV, including Sarah's nephew Happy who, despite his name is neither 49 years old nor a character from an Adam Sandler movie. Their destination? More outdoorsy bullsh!t. Man, the Palin kids must be dying for this season to finish filming so they can go back to getting pregnant and having zero contact with their workaholic mom.

First stop is rafting on the Mantahuska River, which Sarah says is only an hour away from the Palin home, yet none of the Palins have rafted it before (but they totally do this kind of stuff all the time, you guys. For real!). As usual, they dump poor Trig off beforehand, because apparently he's too retarded for Alaskan adventures, and, of course, despite being the seasoned wilderness experts they all pretend to be, the family hires some expert to teach them how to not die. See paragraph 2 for a reminder of what a BS fraud Sarah Palin is.

After the hippie rafting expert makes some bad jokes and Sarah rips on his mullett, it's time to hit the water. At the start of the journey we get this choice quote from future President Palin: "When Mudflap (That's the hippie's name. Seriously.) told me that I'd be up front and I'd be paddling and leading...I was tempted to say, 'Nah I'd rather be in the back of the boat. Let someone else do more of the work.'" If that's not the voice of someone who should be in charge of the free world, I don't know what is. Why do we have to wait til 2012?! Can't we just kick the black guy out already? I bet he's never even been rafting!

After the rafts, it's time to break out the rubber, as Willow invites her "friend" Andy to come pitch a tent in the woods with her. After a random Michelle Obama dis (I guess she's not in charge of this show, after all), Willow's f*ck buddy arrives and immediately starts to gather wood (I got camping/boner puns all day, yo). Sarah says that she trusts Willow to not get knocked up by a hick, but adds "I feel bad for our kids because some of their mistakes end up on the front page of The National Enquirer." Forcing them to live out their teen years in front of a camera crew seems like the best way to ease that burden. Yay, parenting!

Political insiders, including none other than popular right wing @ss-kisser Bill O'Reilly, are suggesting that Sarah Palin's reality show, Sarah Palin's Alaska, might actually be hurting her political career. Which, of course, is hilarious, because the whole point of the show is to increase Sarah's odds in the presidential run she's obviously planning for 2012.

Bill O'Reilly Interviews Sarah Palin

Man, as much as I hate her, ya gotta love live interviews with this chick. Did she just say "strategery"? That's not even close to a word. Did she just call Alaska "America's Fort Knox"? Isn't Fort Knox America's Fort Knox?

Anyway, I think there's a special place in hell waiting for both of these a-holes, but it's funny to hear them tear into Kate Gosselin. I hate to give props to Bill O'Reilly, but he delivered the LOLS with "Kate Gosselin is whining, and she saw a turtle or something." However, I have to disagree with Bill on the point that taking a reality TV star into the woods is "not very presidential." Who could forget the time Teddy Roosevelt went hiking with Artemis Q. Pennyfeather, winner of his era's most popular reality show, Who Wants to Not Die of Malaria?

I feel some personal background is needed before I start today's recap of Sarah Palin's Alaska. This morning, I woke up at 8 am, put on 19 layers of clothes and set out in the 34 degree weather to go see an NFL game. At the end of the day, I was outside in the freezing rain for about 8 hours, and I now feel as though I might have caught some sort of disease, that I'm calling LPS (Lil Payne Syndrome), which is only contracted by people dumb enough to stand outside in the rain for 8 hours drinking beer. However, my team won, I got hammered, and a good time was had by all. No one complained, and no one felt the need to make a reality show about it. Then again, Kate Gosselin wasn't there.

Last night's episode of SPA (That's what the kids are calling it. By "kids" I mean the Betty White-aged midwesterners who still watch this show.) started with Sarah Palin making a trip to her local gun store. Of course, she pretended she makes these kinds of trips all the time, so a producer for the show stopped in first to tell the locals not to act surprised when a camera crew and former governor came through the door acting like she's friends with them. As usual, I was excited to see Sarah handling firearms, because, as we all know, you can't accidentally put a bullet through your head without a gun in your hands. Sadly, those producers are a crafty lot and know enough to not let this b!tch hold a gun with bullets in it. They probably wanna go home with their faces intact. P*ssies.

Before she goes camping with a bunch of little kids and lethal weapons, however, Sarah decides to take her family to the top of a mountain. I'm starting to think that constantly engaging in activities that could easily kill her is Sarah's way of drawing a liberal audience to her show. While on the mountain, Sarah addresses the question (asked by no one) of whether she thinks her kids will get involved in politics. "They're all quite independent, and they see some of the brutality that comes from being involved in the political arena, but I think they're all gonna find their own niche," Sarah says. I know it's important for politicians to be able to make a statement without actually saying anything, but the good ones fool you into thinking that they answered your question. With Sarah Palin, you just walk away like, "That b!tch just said nothing at all." Then you realize that Sarah Palin just tried to outsmart you and you get overwhelmed with the desire to grab that gun out of her hand for a good old-fashioned murder/suicide. Or maybe that's just me.

Before leaving the mountain, Sarah makes a joke at her own expense, recalling the time she falsely claimed that she could see Russia from where she lives. Bahahahaha! That was a good one, Sarah! "Hey, America! Remember that time I totally lied to you in a desperate attempt to help an old man take over the country so that I could push him down a flight of stairs as soon as he got sworn in and proceed to strip you of your liberties and run your nation into the ground? Wasn't that great?" OK, she didn't really say that, but you know it's what she was thinking.

Then, finally, it's Kate plus fifty half-Asian babies time! At first, I thought this might be interesting. Finally, we'd get someone on this show who doesn't kiss Sarah's ass for a living. Kate let me down, however, when she started reading from cue cards about how she and Sarah are two peas in a pod. Stupid peas in a stupid, stupid pod. "There's not a whole lot of people that I run into that can understand the scrutiny, the media, and beyond," Kate says. Oh good, Kate's also an expert on saying words that don't actually mean anything AND she's famous for no friggin' reason at all. These two are made for each other, right? No. Wrong. So wrong. Wronger than Sarah Palin on Jeopardy.

On the upcoming episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska, Kate Gosselin and her brood of monsters make an attempt to go camping with Momma Grizzly. As Lil Payne mentioned earlier this week, Kate was a total sour puss and couldn't handle the trip. After complaining about the cold weather and freaking out over the idea of not using a table, utensils, or hand cleaner just hours into the trip, Kate and the kids packed up and left.

As Us Weekly points out, and I don't think it took a rocket scientist to come up with this one, Kate and Sarah Palin had "zero chemistry".

"They didn't speak off camera. She said the food and accommodations were terrible, and it was the worst trip she'd ever been on."

Although the eight Gosselin dwarves were having a fabulous time with Sarah's kids, Kate "had a meltdown" in the 53-degree weather and left before sundown. "She just couldn't cope".

First, Kate has zero chemistry with any human being and about the only things that won't get on her nerves are walls and ceilings and any other inanimate object that can't move or talk. Second, Kate had to leave by sundown before her nose warted, skin turned green, and her broom came flying to her from Pennsylvania.

TLC was smart to pair those two together because they know what a whiny and pathetic person Kate Gosselin is when she has to deal with anything in the great outdoors.

Well, I don't know about y'all, but I've been waiting to see Sarah Palin unleash her righteous redneck rage on some unsuspecting wild animal since the day she announced her reality show. Granted, I was hoping she'd either pull a Dick Cheney and spray one of her lackeys in the face with bird shot, or that she'd get charged by a herd of caribou and violated by a well-placed antler. Neither of those things happened, but I'm still pretty pleased with the Three Stooges-style hilarity that ensued when Sarah, her dad, and some other old dude took to their shotguns and blood lusts out to the tundra to kill 'em up some caribou.

Tonight's episode opened in a dramatic fashion usually not found on a show where most of the dialogue revolves around fishing. Sarah took aim on a caribou, pretended it was Nancy Pelosi, squeezed the trigger, and got ready to blow that caribou's hippie brains out. But right before the carnage starts and Sarah strips down to dance in the entrails of her fallen prey, we flashback to three days earlier. Seriously? Sarah Palin's Alaska is gonna start keeping us in suspense now? I didn't realize I was watching LOST: Alaska.

So, three days before her epic showdown with nature, Sarah was just a typical insane, millionaire housewife getting ready to go off into the wilderness and make the snows of Alaska red with the blood ofthe liberal eliteof her fallen prey. This year, the slaughter would be different, however, as Sarah and hubby Todd would be going on separate hunting trips, "This year Todd and I will split the hunting and gathering responsibilities," Sarah said. What hunting and gathering responsibilities? She makes it sound like if she doesn't trudge out of the woods with 30 dead caribou slung over her shoulders, she'll be banished from the village or something. And when does the "gathering" start? Next week, I wanna see real time footage of Sarah on her hands and knees, foraging for berries.

Turns out, this trip is also special because Sarah's taking her along her elderly father, who she's finally able to take on trips, because she still has the travel Depends diaper bag that she used for traveling with John McCain. Like everyone else on the show, Sarah's dad knows who the cash cow is, and sings Sarah's praises every chance he gets. "She carries her own weight. Whether it's hunting, or fishing or politics...anything Sarah Palin does, she does it with all four feet." Well, nice endorsement, dad, but unless it's spayed or neutered, I don't really want anything with four feet in the White House. Women spent enough time on all fours in there when JFK was in office (bah-dum-ching. I'll be here all week).

Sarah surveys the food situation like she's friggin' Sacajawea and decides that unless they get to shootin' they'll never live through winter. So, she and her two-man posse take a 600 mile plane ride up north, so that they can gather their essential food in a place that's, like, more bad @ss-looking than where they live. They meet up with Sue, the "mama grizzly" who lives alone in a one-woman Manson family compound north of the Arctic Circle. Sue assures us right off the bat that she has "a lot of guns." Oh, that's good. I was worried that I was terrified of her for no reason. Oh, there's more. Turns out this broad once survived a bear attack and then went back and killed the bear! I thought the point of this show was to make Sarah Palin look like she's hardcore. Chuck Norris wouldn't look hardcore next to Sue.

In the most inspired cross-over promotion since the the Flinstones met the Jetsons, TLC has arranged for two of their biggest reality stars to exploit their families for fame together. Well, I guess it's one of their biggest reality stars, and one chick who just got canned by the network, but the TLC brass probably arranged this thing long before they decided to cripple the US economy by putting all 700 Gosselin kids on welfare.

Yep, Kate Gosselin just happened to be in Alaska around the same time that Sarah Palin was filming her reality show, Sarah Palin's Alaska. The two inexplicably famous mom-monsters decided to go camping together, because roughing it in the Alaskan wilderness is all about surprise celebrity cameos. The episode doesn't air until next week, but according to Huffington Post, Kate defends her title as whiniest b!tch on cable by complaining about everything from the weather to the fact that Sarah apparently enjoys watching her friends get eaten by bears.

Things start to get tense before the camping even begins as Sarah takes Kate to bear safety training (it wouldn't be Sarah Palin if she didn't find a way to talk about bears), where she jokes that it's best to camp with a "partner who's slower than you." Because the Kate-bot is not programmed to understand what we humans call "humor," she's totally shocked by Sarah's attempt at comedy. "Oh my gosh!" Kate exclaimed. "Sacrifice your friends?" Yep, a career politician just advised you to feed your friends to bears on national TV. She was totally serious, too.

Once the trip gets underway, the weather and conditions don't live up to Kate's expectations. "This is not ideal," Kate complained. "I am freezing to the bone; I have 19 layers on; my hands are frigid. I held it together as long as I could and I'm done now! It just kills me that people, like, willingly do this." After an extended pity party, Kate gathered up her kids - who appeared to be having a blast - and bounced on the whole camping scene, cutting the trip short after only a few hours.

So, Kate Gosselin acted like a spoiled, selfish stick-in-the-mud, and ruined everyone else's good time. No surprise there. What's truly terrible about this is that she forced me to side with the Palins! I'll never forgive you for this, Kate Gosselin.

Jesus Christ, more f*cking fishing! This week on Sarah Palin's Alaska, the Palin family headed to a totally different part of Alaska for more of the same choreographed outdoorsy crap they do every week. The episode started with Sarah giving us some background about Bristol Bay (Oooh, they're fishing for salmon this week, not halibut. This show really keeps ya guessing!). "It's so special to us, that our first daughter was named after Bristol Bay," Sarah says of the spot. I'm guessing it's because they're both crawling with crabs and few men dare to brave their murky depths without head-to-toe rubber.

The whole family heads to Todd's parents' house in White Trash Fame Whore Bristol Bay for free babysitting because that's where they "headquarter" during fishing season. Can this family do anything without making it sound like a full-scale military invasion? At the grand folks' house we finally meet the members of the Palin clan who have been hiding out from the cameras in their private meth lab, or have been kept out of the spotlight because they're slightly more retarded than the rest of the family. That's right Trig and Track Palin make their television debuts this week and their cameos are as mind-blowingly stupid as their names. Oh, and they also brought along Bristol's bastard son Tripp (Seriously, with the names? It's like this family feels like they haven't given us enough to make fun of).

Track (the druggie, not the tard) pretty much just points his Oxycontin hangover gaze at the camera and mumbles something about what an awesome fisherman his dad is. Then he goes out with his boys and wrecks the boat trailer, because apparently, that's how kids rebel in Alaska.

Yet again, we're subjected to roughly 18 hours of fishing footage with educational narration from Sarah. Apparently, Todd has a lock down on all the best salmon spots, because it's important that the Palin family make a ton of money from commercial fishing, as they have no other means of supporting themselves. "Todd and I have had seasons where we relied on the fish money to pay our bills," Sarah says. "So we know how hard it is for Track when the fish aren't hitting." Yeah, it's gotta be pretty tough on the rich party kid when he decides to work for a month out of the year and it doesn't go just as he planned. No wonder he loves drugs!

Then it's finally Trig time. Trig, of course, is the Palin's youngest son (about the same age as their grandson) who was born with Down's syndrome, and we all knew it was only a matter of time before they trotted him in front of the cameras for some free sympathy points, but I actually thought they'd be a bit more subtle about it. Stupid me. Sarah Palin and her whole 6-hour campaign ad reality show are about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face, so naturally when it came time to remind us all that there's a member of the family who's NOT a disgusting human being, they milked it for everything it's worth.

There was some footage of Todd and Trig playing with a wine jug tied to a tree or some sh!t (They really know how to stimulate a kid, those Palins. If only they could afford real toys!). Then Sarah spews some nonsense about how raising a retarded kid has totally prepared her to run the free world. "He helps us really focus in on the heart of a family," Sarah says, as though that actually means anything. "We both pitch in and do whatever needs to be done to raise this family." God bless you Todd and Sarah! Oh wait, that's called being f*cking parents. Literally billions of people do it every day and don't get reality shows made about them. Sarah goes on to threaten the world with more demon spawn, saying both she and Todd "always wanted a big family." Oh God, no! Sarah if you won't stop squeezing out kids for the world's sake, do it for your own. Having kids in your late 40s can result in worse birth defects and even stupider names. The last thing we need is three-eyed, humpbacked Trog Palin trolling around Alaska in search of fish and Vicodin.