The Internet is all atwitter about a new video that shows Sarah Palin doing an interview at a turkey hatchery while the birds are being slaughtered right behind her. She’s either more oblivious than we realized or a barbarian, the thinking seems to go. MSNBC, though they’ve been replaying the story nearly nonstop all day, has actually decided to blur out the actual turkey-killing. (We bet the guys at Fox are having a laugh about that.) It really does seem strange — even the guy doing the killings is looking at the camera like, “Are you seriously filming this?” That said, it’s not that gruesome. The turkey is placed into a metal cone thing, shakes a little, then gets pulled out. It’s not Saw V. Besides, in about six days the vast majority of us will be gorging ourselves on that very turkey meat, which typically comes from a formerly living turkey. Delicious.
The truly notable thing about this video is not that Palin didn’t mind the “horrors” happening behind her — it’s that she wanted it in the shot. Palin was apparently told, by the cameraman, something akin to “Hey, you know they’re killing turkeys behind you, right?” And, as an aide told MSNBC, she replied, “No worries.” It’s been speculated that Palin would have trouble staying in the national spotlight until 2012 while holed away up in Alaska, where news travels by sled dog and darkness shrouds the land for months at a time. But this video proves that Palin knows exactly how to continue to attract attention: Take a normally mundane gubernatorial event like a turkey pardon, Palin it up with something irresistible to the elite east-coast liberal media, and watch the coverage follow. Should be an entertaining few years.
