$arah Palin Cashes In

New York Magazine is reporting that  Sarah Palin has earned $12 million in the last year by doing almost nothing. That bit of news has forced reality to finally set in among the commentariat – she’s not running for President. I’ve said this here and elsewhere for months now, there’s no way Sarah Palin is running. Life is just too good collecting Wingnut Welfare.

Just look around and see what Sarah sees – prominent “conservative” personalities who make tens of millions of dollars a year selling their brand of over-wrought victimhood branded as politics.

Take Glenn Beck for example. The Fox host makes $32 million a year through his radio and television programs and by hawking books and other assorted merchandise to his legions of fans. Beck is known for his paranoid right-wing views but freely admits to Forbes magazine that,

“I could give a flying crap about the political process.” Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. “We’re an entertainment company,” Beck says.

Points for honesty I suppose.

Rush Limbaugh makes about the same. But who knows? Maybe Rush really believes what he says everyday – or maybe it’s the Oxycontin talking.

Beck’s fellow Fox host Sean Hannity makes $20 million a year just from his radio show. Hannity’s charity to benefit the children of wounded soldiers was just exposed as a fraud. The charity raises millions but has distributed a minuscule percentage of the proceeds to anyone who’s not a consultant or a private jet rental company. Not coincidentally, Palin’s own Political Action Committee has recently been exposed as operating in much the same way.

Or look to the man who employees Back, Hannity and Palin. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is enjoying soaring profits. Fox News took conservatism and turned it into a consumer product. Fox turned a political ideology into nothing more than a commodity to be marketed and sold just like Coca-Cola.

It may finally be dawning on the few conservatives who actually care about policy that the broader conservative movement is being exploited by common hucksters straight out of a Mark Twain novel. Neither politics nor policy drives the movement now, just pure profit motive. In fact it’s more profitable for these people if Republican’s are on the ropes, that’s why you find Palin, Beck and their ilk in a perpetual state of victim hood.

In the conservative movement ideas have ceded the playing field to profits and marketing. Writing at his blog recently conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat lamented,

It may be that conservative politics have benefited dramatically from the rise of a right-wing media-industrial complex, but there’s plenty of evidence pointing the other way.

Here’s mild mannered establishment journalist Marc Ambinder wondering if conservatives have “gone mad,”

It is absolutely a condition of the age of the triumph of conservative personality politics, where entertainers shouting slogans are taken seriously as political actors, and where the incentive structures exist to stomp on dissent and nuance, causing experimental voices to retrench and allowing a lot of people to pretend that the world around them is not changing. The obsession with ACORN, Climategate, death panels, the militarization of rhetoric, Saul Alinsky, Chicago-style politics, that TAXPAYERS will fund the bailout of banks – these aren’t meaningful or interesting or even relevant things to focus on. (The banks will fund their own bailouts.)

Conor Friedersdorf thinks the problem lies with the conservative movement’s major spokespeople  – its radio/net news nexus — and the “overwhelming evidence that their very existence as popular entertainers hinges on an ability to persuade listeners that they are “‘worth taking seriously as political and intellectual actors.’” That is why the constant failures of these men to live up to their billing is so offensive, destructive, and ruinous to conservatives.

In today’s world conservatism is no longer a coherent political ideology in the United States, its a team that you root for and for which you buy all of the official team apparel,

The unifying feature of the right in the 21st century is not so much ideology as an embrace of ignorance, represented most obviously by the leading figures on the right in the US, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Rather than reflecting an even partially coherent world view and political program, rightwing politics now consists of the restatement of talking points in favor of a set of policy positions that represent affirmations of tribal identity, rather than elements of a coherent program

Contra Ambinder, I don’t think conservatives have gone mad. It’s just that now we’ve finally reached the point that no sentient human being can deny what’s happening.

Sarah Palin won’t run for President. She knows that life as a Republican politician is far less fun, far less amusing and far less profitable than life as a conservative celebrity.