Sarah Palin's attempt to cast herself as a true Alaskan, in love with the outdoors, fishing, hunting, is, of course, a lie. Her first ever appearance in the Alaskan press, long before she was governor or even Mayor, was in the Anchorage Daily News. It tells you all you need to know about a woman who wanted to be a beauty queen rather than the wife of a fisherman in the boondocks:

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.''

Desperate for glamour and culture. That's not exactly Palin's message today, is it? But what she realized between then and now is that she could use Alaska as a means for her to gain "glamour and culture." Notice how she admits she smells of salmon and wants to get past it to something Trump-like. Well, she has now, but only by exploiting the mythology of where she was born. How many beautiful clothes can she now buy with TLC's moolah? More than she could steal from the RNC. Levi got her exactly:

"She says she goes hunting and lives off animal meat - I've never seen it," said Mr Johnston, 19. "I've never seen her touch a fishing pole. "She had a gun in her bedroom and one day she asked me to show her how to shoot it. I asked her what kind of gun it was, and she said she didn't know, because it was in a box under her bed."

Surprise! I Believe Levi. But then I have long believed that Palin lives in an utterly fabricated world where she shoots, fishes and has contractions while giving speeches. A reader writes:

Finally, a subject on the Dish on which I am a certifiable expert! I've spent several summers working as a fishing guide in Alaska. It's true, Palin doesn't know what she's doing, but not for the reasons Guy Adams listed.

Actually the reader betrayed a lack familiarity with Alaska fishing. Plenty of Alaskans spin fish for salmon. In fact, I can almost guarantee that most Alaskans would spin fish for salmon before fly fishing, especially in the cloudy glacial-stained river such as the one shown. Only tourists with romantic notions (I include myself in this category) want to exclusively fly fish for salmon. Furthermore, it's not a foregone conclusion that they are salmon fishing. They could be chasing rainbow trout, grayling, dolly varden, arctic char (even lake trout or pike, but doubtful considering the glacial water). Finally, standing up in the those jon boats is standard operating procedure in Alaska. The boats are very stable and I've only seen someone fall out when standing on a seat or the bow (as Todd is seen doing), but these are nothing I haven't done myself. On to Sarah: The reason I can say she doesn't know what she is doing is from the way she handles the fishing rod. Her grip of the rod is something of a caveman death grip, and far too high on the handle to properly control the rod. The rod should be grasped directly above the reel, leaving the index finger free to control the line while casting. The absent-minded retrieve as she reels in at the 20 second mark is amateurish at best; most lures are more effective if retrieved erratically with twitches and pauses. But the biggest tell is when she casts the rod at about 120 seconds. The way she sort of awkwardly lurches forward in the motion and holds her arms at length as if that will somehow make it go further. That is exactly the kind of cast that the bored, mostly disinterested wives of our clients execute. I've seen it hundreds of times. None of those women fish, and neither does this one.

Everything she says and everything she does is phony.

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