Sarah Palin stops pretending and goes full-on Birther. Wouldn’t want to be shown up by Donald Trump.

Is Libya an intervention? A war? Or even worse, a “squirmish?”

Last night on the nation’s center of right wing propaganda, Fox News, Sarah Palin casually overstated the cost of the Libya intervention — by 700%.

Pentagon figures show that the Libyan operation cost about $600 million in the first seven days, but Palin told her pal Greta Van Susteren (and millions of Fox viewers who will now repeat it endlessly like robot parrots) that it cost that much every day.

PALIN: And that’s the $600 million dollar-a-day question that is being asked now because that’s the cost incurred by Americans as we support the no-fly zone, which, of course, the no-fly zone, the intervention or enactment is turning into more than that.

Is Palin really so dim that she didn’t understand the Pentagon’s figures — or was she deliberately lying because she knew her audience would swallow her false claim without blinking?

Sarah Palin’s on one of her rare trips outside the US, and told a reporter for India Today that the reason why the Republican ticket failed to win in 2008 was because she wasn’t at the top.

Speaking at the India Today Conclave in New Delhi, Palin was asked why the GOP ticket did not defeat then-Sen. Barack Obama (D). Palin said that Obama ran a strong campaign and effectively billed himself as a change candidate.

Pressed by India Today editor Aroon Purie that she also represented change, Palin replied, “I wasn’t at the top of the ticket, remember?”

Certainly not lacking in blissful self-confidence, is she? Especially when the truth is that her presence on the ticket was one of the biggest reasons for the GOP’s 2008 defeat.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Republicans are deserting Sarah Palin’s sinking ship.

For the first time in Post-ABC News polling, fewer than six in 10 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents see Palin in a favorable light, down from a stratospheric 88 percent in the days after the 2008 Republican National Convention and 70 percent as recently as October.

In one sense, the poll still finds Palin near the top of a list of eight potential contenders for the GOP nomination. The former vice presidential candidate scores a 58 percent favorable rating, close to the 61 percent for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and 60 percent for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and better than the 55 percent that onetime House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) received.

But Palin’s unfavorable numbers are significantly higher than they are for any of these possible competitors. Fully 37 percent of all Republicans and GOP-leaning independents now hold a negative view of her, a new high.

Note that this shouldn’t be taken as a sign of burgeoning sanity in the GOP; the current frontrunner is deranged squirrel-eating theocrat Mike Huckabee.

In a tough, hard-hitting interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Sarah Palin bashes Barack Obama for his handling of the Egyptian crisis, then tosses up an especially colorful word salad for our enjoyment.

“It’s a difficult situation, this is that 3am White House phone call and it seems for many of us trying to get that information from our leader in the White House it it seems that that call went right to um the answering machine. And nobody yet has, no body yet has explained to the American public what they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know who it is who will be taking the place of Mubarak and I’m not real enthused about what it is that that’s being done on a national level and from DC in regards to understanding all the situation there in Egypt. And in these areas that are so volatile right now because obviously it’s not just Egypt but the other countries too where we are seeing uprisings, we know that now more than ever, we need strength and sound mind there in the White House. We need to know what it is that America stands for so we know who it is that America will stand with. And we do not have all that information yet.”

Tasty!

Alaskan politician Andrew Halcro has a very interesting post on the appeal of Sarah Palin.

In April of 2006, the morning after a debate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Palin and I were sharing a cup of coffee at the Captain Cook. “I hear you spout off facts and figures with no notes and I’m just amazed, but then I look out over the audience and I wonder if it really makes a difference”, she said to me.

Palin was correct. Having a grasp of the issues and facts didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

Voters loved Palin for who she was, not what she knew and therefore gave her a pass and accepted her glittering generalities as public policy gold. All her vague talk about new energy and transparency were more important than specifics on improving education or public safety.

(h/t Stanley Sea.)

Following the shootings in Arizona, Sarah Palin’s Facebook drones went into overdrive, scrubbing any and all criticism from her page. Someone captured this video showing the comments disappearing as fast as they’re posted; I don’t know what the final count of deleted comments is, but it has to be in the tens of thousands. Watch the numbers…

On Sarah Palin’s Reality last night, the half-governor claimed that her now-infamous use of the non-word “refudiate” was a typo.

While in the car, Sarah also talked to Todd about the time she tweeted the word “refudiate.” “I pressed an F instead of a P and people freaked out,” said Sarah, pointing out that her blunder was the second-most-searched word on Google trends. “Make lemonade out of lemons,” said Sarah.

Well, F is pretty far from P on my keyboard, and Palin seems to have forgotten that this wasn’t a fluke; she used the word “refudiate” previously in a July appearance on the Sean Hannity show, and she wasn’t typing at the time:

It’s still a long way to the 2012 election, but hey … the numbers from the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll are really bad for Sarah Palin: Six in 10 Rule Out Palin In the Hunt for 2012 (PDF).

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