Psycho grizzly . . .

VANITY FAIR has a fine article by Michael Joseph Gross, "Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury", and it's worth the read.

Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder, she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her. Following the former Alaska governor’s road show, the author delves into the surreal new world Palin now inhabits—a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family—and the sadness she has left in her wake.

This spring and summer I traveled to Alaska and followed Palin’s road show through four midwestern states, speaking with whomever I could induce to talk under whatever conditions of anonymity they imposed—political strategists, longtime Palin friends and political associates, hotel staff, shopkeepers and hairstylists, and high-school friends of the Palin children. There’s a long and detailed version of what they had to say, but there’s also a short and simple one: anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.

Of her supporters, known as Palin's Paladins,

Erratic behavior and a pattern of lying matter little: “Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship.”

Richard Boone would not be impressed.