So what - so Sarah Palin charged a few thousand dollars to the ol' Alaskan Amex for Bristol and Norwalk and the rest of her kids she named after Connecticut towns to come with her on trips. Okay, so it was about $21,000 worth of benefits and they weren't declared as income - or declared at all. Sure the kids stayed in $500+ a night rooms at the Essex House on Central Park South. Sure they showed up at official events uninvited and without one iota of appropriateness or with anything to do there other than shove food into their pieholes and make long distance phone calls afterward from the hotel phone to Alaska to talk about the unprotected sex they'd have with their hockey hooligan boyfriends when they got back.
But let's examine what was SAVED, not what was SPENT. That is the threshold issue here and that is what should be discussed.
The going rate for a room at The Essex House is, sure, like $500 or $600 bucks a night (incidentally, I know for a fact the rooms are actually pricier than that now. She must have gotten the Alaskan Secessionist Party group discount). And sure, a plane ticket from Anchorage - via a real city - to New York is like over a grand. But that isn't the real story here. Fact is, Joe Six Pack, that Sarah Palin not only made the right choice in bringing them, but actually had no choice BUT to bring them. Fact is that if Palin had NOT brought the younglings, several terrible things would have happened:
1) The Alaskan taxpayers would have had to pay for a babysitter. Possibly more than one, considering the number of angry, hungry, secessionist mouths to be fed. My amateur sleuthing has revealed the going rate for a qualified babysitter in Alaska to be approximately $900 per hour, because in the entire state there are only two Inuit twins that do it and they price-fix since they've cornered the market. Thus, if the Governor had left the kids there with a full-time babysitter, it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars more than bringing them to New York and putting them up on Central Park South. It isn't that Sarah Palin SPENT Alaska's money. It's that she SAVED Alaska money. (The First Dude couldn't take care of them because he was off at an Alaska Independence Party rally on his Arctic Cat.)
2) Each Palin daughter (sigh, okay, probably just Bristol) would have had the opportunity, with both parents out of town and only supervised by said Inuit babysitting tandem, to get knocked up (or again for the first time), thus costing more money later on down the road to pay for the screaming offspring to come on future flights - in addition to the baby-daddy who would also need to come along to be properly supervised/sterilized and for any impromptu photo ops. We can assume the Palins would then have learned their lesson and would in this future bring all the kids everywhere to keep an eye on them (as they do now that Bristol has had it "slipped by Richter, no kick save"). Or, of course, they could leave the daughters at home again, tempt fate yet again and risk further knock-uppage, since we know those Palin girls will panty-drop for the first varsity hockey player with some spiked cider that knocks on the front door of the Governor's igloo. (Sigh, okay, again, only Bristol. Fine, perhaps that was unfair... but apples don't fall far from the tree, Sarah. We can see that your husband's penis has quite a habit of seceding from his pantaloons.) As you can see from this simple equation, every time a Palin daughter (okay, again, Bristol) would be potentially left alone, by the transitive property of unprotected Alaskan teenage sex, they would be impregnated by a second string high school hockey defenseman. The formula can be written quite simply as Levi over Bristol minus Sarah equals baby.
As you can clearly see, leaving the Palin children at home would have caused not only a teenage baby boom the likes of which haven't been seen since the drugstore on my corner ran out of condoms for three days in 1994, but would have cost the state countless dollars in babysitting fees and, down the line, in, uh, further babysitting fees. Thus, Sarah Palin did not spend irrationally and against the spirit of the rules. In bringing her daughters with her, she saved us all from other and further Palins. And that's a victory for every American.
But let's examine what was SAVED, not what was SPENT. That is the threshold issue here and that is what should be discussed.
The going rate for a room at The Essex House is, sure, like $500 or $600 bucks a night (incidentally, I know for a fact the rooms are actually pricier than that now. She must have gotten the Alaskan Secessionist Party group discount). And sure, a plane ticket from Anchorage - via a real city - to New York is like over a grand. But that isn't the real story here. Fact is, Joe Six Pack, that Sarah Palin not only made the right choice in bringing them, but actually had no choice BUT to bring them. Fact is that if Palin had NOT brought the younglings, several terrible things would have happened:
1) The Alaskan taxpayers would have had to pay for a babysitter. Possibly more than one, considering the number of angry, hungry, secessionist mouths to be fed. My amateur sleuthing has revealed the going rate for a qualified babysitter in Alaska to be approximately $900 per hour, because in the entire state there are only two Inuit twins that do it and they price-fix since they've cornered the market. Thus, if the Governor had left the kids there with a full-time babysitter, it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars more than bringing them to New York and putting them up on Central Park South. It isn't that Sarah Palin SPENT Alaska's money. It's that she SAVED Alaska money. (The First Dude couldn't take care of them because he was off at an Alaska Independence Party rally on his Arctic Cat.)
2) Each Palin daughter (sigh, okay, probably just Bristol) would have had the opportunity, with both parents out of town and only supervised by said Inuit babysitting tandem, to get knocked up (or again for the first time), thus costing more money later on down the road to pay for the screaming offspring to come on future flights - in addition to the baby-daddy who would also need to come along to be properly supervised/sterilized and for any impromptu photo ops. We can assume the Palins would then have learned their lesson and would in this future bring all the kids everywhere to keep an eye on them (as they do now that Bristol has had it "slipped by Richter, no kick save"). Or, of course, they could leave the daughters at home again, tempt fate yet again and risk further knock-uppage, since we know those Palin girls will panty-drop for the first varsity hockey player with some spiked cider that knocks on the front door of the Governor's igloo. (Sigh, okay, again, only Bristol. Fine, perhaps that was unfair... but apples don't fall far from the tree, Sarah. We can see that your husband's penis has quite a habit of seceding from his pantaloons.) As you can see from this simple equation, every time a Palin daughter (okay, again, Bristol) would be potentially left alone, by the transitive property of unprotected Alaskan teenage sex, they would be impregnated by a second string high school hockey defenseman. The formula can be written quite simply as Levi over Bristol minus Sarah equals baby.
As you can clearly see, leaving the Palin children at home would have caused not only a teenage baby boom the likes of which haven't been seen since the drugstore on my corner ran out of condoms for three days in 1994, but would have cost the state countless dollars in babysitting fees and, down the line, in, uh, further babysitting fees. Thus, Sarah Palin did not spend irrationally and against the spirit of the rules. In bringing her daughters with her, she saved us all from other and further Palins. And that's a victory for every American.
