Sarah Palin’s 13 Suitcases

It’s no surprise that it just keeps getting better and better (and weirder and weirder…)

On top of the $150,000 first outlined in Federal Election Commission filings, Palin spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on additional clothing, makeup and jewelry for herself and her family, including $40,000 in luxury goods for her husband, Todd, our colleague Michael Shear reports. The campaign was charged for silk boxer shorts, spray tanners and 13 suitcases to carry all the designer clothes, according to two GOP insiders.

“The shopping continued after the convention in Minneapolis, it continued all around the country,” one source said. “She was still receiving shipments of custom-designed underpinnings up to her ‘Saturday Night Live’ performance” in October. Sources said expenses were put on the personal credit cards of low-level Palin staffers and discovered when they asked party officials for reimbursement.

The interesting side to all of this is that it’s opening up some debate about the responsibility of the media. If they’d been told off the record how stupid Palin really was (Africa was a country and who knows what countries make up North America or NAFTA), then didn’t they have a responsibility to inform the public about that, preferably before an election where she could be one old man’s heartbeat away from running the United States?

I understand keeping your sources happy and keeping off the record information off the record, but it seems that at a certain point the welfare of the planet might come into play. At a certain point, don’t you need to put the good of mankind over the secrecy of your information?

Maybe the journalists all knew that there was no way that McCain and Palin would win, and if they’d been leading in the polls they might have revealed more of these frightening facts ahead of time. And maybe they wouldn’t have mattered; I wouldn’t be surprised if most of Palin’s supporters wouldn’t have cared if she didn’t know what Africa was. Maybe I’m underestimating Real America, where they cling to their guns and religion, but I just wouldn’t be surprised.