Palin tried to hide her relentless pursuit of publicity from jurors

When Sarah Palin performs in public, one of her stock lines is that she “has nothing to lose,” portraying herself as someone who no longer takes offense at what people say about her, a line she has been repeating since her 2008 campaign for vice president.

It’s what she is still saying this year about her campaign to replace Don Young in the U.S. House.

"I just think I've got nothing to lose," Palin told Fox News. "What more can they do, what more can they say?

But when Palin and her lawyers talk about their defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, they claim she was damaged beyond belief by a line in a 2017 editorial. The error, corrected within hours, linked Palin to a mass shooting six years earlier.

Palin lost the federal case in New York, but is appealing. Her lawsuit is relevant to her campaign for U.S. Congress in that it displays her hypocrisy about publicity of any kind. Her real occupation is that of being famous, a job that requires constant promotion to retain celebrity status.

It is also relevant in that the legal bills are enormous and someone other than Palin appears to be on the hook for them, but she has not released that information to Alaskans, hiding the identity of her benefactor.

Nowhere in the Palin libel suit against the Times is her hypocrisy on better display than in the document her lawyers filed listing all the things they didn’t want the jurors to hear about during her trial. They didn’t want anyone to know about Palin and her relentless pursuit of publicity.

They asked that 66 items be forbidden from the proceedings and that the Times be prevented from “using, disclosing, discussing, and/or describing the contents” of the objectionable items.

What many of the unmentionables have in common is that they show Palin’s unquenchable desire for the spotlight, a trait that undermines her claims about how much she was damaged by the editorial error.

Other unmentionables deal with Palin threatening to run against Sen. Lisa Murkowski. For instance, she asked that this tweet, which dates from the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight, be verboten.

Palin’s lawyers also didn’t want the jury to see the video she created in 2020 in which she kept repeating “this is my house,” emphasizing different words and threatened to run against Murkowski.

“Lisa Murkowski, this is my house,” Palin said, pointing to her house. “This is my house. This is my house. This, this is my house. This is my house. I’m willing to give it up. I’m willing to give it up for the greater good of this country. And the great state.”

Or the time she spent wearing a bear costume while rapping and dancing on the “The Masked Singer,”

When attorneys for the Times asked her about dancing in a pink-and-purple bear costume on TV, she shouted “objection” from the witness stand, and then claimed it was dumb for her to do so.

Palin said on TV that she appeared on the show for “unity,” but on an aftershow interview she said she did it in a “respectful way,” as kind of a "walking middle finger to the haters out there in the world. . .”