Sarah Palin: ‘True Blood’ Joins The War On Women

Sarah Palin on True Blood? Not going to happen.

True Blood, the HBO vampire series that tried to get Sarah Palin to do a cameo, nonetheless offered its audience some gratuitous Republican bashing Sunday night.

A subplot featured the vampires trying to crash a fictional Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) fundraiser at the George W. Bush Library, in which True Blood characters refer to attendees as a**holes and a female Republican as a “Republic**t.”

Based on this sequence, and the violence that later followed, it seems True Blood has engaged in the war on women, conservative women anyway.

Disparaging Republicans or conservatives on HBO is hardly edgy or unusual, so the network is not exactly sticking its neck out, as it were. Moreover, since most viewers watch a show like True Blood as an escape from day-to-day life, why in the world would it bring political propaganda into the episode, especially at the risk of alienating a chunk of the audience?

Some have deemed the HBO cable network “helping Barack Obama,” and one of its executives — who later got appointed as ambassador to Spain — raised more than $500,000 for the Obama reelection effort.

It’s somewhat ironic that True Blood would air an episode about a political fundraiser right around the same time that President Obama is once again in California for big-ticket fundraisers with the entertainment community’s movers and shakers. The president has continued his extensive travel schedule of raking in campaign cash across the country from liberal one-percenters for the Democrats at these events despite one unfolding crisis after another.

In case you’re wondering, much of this presidential political fundraising is on the taxpayer’s dime owing to creative bookkeeping and loopholes: “While Obama can rely on Air Force One and other military aircraft at his disposal for official business, federal election laws require the DNC or individual campaigns that benefit to pay for these presidential perquisites at just a fraction of the costs — the equivalent of a commercial airline ticket — whenever he or other administration officials use those federal government resources for political activity. Like many of his predecessors, Obama tends to piggyback official events onto fundraising trips, further diminishing the costs the DNC must repay the U.S. Treasury, and figuring out the details of just how much they must reimburse taxpayers for the mixed trips is complicated and opaque, confounding even the most experience federal election law experts.”

Did True Blood bite off more than it could chew in its anti-Republican content? Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, was less than pleased with the True Blood episode, including what appears to be attempt to sandbag her, as she explained to Breitbart’s Big Hollywood.

“The brilliant minds of True Blood were brazen enough to ask me to do a cameo on their show, apparently so they could insult a conservative woman in person instead of just all conservative women in general. Their offer wasn’t presented in any negative way, perhaps to benefit from a surprise factor after the guest appearance. I turned them down anyway… To producers who throw these deceitfully ‘flattering’ bones that sound fun on the surface, is it really any wonder I don’t accept your offers to participate in your shows? Nice try HBO. I’d put any mama grizzly in America against a vampire any day; for only one of them actually exists. The left wants to talk about a ‘war on women’? Keep engaging in your misogynist attacks on women you disagree with and we’ll see who wins your self-inflicted war in the court of decent public opinion.”

On his Facebook page, Sen. Ted Cruz also weighed in on the politicized True Blood episode:

“Of all the places I never thought to be mentioned, HBO’s True Blood vampire show would have to be near the top of the list. Sunday night, they aired a misogynist and profanity-ridden episode where Texas Republicans are murdered attending a ‘Ted Cruz fundraiser.’ Well, I’m sorry to have lost the vampire vote, but am astonished (and amused) that HBO is suggesting that hard-core leftists are blood-sucking fiends…”

As far as politics are concerned, people might reasonably wonder if in their gated communities, the highly paid cast and showrunners on True Blood — referred to as Maserati Marxists or Sunset Boulevard Socialists by pundit Ben Shapiro as an update to the term “limousine liberals” — actually pay their so-called fair share in taxes or perhaps rely on elaborate tax shelters to hold on to more of their income.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG2oCGeb5Sg

Regardless of your feelings about Sarah Palin, does it make any sense for HBO’s True Blood to politicize a show about vampires?

[image via Andrew F. Kazmierski / Shutterstock.com]

Added: Ted Cruz tweeted this scene from the Bob Hope movie The Ghost Breakers:

Remarkable. When True Blood attacked GOP & suggested Dems were like vampires…maybe they were channeling Bob Hope? https://t.co/taOi20XzJw

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 25, 2014