For all of the jokes and snickering about Sarah Palin and her lack of knowledge about politics and policy, consider this. Girl is getting paid and in a major, major way. For her 45 minute appearance at tonight’s “Tea Party Convention” she will drop a check for $125,000 into her back account. That’s more than she made in a year as governor of Alaska. With an entry fee of over $500, however, the event will be light on those who are actually supposed to constitute the whole “tea bag” movement, the regular Joes and Janes who drive their flag adorned camper vans filled with “Obama the African Lyin’ King” posters from protest event to protest event. Instead it’s a conference for high rollers who want to associate themselves with the movement people who won’t actually be present, let alone represented. It will be like calling an event a black empowerment conference and hiring Jesse Jackson to address a room full of rich white people who want to look like they care. But girl is getting paid and in a major, major way.

Then consider her book. It was written to sell to all those folks in the camper vans and their ilk who consider her a leader and want to hear what she has to say- or rather want to hear her say what they want to say and are sure she wants to say too. But, given her notorious inexperience with the written word, she had Lynn Vincent, a features writer for the uber-conservative World Magazine, write it for her. We can’t know what Vincent’s deal with Palin was, but we can bet pretty safely that it’s a paltry percentage of Palin’s reported $7 million haul.

Lastly, consider her gig at Fox News for which she’s clearly also getting a very fat paycheck. Fox and company are probably smart enough to know that Palin’s value is in direct correlation to her scarcity. The more she’s on the screen, the less valuable she’ll become and they must know that it’s only a matter of time before she’ll say something mind blowingly stupid that will blow her whole deal. Fox’s answer to Rachel Maddow she is clearly not, but she obviously knows this and has zero interest in wading through policy details or masterbating into a microphone for three hours like her pal Limbaugh.

But perhaps she and her snowmobile husband have figured all this out too? Perhaps, after having been through it once and being a national laughingstock, they have zero interest in running for a public office again. Perhaps they know the smart play is to cash in as much as possible while she’s hot enough to command these big checks and before she is relegated, as she most surely will be, to the Ross Perot/Monica Lewinsky pantheon of “used to be’s.” Until then, girl is going to get paid and in a major, major way.

So who’s the real idiot here?

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