Sarah Huckabee Sanders is at it again
There is something broken about Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I don’t mean the usual Republican dysfunction. No, Sarah Sanders has a special pompous sanctimony all her own. She’s like a haughty, disapproving great aunt, ready to scold and lecture at a moment’s notice, typically in a frigid, humourless minor key.
The hauteur with which Sarah perpetually carries herself even translates to her written decrees. For instance, when the state’s newspaper of record, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, inquired what her exclusive tickets to Super Bowl LVIII cost, her reply was sent down from on high that the tickets “were in the upper level, not a suite,” deliberately dodging the question and withholding the full picture.
Her royal majesty did deign to add that “no taxpayer money was used for tickets to the game for her security detail.” Did they have to buy their own tickets, then? Anyway, that sounds like an indirect way of saying that the good people of Arkansas paid for her tickets — and the tickets for her husband and three children.
And here’s the problem. It’s thought that tickets for the where governor and her family sat cost $37,000 each. That is, a grand total of $185,000 for a family of five. That’s a hefty tab for the good people of the fifth poorest state in the United States to pick up. What’s more, the whole family also had field passes. All in all, counting food and other amenities, their cost for a single evening’s entertainment could have been something near a quarter of a million dollars.
Sanders claims that she paid for the evening. That doesn’t seem likely. She is notoriously cheap, and Sanders is already being investigated for swindling the state out of nearly $20,000. That was for a night on the town for her and two friends in Paris, France. It turns out that she tried to hide the cost in an overpriced lectern that seems to have gone missing. The conclusion of that investigation is supposed to be released within a week.
Whoever or whatever picked up the cost for the tickets, it’s doubtful that it was snobby, stuck-up, self-important Sarah. Maybe she’s taking lessons from Clarence Thomas on good deals for good times.
Whatever it turns out to be, it’s clear that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is hiding something. So elitists everywhere can take comfort from the fact that the governor of a state where children routinely miss meals, and poverty is a daily catastrophe for other people’s families, stone-hearted Sarah and her brood are doing just fine, thank you very much. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.