A Tale of Two Border Crossings

Did you hear the one about Sarah Palin crossing the border into Canada to get health care?

Prepare to be SHOCKED!

Oh, and the other border crossing story is kinda old news... probably not worth your time to even bother with really.

It's just that there was this other completely irrelevant story about some dude from Canada coming down for a procedure in America.

Anyway, back to the Sarah Palin story; Let's examine the author's writing process first.




The most basic tenets of the writing planning stage are;

1. Identify your topic

2. Identify your audience

3. Identify your purpose and/or intended response

In this case that would be;

Topic - Sarah Palin

Audience - Huffington Post readers who hate Sarah Palin

Purpose - to obfuscate uninteresting cherry picked facts into an easily regurgitated anti-Palin sound byte. (One that will most likely prove more and more inaccurate upon repeated regurgitation.)

To set the stage, the header is "Palin Crossed Border for Canadian Health Care"...

This headline paints a picture of Sarah Palin and her husband Todd loading up Flack, Brister, Salix, Pepper and Flick onto a snow machine and driving past hospital after hospital in Alaska as they trek on towards Mecca-Canada for some of Canada's utopian health services. (Possibly as recently as three weeks ago.)

The 'article' then goes on with some factoids here, some innuendo there until finally- in the second to last sentence comes the punchline:

"Up to the age of six. Palin lived in a remote town near the closest Canadian city, Whitehorse."

Which is funny when you picture the HuffPo 'editor' or whatever reading over the piece and saying,

"You might want to mention the fact that Whitehorse may have had the most accessible hospital to residents of Skagway, Alaska back in the 1960's."

So in essence, this is a story about how when Sarah Palin was a kid one of the nearest hospitals was located in Canada and her parents took their family there. (Also, Canada didn't go full on Universal Health Care until 1966... so, there's that.)

The only reason I bothered with the other link about the Canadian elected official opting to travel to Florida for heart surgery earlier this year... is because I am the target audience and it led me right where I was dying to go.