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Bunny's “Ballad of Sarah Palin”

Bunny's “Ballad of Sarah Palin”

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When Lady Bunny first came up with the idea for "The Ballad of Sarah Palin," the New York-based drag queen wanted to make something a little less outrageous than her typical YouTube videos.

Fast-forward to Thursday morning, when The New York Observer posted the video, saying, "When it comes to Sarah Palin parody attacks, you can't get much stranger and wilder than this."

"That's because Sarah Palin is one of the strangest and wildest targets," Lady Bunny tells The Advocate.

Bunny says she struggled with the tone of the video -- she wanted it to be funny, but she didn't want to lose sight of the tragedy in Tucson that has put the former governor of Alaska back in the headlines.

"Liberal media is already starting to come out and say Sarah Palin can't run for president -- that her Tucson video was the final nail in her coffin. But I want her to run because I think Obama can beat her."

This certainly isn't the first time Lady Bunny's gone political -- in fact, her blog entries frequently veer into politics. But what may surprise some is that gay issues and references are absent from the Palin spoof, and the reason, she says, is simple.

"There's nothing gay about Sarah Palin," she says. "She's antigay, she's fundamentalist, and she paints herself as this man's girl who likes to hunt, likes to shoot ... "

What there is a lot of in the video is parody, and the woman Bunny found to play Palin went about it in a slightly different way than we've seen before.

"Her name is Dorothy Bishop, and I met her when she introduced herself to me in a nightclub," Bunny says.

"She's a former beauty queen, and she said to me, 'Sarah has been coached, as beauty queens are, to say nothing.' I thought that was really interesting, and so we explored that."

In the end, Lady Bunny says she hopes people see the humor in the video -- but she also hopes it makes people take a step back and think.

"It's a pity that we waited for Tucson to join together as people to denounce this crazy rhetoric."

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