ABC: No, Palin wasn't booed on "Dancing with the Stars"

Before the grumbling starts in the comments that “this isn’t news!”, let me gently point out that (a) Sarahcuda’s favorite site has already deemed it blogworthy and (b) according to Drudge, here’s what the hottest story in America is on this painfully slow news day:

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I.e. it could be worse. You’ll find the DWTS clip below, but there’s really no way to tell what the boos are a reaction to. The show’s host told Jimmy Kimmel after the show that the response was “mostly” for the worse-than-expected scores given to Jennifer Grey for her routine, a point later supported by an ABC spokesman:

Instead, the network said, the crowd was upset that Jennifer Grey, the former “Dirty Dancing” star who performed immediately before Bristol Palin, got only a trio of 8s from the judges, even though the routine she did with partner Derek Hough was a clear audience favorite. (They might have spared themselves the trouble, as Grey and Hough emerged with the evening’s top score anyway.)…

“They were just expressing their feelings about a really, really good dance,” a network spokeswoman said. “It’s not at all unusual.”

The Daily Beast counters that Palin’s reaction, shaking her head, as the camera cuts to her suggests she thought they were booing her. And if you watch this version of the clip, it looks like the audience applauds when Grey’s scores are first announced, in which case why would they boo a few moments later? On the other hand, there are clearly loud cheers for Palin when she’s first introduced, which makes no sense if the earlier boos were directed at her. If you were a stone-cold nutroots warrior sitting in the audience eager to embarrass her on TV, wouldn’t you boo even louder once you knew for sure that she was on camera so that everyone at home would hear it? ABC’s explanation makes more sense.

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Only two things are certain, my friends. One: America will surely continue to analyze this piece of tape frame-by-frame like the Zapruder film. And two: As Entertainment Weekly says, if people really were booing her at a dancing competition with not one but two of her kids right there, those people need a mental-health break from politics. Soon.

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