Candidate’s lookalikes ‘Palin’ by comparison

Looks like me!

Within two weeks of Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s announcement of Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, the global search for her mirror images has begun in earnest.

Finding doubles to parody public personalities is a staple for late-night talk shows. Jay Leno has done it for years on The Tonight Show, even helping comedians like Brent Mendenhall — a near duplicate of Pres. George W. Bush — turn physical similarities into cottage industries.

Saturday Night Live cast member Amy Poehler regularly lampoons Sen. Hillary Clinton, even appearing side-by-side while Clinton’s presidential candidacy was still alive.

A recent Google search turned up a plethora of blogger comparisons between Palin and established celebs, like former SNL star Tina Fey.

While the blogger lauds the uncanny semblance, he admonishes that “One is funny. One is scary.” Another blogger swears Palin is an identical twin to Kathrine Narducci’s fictitious Soprano’s character Charmaine Bucco.

Looks a lot like me?

But the life of an instant celebrity can produce implications far beyond the realm of mere recognizable imagery. Scanning through photobucket.com reveals scads of people who think they are the ones who best compare to Palin. Some of these images are posted by folks who are either delusional or just plain vision impaired, or possibly both.

They range from the absurd — like “Sicko” producer Michael Moore’s face superimposed on a hairy, extremely obese body with enormous man boobs — to a voluptuous nude woman hugging a snowman.

With nearly 85,000 Google pages as of yesterday, there seems to be no shortage of people looking for women meeting the Palin glamour criteria. And there’s no lack of those seeking Palin body doubles for prurient reasons and occupation.

Looks like something I killed!!!

The candidate from the state whose state flower is the “forget-me-not” has elicited lookalike casting calls on the Internet from Los Angeles to Atlanta that she’d probably like to forget.

Provocative ads seeking women to appear in hardcore and soft porn videos are in no short supply. Some of the more crass ones have already been flagged for removal for depicting the types of “acting” counterfeit Palins are needed to perform, including one — which has since been shut down — that sought to pay a woman “tons of cash” to perform oral sex on a moose on camera.

One Los Angeles adult film producer’s ad on Craigslist reads,

NEED SARAH PALIN LOOKALIKE ASAP FOR ADULT FILM (LA)

Looking for a Sarah Palin lookalike for an adult film to be shot in next 10 days.

Major adult studio.

Please send pix, stats etc. ASAP

Pay: $2000-3000

No anal required

While much ado has been made that the hopeful second-in-command is an attractive woman, isn’t it nice to know that we don’t need to worry our pretty little heads over issues like war, the economy, health care, First Amendment rights, separation of church and state, or destroying the environment?

Our main concerns are about finding somebody who “looks” like the person trying to represent those issues.

There you have it folks. And now for a little interlude titled "The Ballad of Sarah Palin."