Sarah Palin doesn't play in Bethlehem

Sarah Palin failed to visit Bethlehem during her visit to Israel. She drove to a checkpoint, then turned around.

William Butler Yeats wrote of visitors to Bethlehem, years ago:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Politico has a story about Palin's spin on her failure to enter Bethlehem, but the Guardian article, linked above, states: "Tourists need to carry passports to cross checkpoints into the occupied Palestinian territory ... ." Bethlehem is not part of Israel.

It is not Sarah Palin's hour.