Kate Gosselin and her poor kids were the very special guests on Sarah Palin’s Alaska last night. (Unlike Sister Wives, TLC has actually put SP’s Alaska on iTunes, so props to them for that.) As we’ve heard from the leaked previews, the show has Kate Gosselin at her finest. Kate and her kids and the outdoorsy Palin family all went on a camping trip in a national forest only reachable by plane. The details we were privy to did not do justice to what an intolerant, entitled bitch Kate Gosselin was. She complained the whole time while her kids seemed to be enjoying themselves, leaving before they had a chance to camp out as planned. This show made Sarah Palin seem somewhat normal, albeit affected and annoying, especially in comparison to Kate and her complete inability to focus on anything beyond her immediate needs, particularly her kids.

First we saw Kate and Sarah bond over their shared media issues and how they’ve both been the target of the media. When they went to “bear class,” things started to go south. Kate was negative, pessimistic and bored during their bear awareness class, which included an education section followed by some target shooting. Kate couldn’t be bothered with any of it, and that was the case when it came to camping out. Everything was set up ahead of time and ready for her, including a fire, but she stood grumbling under the tarmac instead of joining in with her kids and the Palins, who were having a great time. Entertainment Weekly has a very good recap. Some of EW’s recap is below, with more at the source:

As Sarah’s father said later of Kate, “She bitched from the moment she got off the plane.” The morning of the camp-out, it began to rain. “I’ve never camped for real,” said Kate, gazing at the damp camp site that had been chosen. “You really like this?” she asked Palin. Sarah maintained high spirits in direct proportion to Kate’s plummeting spirits. “We’ll stoke the fire and stoke some fun!” Palin crowed, bustling around with Piper, daughter Willow, and many of the Gosselin children gathering sticks and chunks of wood.

Kate, however, left her brood to the care of Sarah and Palin’s dad. (Husband Todd, wise man that he is, very noticeably went off to fish somewhere where he would not be able to hear Kate’s lamentations.) Kate jammed her hands in her poncho pockets, parked herself under a small open canopy that had been built for minimal rain protection, and started to complain.

“I’m worried about my toes; they’re freezing,” she said.

“I’ve been bitten [by bugs] about 200 times — it’s horrible,” she moaned.

“I’m miserable, but somebody‘s gotta be,” she said nonsensically.

“This is cruel and unusual punishment,” she whined.

When Palin and her daughters helped all the little Gosselins make s’mores over the camp fire, Kate declined to join them. Instead, seeing some gooey marshmallow land on a few sleeves, she went into a temper-tantrum fury.

“This is ridiculous!” she shrieked. “I just don’t get it! There are no paper towels! I’m freezing to the bone, I have 19 layers on, my hands are frigid!”

Kate issued an ultimatum: “I held it together as long as I could, and I’m done now.”

And she told the kids they were not going to camp out overnight as planned; they were heading back home. Their little faces fell. They hesitated and expressed little chirps of protest, saying they wanted to stay.

Kate was cruelly decisive: “Okay, goodbye. You’re now a Palin, not a Gosselin,” she said. Faced with a camp-out versus a loss of identity, the wee ones followed their mom onto a waiting plane to escape Alaska. Cut to an appalled-seeming Piper, who no longer looked as though she was a fan of Kate’s. Palin and her family remained, and spent the night in tents.
Palin said she regretted only that the Gosselin children missed out on the camp-out, a “good experience they never would have forgotten.”

I honestly cannot imagine what goes through Kate Gosselin’s head these days. Why does she voluntarily place herself in situations in which she knows she’ll end up in a foul mood, and then not even try, even if only for the selfish reason of improving her media image, to be minimally pleasant? Since every one of Kate’s complaints was made directly to the camera, no one can even claim that the producers of Sarah Palin’s Alaska somehow edited the footage to make Gosselin look bad.

She did that all on her own.

[From Entertainment Weekly]

I was actually starting to feel sorry for miserable Kate until she made a really nasty and unnecessary remark to Sarah’s youngest daughter Piper. She confronted the nine year old girl and asked “Is this what you guys do here? This is fun for you? It’s very interesting.”

Other price quotes from Kate include:
“It kills me that people, like, willingly do this. [camp outdoors] I can’t get over it. I mean, that is so shocking to me.”

“We are not camping people, I’ll scream it from mountaintops. This is ridiculous. Why would you pretend to be homeless? I don’t get it, I just don’t get the concept.

“There’s no paper towels, like how do you make sandwiches for eight kids on your arm? I don’t see a table, I don’t see utensils, I don’t see hand cleansing materials.

“This is not ideal conditions. I am freezing to the bone, I have 19 layers on. My hands are frigid. I held it together as long as I could and I’m done now.”

Kate’s kids didn’t seem to mind sleeping out in the woods, in fact several of them told her they wanted to stay. That didn’t happen of course. It’s all about Kate and how comfortable and catered to she is. It doesn’t matter if her kids are having fun making s’mores and camping, she can’t be bothered. I’m surprised she didn’t bring her bodyguard with her.