From a Left-Wing Loon: An Open Letter

(I was going to send this to the editor at a weekly called the Dayton City Paper, but decided against it.)

To David H. Landon, former Chairman of the Montgomery County Republican central Commitee:

I have a few questions with regards to your column in the Dec. 2nd edition of the Dayton City Paper:

Do you really think that Palin's dismal interviews on ABC, NBC, CNN, Oprah Winfrey's and Sean Hannity's talk shows amount to substance? In case you missed the memo, her "autobiography" was totally ghost-written. I do believe that she read early edits of the book, and that she might even have had someone in her publicity team slice up a few blurbs from national news so she could pretend to know what she was talking about when asked milquetoast questions on national television. But to call her "well spoken" after countless examples that the woman knows little to nothing beyond plattitudes about the country she wants to lead should be very, very frightening for the GOP.

Halfway through your condescending, fact-ignoring assessment, you say "The election of Barack Obama has taught us the hard lesson that substance can be overcome with sizzle." By the virtue of that statement, you think that Obama's whole campaign really did rest on a slogan and that, consequently, the independents who voted for him failed to examine his policies; that the 2000 election was decided on Bush's mastery of the facts when, in fact, he coasted on scaring us into a spending freeze and a constant accusation that the word "liberal" is somehow equivalent of a racial slur.

And what, pray tell, is really so "compelling" about the Barricuda's story? That she was a former beauty runner-up who became mayor of a town of 5,500? That she was able, for half a term, to run a state with the smalles tpopulation in the union while simultaneously pretending to raise five offspring?

Yes, I said "pretending." I watched with absolute disgust as she trotted out her youngest, Trig, to prove that her child with Downs Syndrome made her more a "woman of the people" than anyone else. She used her youngest and eldest children as props, and you cynical bastards in the GOP leadership ate it up.

The best thing Sarah Palin can contribute to the national debate is to force a third-party candidate in the 2012 election and expose just how broken the two-party system really is. She will prove that populism is sometimes sexier than substance, and that a good catch-phrase masking plain stupidity will energize a group of people too easily manipulated to see that they're being had. Maybe, after all of the smoke and mirrors behind her celebrity has faded, all of you angry white men will finally shut up and realize that the President you've been calling "arrogant" in public and "nigger" behind closed doors is actually making the attempt to do something substantive for this country. I'm not naive enough to assume that you'll let him without a fight. But I have enough faith in your intentions to assume that you will eventually stop turning your own party into a tabloid and make it into one that espouses real alternatives rather than insults. Maybe she's the best thing that ever happened to you: maybe she shows the rest of the country just how backwards your tactics really are.

But there's my naiveté again. I assume that the country will start to actually examine what they're being told, rather than believe a slogan on one side and fear-mongering ont he other.