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.

An Unlikely catalyst to a Three-Party System

Boys! Girls! Friends! Lovers!

Before you read on, you should watch some of this. Otherwise everything written after this point will just seem like run-of-the-mill Sarah bashing. As it is I think her new book does enough to bolster the Barracuda's ego. there was a crazed media frenzy surrounding the release of this book-- ghost-written, of course, and light on policy, heavy on colloquialisms, and riddled, I hear, with just a touch of self-aggrandizement.

Of course, you should watch this video and notice something: this woman-- who wants to be President, and whose crazy right-wing nut-job fantatical supporters are busy circulating ad campaigns to sell her book and, consequently, build momentum for the run (or at least a long set of fundraising events)-- seem not to remember this interview when they hoist her up. I have heard tons and tons of people bemoan that this interview is edited badly; that the edits we saw on national television were too simplistic and failed to show us the "real sarah" because of this bogeyman left wing liberal media bias. Well, to those of you who say that, I invite you to do what Palin never did while accusing Obama of "palling around with terrorists" or any of the other silly lies she parroted during the campaign, I challenge you to actually watch any of this man's speeches and tell me you can't find anything that, while inflammatory, is also undeniably correct.

If anyone puts her on the ballot, the Republicans get exactly what they deserve: a long, slow, painful re-alignment.