http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/07/10/notes0710...
Don't go, Sarah Palin! By Mark Morford
A nation turns its lonely eyes to your ditzy insufferable ramblings
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 10, 2009
I know, I know, we all said we were entirely sick to death of you,
Sarah, never wanted to hear another folksy, semi-coherent peep, were
hugely grateful that you had mercifully receded like a perky red tide
back up to the rural bucolic animal-skinned parts of podunk
rusticville from whence you came. I know.
We were all happy to hear you had finally removed all those expensive
designer clothes you so gleefully hoarded from Neimans and charged to
poor ol' grandpa McCain, and had returned to your baggy sweatpants and
"I Heart Bowhunting" glitter sweatshirt, as we all hoped deep in our
hearts to never hear much from you again, even as we all became
instantly annoyed that the media kept insisting on reporting your
every little hiccup and twitch and errant pantyhose episode, even long
after you had left the building.
I know, good Sarah, we said all that. And oh dear God, we meant every
word, too. No lie. We really, really meant it. Like you cannot
believe. Really.
But now, something is amiss. Something feels, how do I say this, a
little bit sad. Now that you've up and quit as America's favorite
hottie milf ditzball politico moose-slashin' anti-choice anti-feminist
destroyer of linear grammar, we feel adrift and lost, a nation without
its favorite squeaky purple balloon.
Look, we all knew you were slightly weird, offbeat, entirely
unqualified and unprepared for The Show, that you were obviously in
way, way over your head as VP nom, your cutesy mannerisms and childish
winking merely a mask for the fact that you thought the Sunnis and
Shiites were some weird European soccer teams and domestic torture
meant not eating cupcakes for a solid month and foreign policy was
waving to Vladimir Putin from your back deck.
This all was, of course, merely part of your crazy allure, merely what
the GOP base still adores about you -- the fact that you are, without
doubt, just as uninformed and generally ignorant of global and social
complexity as they are. The fact that you had so captivated a nation's
imagination had zero to do with your governing abilities or political
insights, and everything to do with the fact that no one could quite
understand how the hell you made it up on that stage in the first
place.
But no one ever imagined you'd just up and quit, just give up like
that, the pressure and the scrutiny and the financial woes from all
those probes into your various ethics violations and your adorable
cartoon family proving to be too much for your quirky, hollow
sensibilities.
No one ever imagined you'd step up to the mike and deliver one of the
most barely coherent, side-steppin', nonsensical,
what-the-hell-is-she-talking-about resignation speeches of all time,
leaving your role as the right wing's most unlikely taste sensation to
... well, no one knows exactly who. Michele Bachmann? Trust me, Sarah,
that flat-out nutbucket can't hold a candle to your winkin', smirkin',
carefully manicured caricature of a smart female. Her ignorance and
homophobia are far too literal and obvious. You were so much more fun,
largely because no one can really understand a single word you say.
So now, we take it all back. I know, it's a bit humiliating to admit,
but the nation needs you, Sarah.
Or, more specifically, liberals and Democrats need you, given the
simply spectacular job you've done of helping drag the Republican
party, if not further to the extremist nutball right, certainly much
further down the ladder of intelligence, respect and viability, than
even Bush could've dreamed. As long as you're serving as the GOP's
hood ornament, and as long as Rush and O'Reilly and Glenn Beck are
behind the wheel, the Republican party has not a single prayer of
relevance and capability in the next two decades.
And what of your rumored 2012 presidential ambitions? I know I, for
one, was seriously looking forward to your debates with President
Obama. I was looking forward to hearing you try to pronounce
Ahmadinejad's name, or locate France on a map, or explain what you'd
do to fix health care ("free rifles for all schoolchildren" doesn't
really count). I was eager to watch Obama struggle not to roll his
eyes or chuckle softly or quietly pine for the good old days of his
debates with Hillary, a woman of such fiery political intelligence she
makes you look like Miley Cyrus trying to read Shakespeare. So cute!
You know, for the longest time, Sarah, I and millions of liberals like
me have dreamed that the truth would finally come out about many
leading members in the savage, homophobic right-wing party, that we'd
finally hear about, say, Rush Limbaugh's massive kiddie porn
collection, or Bill O'Reilly's sex tapes with numerous gay
prostitutes, or Newt Gingrich's multiple wives. Oh wait.
But then I thought, why? What's the point of that? Just more obvious
hypocrisy? More of the same? Nothing ever changes anyway. It's not
like another gay sex scandal or drug addiction or adulterous affair by
some God-loving hypocrite ever serves to make the Right understand the
nature of its own narrow-mindedness, and move to upend its uninformed
ways. Hell, Jesus himself could return tomorrow on a firestorm of
revelation and point at the megachurches of the nation and shake his
head and say, "No no no, you're doing it all wrong."
Do you know what would happen, Sarah? Of course you don't. I lost you
eight paragraphs ago when I wrote all those polysyllabic words. It's
OK.
Nothing, Sarah. That's what would happen. Nothing at all. The right
would simply ignore or even shun Jesus, call him a fraud, claim he
must've been brainwashed by Satan somewhere on his big elevator ride
down, would lock him up and call him a hippie and pretend they never
saw him, then go right on hating gays and demeaning women and calling
Obama a commie fascist.
In other words, Sarah, the best the left can hope for is for the
right's most extremist, silly or otherwise unhinged figureheads --
that's you, Sarah! -- to keep doing exactly what they're doing,
shoving out the moderate voices of their own party in favor of wacky
fanaticism and raging on about homosexuals and abortion and God, thus
locking in Obama's second term and further guaranteeing their own
delightful irrelevance.
Do you see, Sarah? We need you here, to keep doing your fine and
upstanding and nonsensical work, keep making the right the adorable
laughingstock of the world it has so very become.
Look, here's my Platinum Amex. Go nuts at Bloomingdale's. I won't tell
anyone where you got those Gucci riding boots, promise. Come back
soon, K?