Dear Fruitbat,

            Sorry, Sarah Palin. Just kidding. You are not a fruitbat. You cannot, for example, echolocate guavas, I'm betting. Although I don't know you, and I could be wrong. Perhaps that's a requirement to become governor of Alaska.

            You are, however--and please, don't bother to deny this; it would just cheapen this moment for both of us--crazier than several shithouses full of rats. Based on what I know of your politicians up there--Hi, Ted Stevens!--I'm pretty sure that is a requirement to hold office in Alaska.

            While we are waiting for the next turn of the news cycle, and the other moose-hunting boot to drop, I thought we might perhaps explore your appeal to the right wing, and why we in the center and the left find you...well, just so fucking appallingly intriguing, despite your being beyond loony-licious. (On that other hunting boot: my sources--which are always wrong, but always entertaining, and mostly consist of the voices in my head--inform me that you are planning to have yourself frozen, hoping to wake sometime in the distant future when the Republicans again have a shot at winning the White House, perhaps when Morlocks have been given the vote.) (Here's a hint: don't trust your kids to defrost you. Fucking kids never remember to take stuff out of the freezer.) Believe me, trying to figure out why you appeal to people will take an effort of imagination on my part that just might unmoor my poor little head from my neck. Ever see Scanners, Sarah Palin? Like that.

            Since you are a superficial twit, let’s start with attractiveness. Much was made of your attractiveness by the media, back when John McCain, whom we shall refer to hereinafter by his Secret Service codename, Fossil One, chose you to be his vice-presidential running mate. I must tell you, Sarah Palin, I don't see it. While you are physically attractive, it is true, it seems to me that there is something…missing in you, and that, furthermore, you have more than a little whiff of unformed plastic about you, like a Barbie that has been left in the oven. (My kids were not careful with their toys.) No, Sarah Palin, I am not suggesting that you have had plastic surgery. I am suggesting that you are a soulless revenant from Hell.

            Just kidding. You are from Alaska, not Hell. You must admit, though, for someone who prefers an urban environment, it's an easy mistake to make. And, in my own defense, you are a soulless revenant.

            I suspect that much of the rabid right-wing resembles the guy whom we used to imagine everyone on the Internet to be (and we've all seen this picture): obese, disdainful of personal hygiene, angry (at "the blacks" and "the gays" and "the Feminazis" and, as Marlon Brando's character in The Wild Ones put it in another context, "Whattaya got?") and, above all, home alone and naked. You are these guys' pinup. You are the Betty Grable, the Betty Page (why are all pinups from the 20th century named Betty?), the Farrah Fawcett (except her) of the Internet age. You distill all the qualities that these men think womanly into a single person: physically attractive, vapid, and really kind of a bitch. (These guys think all women are bitches; you are their all-woman, and confirm that for them.) Congratulations, Sarah Palin. At any given moment, you are the mental fucktoy of half a million physically-repulsive emotionally-retarded specimens of  masculinity, many of whom have breasts larger than yours. This spunk's for you.

            Part of your loony charm for the right is, I suspect, your misappropriation of feminism. First you claim the mantle of women's empowerment, describing yourself as a "pit bull in lipstick." (There's an image that made me throw up a little in my mouth, but onward.) Then, whenever anyone was the least bit--shall we say, critical?--of your record or your views or your only-distant acquaintance with reality, you pouted and claimed that they were attacking you because you were a woman. Nicely done, Sarah Palin. You have managed to seem both self-aggrandizing and self-pitying at one and the same time. And by claiming that the media attacked you because you are a woman--and not, say, oh, let's see, because you're an idiot and out of your fucking bazoo--you have managed to taint by association a movement that has done astonishingly great good for half the population. (Not to mention that no one attacked you; the media, for once, did their jobs by reporting on you, which, admittedly, might have seemed to you like an attack.) Since you, as right-wing whackaloons do, despise the feminist movement, you've simultaneously damaged, however slightly, a movement you hate and further ingratiated yourself with the other right-wing whackaloons, guaranteeing the votes of that 15% of the population who watch Fox News, or at least the 7.5% who watch Fox News and vote. Actually, I suspect we're down to 3% if we only count those who watch Fox News, vote and read well enough to distinguish your name from that of, say, Sheldon the Wonder Horse. (Run, Sheldon, run. Confuse the Palin base.) (Also, you're a horse; running is what horses do, is it not?)

            But the right has no corner on the Palin-fascination market, Sarah Palin. As evidenced by the cover of Salon since last Friday, we inhabitants of the planet Earth are also intrigued by you, though more in an oh-fuck-what-if-she-actually-wins kind of way than a wow-what-a-strong-independent-thinker kind of way, except perhaps for a few of us with railroad spikes through our skull. (You can survive that, but it does make you cranky and little erratic.) (That’s erratic, not erotic, for those of you preparing to stop by the hardware store to pick up some spikes and a 16-pound hammer.) Presumably, this apprehension derives from the success of the last numbnuts governor of a red state who we thought had no chance to be President, but who was nonetheless elected by the Supreme Court his daddy had put together for him one Christmas morning. The problem for you, Sarah Palin, is that that very numbnuts red-state governor fucked everything up,  thus fucking everything up for you. Now that I have to cash in my 401K to buy a bucket of Original Recipe and ever since the author of Buy It, Fix It, Sell It! retitled his magnum opus Buy It, Fix It, Burn It To the Ground For the Insurance! (apparently the fixing it part is optional now), incompetence doesn’t look so great, even to the incompetent. Bad news for you, Sarah Palin: people don’t want a President they can have a beer with—not that I ever did, because I have friends to have beers with, unlike, say, your supporters--people want a President who knows when Alan Greenspan is having a brainfart because he is A) like 700 years old and 2) not as smart as some people, notably he himself, think he is. Worse news for you: you can’t convince an unemployed auto worker--even one who voted for that other numbnuts governor--that you will revitalize the car industry by lowering taxes on stock investors. My one worry is that Obama will fix the economy before the next election, allowing the electorate to once again focus on issues of importance like which of the two candidates looks best in a pair of heels. Sure, you’d win that, Sarah Palin and Tall, but Barack might give you a race for your money. And for mine.

            In closing, Sarah Palin, I wish you and your family the best of futures in the private sector. As a staunch believer in private enterprise, you are no doubt eager to leave the world of government behind, and leave it to people for whom banal notions of competence and integrity trump, in the words of a long-ago band, hairdos and attitudes, at both of which you, admittedly, excel. I applaud you for this, Sarah Palin; go proudly onward to your book deals and speaking tours, your business ventures and moose-hunting trips. I have no doubt that government and politics—for which, we can have no doubt, you are way too good--have seen the last of you.

Yours In Credulity,

Floyd Elliot