The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin! Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle, can’t the liberals talk about anything else?

I have lots of liberal friends – living in Madison, I’d be awfully lonely if I didn’t! – and they are consumed by the mystery of Sarah Palin.

It’s like Ann Coulter put it: “People who hate her guts feel she's really let them down by resigning… She's like the ex-girlfriend they're SO over, never want to see again, have already forgotten about -- really, it's O-ver -- but they just can't stop talking about her.”

I cannot convince my friends that I don’t care. I was not happy when John McCain chose her as his running mate, and I think the election results bore out my fear that she brought nothing much to the ticket.

So: Bye now. See ya. Maybe she’ll be back, maybe she won’t. How ‘bout them Brewers?

But my liberal friends can’t let go.

“What do you think about Sarah Palin?” asks Marie, forgetting that this is the third time she’s asked me that question.

“Don’t care,” I reply.

“I’ve got this friend,” Marie continues, undeterred by my pointed display of disinterest, “and she’s REALLY conservative. Always votes Republican. But she voted for Obama because she hates Sarah Palin!”

“You want a gin and tonic?” I say.

My friend Richard is even worse. First he e-mails me an article in which some left-wing conspiracy nut parses Palin’s resignation speech like a voodoo priestess studying the entrails of a goat, then decides: She’ll be back.

When, out of boredom, I fail to respond, he e-mails: “Is there any truth to the rumor that ‘Alaska’ is really an alias for ‘Argentina’?” trying to link Palin to South Carolina’s can’t-keep-it-in-his-pants Gov. Mark Sanford.
“Really, Richard, your hatred of Sarah Palin is starting to sound a little misogynistic. What did she ever do to you?” I e-mail back.

Well, I should have kept my finger off the ‘send’ button because that triggers Richard to send me two more e-mails, in which he goes on at lawyerly lengths to explain that he doesn’t hate Palin, he just thinks she’s a hypocrite because she preached family values while abandoning her own family to hit the campaign trail…

Yadda yadda yadda. Whatever. Have you seen “Public Enemies” yet?
The worst of all is Barry, who is SO liberal, he thinks Obama is being “forced” to govern from “the center.” (Fortunately for us, Barry never votes, but he doesn’t know that I know that.)

Barry, who also insists he doesn’t hate Palin, goes on and on – over the course of 13 lengthy e-mails – about what a “total flake” she is.
And then he says: “She deserves everything she gets from the media.”

Alas, Barry knows how to push my buttons.

Because no matter how much I don’t want to talk about Sarah Palin, there is one thing I know for sure: NOBODY deserves the treatment Palin has gotten from the press.

Take Anne Lamott – please! Lamott is a columnist for the online Salon magazine. Last fall, she called the McCain-Palin ticket “obscene.”
McCain and Palin are people “whose values we loathe and despise – lying, rageful and incompetent, so dangerous to children and old people, to innocent people in every part of the world.”

She called them “smug egomaniacs” and “morally repellent.” God hates them, she declared, adding that Palin “takes such pride in her ignorance, doesn’t have a doubt in the world about her messianic calling, that it makes anyone of decency fee nauseated – spiritually, emotionally and physically ill.”

Or take Canadian writer Heather Mallick. In the British newspaper The Guardian, Mallick called Palin a fraud, a hick and a liar. Alaska, she wrote, “is the back of beyond… a frontier state full of drunks and crazy people,” “our redneck cousin” and “the end of the line.”

Then, she got worse: Writing for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s web site, she called Republicans “white trash,” “hillbillies” and said GOP men are “sexual inadequates.” (Which begs the question: How does she know?)

Palin looks like a “porn star” and is “vicious and profoundly dishonest.” Rural Americans vote Republican “to give themselves the only self-esteem available to their broken, economically abused existence.”

I repeat: Palin does not deserve such treatment. Nobody does. Chelsea Clinton certainly didn’t deserve it back in 1996, when McCain joked that the reason Chelsea was so “ugly” was because her father was Janet Reno.
Shame on whoever wrote that joke. Shame on McCain for telling it.

Among conservative flamethrowers, the aforementioned Coulter is easily a match for Mallick and Lamott on the Richter Scale of rudeness. But at least she keeps getting fired by editors who refuse to allow her garbage to appear in print.

For instance, Coulter lost her gig covering the 2004 Democratic National Convention for USA Today when she submitted a column that began “Here at the Spawn of Satan convention in Boston...” and called Democratic women “corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons.”

She has also been axed or spiked by editors at MSNBC, the National Review Online, and various U.S. newspaper editors. Mallick, Lamott and others of their ilk deserve the same treatment.

This is not a call for censorship, any more than it is censorship when I refuse to allow my teenage daughter to leave the house dressed like Britney Spears. Nor is it a call for political correctness. I just want some maturity and self-control.

People who consider themselves professionals should behave like grown-ups. On-line publications, despite the ephemeral here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of the medium, should stop acting like electronic emesis bowls.

And so should comedians like David Letterman.


I thought both liberals and conservatives could agree that teenage pregnancy is a national tragedy. So why is it OK to make jokes about Bristol Palin's pregnancy?

And why do my liberal friends insist that Bristol Palin a hypocrite for speaking out against teen pregnancy? There's a big difference between hypocrisy and the voice of bitter experience. If Bristol gets knocked up AGAIN, then she will be a hypocrite. Right now, she's just a young girl who made a mistake and is paying for it.

Finally, as much as I don’t care about Sarah Palin, I care even less about the argument that the First Amendment gives people the “right” to make crude or cruel or hateful remarks that are going to be fodder for public consumption. So what if it does? That doesn’t make it right.

You want to tell a rude joke to your friend? Go ahead. In fact, tell it to me: I love rude jokes.

But when you post it on a web site, or tell it in a public speech, or write it in a column for publication, shame on you. You’ve done nothing to contribute to civilized discourse.

There. I feel better now. What were we talking about before, anyway? Anything but Sarah Palin.

-July 16, 2009

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