Decent Thing For Palin To Do Would Be To Retire From Politics

By Manifesto Joe

No, she didn't shoot anything, at least nothing with any more civil rights than a moose has.

But last year she had a map of 20 congressional districts with "crosshairs" over them, and one of them was the district of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., now recovering from being gravely wounded by a gunman.

It was already quite evident that Sarah Palin is just too f***ing stupid to be a presidential contender. She was too stupid to have been governor of Alaska, or even the mayor of a town. I considered Il Doofus perhaps the dumbest SOB who ever held the highest office in the land, but even he looks substantially brighter than Klondike Cutie.

I've held off for a few days on posting anything on the Saturday shooting in Tuscon, for a variety of reasons. It's hard to know what to say about a hideous event like this, so I thought it would be good to just let the facts unfold for a few days before commenting.

I have enough of a political bias to admit that I'd anticipated that the suspect would be some sort of Tea Party poster boy. He's pathologically anti-government, but his political profile is like, all over the place. Like some other nut cases I've run across in my time, the suspect apparently could be a Marxist one minute and a Nazi the next.

One thing that's clear, though, is that he was attracted to extremes, and to violence. Although the far right certainly has no patent on extremism, they've cornered the market on it in contemporary America. Just listen to AM radio on any given afternoon.

And politicians like Sarah Palin have been shameless demagogues, ruthlessly exploiting ignorant bigots for their own gain. There have been many offenders, but Palin has been the most high-profile of them, raking in big bucks while cynically promoting herself to Tea Partiers with overactive prostate glands.

With the blood of a federal judge, and nearly that of a once-promising young member of Congress, at hand -- no, not directly on HER hands, but -- I'd still say that in view of Palin's violent rhetoric, it would be proper penance if she would simply go home to Wasilla and stay there.

We've seen a bit too much of this kind of behavior in recent years in America, and much of it was during the midterm election campaign. Giffords was on Palin's "hit list," and she was the target of death threats, vandalism and harassment. Elsewhere, in Kentucky, we saw a Rand Paul supporter stomp on the head of an opposition activist, giving her a concussion. And then, the stupid SOB wanted HER to apologize to him.

Enough with the brown-shirt act. For one thing, the right doesn't have a monopoly on that -- they just have been producing the most obvious examples of it. Other people are quite able to fight back, but they may have a lingering fantasy that there is still a process of civil debate alive in the U.S.

Sarah Palin is the one politician I can think of who has consistently gone beyond the boundaries of any civility. If there's going to be a Judas goat in this thing, she looks like the obvious one.

Go home, Sarah, and stay there.

For one thing, you're far too ignorant to have come this far in life. I have seen one person before who used the word "ravished" instead of "ravaged," like you did in an e-mail or tweet or some such thing to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindall during the oil-spill crisis.

But that person wasn't potentially running for president. The guy I think of who actually did that (at a newspaper I worked for in 1979) was a penis-headed ad salesman who drove a 1960s Volkswagen "bug." It almost got in the paper as a banner Page One headline. ("Storm ravishes county") I had been out all day, and then in the newsroom, writing about storm damage. Then, just before they sent the page, I saw that. It didn't surprise me to have to correct him -- but he clearly couldn't even run his own desk, let alone a small state.

Go home, Sarah. And stay there. You are just too goddamned dumb to be in this arena.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.