I used to be one of your biggest detractors, I used to hate you. I said you were not only stupid, but proudly ignorant. I said the fact that you were nominated for Vice President was a stain on the office previously held by the unapologetic torturer Dick Cheney. I even wrote an editorial in my school newspaper in which I called you a "bimbo." Boy was I wrong. You’re not stupid at all, you’re crafty, cunning and utterly without shame. I pray to whatever gods there are that you don’t become the face of the Republican Party, because we Democrats are going to be in serious trouble if you start calling the shots.
First of all, bravo, just brav-f’ing-o on you forcing David Letterman to crawl on his hands and knees on late night television to apologize for a joke you know full well wasn’t in the least bit outrageous. No one thought Letterman was talking about a MLB player committing statutory rape with your 14 year old, but you latched onto the idea and force fed it down the throats of the news cycle for a week. A week! There were stories about it on every news program I watched all last week! You had prime time interviews to discuss it! When they shot 3 cops in Pittsburgh there wasn’t nearly as sustained a media outcry but you got it over a joke made by a late night comedian! Well done!
And my lord did you milk it. This wasn’t just a joke about statutory rape, no sir. This was an affront on ALL WOMEN IN AMERICA. That’s right; this was the liberal, late night media taking shots at the dignity of women. A dignity you’ve always been quick to uphold through your stalwart efforts to turn women into sexual stereotypes during the vice presidential debate (I’d post the picture for reference, but I really have no desire to give myself acid reflux). Truly, taking the one real opportunity you had to show that a woman politician can go toe to toe with the political heavy weight Joe Biden and you turn to sex appeal and flirtation to win it for you. As my friend would say, "that’s classy with a capital K." But your ardent defense of female dignity certainly doesn’t stop there. You’ve been quick to make your daughter uphold that dignity when you paraded her and her boyfriend in front of the national media and turned the ordeal of teen-pregnancy for your own flesh and blood into some sort of political bonus for you. And you weren’t done with her, oh no, she still had political points to win for you. That’s why you furthered the dignity of women when you made that same daughter go around the country promoting ABSTINENCE ONLY SEX EDUCATION AS EFFECTIVE. Instead of taking your daughter’s experience and use it as a teachable moment about the efficacy of abstinence as a doctrine and the cost such ignorance can put on women, especially young women, you instead use it to score more conservative political points at the expense of your daughter. Oh yes Sarah, you truly are the champion of women’s dignity.
But your accepting of Letterman’s apology, well, I stand in awe. You accept it (though once again you say it was a joke about sexually exploiting young girls, which it clearly was not), but -and this is what was so galling it almost gave me a stroke – you turn it into a chance to use the apology to explain how "And this is all thanks to our U.S. Military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's Right to Free Speech." Wow, just wow Sarah. The sheer opportunism of that makes Karl Rove look like a penitent monk. You take a manufactured outrage over a bad joke and you turn it into a way to show how much you love the troops. That’s just ballsy. Oh, I’m sorry, is "ballsy" too sexist? I know how sensitive you are to women not being accorded the proper respect. My apologies. But taking something you manufactured and then, once you had milked all the political points from it you could, still tacking on a trite message about supporting our troops and loving the constitution right at the end for maximum exploitation of the spotlight you were given shows a level of opportunistic schiesterism I haven’t seen in my entire time following politics.
So Sarah, congratulations on proving me wrong. You are a canny politician, an evil harridan perhaps, but clever and resourceful and oh so cunning. I mistook an utter lack of shame and good taste as a lack of intelligence, but boy, have you made me look foolish. I promise not to underestimate you like that a second time.