A reprinting of my 2010 Valentine to the Queen of Mean.
Originally Published at The Huffington Post, February 14th, 2010
Hi Sarah! Happy Valentine’s Day.
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I thought I really ought to be send you a Valentine’s Day greeting today, because I fear that next year you will be forgotten by all but your most rabid and demented fans. The more we learn about you, the less impressed (and more shocked and often nauseated) we are, the more we harden our suspicion that you really ARE an empty vessel, a vacuous, amoral small-town grifter with an eye for nothing beyond the main chance, the next pay-day and the next photo-op. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant, and they’re not wrong. But for you, the one most sorely in need of disinfecting, sunlight has the same effect it does on vampires. It eats away at you little by little, rotting you until nothing is left. The next time I address you it won’t be in the form of a Valentine’s Day greeting — it’ll be an anti-panegyric preached over the coffin of your political ambitions.
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I will miss you when you’re gone. Your entertainment-value quotient is off the charts, especially for “over educated”, cultural-elitist snobs like me. There’s the maddening little sing-song delivery of your speeches, with those weird, unmotivated upticks and misplaced emphases that suggest you are literally reading “your own words” for the very first time. For anyone who appreciates real oratorical skills, like those of Churchill, MLK or Pliny the Elder (you can google all these names, sweetie), it’s like having knitting-needles kicked into one’s ears over and over again. There’s your matchless ability to grind grammar and syntax into a non-intelligible word-pulp containing the odd sharp, indigestible fragment of John Birch (“Bomb Iran!”) or Jesus-Freak (“More Divine Intervention!”) insanity, the frequent cheap slurs against your political enemies — who, I can’t help noticing, are sprouting up even in the madder precincts at your own end of the political spectrum — and the usual genuflections towards Boy Jesus and Saint Ronnie (who I bet wouldn’t touch your ass with a forty-foot pole). And then there’s your sorry history of climbing towards the top over the corpses of the people who helped get you into office in the first place.
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It’s like a pathology you can’t seem to conquer. I don’t think there’s a step you’ve taken on your long (albeit short) march to infamy that hasn’t featured the wholesale betrayal of the most recent tier of your erstwhile political mentors — the corpses of the disgruntled and thrown-over now surely make up a substantial percentage of the Alaskan electorate. No wonder you quit your job.– the corpses of the disgruntled and throw-over now surely make up a substantial percentage of the Alaskan electorate. No wonder you quit your job.
