At first I wasn't sure whether to put this in the Love thread or the Frustration thread, but after some due consideration I think it belongs here. Sarah Palin is quitting the governorship shortly, so I figured I'd offer some parting thoughts.
Sarah Palin made me angry. I found her candidacy offensive. It was an insult to the intelligence of the American people. Her problem is that she is a living caricature. All those spoofs of conservatism, all those mockeries and hyperboles...suddenly Sarah Palin came along and they all turned out to be exactly true. It was horrifying, disgusting, and insulting. Everybody gives Tina Fey credit for her Palin impersonation last year, but all she really did was play the role straight. Sarah Palin is a caricature, a caricature, and yet she's dead serious. That's what made me angry.
She is the logical culmination of conservative anti-intellectualism: a non-thinker, blind to reality, who can't govern and doesn't even want to, with beliefs that are frankly crazy. In an enlightened world or even a merely responsible one, she would never get within a moon's length of the Alaskan political stage--let alone the national stage. Yet there she was last year, potentially a heartbeat away from the highest office in the world. She got to where she was because the Republican base loves her, absolutely loves her. They love everything she claims to stand for. She is the pinnacle of their ideology. Those terrifying, awful people are the ones responsible for taking conservatism into a world so bizarre that Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino may as well retire.
She is not just Sarah Palin. She is the symbol of what American conservatism has become. Decay, depravity, deceit...despicable. So long as a majority of the Republican base are ready to swear their allegiance to her and others like her, the GOP will remain a force of unqualified evil in this nation and the world.