Steyn on Palin:

So Occam’s Razor leaves us with: Who needs this?

In states far from the national spotlight, politics still attracts normal people. You’re a mayor or a state senator or even the governor, but you lead a normal life. The local media are tough on you, but they know you, they live where you live, they’re tough on the real you, not on some caricature cooked up by a malign alliance of late-night comics who’d never heard of you a week earlier and media grandees supposedly on your own side who pronounce you a “cancer”.

Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it’ll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You’ve got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who’s given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.

Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to – what’s the word? – “empathize”? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you’d have to turn into under that scenario?

National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain) and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss.

And the Left’s gain. They’ve now apparently succeeded in shouting someone right out of politics altogether, for absolutely nothing more than the heinous crime of being a conservative Republican. They will be emboldened by this success; it WILL happen again.

These suggestions look to me to be the right steps for Palin to take, in the unlikely event she wants to seek higher office later on — most particularly this one:

2. Ignore her enemies, both in the MSM and the Dem party, and in the liberal wing of the GOP. Define herself on her own terms. No more chat-fests with the likes of Katy Couric.

That speaks to the heart of why ordinary Americans love her, and to why elitists from both parties hate and fear her. They simply don’t get her, they don’t get America, and they don’t get us.

We’re sick of the Courics and their prim, snooty arrogance, and we’re more than sick of trying to make nice with them, which never works anyway. We’re deeply angry about what’s been done to our country by statists from both sides. And now we’re truly pissed off that a decent and successful state governor has been run out of office by absurd smears; frivolous ethics complaints; personal attacks; outrageous, low assaults against her family; and the kind of trash-bin “journalism” that, had anything remotely like it been hurled at Obama, would have resulted in howls of “racism” from dawn til dusk of every single day.

Palin should do exactly what so many of us were so disappointed in Bush for refusing to: make her case to people who are actually listening, and not to hostile dipshits who are interested only in twisting her words to discredit her personally without ever once honorably engaging her ideas; who do not approach the debate with honest intentions; and who will promote their agenda without regard for decency or integrity. Those people should be ignored, when they’re not being vigorously attacked.

And for the rest of us, attack them we must. We must leave no stone unturned when it comes to Democrat Socialists at every level of government and their bought and paid-for media whores; we should mete out to them, measure for measure, the same vicious vitriol that they hurl at us. We should plow them under, bury them, and salt the earth over their heads. We should go after every last one of them — from Obama on down — not with open hearts and hands, but with clenched fists and hard-hearted ruthlessness.

It will never be enough merely to defeat them; we must destroy them utterly, with every means we can possibly find to use, fair or foul. From here on out, the question should never be: is this polite? Is this decent? Does this make us more like them than we’re comfortable being? Rather, it should be: is this effective? Does it lead us to victory? Does it assure that, when they smear and vilify us, they know there will be a heavy price to pay for it?

The stakes here are way too high to pull our punches in the name of supposedly fighting fair; the stakes are our country, our freedom, and likely enough, our very lives. Anyone who thinks these things not worth fighting hammer and tongs for ought to step aside until the dust settles.

Update! Even as modest and moderate an observer as Glenn says it: “I don’t want to hear any of that dishonest have-you-no-decency posturing from the usual moral poseurs if that happens to somebody they like. They have sown the wind.” Indeed they have. May they soon reap the whirlwind, and may any such disingenuous bleating as may issue forth from them be carried off with it, unheeded and unheard.