JOE McGINNISS

IF, AFTER THIS, Sarah doesn’t run for president, she’ll be leaving her last vestiges of support–those in the deer stands and duck blinds, as she referred to them today in Iowa–up Moose Creek without a paddle.

I still don’t think she’ll run. She has too much to be afraid of.

I’m not egotistical enough to suggest that the September 20 publication of THE ROGUE enters into her calculation.

I don’t think Sarah gives me or my book a moment’s thought. I know she pays scant attention to bloggers, and no attention whatsoever to chronic commenters on blogs that attack her.

I wish it were otherwise, but the hard truth is that anti-Palin bloggers and commenters–like pro-Palin bloggers and commenters–talk only to each other.

There is a whole big country out there that not only doesn’t care what Palin-centric blogs have to say, but that doesn’t even know they exist.

Sarah Palin, the phenomenon, goes on.

I still don’t think she’ll announce her candidacy, but I also realize it doesn’t matter what I think.

Sarah doesn’t care what I think.

Sarah doesn’t care what you think.

Sarah is as Sarah does.

She is a phenomenon.

I try to explain why in THE ROGUE.

Even if I don’t do it well, the fact remains, as I told Todd last May when he trespassed on to my property: “She’s a phenomenon.”

We can wish it were not so, but it is.

And trashing her in blog comments cannot change that.

Even THE ROGUE cannot change that.

A hurricane is a hurricane, and we can’t wish it away.

I don’t think we’re going to face Hurricane Sarah in 2012, but my opinion makes no difference.

Neither does yours.

I know that’s very anti-“social media,” but it’s a fact.

Not a single comment that anyone makes on anyone’s blog, nor any blog post itself, will make the slightest difference to what happens to our country between now and the presidential election of 2012.

Social media is bread and circuses, fed to the masses to distract them, while the guys and gals in power continue merrily on their ways.

Twitter is electronic masturbation. It might make you feel better temporarily, but onanism is not political action.

Blogging is a cop-out: cheap and easy.

If we want to save our country from the likes of Sarah Palin, we’ll have to take–peacefully–to the streets.

We’ll have to get off our asses and away from our keyboards and our cheap and easy snide remarks and actually do something.

Blog comments are dust in the wind.

Nobody cares what you think.

Few people care what I think, even though I’ve published twelve books.

But millions of Americans care what Sarah Palin thinks.

Is there anything we can do about that?