There are many things I don’t admire about the governor of Alaska, in fact I can’t think of a single thing I do admire about her, but one thing (or two metaphorical things) I have to be impressed by are her (metaphorical to the extent of my knowledge) balls. Now, chutzpah and stupidity are often difficult to differentiate, and often can be the same thing, which may be the case here.

I don’t know Sarah Palin, so I don’t think I can really say if she’s stupid. There are many different kinds of intelligence, and most people are brilliant with a few things and utterly ignorant with many more. I don’t feel one can effectively judge a person’s intelligence by a television persona. Some bright people are horrible on television, and some bright people cannily develop a dumb persona to their own benefit. Paris Hilton certainly knows exactly what she’s doing.

If Sarah Palin means to play dumb, she’s certainly convincing. Many of us have a special place in our heart for the infamous Katie Couric interview, the one Tina Fey didn’t even have to exaggerate in order to mock. If Sarah Palin’s goals are to help the image of her political party and serve as a role model for young women, she’s a dismal failure. Her strident moronery put even Dan Quayle to shame, as the only figures to best her for idiotic public statements in the last year or so happen to be the only vessels that seem more vacant and plastic on television, beauty pageant contestants. As for her influence on young women, she is a concrete example that you can run something like a state and be a stunt running mate in a presidential election, but she also perpetrates such old negative stereotypes that intelligence is unimportant and undesirable in women.

I don’t think Sarah Palin is as dumb as she loudly portrays herself to be, though, I must cringe to admit. She doesn’t strike me as a person who gives a damn at all about being a role model or a political leader. The rehearsed and over-emphatic tone of feigned indignity she constantly affects suggest a serious sincerity void in every high horse she mounts for the cameras. Sarah Palin ironically likes to aggrandize herself as an Average American all the time, which must be why she leads our largest and least populace state. She paints herself as the alpha American of iconic stature that lives in the mythical heartland despite residing left of the coast. Sorry to harp on that, it is just that Alaska is not a state average Americans settle in to embrace middle America. It is a state vampires settle in to take advantage of the long, dark winters.

Sarah Palin is, however, an exemplary average American in one respect that is more telling of our nation than all the middle Americana fiction she panders to. With our social networking, with our plastering our personal mediocrity on youTube, with all of the twats we tweet on Twitter (just kidding, nobody uses Twitter), and indeed with blogs such as this one, we are a nation of ignorant media whores, and Sarah Palin is about the best of our kind at branding her very person onto a fractured media landscape without any visible qualification to do so.

As such, this makes her a fairly illustrious American. She is the queen of reality stars, and her breakout series was a presidential campaign. Now, she’s doing the post-show parade of keeping herself in the nation’s eye through any nutty shenanigans necessary. Sarah Palin, like a mid-90s rapper, is inflating a complete non-incident and starting beef with David Letterman. For somebody so notoriously bad on television, who got demolished by as much of a softball as Katie Couric, it would seem foolish to take on one of the best broadcasters of his generation. So I would think, but reading this statement it is hard to think there is not some zen brilliance to that trademark Palin dingbattery:

Laughter incited by sexually perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/N.Y. entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands – that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.

I am an over-writer who twists sentences into redundant nonsensical circles through crimes against sub-clauses, but even at my most whiskey addled, I don’t think I could concoct such a fascinating doozy as that one. That’s why she gets the big bucks, while I write a blog. The fact that she has spurred me, despite my tendency to avoid directly addressing politicians, to give her this much digital ink for her silly misbehavior, is a consequence of her genius at celebrityhood. And that is how I write about her, as a celebrity and not a politician. She’s not running for vice president, and her governorship is of at best nominal relevance to the nation at large (you know, those golden middle Americans she strokes so well), but I’ll be damned if she hasn’t remained important in the field of people proudly saying dim things on television (a field that includes more people than the state of Alaska).

It is funny, then, that the role she has chosen for herself is that of the crusader railing against those evil LA/NYC entertainers on behalf of the common man (because, you know, the common man hates movies, television, and music, so fcuk those cities). Sarah Palin is a more crass and media manipulative celebrity than most of the people who actually file their taxes as such, and she just might know that embodying huge contradictions like this is a key to her mystique.

What made me choke on a little bit of vomit here (the “so what” in publicity terms) was her choice of targets. David Letterman, in addition to being a hero of mine, is something that Sarah Palin will never be no matter how much she tries to cram it down her throats. Letterman is a beloved American. Sure, plenty of people don’t care for him, but so many adore and respect him deeply that he has become and remained something increasingly rare in the information age, a cultural institution. Sure, more people watched Jay Leno and his pandering (Palinesque?) populism, but fewer actually paid attention to him. Jay Leno will be remembered fuzzily by millions as a friendly dose of fluff as they went to sleep, whereas Letterman will go down with Carson (and his new competition, Conan O’Brien), as one of the all time greats at what he did.

Politics, which is show business that happens to have ramifications in local, nation and international policy, often gets granted a degree of esteem that entertainment is not. This makes sense when you think of the symbolic relevance of an Obama. Regardless of his actual worth as head of state, he is the most famous person in the world and has indelibly left his mark on the nation. Looking at him, I can see why some might be offended to see politicians thrown into the disposable culture fray with actors, musicians, talk show hosts and inexplicable reality phenoms. Palin, however, fits right in there.

Sarah Palin will go down like Walter Mondale, a limp automatic punchline when the joke calls for a political loser. Or maybe a political celebrity analog to Joan Rivers, with a bit of groundbreaking credentials obscured by years of increasingly desperate and caricatured media grubbing (I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if she popped up on “The Celebrity Apprentice”). Letterman will retire as somebody who transcended being a mere entertainer and helped to shape and mold the culture. Carson is the only person I could consider more influential in the overlapping fields of late night television and American comedy.

Ultimately, though, the difference is spelled out by how classy Letterman has handled this kerfluffle (ironic because it was sparked by jokes he made about A Rod knocking up Palin’s daughter and Palin herself fashioning herself like a slutty flight attendant). As crass as such late night jokes were, Palin has been much more vulgar in her insistence to fan the fires on a larger and larger platform, essentially arguing a point the Supreme Court itself rejected in the landmark Falwell v. Flynt decision. More offensive is her vigorous confidence in the Hitler arguemental flaw (this is where you distract from the weakness of your case by comparing your enemy to a monster). Palin comes awful close to suggesting that David Letterman is a rapist, and clearly thinks this is the ace up her sleeve that keeps on trumping things like common sense.

Letterman, on his end, responded and explained with a non-sensational degree of respect Palin never earned and a degree of sarcastic skepticism that has become his trademark when tolerating the hijinx of insulting, shallow celebrities. His refusal to apologize is indicative of the degree of integrity he has established and maintained over 30 years. Palin, meanwhile, has taken the fifteen minutes or so of fame she has had so far almost like a performance art piece to test the tolerance, stupidity and gullibility of the American public.

Yes, Letterman can often come off as rude, and nearly always as cynical. This is not because, as Palin depicts him, he is a detached New York wise-ass. Letterman comes from Indiana, and he is, deeply, a sincere, middle American wise-ass. The reason he has made such an indent in the talk show world is because he refuses to smile and honor industry pretension. When he eviscerates a vapid celebrity guest or uses his network show to engage in giddy fun instead of empty formality, he is exploiting his heartland pragmatism to protest the insulting, pandering formality of showbiz. He is more an intelligent representative of the average American than Sarah Palin could ever hope to be, and he means much more to his devotees than she does to hers, who mostly cling to her as a celebrity congratulating various strains of irrational hatred.

It is probably pointless to analyze this as any real conflict, anyway. Like manufactured hip hop beef, it is clearly a win-win publicity dervish for both figures. Palin claims to be standing up to protest Letterman and his supposed kind, but she must know how much her media whoring has helped a 16-year-old show facing competition from a brand new, highly publicized line-up headed by his own spiritual heir. If this was really meant to hurt Letterman, why did the publicity bump lead to his first ratings victory over Conan? Palin knows insinuating herself into the fabric of Late Show can be valuable in extending a close to expired cultural shelf life. Just ask Joey Buttafuoco. Difference was, Buttafuoco had class. All Sarah Palin did was run for vice president and lose, something my homegirl Marilyn Chambers did years before.