A heartbeat away from the Presidency if McCain should win is a woman who is mostly a shameless thief; her instincts are a bandit’s and her loyalties are a mobster’s.

She deliberately destroyed the world’s largest sockeye fishery for no better purpose than the profit margins of some Goddamn mining consortium; she likes to pretend that she’s a loyal Christian but she’s got that same evangelical fixation on her own petty, ridiculous issues - treating a pipeline like an object of saintly veneration, conscripting children (who Jesus of course admires more than anything, so long as they’re white) to pray with her (TV cameras rolling - Heaven forbid we not be noticed in our piety, good Philistines we are) for a fucking pipeline.

I like to say pat things about the terrible mick fuckers who squint on their million-dollar TV programs to convince the audience they’re extra special pious, but they at least have a concept of piety divorced even conceptually from their own bottom line. Palin literally believes God is smiling on her petty graft.

In the course of doing so, of course, she scammed money from the government. The gesture means more than the amount - $600 would seem pathetic to someone like her - after all, she doesn’t share the daily difficulties of the working class, and for her $600 is not a month’s rent but pocket change to be spent on a flight and a lunch; she’s stolen much larger amounts, but they all follow the same basic logic.

She has a basically fascist concept of society - it doesn’t seem at all out of place for her to requisition money to pray for a pipeline in public, nor to spend $400,000 campaigning against common sense or campaign actively against her own government on the basis of its incoherence with her private worldview. She’s been doing it since she was a small-time operative; before she became a fearless Duce for Alaska, she played the same role in Wasilla, waging a D’Annunzian war against a local librarian whose insufficient zeal for censoring moral turpitude revealed too little support for the mayor - in her own words.

Her speeches since she became nationally prominent have all been great fulminations against civil society - grand proclamations of the uselessness of community organizing, the inefficacy of private society and the transcendent beauty of the state. Small wonder she has an Objectivist fan-club devoted to scouring every black mark on her character from the public record - no human being has been as shameless about their political bankruptcy since Rand sang and danced for fascist Italy. She has no concept of power unless it be divorced from the power of life and death; no concept of good unless it be enslaved to the crusade against evil; and nothing but contempt for any people decadent enough to refuse any power to their rightful Leaders.

This is not just another rant about the inexplicable rise of the Basileus of Wasilla, however hilariously it lays bare a truth about the American right too terrible to explain directly. Her fascism - and here the word is so literal I actually feel ashamed for using it on people who simply exhibited surreal enthusiasm for power rather than openly worshipping it - is not so much a governing principle as a malignant worldview, a festering, evil rotting of the soul. Like any other aspiring autocrat, she has no power over the demoniac pull of her ink-black spiritual abyss - she simply feels its compelling claw, understands beyond understanding that eternal urge to triumph through faith.

No: the one thing Palin can understand, the one emotion she can be counted on to exhibit, is contempt for things outside of her domain. Like the nearly erotic terror the idea of art and culture divorced from tradition aroused in the Nazis and their sympathizers, anything that she cannot clump into her own stilted, corrupt experience - the Pinochetian cosmos of greed, grasping Nietzchian wills and impossibly complicit victims - is an impossible beast, something to be set alight and trampled underfoot. Anything that is not part of the rat-race must become fuel for that which is.

This is the common theme we see in what she does where there is no clearly understandable profit motive. We can exercise the benefit of the doubt and suppose that her militant contempt for ANWR might just be the hand of big oil up her ass, and we could similarly paint her willingness to rip her own state’s future as a tourist haven to shreds as the impossible desperation of a miner’s whore in an incipient ghost-town.

But we cannot by these means explain the wolves.

Like that filthy monster Reagan - dead before the public ever knew his name and shambling about even now these four years after his mouldering body at last followed his conscience and memory in giving up the ghost - she hates the world in a way functioning human beings find impossible to understand. Reagan insisted that the redwoods and other precious parts of our nation’s most populous, diverse, and essentially American state were interchangeable logging stock; even that had some surreal, warped basis in economic impulse. But Palin goes beyond this.

She offers men who think of themselves as hunters, responsible men of the world, a hundred and fifty dollars each to destroy wolves. She has been warned by people who understand ecology, even those - like the Republicans for Environmental Protection mentioned by Dolan - who share her culture’s insistence that the place of nature is under the dominion of man. Unlike any other hunters in the first world, the methods she favors - methods that shameless thief’s thief spent $400,000 of the state’s money to encourage at the polls - are mechanically efficient. We are not dealing with boar-stickers or deer-slayers; these women and men are intimate with the idea of death and share a kind of spiritual concern for the animals they destroy. They are often not the most ecologically-minded of people, but they are united by a vague idea of sport.

Palin, aiming to correct their ludicrous inefficiency, suggested they machine-gun the wolves by Cessna. To her, not only is the idea of the wolf repellant but so is the idea of the wolf meeting a human end. She can understand humans preying on big game - even if she does not understand, as ecologists now do and as sport hunters always have, that their fellow predators play a vital role in weeding out the weak and sick and keeping the big game strong - but the idea of something hunting out of hunger is alien to her, and so is the idea of competition with mercy. Wolves must be destroyed; the strong must destroy the weak even when forebearance serves them just as well.

Here, thus, we can record the only principle Palin has ever exhibited in any of her forty-four years: that God put us on Earth to strafe the wolves. I am no Christian, but I’m not sure what Christ would say about this.