Doggone it!

A few years back, my father shot an apparently vicious dog, which was attacking another dog. (He's dead now, if it makes you PETA-freaks feel better. My dad's dead.) I often think about this one incident and what it says about him and myself. But ultimately, this leads to an unavoidable conclusion: It was just a dog. In some parts of the world, dogs are food. My father, for all his flaws, never shot a person or a primate or a dolphin--any creature higher than a dog. Dogs, despite their apparent intelligence, are not particularly high on the evolutionary scale. Beating them is not the same as assaulting a human; it just makes you a world-class douche.

Sarah Palin recently tweeted a pic of her mentally challenged son, Trig, using a dog as a stepladder. It is not so much disturbing that a mentally challenged kid accidentally caused a dog discomfort so much as that his mother transmitted the photo as a source of pride. Sarah Palin--a former governor and current Fox News correspondent--is supposed to be really smart.

It is not evil to kill an animal for food or cloths, but it still doesn't deserve to be turned into a floorcovering to demonstrate how little taste that your family has. Trophy hunting is sickening. Such a gaudy display of slaughter makes a mockery of God wanting humanity to practice responsible stewardship of the environment. The grizzly is one of the most potent land creatures that has ever lived. God did not make grizzlies so the Palin kids can have sex on it. (Drill, baby, drill!) Further, Palin's past reference to herself as a "mama grizzly" makes no sense, seeing how she proudly kills grizzlies.

Palin is, in one regard, a woman from a different time. A Republican such as Theodore Roosevelt supported conservation not because there was a natural order to the world and that humanity had no right to eradicate a species, but so future generations would have something to kill. Hunting has long been a sport of the ruling class, having their other needs met, there's nothing left but to pretend to rough it. I don't have a blanket opposition to hunting; the steak that I had at Sizzler last week wasn't a product of cow suicide.... Hope it was cow.

Palin, meanwhile, has defended herself with her proxy defense: Lamestream media hypocrisy. She pointed out that talk show host and liberal darling Ellen DeGeneres recently posted a pic of her using a dog as a footstool--from 40 years ago. (The dog is long dead, and I presume the animal lover DeGeneres didn't kill it.)

I must rack my mind over the differences, and here's the one that I can come up with: Americans like Ellen; we hate Palin. Ellen does not compartmentize people--when she looks out at a crowd of Americans, she sees Americans. When Palin sees a crowd, she immediately divides people based on them being "real Americans" and non-conservatives such as members of the liberal media elite, who ruined her political ambitions by asking her such "gotcha" questions as: Which newspapers do you read? Ellen supports rejecting the meanness of society; Palin basks in it--except for when such cruelty and moral judgments are directed against her own family. Sarah Palin wallows in human prejudices like a pig of intolerance. I am not a lesbian and I certainly am not a liberal, so I can safely say: You're a bitch, Sarah Palin. Jesus--who is obligated to love everyone--must be deeply conflicted about you, Sarah Palin.

Most of all, the photo confirms what so many of us knew about Sarah Palin: She hates animals. She shoots wolves (which are closely related to dogs) from a helicopter. She loves nature so much as she can profit off it, and she hates God's creatures. The same could be said about Marion Barry's crack use and Bill Clinton's numerous sex scandals, and anything George W. Bush ever said or says or will say in the future. Palin is thus right in claiming that the media are picking on her--she has just refused to alter her behavior to become a more decent human being.