I went online recently and found myself in a progressive chat room.  At one point the topic was Sarah Palin.  A lot of people expressed their fervent wish that Sarah Palin would just go away.  I totally sympathize with that sentiment, but the problem is, it’s not going to happen.

Wish with all your might, but Sarah Palin is not going away.  She will be with us forever.  Thank you, John McCain, for this gift you have given our nation.

We can’t really know why she hastily, breathlessly left her job as governor of Alaska, but my best guess is that, while secreted in the governor’s office in Juneau, she wouldn’t have been able to get everybody’s attention (not to mention boatloads of cash). 

Now that she’s escaped the drudgery of public office, the money’s good, but what truly feeds her is our attention – and she’s always starving.  I can imagine her swooning with resentment when Gabby Giffords so rudely yanked away the spotlight.  All of America’s media coverage and a groundswell of her countrymen’s love was suddenly going to another woman -– and a Democrat at that – the nerve!

Of course, this is all speculation, but it’s just how it looks to one gnarly little liberal in Oregon.

I have a vision of her, sitting in her igloo, and she gets a tweet or something whereby she hears that people are mentioning her SarahPac crosshairs map.  Oh yeah, she thinks.  That left-wing whiner had mentioned that herself, didn’t she?  What was it Gabby Giffords had said about those crosshairs on the SarahPac map?

“The way she has it depicted, we’re in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there are consequences to that action.” — Gabrielle Giffords

Sarah’s mind went: Well, booya!  I’m in the news again –- high fives and frosty chocolate milkshakes all around!

“Mrs. Palin?” an aide murmured tremulously. “Might it not be a good idea to take that map down from the SarahPac page?”

“Sure, sure, whatever,” Mrs. Palin said as she feverishly scanned her blackberry to find just the right speechwriter.

Who was it?  Who put all those big words in Sarah’s mouth?  Were they spelled out phonetically on the TelePrompTer?  We may never know.  We may never care.

But whether we care for her or want to wish her away, she is with us.  She has just enough supporters, very loud, ardent, devoted supporters, to keep her from fading away altogether.  The people who adore her will never see wrong in anything she says or does, and will believe every blatant lie she tells, every bit as much as she does.

Why yes, of course, those WERE surveyor’s marks.

Mourners in Tucson contemplate the devastating impact of recent events on Sarah Palin

This teeny, vocal minority will defend their mavericky Joan of Arc forever, and their cheers will sustain her.  They are Fox viewers and they guarantee her lifelong employment and spectacle.  She will be their snarky, willfully ignorant queen, and her tribe will rightly see themselves in her.

But in spite of her voracious quest for attention, it is not our love that Sarah Palin craves; she probably prefers our enmity.  That makes it easier to be the victim, a role she plays well and clearly savors.  She overdramatizes any small criticism.  If someone should utter a discouraging word in her direction, she embellishes it into a far greater insult. 

Exhibit A:  I think the main message Gabby Giffords and others were hoping Sarah would hear was, “Sarah, you should give a little more thought to the way you phrase things.”  But Sarah interpreted her well-reasoned words as: “Sarah, you’re an accomplice to murder.” (Sean Hannity interview, 1/17/11)

And her devotees see Palin as a perpetual victim as well.  As long as she repeats, “They will not shut me up,” people will believe someone is trying to shut her up -– even as she cashes her Fox paycheck and watches somebody write her next best-selling book.

She is a divisive figure at a divisive time, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.  She provokes just to be provocative; the deeper meaning of her words is irrelevant to her.

She did show uncharacteristically good sense in taking down the insensitive “target” map from her SarahPac page soon after the shootings, but as of this writing it’s still up on Facebook.  She has perhaps done the bare minimum to appear humanlike, and she’s ready to move on and imagine ever greater insults against her.

So how do you solve a problem like the Palin?  Shunning her and embargoing her name won’t work; in her desperation to take over the news cycle one more time, she’ll say ever more incendiary things.  And if we still ignore her, she’ll take to the Fox airwaves, Facebook, and her Twitter feed to protest that she is being censored.

It’s time to face it: Sarah Palin will always be with us.  We might as well accept it and start thinking about what we can do to lessen her toxic influence on our society.