An Open Letter to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin

Dear Governor Palin,

Welcome back to Alaska. As you've already commented, there is a lot of work to be done here. Listening to your interview at the airport yesterday evening, it seems you've already mostly dropped the Prairie Home Companion accent you acquired for the presidential campaign. I hope you've left a lot of the other stuff you acquired during the campaign behind, too.

I hope you plan on holding a free-ranging, open-ended press conference very soon. I hope you invite any press that can make it there to attend. Including Alaska and Outside bloggers. Your candidacy brought Alaska into the national and international spotlight more than any event in our history, including the ongoing Corrupt Bastards trials, the Great Alaska Earthquake, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Hundreds of journalists came to Alaska from all over the world. Perhaps, including their supporting team members, they numbered almost a thousand. Some revisited old stories about your political history. Others brought out new information. Overall, their coverage of your improbable rise from Wasilla Planning Commission member to U.S. vice presidential candidate, helped a nation and world understand why you were so thoroughly unfit to be such a candidate. That information, combined with your thorough ineptness on the campaign trail, have made you the biggest political laughingstock of the 21st century.

There are many unanswered questions resulting from investigations into your official conduct, and from your unavailability to answer them in a meaningful way. Before you were selected to be Senator John McCain's running mate, I thought you to be a competent Governor of Alaska. But that selection, which I felt to be inappropriate from first thought, and your conduct on the campaign trail, have led me and tens of thousands of other Alaskans to re-think our earlier, favorable impression of you as Governor.

From your airport comments last night, it almost seems like you expect Alaskans to shoulder the burden of accepting a new Sarah Palin. I take exception to your notion. It is you, Madam Governor, who needs to shoulder the burden of explaining the new, more detailed version of Sarah Palin that has emerged in history.

Regards,

Philip Munger