Wow. Don't tell Sarah Palin that. She already thinks she's the future savior of our nation. I don't think her little body can hold any more inflated self-admiration.

Are you trying to "swiftboat" me son? VietNam was 40 years ago ,I've done a lot since then,so have all of my friends who are veterans.Are you stuck in the moment like the fictional Rambo(Stillone was in Switzerland for the war) or John Wayne(never served a day in his life)? Most of us, and I would hope the country at large, learn from our mistakes,we don't defend them,we acknowledge them and move on .Iraq was a mistake,Viet Nam was a mistake,and Sarah Palin was a mistake for the Republican Party and for the State of Alaska.She read the teleprompter very well at the Republican convention,from there it was downhill.I can think of a half dozen Republicans that would have been a match for Joe Biden,but she wasn't.God bless this country and the way we select our officials.Coming from Illinois,I'm proud of the fact that a self-taught hillbilly rose to become one of our greatest presidents and that an African American South Side community organizer could become president.But with all of that we get flukes who should have never been there but can be by the virtue of our system. Sarah palin is one of them.By the way,that was The First FIELD Forces,sorry for the typo.

Steve Branchflower may have been the prosecutor's boss (the prosecutor was a young woman who later was briefly the deputy criminal AG for the Alaska Dept. of Law.) He didn't do the trial.

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I wish the lot of you would stop caterwauling about Vietnam on Salon letters threads. Surely something worth talking about has happened in the intervening 40 years.

I was stationed at Udorn up the road from your father (I'm assuming he was at Korat). Our radar site handled Tanker hookups going north and coming home.

Wild Weasels: "First In, Last Out".

Virtue, man up and apologize to Kilchis.

appreciating virtue's virtue for the ability to apologize, and that my impression of him is that he seems more interested in defending Palin's, uh, honor than her fitness for office, until double-r just came along with his/her patented literary reference-laden post proceeding to even more remarkably compare Palin to Diana. Which I love, since I agree - neither deserved the accolades.

Now I hafta say I sure do hope s/he gets his Rep. strategist job (tho what a strange place to audition) very soon, and is so busy on the pro circuit (read: shows I don't watch) to bother with the likes of us.

Remember the "gluttonous with self-approbation" quote from a TV series? About as obscure as it gets, but my literary reference is also appropriate, as it applies to both double-r and Palin.

And if there's no such thing as someone who served questioning wars that were a mistake, then Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals player who quit to serve after 9/11, must actually never have been a soldier. For he did, of course, describe the Iraq War as "so fucking illegal." Since apparently, according to virtue001, no-one who was in Vietnam would ever say it was specious to say that it was fought "to protect our freedoms," Pat Tillman must not have been a soldier and said that about the Iraq War.

Sarah Palin is Princess Diana now? The cultivated, socially adept, charming and educated Princess Diana, who deftly worked public opinion, in service of ideals such as the banning of landmines, so as to save children's lives all over the world?

Is Sarah Palin really, really likely ever to devote herself to public service, saving or improving human life, in that way?

Or is she, more likely, going to spend her retirement the way George Bush has, so far (eating and relaxing), or the way that Dick Cheney has so far, after and even before he left office (devoting his entire existence single-mindedly to ensuring that people get tortured). Hm, which do you think?

Sarah Palin is Princess Diana. There's just nothing you people won't claim, is there? If you're going for the implausible, why not just go whole hog? Why qualify, "I'm not saying she's Jesus"? Why not just compare her with Jesus?

I had to catch up on one week's news in one hour and it's become a bit of a muddle.

I have to say that it would be unusual for a politician to resign because of an investigation into financial improprieties. Just the opposite: retaining office is a good defense strategy. She'd be more exposed to liability by quitting, not less. She about said as much.

I doubt whether Palin has given deep serious thought to a Presidential bid (or anything at all), but I think any Alaskan governor who wanted to run for President might want to quit. It's a no-win. Quit and be called a quitter. Stay in office and be accused of not paying attention to her state, what with all the long travel times keeping her in the lower 48. An Alaskan candidate would need play by different rules than the Washington/NY-centric press cares to admit. But all that's beside the point.

Nah, this whole deal is closer to Palin's entertainingly expressed version than most of us care to admit. She was bugged donchaknow, and quitting is her version of Diprivan. Just make it all stop!

I'm not saying she's not corrupt in a parochial cozy sort of way. As the Ted Stevens case showed, Alaska appears to be a small town with small town politics, albeit a small town spread over a half million square miles. Palin has always been a village mayor tarted up in fancy East Coast skirts. She thought she was a big fish, but discovered she was fooled by her small pond. It's as if Susan Boyle opened her mouth and discovered she couldn't sing. Or as if Michael Jackson had been all loon talk and no moon walk.