Okay, I’ve just about had it with you people. Yes, I’m talking to you, the Palin family of Moosewhack Village, Bumblefork County, Alaska, USA, Earth, Universe. I mean, who in the name of old Joe Hill are you to be constantly coming into my living room unannounced and uninvited?

It was bad enough when the most unqualified person in American life — I’m talking to you, Sarah — had the effrontery to run for vice president. It got even worse when, after your well-deserved shellacking at the hands of the most qualified person in America — that would be His Exalted Majesty, the Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II, Lord of the Flies, Master of the Hoops, and Keeper of the Holy Cities of Honolulu and Chicago — you refused to slink off into the obscurity of the Arctic Standard Time Zone, or whatever that place is called where the sun don’t shine. Now you even have your own reality show, on which no moose or caribou is safe.

But while you’re banging away at the wildlife population and then popping their remains in a pot for dinner, you’ve bequeathed us Bristol, little miss Dancing with the Stars and now the proud owner of some choice Arizona real estate, to carry on the family tradition of driving us nuts.

Listen to me: It’s just not right that you Palins are using the trash culture we’ve so lovingly created against us — that was meant to inflict Britney Spears on your wingnut families, not to blast us with Bristol. Teenaged unwed mother? Check. Tabloid fodder? Check. Famous for being famous? Check. Normally, we would endorse all those things, just as, in a rational world, we would embrace Mama Grizzly for her “compelling personal narrative,” as the Finemans of the media like to call it.

But, of course, we don’t. Because we can’t. Because to do so would mean the end of our carefully maintained double standard — and the minute you folks on the right no longer accept your second-class status in the moral pecking order, we are finished. 

As is well known, I am a man of consummate fairness and nearly infinite tolerance. Like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland, I can tolerate at least six impossible things before breakfast, and in the interests of No Labels civility, I fervently believe that the families of political figures should always and everywhere be off limits.

Except, of course, for you, the Palin family. Because you’re simply intolerable. Your very existence makes the heads of all progressives want to imitate that scene from Scanners and explode in a shower of compassionate brains and blood. Just when we think we’ve finally put you in the ground, you get up and keep coming at us, like the demon spawns of Audie Murphy and Annie Oakley, circling us with your repeating rifles and your white teeth and your flashing gams and your voices that would shatter Waterford crystal.

You are making us mental, you people. The thought of you fills us with an overwhelming desire to see your Harvard transcripts, or at least your high-school diplomas, which we frankly doubt you have. Your very being-ness causes us to doubt our belief in the existence of Gaia and sends us screaming back to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit for comfort and consolation. Watching Bristol waltzing about in a slinky dress on national television and coming in third behind Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey and Disney’s Kyle Massey is enough to cause me to lose control of my Prius and possibly sideswipe a homeless shelter for unwed lesbian mothers awaiting deployment to Afghanistan in our new post-DADT army. I’m sure I’m not alone in my despair.

For you simply won’t go away. Even worse, you have the power to cloud men’s minds. Last fall we rolled out one of our biggest guns — Vanity Fair! — which deployed a Princeton-educated hatchet man named Michael Joseph Gross to chop you up into little pieces. Alas, he couldn’t tell Trig from another baby boy, because as we fair and tolerant lefties know, all Down-syndrome babies look alike. Our bad! Next time, we’ll send someone from a real school, like Columbia. At least he’ll be able to tell Piper from Willow.

Which brings us back to Bristol. Oh, the schadenfreude we experienced when news of her pregnancy broke right in the middle of the campaign! The delight we took when the ex-boyfriend, what’s his name, made the rounds of our sympathetic media shoulders and slammed Sarah for . . . I forget what, exactly. Existing, probably. After all, what would Chris Matthews and Norah O’Donnell and Joe Klein and Andrea Mitchell and Mika Brzezinski have to talk about without the Palins? Politics? Hegel?