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I am indebted to Caitlin Peters and Brian McClintock of the Field & Stream staff who sent me a post that ran on the Huffington Blog. It’s called “Drill, Drill, Drill,” and was written by an essayist and playwright named Eve Ensler. Ms. Ensler does not like anything about Governor Palin, and most particularly, she does not like the fact that Governor Palin hunts.

Here are the hunting-related excerpts from the post, along with my comments. The purpose of all this is to demonstrate that when it comes to firearms or hunting, you can say anything and people will believe it. “Drill” is all over the Internet, and has the ignorant, the hysterical, and the downright silly jumping up and down and barking at the moon.

“Sarah Palin believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle.”

There’s nothing wrong with believing in guns. To quote from the film Conspiracy_, “I have become mistrustful of words, but a gun means what it says.” The sinister significance of the Austrian rifle is lost on me. I’ve never thought that Austrian rifles were any more evil than rifles from any other country. Maybe Ms. Ensler is not crazy about carved oakleaves and fish-scale checkering in stocks, on which Austrians dote._

“I dreamed last night that she [Sarah Palin] was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starving Polar Bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one or touched one….Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.”
_
Dear Ms. Ensler: Polar bears are not white; they are pale yellow. If you ever touch one, you will probably never touch anything else. I like polar bears but I don’t need them. I need $15,000 to buy the Pete Norene .416 Rigby at Cabela’s. Oh yes; ” polar bears” is not capitalized, but “Arctic” is._

“She has shot 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.”

_It’s quite possible that Sarah Palin has shot 40 caribou over a period of years. Her family may qualify for a subsistence-hunting license, which would make it both legal and common. But as for dropping them all at once, field-dressing and transporting 40 caribou at one fell swoop would require a brigade of the Alaska National Guard.

I tried calling the Alaska Fish & Game for some insight, hoping I would get a game warden who would assure me that Ms. Palin had always obeyed the law, and if she hadn’t, she would have been imprisoned and beaten to death, and her family hunted down and killed, just as with any citizen who transgressed.
What I got was transferred from the main switchboard to the Commissioner’s Office, and when I explained what I wanted, I was switched to McCain-Palin Election Headquarters, where a functionary took my message and said someone would call be back. No one did.

About the wolves: Shooting wolves from airplanes has been going on in Alaska since at least the 1950s, and probably before that. If you don’t keep the wolves hammered down, you are not going to have many caribou, or moose, or wild sheep, and doing it by plane is the most efficient method.

However, if Governor Palin had shot hundreds of wolves from a plane she would not have been a mayor, or a hockey mom, or a governor, or a beauty queen, or anything else. She would have been up in that plane with a gun, and nowhere else. One does not simply go up and put the power to a dozen wolves in an afternoon. I think we can put this part of Eve Ensler’s essay down as arrant horse s**t or, in this case, arrant wolf s**t.

But then, this is the Internet, so why worry?_