Sarah Palin makes me want to rip my brain out through my skull and light it on fire.

The former vice presidential candidate may sit atop the New York Times bestseller list, dominate the political airwaves and rake in millions; it doesn’t mean I have to care one iota. Neither should anyone else. This is a woman who believes the rapture will occur in her lifetime, who couldn’t name a single prominent Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade, attended five low-tier colleges in five years and thinks winking coquettishly is a serviceable substitute for wit. She crashed and burned as a vice presidential candidate, has yet to impress in a media setting that isn’t scripted for her benefit and couldn’t handle the heat as governor of a state in which it was her job to oversee the same population as the typical county executive.

So why do I get the nasty feeling that she’s laughing at all of us right now?

As a nation, we’re dealing with two seemingly endless wars. We’re about to try a handful of our most fearsome enemies in our civil court system in the same city they terrorized eight years ago. The debate over health-care reform continuously rages around us, with climate-change legislation and financial reform fighting for the next place on the docket.

And yet we can’t stop talking about Caribou Barbie, who can change the parameters of a national debate with a Facebook note. George Stephanopoulos, speaking with Sec. of State Hillary Clinton during her trip to China, felt it pertinent to ask her whether she would sit down for coffee with Palin. Clinton’s discomfort was palpable as she stammered out an affirmative, all the while looking like a harried mother asked to stage a tea party with the neighborhood child who takes pleasure out of killing ants with a magnifying glass. She’s already done immense damage to the national discourse; directly with her “death panel” nonsense and indirectly with the influence she’s had on others — witness her impact as a role model for Carrie Prejean, the confirmed airhead and failure of a Miss USA candidate, who’s now parading around hawking her own tome, in which she proudly labels herself “Palinized.”

One of my friends told me recently that he was trying to do his part for humanity by refusing to click on stories about Palin on his favorite news sites, reasoning that “if enough people start to do this, the media just might stop giving her the attention she doesn’t deserve.” I wanted to laugh in his face.

Sarah Palin can’t be stopped, at least not while her sights are set on honors no one could compete with her for. In a way, she’s fascinating for the same reason that otherwise sophisticated comedians — rest in peace, George Carlin — still crack fart jokes on a regular basis. She’s a reminder of how base and stupid we really can be, despite our pretensions otherwise.

Substantively, she may be little more than a cipher feeding the fantasies of the collective right (think Wesley Clark, circa 2005, except without the accomplishments). But the fact is, the political convictions she holds deep down, despite her established vacuity, are dangerous. Beneath the cute surface layer, this is still a woman who attended a rally for 1992 presidential candidate and Jew-hater Pat Buchanan and wore his campaign button proudly. She knows where her support comes from; in Facebook rants, she instructs readers to pay attention to the words of such notables as Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Obviously — who has called for investigating the un-American views of her Democratic colleagues in Congress — and Glenn Beck, self-appointed defender of what he refers to as “white culture.”

However, the liberal intelligentsia, complicit in her rise as a pop-culture sensation, would be well advised to handle her with more care. They think they’re having a good laugh at Palin’s expense, but the joke might easily wind up being on them. Some may wish to see her as the 2012 Republican standard-bearer, seeing the Witch of Wasilla as the easiest candidate for President Obama to trounce on his path toward a second term; to that I ask: What happens if Obama is found in October 2012 in bed with either the dead girl or the live boy Edwin Edwards used to kid about? Stranger things have happened, and even if it doesn’t, the risk can’t be worth it. For the sake of democracy and progress, we need the best candidates on both sides — and if that doesn’t convince you, there’s always the necropedophilia thing.

And what if Palin, like one of Frans de Waal’s lemurs, were to begin to display further signs of budding self-awareness and an incipient ability to manipulate circumstances to her advantage? As Rex Banner once warned the customers of Moe’s Tavern/Pet Shop, during Springfield’s ill-fated experiment with prohibition: “Alright. But you people remember; baby turtles and alligators may seem like a cute idea for a pet, but they grow up!” Palin may seem like less of a risk to mature mentally or politically (note that these are mutually exclusive traits), but she remains a risk nevertheless. Maybe my friend did have the best idea. Maybe it’s time we stop poking her and look away while we still have a chance, before either she mauls us or, equally likely, forces us to reach for the kerosene.

Editorials Editor Asher Smith is a College junior from Great Neck, N.Y.