Vin Suprynowicz's recent essay on Sarah Palin struck a chord with me. I, too, am a longtime libertarian; I, too, know that she is not. Yet I think she may be something more important, and more American, than a libertarian: an individual. Not some plastic cookie-cutter politician who exists only to curry favor and buy votes, but a real person who thinks and acts for herself. I get the strong sense that she doesn't live for power. Oh sure, she enjoys the rough-and-tumble of the political arena ("Sarah Barracuda"), but there's something fundamentally healthy about her involvement: she's competitive, she likes to win, but she's not in politics to lord it over the rest of us. There's an honesty and a realism about her that a lot of Americans find deeply refreshing, especially after all the phony "freedom fighters" among limousine liberals and Rockefeller Republicans alike. And, as Vin points out, that's why the establishment feels so threatened by her: because she gives the lie to the way they have lived and governed for all these years. Right now I don't know whether she will remain independent or be co-opted and corrupted by the miasma that is the District of Columbia, whether she will succeed or fail, or even whether the impression she makes on people is real or illusory. But I do know that she strikes fear into the kind of people I loathe: power-lusting politicians, their corporate and union co-conspirators, their increasingly brazen flunkies in the mass media, their airhead apologists among the Hollywood jet set, and associated other lowlifes. And that's reason enough for me to like her immediately, if not unreservedly.