I no longer give a fig about so-called extreme or ultimate fighting.

But I confess that I would very much like to witness a cage-fighting match between Todd Palin and David Letterman.

I would complain only about the stunning brevity of the match. Letterman would go down immediately and would get back up no time soon. To the wager-minded: How long do you suppose it would take for Letterman to regain consciousness?

Gov. Sarah Palin's recent announcement about stepping down is what got me thinking about all this.

Todd Palin is incontrovertibly justified. Letterman unjustly and needlessly insulted Sarah, Todd Palin's wife, showing no respect for the woman or for the honor of her husband, and he also said unspeakably vile and wicked things about their daughters.

Letterman is on his own. Whatever he gets, he merits.

What Letterman did is rooted in some of the long-standing tactics of the "news" media and the American left as concerns their irrational and unhinged hatred of all things Palin, Sarah and otherwise. That hatred is behind Letterman's astonishing stupidity, of course, as it is behind virtually everything else involving the Palins.

The American left is characterized by disease of soul. I know. The people of the left are bereft of their senses, certainly. They have been so for a long time. In everything — in their actions, their words, their attitudes — they are savage and infernal. This is a new low, however.

That anyone should so publicly and so cravenly assault a man's wife and daughters — amazing. I don't care that the assault was only "verbal." Because it was also spiritual. Letterman is guilty of the grossest unmanliness. He is an utterly contemptible coward. You don't mess with a man's family, and if you do, I think you should be prepared to own the consequences and to become much better acquainted with the man you have insulted. Mano a mano.

Those cracks about the Palin girls especially irk me. One daughter is a young woman, sure, but the other is still a young girl, and anyway, both are still girls in the sight of their parents. (I'd like to break this dude's jaw myself.) I recall ugly comments made also about President Bush's daughters, though they were already about 20, and that was little compared to this.

All of that said, I would remind myself and remind others that we must never yield to the temptation to follow the leftists' example of depravity and pernicious conduct. I have heard some call for an "open season" as it were, on Obama's children. Wrong. The children of even our worst political enemies must ever remain off-limits. They are children and deserve our protection.

The reason the left can attack even children the way they do is that lefties are crazy. This is why they murder their infants and then sanction their savagery through "law."

I have yet to observe anything at all in Sarah Palin that I would consider personally offensive, or deserving of reproach on any level. I do not know the woman, of course, but I've read and heard those ubiquitous, seemingly endless criticisms and accusations. And I have to say that they continue to strike me as being pitifully shrill and strained. I don't get it. I simply see nothing there that does not look and smell like plain calumny and malice.

That sort of thing starts out as beneath contempt, then dashes off and takes an elevator to the sub-basement.

I mean, this stuff is LAME. As governor of Alaska, Palin worked to get some state trooper fired. Here is a guy who, by every account, belongs rather in an asylum or in prison than in any law enforcement agency. Palin's enemies hunted with desperate tenacity for grounds to accuse her of abusing power in that instance. They turned up nothing, because she had done nothing wrong.

All that ceaseless hiss and siss about Palin's lack of experience and her unfitness to be president — Who can keep from laughing? I never forgot that she was actually running for vice president, even if the news media never seemed to find much zest for admitting that. Like it or not, though, to this very hour Palin remains eminently better prepared to assume the Oval Office than Obama is to be even a state senator. Look, the man is not so much an empty suit as an empty wardrobe. Sorry, hoss, but that's just the way things is, and danged if the facts ain't just as stubborn as everybody says they is.

I hear disparaging comments about Palin from many in my very own circles who seem otherwise to be reasonable and decent people. Yet I perceive something bizarre about their attitudes toward Palin. Frankly, I think many women hate her because she is beautiful and sexy while being strong and virtuous. I believe men hate her because she's got more spirit and fire — more proverbials, actually — than many of them do. Of course, we're talking here about Lefties, mostly.

This lady has shown the pampered cowards of these present generations what it is to believe in and stand for life-affirming and worthwhile things and fight for them with honor. No one on the Left fights that way. They fight like animals — with venom and shrieking and lust. Sarah Palin fights like a warrior — with discipline and purpose and calling.

All the hostility aimed at her seems insanely disproportionate, unjustifiable, even illegitimate. What has she really done that justly earns this degree of disapprobation? Nothing, really. She seems to this observer to be a good governor, a good politician, a good wife, a good mother. Who has proved her to be otherwise?

But this world is lousy with souls who hate anything that is good. Once, there was a good man who walked about the earth.

They nailed Him to a tree.