I’m crediting Wonkette with establishing the “GILF” meme back when Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska got sworn in:

Alaska governor Sarah Palin as America\'s hottest governor

She’s a former Miss Alaska contestant (Miss Wasilla 1984), and so you’ll see this old beauty contest mugshot being widely circulated:

Sarah Palin, Miss Wasilla 1984

Now that the cable news networks are reporting that she’s been tapped by John McCain as his vice presidential running mate, it’s time to remind the world that there’s a persistent rumor of a Sarah Palin nude photo “out there”. If it’s real, and it’s out there, and you have it, please send it along to ErosBlog, would ya?

The rumor surfaced during Palin’s gubernatorial campaign, when allegations flew around Alaska (and even reached my tender ears, the Internet being what it is) that such a photo was being circulated by her political opponents as part of a dirty tricks campaign. Although the story was not much reported by responsible press outlets, I got emails asking me if I knew where to get the photo, so I know the rumors were real; and there’s a shadow of them in the cesspools you find wherever newspapers publish “blogs” and then leave the comments open and unmoderated. (Ask Violet Blue how much to trust the stuff people write when they are fingerpainting in that sewage, though; she’ll give you an earful.)

I’d be more dubious about the whole story if not for the fact that one of my email correspondents claims to have seen the nude photo of Palin. Admittedly, the provenance on this story is so bad it’s classic: he says a guy in a bar showed him the printout of the email that was circulating. And, you know, it was a bar; the light was bad.

Since Governor Palin’s wild teen years were (if they happened at all) in the early 1980s, before the advent of digital photography, I’m pretty skeptical about the whole “nude photo” story. If the alleged shot ever surfaces, I’d expect it to be a photoshop of one of her beauty pageant pictures. She was a pretty girl in 1984, and she’s still – as they used to say in more delicate times and bad western movies — a fine figure of a woman.

Her husband, by the way, is a commercial fisherman (think Deadliest Catch), oilfield worker (think “drill rig at forty below zero”), and endurance snowmobile racer. He’s perfectly capable of kicking your ass, or mine, so be nice.