John Ziegler, a talk-radio host and filmmaker whose zeal in defending Sarah Palin's every move and utterance over the past two years zoomed past advocacy and into creepiness has now done what all stalkers do eventually: He's decided if he can't have her, no one can.

In 2009, Ziegler, whose previous claim to fame was being the hero of a David Foster Wallace story on the moral bankruptcy of talk-radio and getting fired for saying there's a difference "between people who just happen to be black and people who act like niggers" on the air, made a movie called Media Malpractice... How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted. He spent the next three years on television talking about how awesome Sarah Palin is and how awful liberals are etc. To judge by Ziegler's own account of his relationship with the Palins, he spent a lot of time trying to get...closer to them, and ended up getting rejected now and again in spite of his tireless ass-kissing.

Well now he's decided she can't be president and has written a lengthy tell-all-ish (tell some?) story in the Daily Caller arguing that she's going to destroy the Republican Party if she runs—which, he says, she will—and is surrounded by yes-men. He's also launched a site called "The Sarah Palin I Know" as a future vehicle for damaging information about her. Ziegler is the second high-profile denizen of Palinland to defect: Earlier this year long-time aide Frank Bailey wrote a tell-all based on thousands of e-mails with Palin that he'd kept.

Bailey's turnaround was instructive in the sense that an insider became disillusioned with Palin as he came to know more about her. Ziegler's is instructive in the sense that any time you see someone on television defending Palin, keep in mind that they're probably an attention-starved opportunist who just wants to feel important and will probably say whatever you want as long as you keep listening. Also that Sarah Palin surrounds herself with horrible people, because she is one.

[Photo of Palin via AP]