For the record

Just in case years from now, historians look back and wonder what kind of feckless morons we were to even think about running candidates as inarticulate and inept as Sarah Palin, let me say, unequivocally, her debate performance reeked of evasion, lying, distortion and incoherence.

My disagreements with her on matters of policy are minor by comparison with my revulsion at her utter incompetence. The fact that she is being applauded by our erstwhile punditry merely because she didn't stare like Bambi into the headlights of a Couric softball question, doesn't mean she is not still the least qualified person to ever run for the Vice Presidency in the history of this country. Beating even such luminaries as Danny-boy Quayle.

That McCain picked this idiot says as much about his cynical posturing as it does about our ever gullible population and our deeply frivolous press. Pace the inimitable Charles Pierce:

And yet, through the entire run-up to the debate, it was argued by serious people who analyze serious politics and make a serious living doing it that Sarah Palin could reveal herself to be non-dim by putting on the correct puppet show for the media in her debate against Joe Biden. Make no mistake. That's what the punditocracy was arguing. Give us a reason, please, not to have to write what we all know to be true, what has been self-evidently true to the entire country since you walked off the podium in St. Paul. No rational person can possibly believe that she got smarter, or better informed, or more curious in the time that elapsed between when she talked with Ms. Couric and last night's debate. What we were being asked to judge was purely how well she had refined her performance skills in the interim. None of what the Walking Dead on the cable shows were looking to see has the slightest thing to do with her fitness for the office she seeks, let alone the office that might descend upon her.