A stake in the ground

Just wanted to mention a political prediction that Dori made yesterday:

"I think that Sarah Palin will drop out of the campaign after the Republican Convention is over, to "spend more time with her family." That will allow McCain to then pick Lieberman, which he wanted to do anyway, but couldn't because the hard-right conservatives at the convention would have gone nuts in front of the cameras."

Yesterday, I scoffed a bit. Today? Not so much. Palin's candidacy is on the National Joke trajectory.

So let's see. With this pick, John McCain pissed away his "Obama isn't experienced enough" argument just to try to win one or two news cycles (success) and stomp on Obama's convention bounce (probably not). If Palin steps out of the spotlight because it was clear she wasn't up to the task and because the McCain camp did almost no vetting, it pretty much kills McCain's other big argument, that his judgement is superior to Obama's.

Later edit by Dori: Actually, I think her "reason" will be something along the lines of "While I knew the national media had a liberal bias, I didn't expect that they would come after me and my family so hard and so personally." But it all works out to the same thing in the end.

Just when you thought they couldn't get stupider...

The latest official GOP talking point in favor of the hilarious pick of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP pick is so absurd, it deserves all the scorn we can muster.

Cindy McCain, speaking as a representative of her husband, said today on ABC's This Week:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But she has no national security experience.

McCAIN: You know, the experience that she comes from is what she’s done in government, and remember, Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia. It’s not as if she doesn’t understand what’s at stake here.

Wow. That's some primetime stupid going on. A quick lookup tells me that Anchorage is approximately 4,400 miles from Moscow. That's more or less the distance between Los Angeles and Jamaica. And anyone who thought that living in Hollywood would make you an expert on the foreign policy of Kingston would surely be accused of smoking some primo ganja.

Now, this was stupid enough when that Steve Doocy moron on Faux News said it Friday. But when it becomes a campaign talking point, you know they've really gone off the rails.