The Palin nomination is a gift from the folks who brought us Spiro Agnew and Dan Quayle. Sarah Paylin though is clearly far less qualified to be President than Quayle, and, depending upon the outome of numerous investigations, may be even less honest and more anti-Semitic than Agnew was.

I cannot name a female Senator or Congresswoman or high level Bush Administration employee who would not have been a significantly better choice than Palin. Her nomination is cynical sop to the radical right, being dressed up as an appeal to Hillary Clinton voters. Only Hillary Clinton voters entirely motivated by opposition to Barack Obama could be interested in her: she stands totally against the views of Clinton on just about every conceivable issue.

It appears the McCain campaign strategy is to keep her under wraps and preparing for the Biden debate; they hope the voters will be too busy to notice that she is barely campaigning and almost totally avoiding reporters. This "hide the number 2" strategy helped sink Democratic gubernatorial candidate Pete Flaherty in 1978, when the voters mistakenly chose an unqualified candidate for lieutenant governor named Robert Casey; here, of course, McCain himself is ultimately responsible for being stuck with a runningmate who has to be hidden.

The best journalism on the McCain/Palin campaign/fiasco has come from two sources: the Anchorage Daily News and Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. If anyone hasn't already seen the following two videos, illustrating the total hypocrisy of conservative talking heads on the one hand and John McCain himself on the other, here are the goods:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=184086&title=sarah...

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=184111&title=john-...

Mr Maverick is running on the same "reform" platform as the guy who beat him in 2000, and stood up to his party by immediately conceding to their VP demands when the party chiefs threatened a floor protest if he picked Lieberman.

That's how we came to this: for all his other petty lapdoggery, Joe Lieberman still supports women, Mike Huckabee loves Jesus more than money, and John McCain like 95% of Americans hates Mitt Romney's guts. McCain will never be able to do enough to pay the party back for his already-thrice-recanted heterodoxy on tax cuts, torture, and immigration, even though he owes his nomination to the voters (and his own prescience in pandering), not the party.

The only real difference is that John McCain is promising an even more belligerent foreign policy than Bush at inauguration or even in his second term. That's the last leg he's standing on.

We have got to beat these guys.