When McCain ran with the "maverick" label, the word ceased to have meaning. McCain is not a maverick. He never has been. He's a "veerer," a new word I just made up. Occasionally, he veers slightly from a strict party line; usually when his veering won't change the outcome much anyway.

Palin a maverick? Yeah, her ideas are just sooooooo different from what other morons having been saying for years. Before she came along, it was completely impossible to find a champion for abstinence only sex ed.

James Garner is the only real Maverick, but that show was so long ago.

What was that? I couldn't hear you.

To be a good Republican, you have to believe stuff like this. How else to explain the idea that Sarah Palin could go from "Sarah who?" to "Best Idea Ever!" in the space of about 90 seconds?

And I say that as a guy who once worked on a crab processing ship in the Bering Sea, which is even closer to Russia, and by Russia I mean Siberia, than Alaska is. That makes me an expert on foreign relations. I'm waiting for the call to be Secretary of State.

Hey, come on, guys. Can't we all stop asking questions and just instantly agree that Sarah Palin is the best because she's the best. The assertion proves itself!

I listened to about as much of it as I could on the radio. I only heard a few minutes, but there were so many places where she would rattle off some bit of information, and it was utterly clear she had no idea what she was talking about. She'd come to a big word, and there'd be a slight little hitch in her delivery. I don't know how this came off on TV, but I could hear it in her voice. "My god," I thought, "She's completely full of shit."

But then, it was obvious in 2000 that W. was completely full of shit too. Same for 2004. There's a large percentage of voters unable to tell the difference.

Oh, and it bears constant repeating: McCain is NOT a fucking maverick. We must keep fighting that stupid, stupid meme.

Earlier in the letters, I said that I had heard the speech on the radio, and that it was clear to me that she didn't really understand the words coming from her mouth; she was just trying to sound all experty, like she has lived with this stuff on her mind for months if not years, when in fact it was just now entering her brain for the first time as it flashed on the teleprompter.

I just saw the clips of that segment on The Daily Show, and it was worse than I thought. I can't believe she was fooling anyone that wasn't desperately needing to be fooled.

The other thought I had: Here's a person, plucked from nowhere, placed in an incredible position of prominence through no effort of her own, and it doesn't seem to strike her as unusual in anyway. "Am I ready to be President?" did the question daunt her at all? It's about the most sobering question I can think of. It didn't seem to phase her even a little. This makes me think two things: Given the religious beliefs she possibly believes she's been called by God, and two, she has no ability to imagine the vast ocean of knowledge she knows nothing about.

Also, given the fact that having put in none of the hard work at all to attain her position, where does she get off being so smugly derisive, snotty and dismissive of those who have put themselves where they are by virtue of non-stop hard work.

Really, I just don't get it. I watched and listened and experienced nothing; I've known dozens of men and women just like her — utterly mundane and banal in that special way that keeps them advancing precisely because they are utterly mundane. Really, look into her eyes. There's just not much there beyond a certain pig meanness to any who would cross her.

McCain has no executive experience at all. Palin out qualifies him by far on that score. And Arizona? Give me a freakin' break! Have you SEEN how far from Alaska it is? What the hell could he possibly know about foreign relations? And for godssakes, where's his Down's baby, the ultimate test for presidential readiness?

One last question: Torture is the official policy of this great country that he loves so well. Yet a few months ago, when the Supreme Court took the bold step of saying that prisoners at Gitmo did indeed have a couple of meager legal rights, McCain derided that decision as being one of the "worst decisions in the history of this country." So the man who has constantly played the "I was tortured" story for all it's worth has no qualms at all about denying others there habeas corpus rights. What was done to him was wrong, the narrative goes, but when we do it it is righteous.

So here he is now, a basically non-religious man from all that I've read, who has sold his beliefs to put a crazy-ass fundamentalist a heartbeat away from the presidency, and standing on a Republican platform that is even more right than ever, and promising to reach across the aisle to anyone who is willing to "get the country moving again" just so long as when it's moving, the motion is inexorably in the direction of denying civil rights to gays and teaching evolution in schools and denying science in favor of theology, and paying for endless war with more tax cuts to the rich. And all of this sameness to what has already been tried and failed for years will now be called sweeping change.

I'm just going to come out and say it: I think John McCain is full of shit.