Obama's job was to convince people that a person of color was plausible as President and he did that very well. He defanged a lot of the fear that was going on about him. McCain's supercillious nastiness did not do McCain any good and responding in kind would have done Obama harm.

McCain's undoing will be done in the VP debate by Sarah Palin, not by McCain himself. Thursday may be the coup de grace to any illusion that McCain is capable of acting with the country in mind. Sarah Palin will do what Obama cannot and remain a deliberative and thoughtful presence. She will show the nation that both she and McCain are more dangerous than Obama ever was.

My biggest horror is that they will send in a robot that looks exactly like Sarah Palin but that has been programmed with a brain like Stephen Hawking.

How often have you seen cartoons of someone who just stands still with his hand on the head of an opponent who runs furiously in place, exhausting himself while the other person doesn't even break a sweat or of a toreador who stands aside while the bull charges? That's going to be Biden's role if he's as smart as he looks. All he needs to do is to remain stationary while Palin does everything she can to charm and weasel out of substantive questions.

Unless, of course, Disney-style animatronics has created that dreaded Palin-Hawking creation.

I want a POTUS with a real intellect and with real thoughts in his head. I want a POTUS who can deal with subtleties without getting his knickers in a knot. I want someone who is smarter than I am in the White House (and I had a 4.0 GPA in college). I want someone who understands and values the Constitution, knows his way around science even if he is not a scientist (i.e. knows that the solar system is about 4.5 billion years old and that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist and that life forms evolved rather than got put here by God some six thousand years ago). Can you imagine George Bush as POTUS in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis? We would not be here having this conversation today.

McCain's campaign is dead. The McCain who deserved to be President of the US died sometime after 2000 of injuries incurred during that campaign. The person who emerged was no longer John McCain but rather some kind of undead creature who thirsted for the office the way a vampire thirsts for human blood. He needed it for his survival and the older he got, the more desperate he became. By the time 2008 rolled around, he was willing to do anything.

Anything is exactly what he has done. He turned againt veterans, not even bothering to show up. He turned against laws against torture even though he had been tortured. He turned against everything that was good and noble about the man who had died and he has dragged the body through the mud the way Al Qaeda dragged the Americans in Mogadishu.

He needs to be repudiated, his hopes buried. Maybe then he will return to the Senate and come to his senses. The poisoned cupcake he named as his VP candidate, throwing the country to the wolves, as it were, needs to go back to Alaska. The Republican party needs eight years out of power to lick its wounds and purge the neocons and the rabid evangelicals out of the government and out of the party. The Republican party needs to be concerned with more than the goings on at men's behinds and in women's uteri.

Maybe after eight years in the cold, the GOP can return to who they were before Reagan and the Bushes -- a more conservative, deficit concerned and libertarian group of people who deserve to be listened to seriously.

The jitteriness of McCain last night, his "bulging eyes" might be an indication to have his thyroid checked. It very often gets out of balance as people age. John McCain may be experiencing hyperthyroidism or Hashimoto's thyroiditis. It's treatable with a combined regimen of obliteration of the thyroid by radioactive iodine and subsequent replacement. It is not a trivial problem -- it can lead to arrhythmias and other cardiac problems Nobody with Sarah Palin as his running mate should risk that. Also, it can cause agitation and thought disorders, namely racing thoughts.

I don't think he was on speed. I think he is showing his age in several ways.

As for psychological screening of the candidates, the only way I could advocate it is if the results were kept confidential. Nobody in his right mind would consent to an examination that would show he wasn't.

I hear her nibs is going on Saturday Night Live this weekend. This ought to be interesting.

Someone wrote that if you want to know your intention, look at your results. Okay, it was in the movie, "Semi Tough," a really funny take on Werner Erhard, est and the New Age but it was apt. If you want to see McCain's intentions, look at the campaign he's running and who he has hired to run it for him. Look at the way Palin whips a crowd to a hateful froth of rage. Look at his own twitchy nastiness in the debates and his contempt for Obama and for us.

He isn't being forced to do anything. He has chosen a staff that tells him the only way to win is to punch below the belt and hope your opponent punches back. He has chosen them because he is willing to do anything to win. He has turned his back on the McCain people admired, has murdered that John McCain in the course of getting where he wants to be and that hasn't even worked for him.

I am imagining another version of "A Christmas Carol" wherein he is visited night after night by the promise he once showed.