"When the three insiders presented her to a smitten, impetuous McCain, he accepted their judgment, ratified by Charlie Black, one of the most experienced Republican operatives in Washington, who told him that if he chose her, he might win -- and otherwise he would surely lose.."

beautiful, says it all. anyone watching the election knew McCain was toast.

"Get elected as president"?

The poor dear won't make it out of the primaries. Just imagine her in one of those group debates on TV with Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich, and whoever else is running.

She can't string three coherent sentences together, and two of those will be garbled platitiudes.

Palin is light entertainment, show biz, shallow and self-agrandizing.

Matt,

"Sarah is like Bush!" Bring that heat Matt.

By the time BO is done with our economy, Bush will look like a picnic.

You may think BO is our first black president but he is really a chameleon and he is going to change political color on you as often as his teleprompter tells him to change.

Oh, you might want to learn an alternative spelling to "there".

Sorry for the petty criticism

I'm with fightthetheocracy on this. Stop giving this non-entity so much press. I subscribe to Salon to get away from this kind of shit.

Sarah Palin sucks, blah, blah, blah..we get it. Old hat. Try something original, Joe. We're all in agreement about her and our basic desire to not think about her for awhile, but you fetishistically continue to trot out your best attempt at snarky prose when she's involved in the conversation. As if maybe if your writing is vile enough, perhaps you could trade up from Elizabeth and get with Maureen Dowd (not happening, you're a bit old for that cougar). Your worse crime is you continue to demean the craft of "incisive writing" with your generic smarm.

Josepth, didn't you go to community college?! So you must be as uncouth and incompetent as an Alaskan hockey mom, right?! Does that logic necessarily follow? No? Well now you know how the rest of us feel reading your blather.

Joseph, didn't you use Linda Tripp (nice!) as a source for your bogus claims linking President George HW Bush with some random woman?! So you're obviously a brilliant journalist or an aging hack. You've got that distinguished albino-white hair, but you're not Anderson Cooper or Newt Gingrich, and this fact makes me sad.

Stay classy, Joe..

it takes a lot simply to incline me to care.

But I have to join the growing chorus on the topic of Salon's coverage of Sarah Palin:

would you all give it a rest, already?

Sarah Palin is not that important.

I'm seeing her exploited- in the classic sense of media exploitation of the phenomenon of celebrity- as a cipher, a blank slate on to which everyone feels compelled to draw their impressions.

To me, the real story here is about how American politics continues to be more about personalities than issues, and more about elections than activism- to the point of nearly exclusive attention on the former factors, at the expense of the latter.

"Endangered the country" is a REALLY nice meme...good work Joe Conason. That is something to beat the GOP over the head with as well as a left handed stab at Palin.

And YES, we do still need to be vigilant.....I personally find it EXTREMELY improbable that her incompetent narcissistic ass could on her best day, beat the powerful Obama machine, it is still worth the token effort (we have NO shortage of idiots, and a lot of very rich people would like another moronic puppet in the White House) of continuing to ridicule and provoke her into continued ridiculous behavior.

Plus it's fun beating the hell out of a sanctimonious willfully ignorant white trash hypocrite. Try it...you'll like it.

V V

to the "USF" -- the United States of Fakery.

I get sick of it -- the 24/7 frauds. Nowadays my TV is most recently awash with bullshit ads for "mortgage modifications," among the myriad other breathless scams.

The USF - fake hair, fake nails, fake lips, fake tits, fake memoirs, fake GOP marriages, fake Alcohol and Addiction Cures, fake FOREX Made Easy, fake Work-at-Home-2-hrs-a-Week-and-Get-Rich schemes, fake Jeff's-EZ-Real-Estate-Riches-Method, fake Weight-Loss-panaceas, fake reverse mortgages...

Dangerously fake Presidential material from Alaska.

Sick of it.

This article would make sense if it were about Obama and not Palin. I mean who is really endangering the country.

Hey Kristi,

You wrote, "Palin is light entertainment, show biz, shallow and self-agrandizing."

Doggone girl, that is my exact, verbatim description of Al Franken - can you believe it!

Its a good thing he will never be elected. Can't you just see the primary debate with Hillary, Dick Durbin, John Kerry, and Al all decked out in his "depends"!

Maybe she will use her new-found free time to go to Chicago and learn the intricacies of being a community organizer with ACORN - then she will be qualified to be POTUS.

The saddest part of all of this is that if the Wassila Gorrila somehow got the Republican nomination in 2012, she would get at least 40% of the vote.

But she's just that fun.

And her popularity says a lot about the state of the Republican Party. A mediocrity like her actually was the candidate for vice-president.

Many of us are still reeling.

Show biz was Al Franken's profession. He meant to make us laugh.

Being governor of the state of Alaska was Sarah Palin's, not show biz. And she meant for us to take what she said seriously.

I do hope you see the difference.

(By the way, no one has ever called me "Kristi." They wouldn't dare.)

Now there you go again - using one of my descriptions for John Kerry - our illustrious war hero who admitted to war crimes in his testimony before Congress and grew up to be a Senator.

He was and is a light weight - all these years in the Senate and his legislative record was wanting.

What was he doing other that chasing after rich widows covered in catsup/ketchup?