D-Day has what I would call the definitive dissection of McCain’s nomination of Palin for VP:
It’s clear that McCain, who has only met Palin a few times, sees the election as an uphill climb and tried to use the pick to command the news cycle with a surprise. Maybe that works for a day, but over time this could backfire heavily. Like Eagleton heavy.
Mudflats has a roundup of local reaction:
Alaska State Senate President Lyda Green (R): “She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?” (Green is from Palin’s home town of Wasilla.)
Via Roy we find that Libertarians, as usual, are willing to sell out their values at the drop of a hat:
Yes, Palin is pro-life and yes, she’s made a huge mistake by supporting windfall taxes on oil companies. But she was a tireless reformer against government waste in a state that is famous for it. She, after all, shut down the Bridge to Nowhere.
Hey look, a young zombie meme in the wild!
Bottom line is that she was for the bridge-to-nowhere before she was against it, and she only turned against it when the money would have to come from the State budget rather than from the Federal budget.
But the bridge to nowhere isn’t the only thing Palin was for before she was against:
So, as recently as less than seven months ago, Sarah Palin refused to even endorse McCain because of a position of McCain’s that, in a relatively rare occurrence, has not changed. That’s how strongly principled she was (note the past tense) in support of drilling in ANWR.
And Ta-Nehisi gets right to the heart of the right’s refusal to get the concept:
I just watched Chris Matthews correct Pat Buchanan who kept calling Sarah Palin—a 44-year old woman—“gal.” Buchanan called her this just as he was claiming she was feminist.
As many others have observed, Republicans think Dems’ vision of affirmative action is “promoting unqualified minorities and women” because that’s the only thing they can imagine doing. They think feminism is simply making sure there’s a 3:1 (or better) ratio of X:Y chromosomes.
Update: Via TBogg, Will Thomas humiliates Karl Rove. AND WHY ISN’T THAT FUCKHEAD IN JAIL?
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Close: they think that all minorities and women are the same, so qualifications don’t matter. They’re fungible. Alan Keyes = Barack Obama, so of course people will vote for Keyes. They’re all the same, right?
I used to think that maybe, possibly, Condi Rice was just out of her area of expertise and if a crisis came up in Russia, she’d know what to do. Nope. The very thing she prepared for and studied her entire academic and professional career—Russian aggression—happened and she had no clue what to do. How do you study Russia and the Soviet Union on the PhD level and still fuck up the Russia/Georgia/South Ossieta situation that badly?