George Will gets it……..

Other folks-not so much.

In choosing Sarah Palin to be his running mate, John McCain told the thinking voter who is in the center-neither liberal or conservative- that building a bridge to 2/3 of the population is not on his agenda:

From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday’s probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign’s closing days.

Some polls show that Palin has become an even heavier weight in John McCain’s saddle than his association with George W. Bush. Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin’s never having attended a “Georgetown cocktail party” is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents “are in charge of the United States Senate”?

She may have been tailoring her narrative to her audience of third-graders, who do not know that vice presidents have no constitutional function in the Senate other than to cast tie-breaking votes. But does she know that when Lyndon Johnson, transformed by the 1960 election from Senate majority leader into vice president, ventured to the Capitol to attend the Democratic senators’ weekly policy luncheon, the new majority leader, Montana’s Mike Mansfield, supported by his caucus, barred him because his presence would be a derogation of the Senate’s autonomy?

Perhaps Palin’s confusion about the office for which she is auditioning comes from listening to its current occupant. Dick Cheney, the foremost practitioner of this administration’s constitutional carelessness in aggrandizing executive power, regularly attends the Senate Republicans’ Tuesday luncheons. He has said jocularly that he is “a product” of the Senate, which pays his salary, and that he has no “official duties” in the executive branch. His situational constitutionalism has, however, led him to assert, when claiming exemption from a particular executive order, that he is a member of the legislative branch and, when seeking to shield certain of his deliberations from legislative inquiry, to say that he is a member of the executive branch

Palin may be an inveterate simplifier; McCain has a history of reducing controversies to cartoons. A Republican financial expert recalls attending a dinner with McCain for the purpose of discussing with him domestic and international financial complexities that clearly did not fascinate the senator. As the dinner ended, McCain’s question for his briefer was: “So, who is the villain?”.

The constant refrain one hears these days from supporters of the McCain campaign is that if one does not accept Sarah Palin as she has been presented-then there must be something wrong with them. It cannot possibly be her. “She’s real, she’s folksy, she’s one of us-if you don’t get it, then you are not one of us and unworthy of opinion anyway”.

Maybe they are right-I don’t get Sarah Palin. I mean, after all, when there is so much talent in the Republican party that passes the conservative litmus tests, yet have proven track records of foreign policy experience, governing experience, of bridging divides and listening to the other half of the demographic-why not pick someone who has little national experience and is the governor of a one of a kind state?

Set aside the fact that most of the bedrock assertions about her and her record have proven to be untrue. Or that, unlike Barak Obama who survived a 20+ month primary campaign and still won the nomination in spite of a lot of things that were thrown at him, Sarah Palin was plucked from obscurity at the behest of that level headed realist, William Kristol.

Pay no attention to the fact that in considering her for the second highest office in the land-one has to not forget that the current possible incumbent may not finish one or both of his terms based on actuarial probabilities? Forget all that.

More importantly, pay no attention to the fact that her stated positions on a whole host of issues are 180 degrees out from where the rest of the population lies. Not relevant.

Just lump it all into the “S” word and make it someone else’s fault. Because its manufactured rage-you understand.

Not plain old dissappointment that someone you once believed in could be so careless. No not that. Must be a conspiracy out there somewhere…………………….