I’m sure Sarah Palin would be overjoyed to know that she’s being defended on the grounds that our public life is so degraded, and the executive branch is such a joke, that even Sarah Palin doesn’t represent a decline in standards.

I might agree with that if we’re just discussing the moral caliber of our presidents and vice presidents, or the policies they’ve espoused. But we’re not–we’re discussing whether she’s demonstrated competence and the mental capacity to tackle difficult problems. By that standard, even if we acknowledge that these men may not have been good vice presidents or good people, she falls well short of the standard set by Vice Presidents Nixon, Johnson, Humphrey, Ford, Mondale, Bush, Gore and Cheney (to name the post-war examples that come immediately to mind).

I guess the retort could be, “Look where those guys got us!” Fair enough. But I’d rather strive to do better, instead of engaging in cheap nihilism and assuming that we might as well select our leaders at random since they’ll inevitably just screw us over regardless.

History has set the bar for serving as President or Vice-President so low that a any argument that any particular candidacy is beyond the pale almost certainly indicates some sort of personal animus by the accuser.

Idiot after idiot has paraded through the Office, and another idiot will do so after the fall election. Were Palin to follow suit, the matter would be wholly unremarkable save for her sex — succeeding Mrs. Wilson and Clinton (both idiots) as only the third female President.

Sincerely,

Lord Peter

This beatification of bumpkiness is one of the reasons I so fervently desire McCain and Palin to suffer an ignoble defeat – although there is a very good chance that an Obama presidency will be bad for the country, a Palin-credited McCain win would (amongst other awful things) further ensconce this dangerous Fargo Knows Best paen to rubedom that has helped lead us to where we are today.

It’s rather irrelevant, of course, since from a political point of view her elevation to the national stage has demonstrated that, by comparison, Senator Obama sounds like Marcus Aurelius and has thereby innoculated him against the inexperience argument

How about a mediocre debate performance and a substance-free convention speech?

I think that’s putting it backwards. None of that demonstrates that she’s unfit to serve, but neither does it demonstrate that she is fit: there’s no presumption of fitness which bad performances rebut. Rather, there should be a requirement that candidates clearly possess experience and articulate positions in such a way as to demonstrate competence and capacity adequate to the task. Palin’s experience is weak and her demonstrations in the campaign have not given any confidence that she can move up to new levels of complexity and responsibility.

Rich Lowry talks about the “starbursts” that flew around his living room when Palin winked.

Brit Hume says that she is “physically attractive.”

And this is the same group that has cried SEXISM coming from the media…don’t suppose the campaign will call these guys out, will they? What hypocrites.

LASER BEAM

Also, this is what happens when you use fake anti-elitism as a central tenet of your politics for long enough that you and your base actually start to believe in its implications: you get politicians who are utterly unexceptional and severely underqualified.