Sarah the unready

Sullivan and his readership reax in what's become typically irreverent fashion.

At this point my instinctual and emotional reaction is to feel sorry for Sarah, the person. She's obviously very bad at working without a teleprompter and it pains me to see her on the national stage so out of her element. But presidents and vice presidents are not sportscasters and cannot work from teleprompters. Maybe Alaskan governors can, but the job she's applying for requires one to be able to think well on an international stage, and at this point she doesn't even seem up to cogent national-level thinking.

It's quite obvious now that McCain should not have picked her, that it was cynical, sexist, politics-first, country-last, hasty, and irresponsible.

It's also obvious that Palin should have declined the nomination when offered, and that Republicans and Christianists should not have been mindlessly eager to assume the best without data.

At this point she's been Quayle-ized, but I fear that we're headed for 39 more days of partisan republican and Christianist denial, media tiptoeing lest it risk offending those too much, and outrage from everyone else (democrats, libertarians, honest conservatives, and the rest of the free world)

I did not think this election could sink as low as Bush's years in office have, but the McCain-Palin campaign is testing that theory. Thankfully none of it is Obama's doing, and with his victory we'll at least be able to say America triumphed over incompetence and gross indecency and dishonor....which at this point is the only way I can think to describe the McCain-Palin ticket.

Meanwhile, the silence on this interview at the Corner was so deafening, K-lo had to defend it from an email.

UPDATE: Fallows chimes in, also feeling sorry, then says:

Couric deserves better ratings for the CBS news based on the steely relentlessness of her questions. Unlike Charlie Gibson, and unlike Joe Biden in a (possible!) future debate, she has no background complications of the older white man bullying the younger, attractive woman. She was a professional woman who has clearly earned her position grilling someone whose bona fides she clearly doubted.

And Couric displayed one brilliant technique I recommend to all future questioners. When Palin ducked a question about financial-bailout provisions, saying that "John McCain and I" had not yet reached a decision, Couric asked the deadly question: "So what are the pros and cons?" There is no way to fake your way around that. As Palin showed.

Nailed it.