Soap-opera drama unfolds

The infighting between the McCain and Palin camps has spilled well into the open, each blaming the other for various goofs and gaffes.

The Africa thing is a bit of a Red Herring; it is far from the only thing that would establish Gov. Palin as a blazing ignoramus. There's her lack of knowledge of the VP job duties, the meaning of the First Amendment, Russia, Supreme Court decisions, socialism, how to tell a call from a foreign head of state apart from an obvious prank, and much more. That's why the Africa thing didn't sound so far-fetched.

In any event, being that she is such a blazing ignoramus with poor judgment, the warring McCain and Palin camps really brought on this whole spectacle of blaming and backbiting themselves. How can the Palin camp blame the McCain camp for all her ignorance? The McCain people weren't the ones who made her ignorant. How can the McCain camp blame the Palin camp for bringing all this ignorance to the ticket? It was McCain who should have known better.

There's got to be a good movie script in the making in all this. Now that the election is over and we can be relieved that this blazing ignorance didn't make it within a heartbeat of the Presidency, there's much comic relief in watching all this play out. It's just too absurd seeing Palin's handlers offer a serious and sober defense of her against McCain-staff backbiting in the context of a ridiculous ticket and campaign.

What is also absurd is the way that the right-wing blogosphere is crawling all over itself trying to defend Palin and her ignorance against all the nasty critics. Evidently the rumor that she thought Africa is a country strikes against their sense of credibility and accuracy -- and yet, concerns about credibility and accuracy seem to go right out the window when their own darling discusses VP job duties, the meaning of the First Amendment, and much more. This is what the hardcore right-wing is reduced to -- a blatant double-standard and bias in how it assesses facts.

[ADDENDUM: More absurdity about the circumstances surrounding the "Sarkozy" prank call. The staffer responsible for poorly vetting the call offers up a mea culpa: "No one's going to beat me up more than I beat myself up for setting up the governor like that." The language is all too revealing: he "set her up," as in, it is part of his job not to let her astounding ignorance get out in the open and create an embarrassment. Just as Sullivan fumes about, they knew what they had and made it part of staffers' job to conceal it as best they could.]