people are already dangerously Far Right. Their wiring is misfiring. Along comes Palin last year, stepping onto the stage in St. Paul, and the zealot delegates hear her berating Obama's community organizing in metropolitan Chicago and they hoot and howl and stomp their feet. They thought the Governor of Alaska was going to deliver them Jesus' own care package from the Great Wells Fargo Wagon in the Sky. Bill Kristol must have felt like he was being lifted off the earth by benevolent angels into God's lap.

Two weeks later, McCain's polling tanked. And these days, Palin trails two or three Puke contenders by significant margins. She's widely perceived as a cartoon. Her husband is an automaton. What's-His-Name is about to flash his ding-dong to the entire globe, as if the world's populations had never seen a ding-dong before. Palin quit her job because the going got tough and she found she could not replace the spirit of public service the job required with her limitless ego and ambition. She's inappropriately flirtatious instead of issue-savvy and she's vacuously stupid.

That she would appeal to posters on the Free Republic is unsurprising. Let's hope her odds against attaining the Republican nomination remain insurmountable. We're trying to run a country here, and after eight years of Dubya we ought to have learned not to turn over adult jobs to incompetent high schoolers.