The Big Dump

With the presidential election campaign swinging into full gear, it seems the problems with Sarah Palin are overflowing. Since John McCain's announcement on Friday that she would be his running mate on the Republican ticket, there has been a tremendous Palin news dump:

She has hired a lawyer to defend her as Alaska state legislators investigate whether she may have abused her power in firing the state police chief for refusing to fire her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper;

Her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant;

She is a member of the Alaska Independence Party (AIP), a group whose sole purpose is to succeed from the union by infiltrating both the Democratic and Republican parties;

She lied in her speech this past Friday about her opposition to the "Bridge to Nowhere" project. She, in fact, supported the bridge as well as the highway leading to it.

And then there is this little morsel:

Q: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?

PALIN: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

Sigh.

Umm...Gov. Palin...that "under God" phrase...well...you see...it wasn't added to the pledge until 1954.

With the steady stream of negative news over the weekend, the McCain camp has sent a slew of lawyers up to Alaska to do a thorough vetting of Gov. Palin. The thing of it is they should have vetted her PRIOR to putting her on the ticket. My hunch is had they done a proper vetting before McCain made his decision, Palin would still be in Alaska and McCain would have spent the weekend campaigning with someone he actually knew! (Prior to choosing her, McCain had met Palin only twice.)

While it may seem to a few like the media and blogosphere are piling on Sarah Palin, I say make no mistake: While it is clearly evident that she is nowhere near acceptable as vice-president, everything we have learned this past weekend actually says more about John McCain than it does about Palin. As I said last Friday morning, McCain panicked with this VP choice.

In a shallow attempt to woo some Hillary Clinton hold-outs while at the same time attempting to shore up George Bush's evangelical base, John McCain proved to America beyond all doubt that he can't be trusted with the presidency. In the most important decision of his campaign he showed us that he is reckless, incompetent, and cynical. And after eight years of that lethal combination in the White House we need not elect it for another four.