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"I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail." -- Bob Herbert, NYT, 9-13-08 Bob Herbert's item in today's New York Times, She's Not Ready, is not so much political analysis as a howl of MSM shock and outrage. No-o-o-o-o!, Herbert seems to cry. I can't believe this is happening to us! Meanwhile, with condescension worthy of Charlie Gibson, ABC's David Wright suggests that Palin has been in need of a "chaperone" on the campaign trail. View video.

Barack Obama knows it. The election he had in the bag is slipping away. The selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate has so thrown him off stride, as it has most other Democrats, that all the momentum he had has vanished. He’s getting panicky advice from everywhere. He intends to launch more and sharper attacks, abandoning any pretense of a new and different, more civil campaign. Democrats know something, and desperation is setting in. They have a novice campaigner who wanders off message. With every advantage in the primaries, Obama couldn’t win the big states...

Wasilla: Outpost Built On A Broken Dream Robert M. Thorson September 11, 2008 Wasilla The media attention on Alaska's governor has been torrential. Not wanting to give her any more attention, I'll focus on the geography that shaped her character. Frommer's Travel Guide to Alaska describes Wasilla as "the worst kind of suburban sprawl of highway-fronting shopping malls and gravel lots." How did this happen? The town's history is the kind of story Mark Twain had in mind when he wrote: "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." First, some background. Alaska is so rich from pipeline royalties...

The Democrats are in a panic. In a presidential race that is impossible to lose, they are behind. Obama devotees are frantically giving advice. Tom Friedman tells him to "start slamming down some phones." Camille Paglia suggests, "be boring!" Meanwhile, a posse of Democratic lawyers, mainstream reporters, lefty bloggers and various other Obamaphiles are scouring the vast tundra of Alaska for something, anything, to bring down Sarah Palin: her daughter's pregnancy, her ex-brother-in-law problem, her $60 per diem, and now her religion. (CNN reports — news flash! — that she apparently has never spoken in tongues.) Not since Henry II...

BWAAAAAA HA HA!! Folks, Sarah Palin has the entire Obama campaign in therapy. They have absolutely no idea what hit them. Listen to the panic. At campaign headquarters in Chicago, the Palin phenomenon is clearly getting under the skin of some aides, who complain she is getting "celebrity" treatment. "The McCain campaign attacks Obama as a celebrity, but they are completely managing Palin's celebrity -- with only handpicked interviews and magazine covers in People and Us," one Obama adviser said. "We're not running for American Idol here -- ultimately we believe the country is smarter than this." So last month's...

Reports that Track Palin vandalized school buses aren't true, says pal By NANCY DILLON DAILY NEWS WEST COAST BUREAU CHIEF Wednesday, September 10th 2008, 7:55 PM Despite snowballing reports and rumors, Sarah Palin's eldest son, Track, was not part of the gang of four teenagers who criminally vandalized 44 Alaska school buses in 2005, a key culprit told The News. "Track wasn't with me. Track had nothing to do with it," participant Deryck Harris, 20, said Wednesday in an exclusive interview. Citing an anonymous judicial source, the Anchorage radio station 1080 KUDO was the first to report last week that...

Sarah Palin is trying to seduce independent voters. But she comes across like a whip-wielding mistress who wants to discipline a naughty America. Sarah Palin has thrown a big-time scare into Democrats. The GOP ticket received a huge bounce after the convention, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll, and McCain now leads Obama among registered voters, 50 percent to 46 percent. And it's mostly Palin's doing. The "elite media" that Palin and her fellow Republicans so lovingly excoriated in St. Paul, Minn., is reporting that her entrance into the race may have put crucial states like Ohio in play. The...

In the heady atmosphere of last week's Republican convention -- electrified by Sarah Palin's barnstorming speech as the vice-presidential candidate -- a curious fact seems to have been overlooked. On paper, the new darling of Christian conservatives ticks all the right boxes as only a media-taunting, oil-drilling, gun-toting, abortion-hating, creationist mother of five could. Equally at home posing for photographs with her children and dead animals, she sends out an irresistible mating call to evangelical voters who suspect that John McCain is secretly too secular for their taste. Did his team carry out sufficient checks before selecting an inexperienced state...

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin stumbled this weekend when she commented on the federal takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Huffington Post "helpfully" pointed out her mistake to anyone who missed it the first time around. Speaking before voters in Colorado Springs, the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers." The companies, as McClatchy reported, "aren't taxpayer funded but operate as private companies. The takeover may result in a taxpayer bailout during reorganization." Economists and analysts pounced on the misstatement, saying...

Amie Parnes reports from Lebanon, VA: Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin's new "change" mantra. "You can put lipstick on a pig," he said as the crowd cheered. "It's still a pig." "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink." "We've had enough of the same old thing." The crowd apparently took the "lipstick" line as a reference to Palin, who described the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull in a single word: "lipstick."

The emergence of Sarah Palin as a political force in the presidential race has left many top Democrats fretting that, just two weeks after their convention ended on an emotional high, Barack Obama's campaign has suddenly lost its stride. Obama has responded aggressively this week to Palin's presence on the Republican ticket, using TV ads and campaign rallies to attack her contention that she is a political reformer who will take on the Washington establishment -- a role Obama has long claimed as his alone. But some Democrats are now worried about the perils of Obama's strategy, saying that his...

South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler sharply attacked Sarah Palin today, saying John McCain had chosen a running mate " whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.” Palin is an opponent of abortion rights and gave birth to her fifth child, Trig, earlier this year after finding out during her pregnancy that the baby had Down syndrome. Fowler told my colleague Alex Burns in an interview that the selection of an opponent of abortion rights would not boost McCain among many women. “Among Democratic women and even among independent women, I don’t think it helped...

“If you want change, you want the Democratic Party,” Cohen said. “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus, who our minister prayed about. Pontius Pilate was a governor.” A similar statement has been circulating in e-mails and on blogs in recent days, before Cohen spoke Wednesday.