Another View of Barack

As for McCain's running mate: "Sarah Palin is now almost as large a celebrity as Obama but her appeal is as tactile as Obama's is abstract, as Dionysian as his is Apollonian. She is genuinely gorgeous, with that thick, cascading soap opera hair, generous mouth, and beauty pageant legs . . .

"No woman who has worn a $2,500 dollar silk Valentino jacket is ever going to return to wearing bargains from Out of the Closet, or desert the glossy standards of the new hairdresser who travels on the campaign plane for the Beehive in Wasilla . . . She is more likely to trade in Todd than give up her new A-list look for long."

Mark her words.

The Palin-versus-McCain spitting match continues, with reporters all too happy to grant anonymity to the snipers. The latest from Mike Allen: "A top McCain adviser one-ups the priceless 'diva' description, calling her 'a whack job.' "

Prompting this response from Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "It's McCain who ends up holding the bag. It's not complicated: if Sarah Palin is 'a whack job,' why did McCain pick her to be one 72-year-old heartbeat from the presidency?"

Is all this too much, even for some liberals? Salon's Joan Walsh says she's "appalled by the McCain camp's recent effort to make Sarah Palin the scapegoat for his horrific candidacy . . .

"What classless jerks. I am no Sarah Palin fan, but I think it was obvious, before McCain picked her, that Palin lacked 'fundamental understanding' on key issues. They chose her anyway; her charm, charisma and appeal to the Christian right base outweighed her drawbacks back in August. Now they're trashing Palin for their own failure to adequately vet her, or to anticipate the way her 'lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues' might actually scare voters."

Andrew Sullivan sees poetic justice:

"My view is that after the McCain peeps had made that crazy decision and realized after the fact what they had on their hands, they put their best face on it. They knew that the normal rules for a veep - a press conference, full media accessibility, airing of all the biographical details - would have required the candidate to quit before November. So they tried to shield her from actual democracy - a dangerous decision for the rest of us, but a rational, cynical decision for a campaign running a delusional liar as the potential next president of the US. Palin of course, lives in her own little, somewhat nutty, world and now believes her manifest destiny has been thwarted."

But nobody can disembowel a target like Christopher Hitchens:

"This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity."

In the wake of Ted Stevens's conviction, the award for Best Scenario goes to Time's Karen Tumulty: