Hail Mary full of gaffes

Whew, talk about dodging a bullet.

It's hard to tell how much of this is the GOP trying to find a single scapegoat for their massive failure in this election, and how much of it is the honest-to-goodness truth (or a bit of both). But it's also hard to figure why Fox News, of all places, would report these stories at all. They were, after all, some of the biggest Palin cheerleaders on cable news. If we want to get really cynical, I suppose you could chalk it up to spite, or maybe they're just being played by McCain staffers in order to further that whole scapegoat thing.

Whatever the case, I still think it's pretty damn clear that almost no vetting was done for the Palin VP pick, and that she was a pretty big weight around the campaign's neck. That said, Palin was not the sole reason for the failures of the Republican party on Nov. 4 - rather, it was a complex and many layered cake that had been baked over the last 8 years of GOP dominance in Washington (it probably goes back even further, honestly). They let cronyism and hard line ideology take control, and the results are being crushingly played out on the American people's pocketbooks and lives.

Still, the not knowing that Africa was a continent thing is, if baffling, pretty damn funny. Oh Alaska, I don't envy you right now.