DISCLAIMER: Because I have, of late, been recklessly delinquent in creating new entries for this blog, I rifled through my drafts folder to see if I could dig up an unfinished piece presentable and current enough to dust off and publish anyway, so as to bridge the time until I may deign to compose new material. So here’s a rough draft I began and abandoned about a year ago. Instead of the forsaken screed to languish in perpetual obscurity, I might as well throw it up here in hopes that—despite its wanting stylistic refinement and half-baked narrative arc—one or the other sentence in it may amuse, enlighten, or exasperate. [END OF DISCLAIMER]

As I understand it, the McCain people had originally intended to go with Joe Lieberman as VP, but that pick didn’t poll too well with the base (or something like that), so they were in a pinch to materialize a replacement on short notice. Some McCain aide had seen one Sarah Palin—a little-known governor of a large little-known state—on Charlie Rose, figured the lady seemed rather charismatic in addition to having some executive experience under her garter belt, whispered his impression into his boss’s hearing aid, the boss went “Sarah who?” and proceeded to greenlight the lady, probably figuring that the governor’s sex would nicely balance out the democratic candidate’s ethnicity, for now both teams were composed of exactly one white male complemented by a novelty act of sorts. A hasty background check was conducted, no major skeletons were discovered, the American history and foreign policy exams were skipped due to time constraints, and thus the fetching Wasillian wound up on the vice-presidential ticket, about to receive a crash course in the world beyond the 49th state.

In the interest of full disclosure, I happen to be a fervently vegetarian pro-choice agnostic with a pronounced predilection for all things green, so the Christian-conservative hunting thing doesn’t exactly set my heather on fire. Comments like “there’s plenty of room for all of Alaska’s animals—right next to the mashed potatoes” accomplish little in the way of winning my sympathy and support.

That said, being somewhat of a neither-here-nor-there independent on the left-to-right continuum, I cannot muster the level of loathing for Ms. Palin which appears to be de rigueur in so many circles. Do I believe she is ready to be president? No. Would I vote for her? Not unless some loopy nutjob of the Janeane Garofalo stripe were the sole alternative, in which case I may either stay home or reluctantly place my check mark next to Sarah Palin’s name. (Working in a cafe in Greenwich Village, I once waited on Ms. Garofalo. In addition to being a left-wing ninnyhammer of the highest order, the Air-America comedienne also pocketed my pen. You can drink my liquor from an old fruit jar all day long, lady, but don’t you EVER steal my pen!!!)

I don’t think Sarah Palin is dumb in the sense of having ridden the short sledge to school. Still, although the lady may have nibbled on the tree of knowledge, she fails to quite come across as having had a full meal. Comprehensive erudition, however, does not equate with intelligence. Sherlock Holmes, no dullard by a long shot, was famously unaware that the earth revolved around the sun, as goings-on in the cosmos were unrelated to his line of work, and the crack sleuth preferred to keep his deduction machine free of irrelevant clutter. Likewise, extensive study of the Federalist Papers or being able to articulate the precise difference between North and South Korea may not have figured prominently in the day-to-day operations of running Wasilla and Alaska respectively. Besides, she didn’t actively put in for running mate in ’08. They asked her, and she simply okey-dokeyed.

Anytime she does give an erudite answer, one gets the sense she memorized it the night before, as she probably had. No doubt the former sportscaster is a great public speaker, carries herself very well, and seems to possess a unique gift of connecting with “the folks.” She came off great on Saturday Night Live and on Conan, plus she turns cute phrases (“So how’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?”). These are certainly excellent qualities for aspiring presidents, and I’m sure she did a bang-up job governing Alaska. (Or perhaps the great state of Alaska governs itself even with a penguin in the wheelhouse. I have no idea. I also have no idea why she suddenly walked off that gig, although I did enjoy her farewell oration by the lake, which she delivered with captivating panache. No clue, though, what she was talking about. Something about too much media focus, whereupon she embarked on a national book tour and became a Fox News analyst. A somewhat curious strategy to stay out of the spotlight.)

I’m neither a politician nor a constitutional scholar—nor a particularly experienced American, for that matter—but even I can list a handful of U.S. Supreme Court rulings I disagree with. When quizzed by Katie Couric, governor and then-VP-candidate Palin couldn’t even come up with Dred Scott, which left many viewers—myself among them—puzzled as to whether she actually agreed with that stupid decision or had simply blanked out. The good governor just kept repeating “Roe v. Wade” as if that was the only item scribbled on the palm of her hand that day.

Sean Hannity, in a well-intentioned effort to dispel the perception of Sarah Palin being a bubblehead, reprised Katie Couric’s question about the Supreme Court decisions. The hot gov had now had more than a year to bone up, and she knew the question was coming. How many rulings did she list? One, just like the last time. To the governor’s credit, at least it wasn’t Roe v. Wade again, and she was, in fact, able to list a few newspapers and magazine titles when Mr. Hannity asked her what she read.

When questioned about her reading routine in 2008, she famously either couldn’t or refused to give specifics. Instead, she claimed to read “everything” she could get her hands on, thus coming across as someone who doesn’t really read much at all. Perhaps she really was as annoyed by the question as she keeps insisting, hence her generic response. Who knows. To her credit, she recently referred to the whole Couric episode as “my bad.”

Unfortunately, it was her bad again on Glenn Beck’s program, when the Beckmeister inquired after her favorite Founding Father. Her answer: “All of them!” Wow. That sounded eerily similar to her erstwhile answer about her reading materials. Apparently, she had not been prepped for the question, and her response left one wondering if she knew any Founding Fathers at all. Upon Mr. Beck’s probing–now having had about 30 seconds to scour her internal database for a name–she finally blurted out “George Washington!”

Of course, that’s an easy one, for the nation’s capital was christened after the man. Had his name been George Anchorage, I’m sure she’d have retrieved it in half that time.

And had Beck asked her to name her second favorite Founding Father, I betcha she’d have said Abraham Lincoln.

If—all other things being equal—Sarah Palin were a pro-choice anti-gun liberal, would the same people who insist she’s a dunce still insist she’s a dunce and rake her over the coals for the same transgressions, like writing little notes on the palm of her hand? Or would she then receive daily accolades on the Huffington Post instead of being pounded into moose pâté?

This is how Monty Python royalty weighed in on the governor in 2008:

… What fascinates me about [unintelligible] is how people watching her on television, can they not see that she’s basically learned certain speeches? And she does them very well, she got a very good memory. But it’s like a nice-looking parrot. Because the parrot speaks beautifully … but doesn’t really have any understanding of the meaning of the words that it is producing, even though it’s producing them very accurately. And she’s been in these training sessions with Cheney’s pals, and she’s learned these speeches, and the extraordinary thing is that so many people are taken in by it. …

Of course, Mr. Cleese’s highhanded snidery has nothing to do with Ms. Palin memorizing or not memorizing her speeches and everything with her being a pro-life Republican. Imagine that, instead of “learning” her speeches, Sarah Palin were in the habit of reading them right off two transparent screens in front of her, as teleprompterboy is wont to do on a regular basis, chances are she’d be getting skewered reading them. If, on the other hand, she were a pro-choice liberal, she could tape her speeches on the inside of her glasses, and the MSNBC crew and their kin would praise her for such ingenuity.

So can Sarah Palin see Russia from her house?

As per my preliminary research, it appears that due to earth’s curvature over the distance of the 700 miles between Wasilla and Russia, in order to see the easternmost border of the evil empire from her rooftop, her house would have to be roughly 63 miles high. Given that, thus far, I’ve never been invited over for lunch (most likely because our respective diets are somewhat incompatible and she wouldn’t know what to cook for me), I cannot personally confirm whether her domicile meets the height requirement.

Of course, I am confident that our future president was merely jesting about being able to see Russia from her house … you abruptly waxed ashen, dear reader … did I say something wrong?

In closing, let’s see what Ms. Palin herself can add to this discussion: