I watched the Sunday shows yesterday, and was simply amazed at all the lying going on as the GOP spin team went to laughable extremes trying to say, with a straight face, that Sarah Palin is qualified to take the presidential oath of office. The lying was amazing, even painful to watch as, I’m serious, these folks’ lips were moving, but their eyes had a kind of sadness to them. Even Joe Lieberman, who is not likely to even be allowed on the White House lawn should Obama win, was clearly lying about Palin. It’s all in the eyes. They’re lying, and they’re not happy about being forced to do it. I may be reading more into this than is there, but I also seemed to detect some anger on the part of these campaign spokespeople and pundits at McCain’s laugh-out-loud veep selection, at McCain having not only given up their most effective weapon—whines about Obama’s readiness—but that McCain has now turned his campaign into a referendum not on Obama’s experience but McCain’s judgment.

It’s the Abbott & Costello candidacy, one reporter describing the McCain campaign strategy as “improvisational.” Forget her qualifications, as I mention, it’s that *voice* that loses. Obama’s big problem is not his experience, it’s his skin color. That’s the plain truth and I wish somebody out there was brave enough to say it. If Obama were white, he’d be dozens of laps around the track ahead of McCain. The headwind Obama is sailing into is overcoming an institutionalized racism that forces Obama to be, at minimum, twice as qualified as McCain before he’s able to compete on the merits. And, as institutionalized as racism is, sexism is even more deeply embedded, Hillary having to overcome the notion she’s Bill’s puppet (I’m quite sure it’s the other way around), and good ol’ boys assuming she’s a bimbo. As I said, I doubt Sarah Palin is a bimbo, but she sure looks and sounds like one. And that awful, terrible image of McCain’s younger, glamorous veep selection *towering* over her dad is head-scratchingly ridiculous. I mean it, all day yesterday, news people were trying, I mean trying hard, to be generous about this idea, giving the spinners extra-long leash yesterday to make their case for Palin.

It all tastes like stone soup. McCain seems to have sandbagged his own team, his own party. The one thing I agree with however, is this is indeed a hail Mary pass into the end zone. Palin appears to be a younger, female, and even less-informed Bush. Worse, there is emerging scads of video of her grinning, talking in that bimbo voice about how she knows nothing about what’s going on in Iraq, etc. The sliver of hope I have left for McCain is this: that he knows she’s an empty suit, but he also knows how stupid and uninformed the vast majority of us are, and how desperate his base is to NOT see an Obama presidency. I think Palin’s nomination aptly demonstrates McCain’s contempt for his own base, as she is a virtual parody of George Bush and Dan Quayle. But both those guys got elected.