Sarah Palin's Impossible Dream

What delightful intrigue. A "senior Republican" cloaked in anonymity has informed the Politico that Sarah Palin has chosen -- you've gotta love it -- to "go rogue."

That's right, you heard it here last; that was the media's weekend obsession, especially since there's nothing left of substance or suspense to talk about in this late-October campaign that was unofficially over in mid-September, if not June or March.

The initial coverage, I might add, was as delightful as Palin's intrigue itself, what with the Politico crooning with operatic understatement that her skulduggery is "complicating" John McCain's campaign.

The latter, such as it is -- and if you saw it portrayed by Tom Brokaw yesterday on "Meet the Press" as an unending series of Great Moments in Hypocrisy, you know what I mean -- was what the Politico chose to call an existence of "already-tense internal dynamics."

On the street -- and please do allow me this one and most fitting colloquialism -- that is otherwise known as a colossal clusterfuck.

Oh my, continued the Politico, numerous sources have kissed and told that "Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard" -- or for that matter, to increasingly disregard -- "the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations…. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image."

Well, politics is largely about finding someone to blame, and in this respect Palin is merely getting the jump on McCain's loyalists (yes, I know, that is perhaps stretching an epithet). Said one "McCain insider," referring to the feckless Machiavellis of Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace: "These people are going to try and shred [Palin] after the campaign to divert blame from themselves."

Actually, they'll do the latter with some justification. It's widely reported that Mr. McCain did in fact have his little self-destructive heart set on Joe Lieberman as a running mate. Aides talked him -- begged him -- out of it. Joe might have been even worse, we'll never know; but in any event Sarah Palin was McCain's decision, not theirs. On the other hand, when it then came down to Sarah, those clever aides should have recalled that most elementary of aphorisms: "The Devil you know…."

Palin's allies have, however, insightfully drawn their sharpest sword to bamboozle the base. They are, that is, blaming the McCain campaign through the heaving of indirect blame on that oldest and most reliable of bogeymen, the media elite. "The campaign," said one Palin humbugger, "as a whole bought completely into what the Washington media said -- that she's completely inexperienced."

So what we've got here, to paraphrase Strother Martin, is a failure to internally communicate at a critical time, resulting in a right-wing woman scorned. "She felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised," the humbugger continued, so -- here it comes, oh joyous pronouncement -- "she's gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts."

Yes, just when we thought the McCain campaign couldn't possibly get any better -- which is to say, get any worse -- Gov. Sarah Palin has decided to act as the detonating atomic bomb to John McCain's hydrogen implosion of Nov. 4.

We're now promised Sarah in the raw, a ravishing moose on the loose out to butcher her mother tongue in the further and bloody execution of what's left of the campaign's discernible policies.

McCain, for instance, has remained conservatively mum on the matter of another stimulus package, since his natural opposition to it might prove wildly unpopular. But it was his silence that proved wildly unpopular with Sarah: "I say, you know, when is enough enough of taxpayer dollars being thrown into this bill out there? This next one of the Democrats being proposed should be very, very concerning to all Americans…. No, you know, we were told when we've got to be believing if we have enough elected officials who are going to be standing strong on fiscal conservative principles and free enterprise and we have to believe that there are enough of those elected officials to say, 'No, OK, that's enough.'"

That's what she said in an "off the reservation" moment, as a McCain aide put it, with CNN's Glenn Beck last week -- and I'd wager even the cerebrally oxygen-deprived Mr. Beck looked upward in syntactical puzzlement when he heard, "we were told when we've got to be believing if…."

But that's our girl, and you gotta love her.

She was but stating the self-evident, however, in her own amusingly diabolical sort of way: "I hereby declare my 2012 candidacy for the presidency of the United States. It's now obvious to virtually everyone that this numbnuts I'm working for has cluelessly toasted his own chances, but I'll be damned if he's going to take me down with him."