The Palin Fiasco: No Longer Funny...Bordering On Scary

So word is that, with one month left before the election, Palin will not be on any of the Sunday morning talk shows.

Everyone who's paying attention knows exactly why this is so, of course.

Now, McCain is probably going to lose. Still, according to Nate Silver, there's currently about a 15% chance of him winning if nothing changes. That means there is something vaguely like a 15% chance that we will soon have a 72-year-old President who's had skin cancer three times...and a stealth Vice President who has held zero press conferences and zero truly serious interviews, and has shown an aptitude for nothing beyond reading the teleprompter, winking, and crinkling up her nose. We know little about her, but the evidence we do have strongly suggests that she knows absolutely nothing about foreign policy and about as much about domestic policy. She is not very bright, and seems to have rather an authoritarian streak. Before she's even in office, she's said that she'd like to expand the power of the Vice President--but nobody's sure whether this is her authoritarianism or her ignorance showing.

It has been asserted that there is approximately a 1 in 4 chance of McCain dying while in office. If Silver is right about the odds of a McCain victory, that currently leaves us with something vaguely like a 4% chance of seeing Palin as president in the next couple of years.

McCain's lust for power has made it a real possibility that now, at this crucial time in American history, we could end up with the most unqualified President of all time.

One of the theories I live by goes like this: don't screw up. And here's why: because if you screw up once, you're off balance. In the normal course of one's life, disasters little and large come along fairly routinely, but one normally can recover from them. But if you screw up significantly, you put yourself in a position from which recovery is more difficult. And then if one of those disasters comes along, recovery will be more difficult. And if you happen to then screw up again, or if you have the bad luck to hit another snag...well, not you've put yourself in a position such that real trouble is possible, and recovery is no longer guaranteed. There's no doubt that many people have died and many nations have fallen as a result of just such chains of events.

By electing Bush, America screwed up, as every thinking person now realizes. We might have survived that just fine--but then 9/11 came along. Then the potential of the original error unfolds, as Bush elects to ignore the threat of OBL and al Qaeda in order to start the disastrous Iraq war. Now OBL is still on the loose, Afghanistan is going South, and we've ground our army down in Iraq, failing to gain victory even there, shredding our alliances, strengthening al Qaeda, and incurring mind-boggling debt in the process. And now the economy is teetering on the edge.

By electing an unqualified President, we set a chain of events in motion that has led us to a place from which irrevocable damage could be done to our nation. Add to this that there remains a significant chance that McCain--and, consequently and God help us, Palin--could become President, and...well, if you can sleep at night, you probably aren't paying attention.

Seems to me that everybody mostly walks around thinking that everything is going to be alright. But eight or even four more years anything like the last eight, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will be alright ever again.

Things might turn out alright, but given what's at stake, the odds that they won't are far, far too high.