Oh, NYTimes, how I love Thee.

Some choice snippets from various articles re: Palin-Palooza 2008 -

Gail Collins:

- “Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to win their good opinion,” said the moose-gutting, polar bear-trashing, aerobics-class-networking vice presidential nominee.

- What followed was a long line of unexpected revelations, from the fabled teenage pregnancy to my own personal favorite: the threat to fire the town librarian who refused to censor books.

- Palin’s speech totally swallowed up all the attention in St. Paul, leaving nothing whatsoever for speakers like Mitt Romney, who celebrated the convention Reform Day by announcing: “We need change all right! Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.” Tragically, nobody seemed interested enough to point out that this made no sense.

- Also fiscal reform. How many times have you heard McCain promise to slash taxes and pay for it by eliminating unnecessary programs? And who better to help carry out that agenda than the governor of a state whose residents pay less taxes than anyplace else in the union due to their genius in making the federal government pay the tab for virtually everything?

Maureen Dowd:

- Indeed, it does. Only four days into her reign as John McCain’s “soul mate,” or “Trophy Vice,” as some bloggers are calling her, on the ticket known as “Maverick Squared,” Palin, the governor of Alaska, has already accrued two gates (Troopergate and Broken-watergate), a lawyer (for Troopergate), a future son-in-law named Levi (a high school ice hockey player, described by New York magazine as “sex on skates”), and a National Enquirer headline about the “Teen Prego Crisis” with 17-year-old daughter Bristol.

- This week, the anti-abortion forces celebrated the news of Bristol’s pregnancy, using it as further proof that their beloved Governor Palin — who will no more support sex education than polar bears — was committed to the cause.

- Since John McCain played craps first and sent the vetters to Alaska afterward, Republicans have been defending Governor Palin by saying that, while she has no foreign policy experience — except, as Cindy McCain pointed out, that “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia” — she has a lot of domestic policy experience as a supercharged P.T.A. and hockey mom.

- “If this doesn’t resonate with every woman in America, I’ll eat my hat,” Bill Noll, an Alaska delegate whose daughter got pregnant at a young age and kept the baby.

Editorial:

- If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

- The fact that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant is irrelevant to her candidacy. There are, however, very serious questions about her political past and her ideology, including her links to a party advocating Alaska’s secession from the nation.

- According to Time magazine, she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian. ***(This was the clincher of dislike para me).

- For Mr. McCain to go on claiming that Mr. Obama has too little experience to be president after almost four years in the United States Senate is laughable now that he has announced that someone with no national or foreign policy experience is qualified to replace him, if necessary.

- In a speech last June to her former church in Wasilla, Ms. Palin said the war in Iraq was “a task that is from God.”

- The Republicans are presenting Ms. Palin as a crusader against Mr. Stevens’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” The record says otherwise; she initially supported Mr. Stevens’s boondoggle, diverting the money to other projects when the bridge became a political disaster. In her speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God in June, Ms. Palin said it was “God’s will” that the federal government contribute to a $30 billion gas pipeline she wants built in Alaska.



***A/N: All of this is enough to make me feel like running for the hills (of Canada) at the thought of McCain succumbing to his age during his potential presidency and having this woman take over. Not that the thought of McCain as President isn't enough to do the trick in and of itself.