Red State’s Dan McLaughlin makes a noble and convincing defense of Sarah Palin, essentially making the reasonable case that she cannot be as astonishingly stupid as we are led to believe.  Essentially, the idea that she doesn’t know the countries that make up North America, or that Africa is a continent, or that she is in any way responsible for that $150,000 wardrobe is the result of malicious elements within the McCain campaign who are more interested in deflecting blame for their disastrous campaign and discrediting the Alaskan Governor’s future influence on the party.

So what.

Perpetuating this defense, getting into the weeds if you will, only serves to highlight the dysfunction within what’s left of the GOP.  Culturally she is a laughing stock.  Her reputation has reached a punch-line status George Bush and Dan Quayle took years to attain, and she did it within a couple of months.  Rehabilitate her at your own risk.

Whether she did or did not know this or that will never erase the moose in the helicopter spotlight look on her face when she couldn’t/wouldn’t tell Katie Couric what magazines she read.

Should the damage control parties succeed in a partial triage of her reputation, making her palatable enough to remain on the national stage, her baggage will remain regardless of the objective truth or the essential fairness of it all.  She wasn’t ready, might be some day, but the damage has been done.  It’s too late.

But that not the whole story.  Her politics, the appeal of her core beliefs is so narrowly focused to such a dwindling segment of the population — on top of a caustic and dangerous tone descended directly from the Gingrich/DeLay style of scortched earth conservativism — dooms her and her faithful followers to distracting nuisance status, marginalized in an era requiring national unity to address a nation on the brink of several disasters.

No doubt, she’ll retain the support of the kooks.  And that’s fine.  All the better to identify and separate them from the herd.  See, I personally think that a sane and reasonable conservative opposition is a good thing — at least compared to what we’ve been subject to for the last several decades.

As we’ve seen the last eight years when the extreme right wing gets ahold of the GOP leadership, as repulsive the extreme is to the “center,” they do have the ability to capture that 50% +1 needed to foist their poison on the rest of us — with horrendous consequences.  That’s a fete the extreme left has never duplicated despite the vile shouts of socialist, communist and liberal-fascists at the mere suggestion of a 4% tax hike on millionaires from basement headquarters that shall remain unlinked.  When the great pendulum of the political winds blow right again, in four years or four decades, I’d rather the conservative faction be a reasonable facsimile of sane than the nutbags we’ve suffered lately.

Sarah Palin does not fit the definition of sane, at least in the sense that her rhetoric permits reasoned compromise or inclusive policies.  Bottom line, her brand of parochial and religious based intolerance is unacceptable in a leadership role in a nation as diverse as ours.

That, and she’s fucking goofy.