If the straitjacket fits....

Somebody better hide K-Lo's plastic round-tipped scissors. Christopher Buckley is voting pro-terrorist:

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.

Go read the whole thing. It's quite devastating.

I once said, or at least I think I once said, that there would come a time when real serious conservatives would look at the Republican ticket in horror. National party affiliation shouldn't be a suicide pact.

Forget for a moment that a badly run campaign and a sense of entitlement has driven John McCain off the deep end. His selection of Palin was the death knell of his campaign. As a national candidate, Sarah Palin is a pet rock. And while the idea of a pet rock is initially kind of cute and novel and amusing, at the end of the day, it's just a rock that sits there and does nothing... and we already have one of those sitting in the White House and look where that got us.

After this election I expect John McCain to fade from view. This is his last hurrah  and, since he has fatally damaged his reputation with the press and some of his colleagues, I don't see him sticking around; a minority within a minority party. As for Palin, she may be damaged goods, and I'm not sure that she will be able to get reelected in Alaska now that her aw-shucks schtick received the national media treatment and Alaskans now realize that they might have an idiot on their hands. Out of office, her next best bet is Fox News. It's the job she has been training for all of her life.