Really rather squalid

You would have thought that Democrats and their supporters would have been prevented from making the obvious argument against picking Sarah Palin as Vice Presidential candidate. Surely, given that Barack Obama, the Presidential candidate, has only 4 years experience of top-level politics, and no executive experience at all, surely they couldn't say that Sarah Palin, with only 2 years of top-level political experience, but that at executive level, lacked the experience to be Vice-President?

Well, of course they could. And they have a good point - just not a point that the Democrats are entitled to make. Yes Sarah Palin is inexperienced. About as inexperienced as Barack Obama. Barack Obama has Joe Biden to provide his foreign policy heavy lifting; John McCain can do his own. The job of Vice President is better suited to acquiring experience on the job that is that of President. Besides, as Kissinger said, it's better to have a first-rate temperament than a first-rate brain - you can buy in first rate brains.

What has surprised me has been the sudden gleeful meme sparked by the Daily Kos that Palin's youngest child - the three-month old Trig - isn't really hers at all but her 17 year old daughter's. Andrew Sullivan picked this up and ran with it pretty hard - before dropping it when it became apparent that the story had no merit to it. Sullivan, incidentally, has hardly been working to disprove Christopher Hitchens's critique of him over the past few weeks. But it's not terribly edifying when the first response by some parts of the left to the appointment of a female Vice Presidential candidate is to smear her teenage daughter and bandy about her sick four month-old baby. If conservatives did that they'd call us nasty you know...

UPDATE: Blimey - nothing slow about this news cycle... Well if the Kossacks wanted definite proof that Bristol Palin wasn't really the mother of her mother's four month old, the news that she's five months pregnant herself ought to do it.