Warning: Political Post ahead!

I'm scared. I'm scared because Sarah Palin is very likeable, even with her whiney , squeaky voice (as K keeps pointing out.) She was very, very good at the GOP convention. She came across as an attractive woman, a mother, a righteous Christian, and a victim all at once. The best quote I have heard to explain this came from Newsweek: "If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could."

But then Sarah Palin met Charles Gibson. And that was enough to scare anyone with a brain. She doesn't quite get the problem she poses to the health and safety of this country. No matter how bad she stumbles between now and election day, all her supporters will blame the media for blindsiding her, or the "Liberal Elites" for picking on her. Now I'm not a liberal, but dammit, I don't see anything wrong with wanting only a well-educated person to be given command of our military, our economy, and our nuclear arsenal.

Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to man our military, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing disease. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

Come on people, how can Sarah Palin possibly be qualified to deal with the foreign policy challenges and responsibilies that may come her way? Hell, even though she could "see Russia from her window", she didn't even have a passport until last year! In fact, when she was talking to Charles Gibson, Palin actually said that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. That is just... wow.

Palin may very well be someone most of America would love to go have a beer with. And she may be a fantastic mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen and ex-sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, literally, world history. Again, the problem as I see it is that half of the electorate of this country actually things that Palin's lack of experience or qualifications is a plus. The McCain camp and the rest of the GOP pump out the cheers of "They think they're better than you!" and that "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Like that's a good thing. Like mediocrity, when it comes to leading this country, is a good thing.

The redneck brigade, and yes I live in the heart of it around here - these are my neighbors, regularly makes statements like "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." And it scares the crap out of me because it suggest such an obvious detachment from the real problems of today. Whomever wins this election must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global warming, our failing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism everywhere, a powerless United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

The bottom line is that what is so scary about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents the combination of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate: "You can't blink," she told Gibson over and over again, as though the fate of the world rests on the outcome of a staring contest. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization...