"A Whack Job"

Watching the Straight Talk Express lately is like watching a Roadrunner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote tries one dumbassed trick after another, but the Roadrunner gets away every time, usually leaving the hapless coyote to be blown up, fall out of the sky, sliced and diced, slammed into canyon walls by giant rubber bands, and otherwise demolished by various Rube Goldberg-inspired devices. Lately, watching the perambulations of the Straight Talk Express as it careens toward Election Day is like watching a coyote-inspired contraption shudder across the political landscape--leaking oil, random parts falling off onto the highway, and flames shooting from the engine compartment as it veers wildly across the highway, destined to never quite win the race, much less reaching the finish line intact.

Today a senior McCain adviser, according to Politico, called Palin "a whack job." Wow, that's one-upping the previous description of her as a "diva," and less than a week after she was declared to be "going rogue!" Meanwhile, Obama is ahead in the polls by an ever-increasing margin, and the Republican party itself is poised for post-election civil war. An unvetted, fatally incurious, fundamentalist fanatic running with a maverick-turned-neocon party hack, with recriminations and lamentations coming from all sides as the campaign draws to a conclusion, is surely a recipe for disaster.

We wait daily for the next calamity to hit the campaign: will Joe the Plumber say that Obama is "death for Israel"? Will Palin ignore her talking points and keep "Wardrobe-gate" alive for yet another news cycle? Maybe an adviser will admit that the McCain health care plan is a fraud? The wheels are falling off, the spell is dissolving, and McCain is looking through the fourth wall at us with the same expression of resigned inevitability that Wile E. Coyote wears, just before the boulder crushed him into the ground.

Maybe the prayers her preacher offered to protect her from witchcraft weren't that crazy after all.