"Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted."
- William Hazlitt, The Round Table (1817)

Conventional wisdom, often outwardly cloaked as cynicism, has it that the voting public in all democracies worldwide fully expect bullshit from their politicians. And get it too. America may be the indispensable nation, but American voters are as stupid as the rest of us anywhere, perhaps more so. This year the Republicans, their ‘achievements cupboard’ just as bare as the proverbial Mother Hubbard’s, have sprung on voters a surprise package of BS in the form Sarah Palin to be geriatric John’s Vice Presidential running mate.

To hear Sidney Blumenthal tell it, the choice was McCain’s, and his alone. Desperate to display his ‘maverick’ status, McCain reportedly rejected Karl Rove’s manipulations - undoubtedly at GWB’s bidding - to thrust a Bush family-endorsed Mitt Romney on the ticket. John’s own initial preference, it seems, was to name Joe Lieberman, a ‘maverick’ Democrat playing ball with the Republicans as a so-called ‘independent’. [McCain, who makes light of his age, may be excused for not seeing the danger of two geriatrics running hand-in-hand. After all, one understandably thinks of others, never oneself, as ‘old’.]

McCain, openly resentful of Rove’s manoeuvring, and presumably to demonstrate that his administration’s only tenuous link to the disastrous Bush-Cheney one it hopes to replace is the Party label, felt he had outfoxed Karl and the rest of the GWB gang - and in the process done himself proud - by his surprise choice of a largely unknown political entity whom he had met, briefly, just once before in his entire life. Remembering the 18 million disgruntled Hillary-backers in the primaries, John surely looked like the cat that had got at the milk as he played the gender card.

Writes Blumenthal: "McCain’s political quandary is paradoxical. Bush has broken all parts of the Republican Party, and McCain’s emergence as the party’s nominee has been made possible by its crackup, which he must transcend. The primaries fractured the conservatives, none of whom were able to isolate the others and unite the whole movement. None could do what Bush achieved in 2000, running at the same time as the candidate of the party establishment and the conservative movement. McCain historically has represented neither." But his selection of Palin reflected his impulse to reject Bush.

While the twin hurricanes Gustav and Sarah called attention to themselves in very different ways, the official data on job losses released on the eve of McCain’s acceptance speech, couldn’t possibly have raised Republican hopes; they surely gave the lie to Palin’s feisty attempt to make voters lose sight of where America is as a nation and how none other than the Republican leadership got it there. Understandably, neither McCain nor Palin dared to go anywhere near the economy: unemployment in August was at its highest level since September of 2003, with another 84,000 jobs lost that month, the three-month average loss being 81,000 jobs.

Wajahat Ali, a Muslim American of Pakistani descent, a playwright, essayist, humorist, and Attorney-at-Law, was dismissive of the Palin pick, describing it as ‘amusing and laughable’ since it ‘obviously catered to the superficial, knee-jerk reactions of the American voting public.’

Although McCain never let voters forget that Obama was woefully weak on ‘national security’, he found no such critical weakness in the resume of his running mate. Since she is a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association and an avid moose-hunter, Ali surmised, ‘If al-Qaeda sneaks through the forests, Palin can single-handedly take them out with one of her many rifles.’ [No surprise that it was for her point-guard skills as a member of her high school basketball team that Palin was nicknamed ‘Sarah Barracuda’.]

That Palin is on the ticket to help distract average Americans away from their economic sufferings under a wave of faux populism seemed to be a constant refrain among commentators on the convention. Typical was Harold Meyerson’s op-ed in the Washington Post: "I have combed the schedule of events here without finding a single forum . . . devoted to what John McCain and the Republican Party propose to do about America’s short and long-term economic challenges. For all these woes, McCain offers only a continuation of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and an ideological bias toward the very kind of deregulation that has wrecked the housing market. If the election is about the economy, they’re cooked - and their silence this week on nearly all things economic means that they know it."

Arianna Huffington’s terse comment: "Listening to McCain, you’d think it was the Democrats who occupied the White House, and it was time to throw the bastards out."

But Sarah’s family troubles, first revealed by internet bloggers just as McCain proudly presented his ‘discovery’ to the Republican convention - [an unmarried daughter’s five-month pregnancy, which the campaign promptly confirmed, and a National Enquirer disclosure of an alleged affair Sarah once had with her husband’s business partner, which the family denied, threatening legal action] - promptly fueled a media feeding frenzy. Steven Rosenfeld, Senior Fellow at AlterNet, was convinced that questions surrounding Palin’s family life were deepening and not going to go away. "There is little chance the media will respect the Palin family’s privacy, not when there are legitimate larger questions about what the surprise choice of Palin as McCain’s running mate reveals about the GOP presidential candidate’s judgment and temperament."

Will Bunch, of The Philadelphia Daily News, took Sarah head on about her blatant lying at and to the convention, especially about how she as Governor of Alaska had refused Congressional funding for what she called ‘the Bridge to Nowhere’ and helped save taxpayer money.

Calling it her ‘Speech to Nowhere’, Bunch noted that when Palin said that she told Congress ‘Thanks but no thanks’ on that Bridge to Nowhere, "that was a lie, and the worst kind of lie in American politics, a blatant falsehood that showed utter contempt for the American people that Palin pledged to serve, assuming we are too stupid to look up or know the truth, that she pushed for those funds in Congress and while she got great political mileage out of announcing that she was killing the project, she still has not returned the funds to the American people."

Palin belittled Obama’s record of having been a ‘community organizer’, turning a noble job into a dirty word to describe thousands of Americans working long hours for little pay in some of the toughest neighbourhoods. CNN political analyst Roland Martin, who was listening to Palin’s speech, later commented: "My two parents are sitting home in Houston, Texas and they are both community organizers. I’m disgusted. Community organizers keep people in their homes, keep their lights on, keep food in the fridge."

It was also a Speech to Nowhere, Bunch added, "because Palin had the nerve to talk at length about John McCain’s ‘torturous interrogations’ [as a Vietnam prisoner-of-war] in the very same breath when she all but condoned the continuation of similar, abhorrent practices that have been directed for eight years by our own US leaders, when she stated that Democrats are ‘worried that someone won’t read them [terrorism suspects at Guantanamo] their rights’."

In Rosenfeld’s view, McCain by his hasty judgment in selecting Palin has merely revealed another, more serious character flaw: a dangerous recklessness in vital decision-making.