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02 Sep 2008 07:20 am

They Just Didn't Vet Her

Josh Marshall nails it:

A lot of attention is being given to Gov. Palin's daughter's situation. The much bigger deal is the expanding trooper-gate investigation, the fact that Palin lied in her Friday speech about her purported opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere, her apparent former membership in the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, and more. Individually, you can come to your own judgment about how consequential these stories are. What they show pretty clearly now -- in addition to the news that the McCain campaign is only now sending in a vetting team -- is that John McCain didn't do any serious vetting of Palin before he invited her to join his ticket and, he hopes, become Vice President of the United States.

Fundamentally, of course, this is about John McCain. And the real issue here is what this slapdash decision says about his judgment.

The salient political issues of the Palin pick are two-fold: Can Palin be trusted to tell the truth? And how competent is a campaign that picks a candidate without any serious vetting of stuff that can appear on the Internet within a few hours of the news? We need to refocus on those core questions. I fear the answers are: we can't trust Palin to tell the truth; and the manner of McCain's pick demonstrates some of the most grotesque incompetence in modern political history.

But we'll see, won't we?

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