Sarah Palin's teen daughter is pregnant. The only real problem I have here is the old Republican double standard. If Palin were a Democrat, we would be hearing endless moralizing conservatives talking about how she can't run the country if she can't keep her family from straying into sin.

I've been on vacation for the last few days, so I missed John McCain's big gamble to derail the Obama Express. But his pick Sarah Palin has some Dick Cheney-type problems:

We rely on elected officials not to use the power of their office to pursue personal agendas or vendettas. It's called an abuse of power. There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired his boss. She first denied Monegan's claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise. The available evidence now suggests that she 1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms, 2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative, 3) lied to the public about what happened and 4) continues to lie about what happened.These are, to put it mildly, not the traits or temperament you want in someone who could hold the executive power of the federal government.

Now that the Democratic disunity storyline has been blown to pieces, perhaps we can get some stories about how the Republicans are in far worse shape on this score. How about noticing that former GOP Congressman Bob Barr is running on the Libertarian ticket and siphoning away a significant amount of Republican votes.

How about the Ron Paul insurgents who are still making serious waves in the GOP. Here in Nevada, they had enough votes at the state convention that the GOP leaders shut it down without electing any delegates, which they then hand picked. If that had happened on the Democratic side, it would have been breaking national news on every network.

How about the conservative grumblings about McCain considering a pro-choice VP?

There's far more disunity in the GOP than anything those Hillary dead-ender PUMAs were stirring up on the other side. But because everyone thinks the Democrats are the ones with the problems, they get the coverage.

And don't think the Republicans don't know this. Why is McCain running ads blasting Obama for not picking Hillary? Why is Mayor Rudy in Denver saying that Clinton should be on the ticket? They are the ones riling up all this fake PUMA crap. They punked the media into believing this was a real movement, when it was all a GOP-led rat-f---ing game.

The Jed Report has done a little adjusting to the McCain/Hillary spot to make it more realistic:

McCain hits Obama for, of all things, NOT picking Hillary as his VP. I'm sure they were really downfallen that they wouldn't have Hillary to rally the conservative hoards to turn out the vote against her.

Joe Biden doesn't wait long before going on the attack:

Josh Marshall has the best explanation for why Democrats suck at what he calls "bitch-slap politics."

Stuff like the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry and McCain's Celeb/P Diddy assault on Obama aren't really about the attacks themselves. In themselves, they're often too cartoonish to be believed in any literal sense. What they're about is smacking the other guy around and making him take it. There's no better way to demonstrate someone's lack of toughness or strength than to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves -- thus the rough slang I used above. That not only makes the other guy look weak. It also transforms him into an object of contempt, which together are politically fatal. It's this meta-message of weakness that resonates far beyond the literal claims. And it's this that Democrats so often seem to miss -- explaining the factual inaccuracies of the claims, demanding that the attacks stop, all the while reinforcing the intended message of the attacks in the first place.

Here's an idea: Just like the GOP did with the purple bandaids at their 2004 convention, now we have an effort to get Democratic delegates to bring a bunch of key rings marked "John McCain house #(1-12)." Sounds like the kind of shallow crap that dominates convention coverage in this country. It should work well.