terrorists and mean girls

The McCain campaign know they can't win based on the issues or based on the merits of their candidates - so they're going all dirty, all the time. And Sarah Palin leads the charge, talking about Barack Obama "palling around with terrorists" based on that slim connection of his to 1960s radical William Ayers. Oh but in a nice bit of dog-whistle racist politics the McCain campaign's talking points for Palin fail to mention Ayers, letting the uninformed imagine that it is Obama and Osama or something like that.

And speaking of Palin, I wonder what the reaction of punditry would have been if a good looking but otherwise unqualified male presidential (or vice-presidential) candidate had been winking at the camera and doing the male version of flirting during a televised debate? Anyway, a female reader at Andrew Sullivan's blog , who calls Palin the archetypal "mean girl" who polarizes women, makes a nice point:

You could almost hear a collective embarrassed groan from educated, non-neoconservative women all over the world who have worked their asses off to be taken seriously only to have this bimbo blatantly and on camera attempt to reduce the role of women to their ability to flirt.