Ladies and gentlemen, the future of the Republican Party...

The blame game goes into weekend spin in the McCainosphere.

CNN came up with a juicy bit I had not yet picked up on, citing a McCain staffer complaining about their now-rebellious VP pick, Sarah Palin:

“Her lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues was dramatic,” said another McCain source with direct knowledge of the process to prepare Palin after she was picked. The source said it was probably the “hardest” to get her “up to speed than any candidate in history.”

Still, as a knowing analysis in the Christian Science Monitor points out, she has more than a few defenders on the far right, not all of them denizens of the murky waters of talk radio. Fred Barnes complained about the McCain management's handling of Palin, writing in the Weekly Standard:

It should have been obvious she could handle the media. When I spent nearly two hours with Palin last year at the governor's house in Juneau, I was struck by three things. She's very smart, brimming with self-confidence, and not intimidated by the media.

This blogger read that Barnes comment not long after it was posted and had to laugh out loud. What reality is it, that the far right sees? The one in which George W. Bush is a great president, but simply misunderstood, and Sarah Palin is a star shining brightly in the future of the Grand Old Party... What sort of inversion of common sense and perception is required to hold views like that?