From deep in a NYT arti­cle about Sarah Palin’s prepa­ra­tions for the press and Joe Biden:

Aides trav­el­ing with Ms. Palin have reported back to asso­ciates that she is a fast study—asking few ques­tions of her policy briefers but quickly repeat­ing back their main points—who already has con­sid­er­able ease and expe­ri­ence before cameras.

A former aide in Alaska who had helped pre­pare Ms. Palin for her cam­paign debates there said she had a talent for dis­till­ing infor­ma­tion into digestible sound bites. The aide said she gen­er­ally prefers light prepara­tory mate­ri­als to heavy brief­ing books…

Remind you of anyone?

UPDATE [9/11]: I see that Andrew Sul­li­van and others have had the same thought. What can I say? Garbage in, garbage out. When I get my brain back from the clutches of this unholy obses­sion, I’ll try to steer clear of such low-​hanging fruit.

UPDATE [9/11]: Just a little more fuel for this par­tic­u­lar fire. Here’s Palin in her inter­view with Char­lie Gibson tonight:

GIBSON: And you didn’t say to your­self, “Am I expe­ri­enced enough? Am I ready? Do I know enough about inter­na­tional affairs? Do I–will I feel com­fort­able enough on the national stage to do this?”

PALIN: I didn’t hes­i­tate, no.

GIBSON: Didn’t that take some hubris?

PALIN: I–I answered him yes because I have the con­fi­dence in that readi­ness and know­ing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so com­mit­ted to the mis­sion, the mis­sion that we’re on, reform of this coun­try and vic­tory in the war, you can’t blink.

(Photo illus­tra­tion by The Huff­in­g­ton Post.)

So it turns out that when the Repub­li­cans were chant­ing “Drill, baby, drill” during Sarah Palin’s speech at the RNC, what they really meant was “Booze, coke, and sexual favors.”

I sup­pose it’s com­fort­ing, in a deeply per­verse way, that even in the midst of Pal­in­ma­nia the one thing we can count on to remind voters what’s at stake in this elec­tion is the unadul­ter­ated cor­rup­tion and venal­ity of the Bush Administration.

From Jonathan Adler’s post at The National Review’s Corner blog this morning:

I’d also sug­gest that Gov. Palin’s expe­ri­ence is not sign­f­i­cantly less than that of our cur­rent Pres­i­dent before he entered the Oval Office.

(I promise I’ll stop check­ing in on the NR web­site as soon as my Schaden­freude is sat­is­fied. When that will happen is another ques­tion entirely…)

Regular read­ers know that I don’t like to get too per­sonal within the con­fines of this blog-​like entity. But I won’t hes­i­tate to con­fess that one of the found­ing arti­cles of my faith is that the state of the world is, as ever, the bane of sane men everywhere.

Today’s proof? Pres­i­dent Bush had to apol­o­gize to Silvio Berlus­coni yes­ter­day for telling the truth:

The Hokkaido G8 meet­ing has pro­duced a diplo­matic faux pas of unprece­dented pro­por­tions. Now George W. Bush has had to apol­o­gise to Silvio Berlus­coni and to the Ital­ian people. But why? To find out, you merely have to glance at Mr. Berlusconi’s biog­ra­phy in the press kit issued by the White House to accred­ited journalists.

“Berlus­coni was one of the most con­tro­ver­sial lead­ers in the his­tory of a coun­try known for gov­ern­men­tal cor­rup­tion and vice”, the pro­file points out. [Read more]