Balloons fell from the rafters in St. Paul where the Obfuscation Talk Express (Straight, had left the building) crowned the King and Queen of the Republican Prom and eased on down the road to a 1950’s, Donna Reed Show style, lily-white, male dominated, middle class America, where the press politely knows their place and doesn’t ever ask the tough questions, choosing instead to just heap praise on you both so they can sit in the front of the new McCain-Palin airplane. 

The enemy is no longer Barack Obama, it’s the liberal media who John McCain no longer needs because he has his Annie Oakley and her gun in Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. 

So even though the US Economy shed 84,000 Jobs in August, the 8th month in a row of losses and the unemployment rate jumped to 6.1%, the highest in five years, you removed yourself from any responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. You deftly ignored and discarded, pretending not to know George Bush and his policies you voted for 90+% of the time and lived for a week in a parallel universe from the rest of us. 

What a convention. You’re such a maverick. Why instead of charting your own course, you did exactly what your handlers told you to do at every turn… got misty-eyed around the flag, mentioned 5-years as a POW dutifully at every stop, showed disturbing images of 9-11 to whip up your base in fear, re-started the culture wars and praise the talk show loons, people will fall lock-step in with you and defeat the Democrats who hate America.

Madison Avenue could not have packaged you better and Jon Stewart’s piece on Comedy Central captured how simple it is for you and every Republican talking head to lie out of both sides of your mouth when it suits you. Your talking heads make it look so simple and yet we all lose.

So it’s a 62-day obfuscation talk sprint and you can keep Sarah hidden from the media for awhile but at some point she will have to face a less than adoring member of the media and be asked tough policy questions that neither the ‘First Dude’ nor her adoring pantsuit legion can save her from. And wily old Joe Biden is licking his chops waiting for the debate because she’ll run out of smart-ass 1-liners pretty quickly and then have to rely on matching her two years of executive experience against the wits of the head of the Foreign Relations committee. 

My colleague Charley James and other investigative journalists have been talking to dozens of residents, colleagues, friends and enemies in Wasilla and Juneau. When you refuse to address or acknowledge your past bullying and abuses of power, they grow and consume you. So many calls were made to and from Alaska this week that several times your entire trunk line system was overwhelmed and collapsed. 

So yeah, the media is coming for you because you’re hiding behind the party handlers. We’ve had 19-months to vet McCain, Obama and Biden and 7-days to scratch the surface of you. In absence of real news, the hopelessly lazy MSM bought the Republican storyline of your mythic Pippi Longstocking rebelliousness. 

We care not a whit about your family, your gender, your multiple universities, beauty paganets or your life before politics. That’s your business. We’re coming after you and your record of governance and abuse of power. Whether you talk or not, the truth will come out. 

So whistle and dance on down the yellow brick road out of St. Paul because the weather is changing and while you both will try to hide from the record, there are three hurricanes and enough bad economic news waiting to be faced on your party’s watch that you cannot blithely wave off and dismiss.

Pretty soon you’ll be clacking the heels of your ruby slippers like Dorothy from Kansas and saying, “I wish I was home, I wish I was home.”