The Noonster was caught with a hot mic earlier today.  And it ain't pretty.

From CNN: Sen. Joe Biden on Wednesday defended criticism of running mate Barack Obama's Senate record while campaigning in the crucial battleground state of Florida.

"Barack has real experience," the Democratic VP candidate said. "This guy could have written his ticket to go anywhere. Anywhere at all."

These campaigns are more like a reality TV show than a serious political election.

Her nomination has definitely created a dramatic stir. The question now is how will the GOP market her and how well will she do.

We begin to find out tonight.

To the extent we still focus on Sarah Palin, Democrats should paint her as a complex person, not a conservative caricature of womanhood. Her affiliations with unions, Feminists for Life, AIP, earmark lobbyists, Alaska politicians, etc., etc., provide quite a bit of fodder to unravel any image that McCain's team will try to make. Then, from Noonan (via MyDD I think):

Final point. Palin's friends should be less immediately worried about what the Obama campaign will do to her than what the McCain campaign will do. This is a woman who's tough enough to work her way up and through, and to say yes to a historic opportunity, but she will know little of, or rather have little experience in, the mischief inherent in national Republican politics. She will be mobbed up in the McCain campaign by people who care first about McCain and second about themselves. (Or, let's be honest, often themselves first and then McCain.)

That image will have nothing to do with the complexity of Governor Palin's life. So, begin to pick apart that image a la Bob Somerby. Palin, her family, and her political career have benefited immensely from all things federalism and liberalism defends and provides: unions, tax dollars, gender equality, corporate regulation (Somerby), etc., etc. Sarah Palin is a liberal, maybe even a feminist, but she choses to affiliate with the dominant party in her state. She either does not get it, she reaps the benefits of liberalism and but vows to sow the seeds of its destruction, or she has been playing politics in her own state as a means to power. From abortion, to federal spending, corporate taxes, etc., Sarah Palin speaks one way, governs a second way, and lives yet another.

I know enough about who Sarah Palin is to know that I could never vote for her. But I do not hate her. I just disagree with her.

I have been really taken aback at the sheer anger at McCain/Palin that appears not just here, but also at other left sites that I really enjoy visiting. Did we really think McCain was going to put a Democrat on the ticket? Why are people so mad at McCain for putting a REPUBLICAN who holds REPUBLICAN values on the REPUBLICAN ticket? Great, they are republicans, we disagree, I won't be voting for her.

But I don't dislike her, I actually find her to be an interesting person, I am impressed with how far she has come from being a small town girl and mother of 5 to becoming a Governor and now a VP (if nothing else, she has to be a multi-tasker and super efficient), and I am interested in hearing what she has to say.

And here's a sad post that shows how correct BTD, among others, was.

Color me unimpressed with the collective clutching of pearls by the MSM.  These folks always managed to get outraged by the stupidest things.  Millions of homeless?  shrug.  Presidential sex?  the horror!

As I recall the last time we had a truly intelligent President the country did pretty well. When "we" went for the guy you'd like to have a beer with we ended up in the cesspool.

Here's McCain's own campaign manager confirming that Palin was a last minute choice, and that the original speech was written for someone else. Right now, they're sitting at that table with the diced up remains of a speech that was originally written for Romney or Pawlenty and putting a dress on it.

It would be interesting to see what the before and after versions of the speech look like. What will be missing from the revised speech? What parts of the speech did the Republicans find so "masculine" that they just couldn't let their VP pick deliver them? Just the fact that they're busily putting pink paint on a speech designed before McCain threw his Hail Hard Right pass shows what they really think about Palin, and about women in general. Unless the speech was full of references to jock straps, just what was in it that Palin couldn't say? Really, how sexist is it to describe a political speech as "very masculine?"