If we may respectfully disagree with everyone on Earth, Joe Biden will do fine. The expectations are so ridiculously low for Sarah Palin that smart people know any half-competent performance will be met with cheers and audible relief and the nation will love her again. But you know what? That's all meta-expectations gaming for Biden. It is now a truth universally acknowledged that Joe will be boorish and say a thousand stupid things and he'll be mean and condescending and no one will like him. But no one seems to remember that ol' gaffey Joe gets away with all of his thousands of gaffes not just because he's been around forever, but also because he seems like a nice guy! He's genial when he says 7/11s are full of Indians! He's friendly even when attacking John McCain! He was great and funny and succinct in primary debates! Sarah Palin will ramble and make no sense and spout talking points and platitudes and Joe Biden will be well-informed and maybe have a couple zingers and a couple crazy unfortunate misstatements and, like the first presidential debate, the punditry will say the Republican won and the viewers will decide which one they want to see on TV for the next four years and go with the Democrat. So calm down, liberals.

The damned moneys. Despite the warnings, the hundreds and hundreds of warnings, everyone insists on treating these near-human masterminds of evil as being just like us! After all, they can handle firearms, but they are also breeding with our innocent pigs. Now that John McCain and scandal-bot Sarah Palin are wooing the family values crowd—while forcing that crowd to disown everything they every said—the monkeys have found a way into the heart of the Christian Right. The little wicked creatures are MARRYING!

We are rarely, these days, surprised by much. Especially the behavior of the national political press. We devoted a couple paragraphs yesterday to predicting their reaction to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's speech before the Republican National Convention last night, but this morning we are having a genuine crazy pills moment. Are we trapped in Peggy Noonan's bubble? Seriously, people? The speech blew you away? It was a generic stump speech with a couple killer lines, delivered competently. It was the Republican equivalent of John Kerry's speech at the DNC, just given by someone America doesn't hate (yet) while the national networks were listening. We honestly can't believe the same media that knew full well that they were playing into the expectations game became so convinced that Governor Palin would massively fuck up that the fact that she was perky and pleasant and funny—the fucking reasons she was selected—was some revelation, or the birth of a new political superstar. We can't believe everyone gave her a pass on the 'bridge to nowhere' bullshit. We can't believe people keep calling her a "reformer" and "maverick" even though as a politician, completely outside her self-constructed narrative, she introduced focus-grouped wedge politics to small-town Alaska and lobbied for the most corrupt politicians in America. Is it really this easy? We know this miserable woman. We are from the great white north, the land of Ms. Palin's congressional doppelganger. We still can't help but feel that the "just folks" everyone images they understand better than everyone else will find Ms. Palin to be, well, as Ken Layne put it: