Is there really no hope for this country, after all? It now appears so.

In January of 2003, John Le Carre wrote that, "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: Worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War."

He was surely right then. Except that what once looked like a period now seems like an epoch.

Just as I was foolish enough to believe that we could dare to hope again, so it now seems that we are locked once more in what has become an eternal loop of Republican depredations, and Democratic responses of "Wha happened?" as the absurdly predictable freight train rolls over them, right on schedule.

Sarah Palin and everything associated with her pick is truly the barometer of the country’s degradation. We are now talking about making someone the potential leader of the Free World who is even more ill-informed, even more rigidly dogmatic, and even more ideologically regressive than was the hapless George W. Bush of 2000. Only this time, we’re talking about doing so as we are still in the midst of eating eight years worth of the consequences of that same prior idiocy. We are folding in half Santayana’s famous adage about being condemned to repeat history, so that we are already screwing up again by the time we get to the second half of the sentence. To understand our current level of stupidity, one might imagine if, on the day after Pearl Harbor – as the smoke was still billowing over the wreckage and the bodies and oil still floating about the water’s surface – Americans all got together and said, "We need to make even more of our military forces vulnerable to surprise attack!"

Three major data points have been added to the Palin story in the last week, all of them discouraging in the extreme. The first was the Charles Gibson interview. If history records that this was the moment in which the American experiment in democracy finally came crashing down to the floor in a cloud of dust, then history should also record Gibson as the Great Enabler of democracy’s demise. It’s not that he didn’t ask a tough question or two. It’s just that he didn’t ask very many, he didn’t follow up properly on the ones he did ask, and he didn’t probe her in any way to see if she’s capable of the slightest independent philosophical thought, or the merest understanding of the arc of history.

So, who cares, eh? Just another day at the shop in what calls itself the American media, right? No, actually, not. Here’s what’s going to happen. Palin’s handlers are furiously pumping her full of as much Cliff Notes quips about the world she’s completely ignored all her life as they can jam into her brain in a month. She does the Gibson interview, she does an even easier one on Fox, then she does the Biden debate (during which neither the media nor Biden push very hard, and she reels off a string of memorized platitudes and cheap zingers). After which she is then kept tightly under wraps until the election, while the McCain campaign claims that she’s been exposed to plenty of tough questioning and anyone calling for any more is an elitist who is piling on like the snobs they are. Oh, and don’t forget this part – piling on to a woman, no less, in ways they never would to a man, because they are not just elitist snobs, but also sexist, elitist snobs.

Thus, history will record the Gibson interview as the first, last and only chance to see what is really behind the crash course in rote memorization. It’s bad enough, in the pathetic state the country has come to occupy, that a complete cipher like Sarah Palin stands as close as she already does to power. So much worse is all the complicity. Gibson’s interview was a serious crime – felonious abdication in the first degree – and all the more so because he and his network and the rest of the media pretend like it was enough, either in terms of depth, or of the number of interviews to which she’ll be subjected. Where’s the shame? If the members of the American media hadn’t all had their embarrassment chips surgically removed, none of these pathetic milquetoast side-kicks to power would ever be able to leave the house.