So word has leaked out about one of those additional things that Sarah Palin knew nothing about in an interview with Katie Couric – and from someone in the Palin camp, no less, for reasons clearly of their own devising if somewhat inscrutable to me. From Jonathan Martin's blog at the Politico:

Of concern to McCain's campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin's interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing. The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about supreme court decisions. After noting Roe v Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases. There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.

Let's not pussyfoot around this.

This is appalling. Remember, and always remember: if McCain-Palin are elected, Palin stands a better chance of actually becoming the president than any vice-presidential nominee since, well, probably since Harry Truman, who did.

So we might elevate to the presidency someone who can produce the name of only one supreme court decision.

For my British readers, let me explain something. Een mai cahntree, the supreme court has a particular aura and lore. One learns about the court as a schoolchild. A special tone of reverence often creeps into teacher's voice. If nothing else one is taught pretty early and pretty thoroughly the following: Marbury v Madison (1803) set the precedent of judicial review; the Dred Scott decision (1857) upheld slavery; Plessy v Ferguson (1896) upheld segregation; and Brown v Board of Education (1954) ended it.

For the mildly curious American of Palin's (and my) generation, round two of supreme court schooling might include United States v Nixon, in which the court unanimously ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes, which forced Nixon's resignation; Baker v Carr, which established the principle of one person, one vote; University of California v Bakke, in which the court initially upheld affirmative action; and of course Roe v Wade.

I am not saying that every American knows or should know these eight decisions. Lord knows most Americans probably don't know how many justices sit on the court (now that I think of it, probably a good question for Palin). But it seems to me not too much to ask that someone who might be the vice-president or even president of the United States should know them, and many more important court decisions.

This is insanity. I understand that there are people who don't think it matters that a candidate knows anything about American history. If she's "like me," that's enough. Well, I'm sorry, but if she's "like you" and you can name only one supreme court decision from all of history, then that's not enough to be the vice-president and help run the country, and I'm not an elitist for saying so.

And of course there is something to be read into the fact that she knows only Roe. Obviously, there are millions of evangelicals and other abortion opponents who aren't blithering fools and who feel passionately about Roe but also know a lot about the high court. So I'm not saying all abortion opponents are like her, by a long shot.

I am saying that it tells us something revealing about her world view that her sense of intellectual responsibility to learn about the court doesn't extend to a single other area. And indeed her curiosity about the law of her country and this unique evil of abortion (as she surely thinks of it) doesn't even extend to her feeling the need to learn a thing about the other major abortion-related decisions!

We are far, far down the rabbit hole here. A part of me would like, at Thursday's night debate, to see moderator Gwen Ifill, one of America's finest television journalists, ask Palin some simple factual questions, just basic things about our history and our system of government.

But Ifill probably won't do that, and it's probably not even a good idea to do that, because it will be "condescending." And even "sexist." So we are then confronted with a situation in which we have three candidates who quite clearly know a great deal about American governance and history – just like every nearly other candidate in recent history, with the semi-exception of George Bush and the very likely exception of Dan Quayle – and one who knows next to nothing about these things and who by all appearances has never cracked open a book of history in her life.

And yet we cannot discuss that openly and frankly, at least on television, because to do so only provides evidence of the crimes of condescension etc that I listed above.

And now, even as some conservatives have urged her to remove herself from the ticket, we've simultaneously entered a "Sorry for Sarah" phase. Judith Warner offered a silly example of the genre in her New York Times column:

I'll bet you anything that her admirers – the ones whose hearts really and truly swell with a sense of kinship to her – see or sense it in her, too. They know she can't possibly do it all – the kids, the special-needs baby, the big job, the big conversations with foreign leaders. And neither could they.

Uh, Judith. No, they could not. And that's completely fine, because they shouldn't be a heartbeat away from the presidency anymore than Palin should. Gosh, First Dude, can you drive the kids to soccer practice? John is just insisting that I learn about this Kashmir place today. I know, I thought it was kinda neat that it was more than the name of a Zeppelin song, too!

Every so often, a writer happens to be firing on all cylinders and lays waste to an argument that is a waste of our time. Rebecca Traister has done us this service in Salon. It's must reading. A small taste:

Sarah Palin is no wilting flower. She is a politician who took the national stage and sneered at the work of community activists. She boldly tries to pass off incuriosity and lassitude as regular-people qualities, thereby doing a disservice to all those Americans who also work two jobs and do not come from families that hand out passports and backpacking trips, yet still manage to pick up a paper and read about their government and seek out experience and knowledge.

Expectations for her performance on Thursday are so low that she may well stumble through. Ifill and Joe Biden will both have to be deft. We all have to go through this charade of pretending that the obvious isn't true. The threat is that the charade may overpower the truth. But even if it does, the truth will still be the truth, and the truth is that she does not belong anywhere near national leadership.