I didn't note Sarah Palin's verbal screw-up when she called South Korea North Korea in an interview with Glenn Beck. Why? Because in context it seemed like a simple verbal slip-up, the kind everyone makes from time to time. Yes, when you listen to the whole thing, there's a weird, nervous-laughter defensiveness about her recognition that she got something wrong, but she gets the benefit of the doubt in my book.

What's really fascinating is her response. It's a merciless, grammar-free, sneering compilation of Obama verbal gaffes. It's like a blog-post from some Malkin clone:

This may be a smart-ass retort; it may be useful inoculation against a potentially damaging gaffe; it may even be a well-researched blog-post, but what it isn't is anything approaching the kind of character we expect in a president. A simple respect for the office she seeks would not reflect itself in these increasingly callow, sarcastic, cheap jibes at a sitting president. But sadly, like so many now purporting to represent conservatism, there is, behind the faux awe before the constitution, a contempt for the restraint and dignity a polity's institutions require from its leaders.

There is no maturity here; no self-reflection; no capacity even to think how to appeal to the half of Americans who are already so appalled by her trashy behavior and cheap publicity stunts. There is a meanness, a disrespect, a vicious partisanship that, if allowed to gain more power, would split this country more deeply and more rancorously than at any time in recent years. And that's saying something.

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