By now you've all seen it:

[W]hen there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, [Palin] appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Her childhood love of cows.

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

Her former junior high school band-mate. A franchisee for Mailboxes Etc.

Now, look. There's a refreshing lack of concern for establishment gatekeeping here, no doubt. But it's not supposed to be a sit com.

Here, again, is another illustration of how incredibly dangerous it could be to install Slick Sarah Palin in the Vice Presidency that Dick Cheney built.

And by the way, just as an aside, if her provincialism causes you to question the "Slick Sarah" moniker, consider this:

In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile. "I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did," Mr. Jenkins recalled. "And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ " Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after. Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was "smearing" her. "Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ " he said.

I don't know Paul Jenkins. I didn't put those words in his mouth. That's an on-the-ground, contemporary assessment of Palin. S-L-I-C-K. A deft backbiter since day one. She may be ignorant of the finer policy points -- or even bedrock central tenets, such as the Bush Doctrine -- but you don't have to know policy to deliver an icepick to the temple.

But back to the dangers of marrying Cheneyism to Palinism. We already know, if only partially, the extent to which Cheney's extraordinary secretiveness allowed him to put his own partisan operators in place to execute the "administration's" most daring extralegal experiments. (That's a euphemism for "perpetrating impeachable offenses," in case you were wondering.) It was Cheney's intimate knowledge of the levers of power that move official Washington that allowed him to do so mostly unchallenged and under the radar. As a result, the operatives he installed were able to work in near total secrecy, with Cheney (so far) successfully flouting federal law requiring that he provide even the numbers, names or salaries of his staffers.

If there's anything redeeming at all that can be said about they way Cheney in particular perpetrated this anti-democratic abuse of the federal government, it's that while his henchmen and hires were almost universally subversive of the Constitution in both their views and their actions, they were at least arguably competent to the governmental roles to which they were ostensibly assigned.

Palin, however, is the Tom DeLay to Cheney's Newt Gingrich. Relatively speaking, the guileless thug who inherits a carefully orchestrated, if essentially groundless (or in the case of Cheney, outright illegal and unconstitutional) "governmental" construct, but who lacks the patience and finesse to keep investigators and oversight committees at legal arm's length.

And so we may well expect from a Palin Vice Presidency not only the ill-considered and impatient grasping at the trappings of power (and the accompanying disregard for the safeguards against corruption represented by power's official levers and mechanisms) embodied by DeLay, but also -- still more frighteningly -- the use of Cheney's secrecy precedents to hide the whole debacle from view.

What really stings about the Times' article is that it exposes Palin's cronyism and irresponsibly provincial worldview, not to mention McCain's own shocking irresponsibility in selecting her. Imagine the dangers to the country and the Constitution of being able to appoint childhood friends, already perhaps in above their heads just in trying to govern 670,000 person Alaska, to high federal office and to use the legacy of Cheney's secrecy to conceal it all from the public.