KEY POINTS:
Okay, that's it. Enough already. My email inbox looks like The Dude's porn collection from The Big Lebowski.
I've received photo-shopped pictures of Sarah Palin in a stars-and-stripes bikini holding a rifle around the family pool, with shotgun-wielding kids splashing in the background.
That one came from three different friends, each of whom considers herself a feminist. (Tell me, would they have tolerated a picture of Obama in a blackface minstrel show outfit?) We need to talk, girlfriends.
I have a list of what some guy's real pit bull and Sarah Palin have in common: Both look confused when asked questions; both like to poop on the environment; both are good at following the commands of their handlers; both have extensive foreign policy experience.
I have invectives on Palin fighting to get polar bears off the endangered species list. Diatribes that she doesn't believe in sex education or evolution, and missives on how she tried to fire her town's librarian for refusing to remove objectionable books.
Even Deepak Chopra showed up explaining that Palin is Obama's psychic opposite, his shadow, "deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses".
I'm not making this stuff up, boys and girls. This is mass, collective panic. John McCain has energised his base all right, and terrified another. Suddenly, that sickly, familiar red and blue cleaver has split the country anew like election 2000 deja bile.
America has some sweating to do. They've rolled up reason.
Yes, it is unfair and sexist to forward fake photos of a bikini-clad candidate. Her sexual attractiveness isn't up for votes. Yes, Palin has a full plate, with a Down syndrome baby and a pregnant 17-year-old at home.
But no one questions whether a male candidate's home responsibilities are overly full. It still doesn't give us the right to judge her choices behind closed doors.
But if there is a line between fairness and fear, this week I've just crossed it. Watching Palin's first painful television interview was like mainlining political Botox. Someone answered the door, but nobody was home.
There is a reason her press plane conversation has been decreed off the record, why she has been kept to scripted speeches without open access to journalists, why her next stage-managed interview will be with fellow cheerleader, Fox News.
It is frighteningly simple: this woman is not ready for the national stage. You could see it in every shrink-wrapped, plastic answer she parroted.
When the interviewer asked if Palin agrees with the Bush Doctrine (pre-emptive, anticipatory self-defence if America feels another country is going to attack), the next possible vice-president of the largest economy in the world stalled for 25 seconds ("In what respect, Charlie?" Then, "You mean his world view?") until the journalist had to explain the concept outright.
This isn't some third form social studies test run amok. I am mortified to get real glimpses into just what isn't there.
Imagine the mayor of Greymouth suddenly becoming the head of Nato. Imagine if every episode of West Wing and 24 starred President Marie Osmond.
Sarah Palin isn't the most potentially disastrous vice-presidential candidate ever to enter the world stage just because of her politics. She is the worst candidate because she is the least-prepared the United States has ever offered. This woman makes Dan Quayle look like FDR.
Throughout time vice-presidential candidates have been chosen for political expediency. This isn't anything new.
But why did the oldest man ever to run for the presidency, one who has had cancer three times, one who said he would choose a running mate most able to lead, choose a woman who has an electorate not much bigger than double the population of the North Shore?
He could have ticked all the boxes with a social conservative, and a woman, but found one with some semblance of sophistication and experience. This is his responsible choice for America's back-up?
John McCain has chosen a vice- presidential candidate brilliantly for John McCain. But John McCain has chosen horribly for the rest of the world. If history is any guide, this woman has a one-in-three chance of taking over the presidency because of death or assassination.
In New Zealand, women are no longer chosen to lead on the basis of tokenism. Thankfully, this country is well past that. America isn't - yet. If I must stomach a woman walking in the back door of the White House for the first time because her lipstick shade is "pit bull", then give me a token the world can be confident she will keep her hands well away from the nuclear codes.
Palin has changed the narrative of this election all right. Her story has made it my nightmare.
* www.traceybarnett.co.nz
