She flings her words like bean bags at a blackboard

What are the odds of Sarah Palin becoming President? If John McCain wins the election in November, the chances of him dying in office and being succeeded by her, are really, really good.

From last night's Vice-Presidential debate: "nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people and too many parts of our planet."

"The most likely cause of her undoing will – strangely – be the McCain campaign. In St Paul, unveiled as the goose who could lay for the Republicans the golden egg of the presidency, she brimmed with the inflated self-assurance of the small-world conqueror, and held a national audience in the palm of her hand as she recited the same confident platitudes that served her so well in Alaska. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and McCain and his advisers should have left well alone, left ‘Sarah’ to be her vote-winning self. Instead, they seem to be no less alarmed by her than liberals are, and have taken to force-feeding her, stuffing her gullet with ‘talking points’ on foreign and domestic policy. Under their frantic tuition, Palin has recently looked less likely to lay the golden egg than to produce inferior goose-liver pâté." -- Jonathan Raban, London Review of Books.