VPILF

John McCain has successfully (at least for the moment) stolen Barack Obama's post-convention thunder by naming Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. But seeing as how she's held elective office for less than two years, has zero foreign-policy experience and is even under investigation in her home state for firing the head of the state police when he wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law, she may be more trouble to the McCain campaign than she's worth.

But someone didn't wait for the announcement to start sounding off on her. On August 4, someone registered a website domain at http://www.vpilf.com touting Palin for the VP job. Now it just so happens that Palin is a former beauty-pageant contestant, and "VPILF" stands for "Vice President I'd Like to F***."

Really.

Now I started wondering who was behind the website, so I did a little digging. It seems that according to the registration info, it was set up through a masking company in Arizona:

Registrant:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.

DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: VPILF.COM
Created on: 04-Aug-08
Expires on: 04-Aug-09
Last Updated on: 04-Aug-08

Administrative Contact:
Private, Registration VPILF.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599 Fax -- (480) 624-2598

Technical Contact:
Private, Registration VPILF.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599 Fax -- (480) 624-2598

Domain servers in listed order:
NS47.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS48.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

Domains by Proxy is a company whereupon anyone can register a website and keep their personal details private. So with the domain registered in Arizona, and the GOP nominee being from Arizona, is it too outrageous to wonder whether this is an arms-length ploy by the McCain campaign to "sex up" their VP candidate?

Considering that Karl Rove's winged monkeys are running the McCain campaign, that certainly doesn't seem out of the question. On the other hand, it seems remarkably shabby for even McCain's own handlers to treat Palin as just another pretty face.

On the other other hand, they've pulled stuff like this before. Is there more to this story?