Eagleton Redux?

Back in 1972, George McGovern announced the picking of Thomas Eagleton as his running mate to widespread press coverage. Two weeks later, Eagleton was unceremoniously dumped from the ticket - also to widespread press coverage - once it was revealed that he had undergone electroshock therapy and been hospitalized numerous times for psychiatric problems. McGovern never recovered from the fiasco and went on to get creamed in November.

Are we seeing the same pattern here?

Ever since John McCain announced his VP pick of Sarah Palin on Friday, unpleasant facts have been coming out of the woodwork:

• Palin and her staff pressured public safety commissioner Walt Monegan to fire a state trooper who just happened to be in a bitter divorce and custody fight with Palin's sister. When he refused, Palin fired Monegan and replaced him with a known sexual harasser who lasted only two weeks before being pushed out himself.
  
• Vetting was at best minimal - the McCain campaign knew nothing about the trooper scandal even though it had been big news in Alaska for weeks, and the vetting process seems to have consisted only of a single chat between McCain and Palin.
• She has no foreign-policy experience at all, with Cindy McCain and Fox News being reduced to claiming that she does know about foreign policy because Alaska is right next to Russia.
• As mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she fired the town police chief for supporting her opponent in the 1996 election, then was almost recalled in the ensuing uproar.
  
• She publicly said she has no idea what the vice president's job is.
• She admitted that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter Bristol is pregnant. (Ironically, Palin opposes actual sex education in schools in favor of "abstinence education," which has repeatedly been shown not to work.)
  

And if all that wasn't enough, there are also widespread rumors that Trig, the family's youngest child, is actually Bristol's, but was passed off as Sarah's.

So with signals of a looming train wreck all around us, just why was Palin selected? Putting aside all the beauty-queen and May-December wisecracks, it appears she was picked for two reasons and two only.

1. She is a woman (or, as Samantha Bee nailed it on The Daily Show, a "vagina-American") whom the GOP hopes can win the support of former Hillary Clinton voters despite having positions completely opposite to Clinton's.
   
2. She is a faithful devotee of the Christian Right, falling into line on everything from banning abortion to opposing gay marriage to teaching creationism as science in public schools.
   

Indeed, there are rampant murmurings that McCain actually wanted Joe Lieberman or Mitt Romney as his running mate, but both of those were nixed by the Christian Right, without whose support he cannot win in November. In other words, she was picked to convince the jihadist wing of the GOP that he will do whatever they want as long as they vote for him.

Not only that, the contempt shown for women embodied in the Palin pick is staggering. The Republicans genuinely believe that women are so dumb that they will automatically support anyone with two X chromosomes, regardless of her actual positions on anything. Poll results show that women realize this, and are not pleased.

So yes, McCain got some momentary good press out of the Palin announcement. But this seems to be turning into a nightmare very very quickly.