with apologies to Sam Cooke

She don't know much about history
She don't believe in biology
She wants to change the science books
She wants to fire the White House cooks
But she does know how to speak on cue
And she knows if she makes fools of you
What a wonderful veep she would be

She don't know much about geography
She don't know much foreign policy
Don't know much about George Bush's war
Don't know what a VP is for
But she knows that one and one is two
And if McCain just tells her what to do

Sometimes I feel as if we're all participating in some kind of psychology experiment and that any minute now, an old guy in a white coat will peer down from the heavens and tell us that we can remove our armbands and go home. Recent political events seem designed to expose our rational failings and prove that in the end, we're all just rats in a maze.

Two month ago, John McCain challenged Barack Obama to visit Iraq, expecting him to decline, but Obama called the bluff. He saw McCain's Iraq and raised him Afghanistan, Israel, and three European nations. Never one to fold easily, McCain raised Obama right back.

According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, John McCain's recently released tax plan is very regressive "even compared with a system in which the 2001-06 tax cuts are made permanent." It provides "relatively little tax relief to those at the bottom of the income scale while providing huge tax cuts to households at the very top of the income distribution."