And she certainly should lay down being angry at the pretty- she has nothing to be ashamed of there. It’s a bit pathological.

There’s plenty to dislike about Karl Rove’s films, but the plots are focused and tightly scripted. This doesn’t seem like his handiwork:

The good news is that Obama has been forgotten for the time being and Palin/McCain are getting all the publicity.

The bad news is that the publicity is about Palin’s 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy–and about Palin lawyering up for Troopergate and being threatened with a subpoena (some documentation is here and here).

I want to believe that McCain is ready for this. It’s important that he promptly demonstrate control of the narrative.

The Dowd piece is deranged, as is much of the little MSM scribbling about Palin that I’ve bothered to glance at. So far I’ve only sampled the 275+ comments here; the Palin skepticism therein is left-of-center but sane.
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Keith writes, And, most importantly, “Sarah” is the way for “John” to revise and extend his pristine views of ANWR.

McCain’s acceptance speech would be a great vehicle for that–if it’s done right. The speech should emphasize the domestic & national-security importance of energy and issue a ‘whatever-it-takes’ call to action. An ANWR change of mind (flip-flop if you will) should not be phrased so as to leave McCain open to the accusation that he is a dotard manipulated by the gold-digging Palin. The MSM would say that anyway, but McCain shouldn’t give them free ammunition.

So when Rush says “Everybody knows who it is. Bring her out there!” it does not imply any special advance notice.

The McCain campaign probably did time her appearance to coincide with Rush’s commercial breaks especially since he speaks to so many of the disaffected base. This seems to be a real possibility, which Rush himself pointed out on his website “A flawless event, which even hit the EIB breaks.” His transcript shows the following comments:
“We’ll take our commercial break here, so as not to screw up our affiliates. This applause is going to go on for a while. We’ll come back after the break and JIP her remarks and listen when we get back.”..and toward the end:”Sarah, we got a commercial break.”

I don’t see this as implying that Rush was “in” on the pick just that he and his audience were wisely taken into account for the announcement to have its greatest possible impact.

Rush’s “over-the-top enthusiasm” seemed genuine enough to me. Especially since the McCain campaign had sent out false indications of a prochoice VP pick such as Lieberman, Ridge & others. I had thought that this might be in preparation for announcing Romney as VP - to lessen the evangelical opposition to his Mormon background by getting them to consider “Well, at least he isn’t prochoice.”

Anyway, the McCain campaign showed their ability to toy with everyone’s mind and that they could keep a secret long enough to maximize the impact of the announcement of his VP pick. Perhaps Karl Rove was consulted. But I don’t think see any especially compelling evidence that Rush was.