Steve Benen and Andrew Sullivan all wonder if McCain has lost his mind, if perhaps there might be something wrong with him, and indeed I think this is a question that must be asked.
When this campaign began and McCain took his trip to Iraq and Israel and had to be corrected over and over again by Joe Lieberman, people began to wonder about his grasp of the facts or his memory.
Throughout the campaign he has had memory problems and said strange things. And now he has chosen the most unqualified person ever to be his running mate, just because she has a uterus and ovaries like Hillary Clinton.
After continually attacking Obama for his supposed lack of experience (though Obama has twelve more years of legislative experience - eight in a large state and four in the U.S. Senate - than Palin) and using the slogan "country first," and after insisting the most important quality he would look for in a veep would be the ability to be president from day one, McCain has gone completely off the rails and chosen someone with much less experience than Obama, much less understanding of the issues of the day, and an absolute lack of qualification to be ready on day one, two or five hundred.
Republicans say she is as qualified as Obama which is of course, absurd. She has a journalism degree (if she actually finished college) from a podunk college in Idaho while Obama has a law degree from Harvard, and worked as a community organizer and a college professor. He has written two highly acclaimed books and run the most successful primary season ever against the Clinton machine. He has traveled and lived around the world and understands the issues in far more complexity than Ms. Palin. It is pure nonsense to put her in the same league with Obama.
It defies explanation and could indeed be evidence that McCain is losing his marbles.
Dementia does not come on all at once. My dad is showing signs of dementia as part of a neurodegenerative disease that is slowly killing him. And we all remember the unususal behavior and memory problems of Ronald Reagan in his final years in office. In diseases that cause dementia, the brain doesn't die all at once. These diseases are progressive. My dad was diagnosed about three years ago, at the age of 79, but when I look back I remember oddities long before that - strange things he said, times I wasn't sure what he meant, unusual things he did.
McCain could be in the early stages of dementia associated with any number of diseases, and we have no idea the toll his years in a POW camp might have had on him.
Now that he has chosen a totally unqualified person to be his running mate, for purely political reasons, and she shows no evidence of realizing how much trouble she is in, McCain's age is more important than ever.
Somebody needs to take a serious look at this before we take the chance that this man and his trophy veep get their hands on the nuclear button.
