A dispirting little summary of modern-day political decomposition is revealed in the mechanics of public opinion polls, within the questions put to respondents - and by examining how skewed those "nonpartisan" queries really are.

Take, for instance, this question from the USA Today/Gallup survey last weekend:

"How concerned are you that Barack Obama lacks the experience needed to be an effective president: very concerned, somewhat concerned, not too concerned, or not concerned at all?"

Within that wording, it's not hard to hear this question: "Barack Obama lacks experience - does that concern you?" No questions reference McCain's experience - or lack of it. Hmm. Odd.

And from a CBS News Poll, from the same time period:

"Do you think Barack Obama has made it clear what he would do as president, or hasn't he done that yet?"

"Do you think Barack Obama has prepared himself well enough for the job of president, or hasn't he?"

Once again, no question about the GOP candidate - it's a given that McCain is as clear as a vodka tonic on what he'll accomplish in office. And "prepared himself"? Goddammit! McCain, in case you've forgotten, is an warveteranandexPOW. A PILOT! He was born "prepared", numbnuts!

And I love this one:

"Do you think Barack Obama is tough enough?"

Now... CBS knows better than to insult the reputation of big John with a pipsqueak, little gnat-bite question like that.

Nooo... McCain eats live animals just to watch them die shitless - wailing in terror and pissing all over themselves. He tears in half big-city phone books 'cause the ripping sound is like... uh... victory. And all he has to do is think “boner” to bust out the fly in a pair of sturdy Wranglers. But, seriously now, what about this little twinkie, this Peter Pan… what’s his name?… Obama? What about that prissy little bitch? TOUGH ENOUGH?

It must have flustered these pollsters somewhat that Obama edged out ahead despite the undercurrent of bias in the questions. Sometimes a question about something suggests doubt about it, and even prompts a sought-after reply; just about everyone learns that on elementary school playgrounds at age... oh... seven.

Strangely, polls taken earlier last month seemed more fair in their approach, with each candidate tracked with the same questions on how effective each would be in office. Maybe the closer Election Day looms, the more desperate media cheerleaders are becoming to prop up their cardboard fly-boy.

Maybe the GOP is getting all flop-sweaty, too. Apparently, the party has decided to opt for dementia praecox, tearing itself asunder to become the change agent in opposition to... eight years of Republican rule!

So... the Republicans are blowing "Taps" for business-as-usual politics, and the "missing man" in McCain's funerary flyover formation is President Bush. These are strange days, indeed.

But you gotta hand it to the old aviator. McCain's remedy for the past eight years is by far the simplest: Erase them from memory. In his acceptance speech Thursday night, McCain's references to Bush and his turgid, moldered Era were so oblique we could as well be suffering through the twilight months of "President X".

It's all about change, baby. Meet the old boss, same as the old boss, but not the same... because... the new boss says so. What? You're not going to take a looong-suffering POW at his word?

While it's absolutely delightful that Republicans are as fed-up with the Bush Era as the rest of us, it may help their case to actually propose... duh!... policy to correct it. ...Put forth a platform. ...Detail some programs for us wall-eyed voters. Uh-huh!

Our middle class is the catalyst for making this country the richest and most powerful in the history of the world, and the prime factor in making American social and political processes "liberal, flexible, progressive, pacific and prosperous" - in the words of one stuffy old newspaper masthead. But the middle class is suffering. Our financial institutions are now regulated only by greed, and, somehow, price increases have achieved a frequence comparable to that of champagne flutes raised on “Bachelorette.”

McCain, from his straight, by-the-book Republican policy points last night, evidently believes tax cuts for the wealthy and less whining from the balance of the population will get us out of this mess. Platform? What platform?

As most pundits have bemusedly observed, the GOP this year is running solely on a candidate - on McCain himself. And even he's upstaged by a neophyte from the Great North, his running mate, Sarah Palin. Some doubts remain as to whether Palin is for real. Have we been handed a political savant, ready to hit the ground running and take up the mantle of Commander in Chief in an (expiring) heartbeat? Or is she simply not ready for national prime time – a karaoke candidate pretending to carry enough heft for a spot on the biggest stage in the world?

Will our media - with owners and publishers so intoxicated by the neoconservative template of war abroad and pacification at home - help us find the answers?

For the life of me, I can't get Rudy Giuliani's death-rictus grin out of my head. It haunts my fever dreams: brownish teeth big as garage doors suddenly, jarringly flashing out in an expression of almost childlike malignity... like the badly carved grin in an out-of-season jack-o-lantern.

When Giuliani smiles, it's truly scary and mean-spirited. And something else underneath... greed. Avarice. Hunger. The former mayor always looks like he's imagining a sizzling porterhouse the size of a Park Avenue tax shelter. Ooo... wake me up!

To absolutely no one's surprise, certainly not the delegates gathered in the Octoberfest yodelin' hamlet that is the Xcel Energy Center, Giuliani and GOP Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin roughed up Obama for his "lack of experience" and "elitism". Then they made governorship of a caribou reserve and oil pipeline easement equivalent to negotiating world peace and solving the gas crisis. Even her service as small-town mayor got the buildup. And don't forget, she's a hockey mom!

Through it all, Palin was so down-home sneery and smug it's easy to relish expections of Biden gutting her like a baby seal in foreign policy debates.

Evidently, it doesn't matter that Cuba and South Molucca get more news play that Alaska. If it weren't for buttery king crab and Inuit carvings, the 49th state would drop from our radar screens altogether, and we'd be free to believe that canned salmon comes exclusively from the remotely forbidding Yukon. Alaska is, after all, 47th in population, including polar bears and ursine reality-show truckers. Governing the state just may entail quality dart-board time.

But it's next to Russia! That has actually been bandied about as a foreign-police entree' unknown, thoroughly untested Mrs. Palin. That must prove it: When nothing is there, any straw is up for grasping.

Everything thus far in Minneapolis has been filmy, vague. There are whispers of dangers that must be faced. Futures in peril! But no details. And no possible solutions proposed, either. Just attack, attack, attack.

And that's the biggest problem for the GOP with all the "red meat" they flung on the stage up to now: It's too fatty to digest.

Giuliani kept yammering on about how this is the most important election "in our lifetimes." But... why? Why, for national security issues, of course. The hard guns-and-butter decisions must be made, including staying the course in Iraq, slinging Russia on the wall, and plotting a wider Mideast conflict in Iran.

How many Americans really find that outline appealing? And here's a bigger problem for the saber-rattling, gloom/doom GOP: Most Americans see 9/11 as an incident - not a condition. The much ballyhoo'd, badly run "War on Terror" has lost much of its attractive heat over the years. Sure - Al Qaeda is still a potent force. But the threat it maintains is testament to the Bush Administration's  fraudulent agendas than resiliency of a pan-Arab radicalism. When the war was diverted to Iraq - for reasons still not delineated by the Administration - the cabal that brought down the buildings got away.

Americans are run haggard by war and gulag justice, by a President whose abrogation of the Constitution is matched only by his aggregation of imperial power; the "decider" shares command with no one.

For the nuts and bolts, for the problems of Kitchen Sink America, under siege not from foreign foes but by rising prices and stagnating wages? Well... the GOP apparently has no answers. As John McCain told a rust-belt crowd earlier this year, the "good jobs aren't coming back"... so tuck it up and persevere.

Even on energy - a subject the Obama camp has begun to coalesce around and propose detailed solutions - Palin and the chattering party hacks had nothing. In an unguarded moment, she admitted:

"Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America's energy problems - as if we all didn't know that already."

With a weak shrug and "well... it's better than doing nothing" she got her applause line. And no credit for answers or possible solutions... No intelligent proposals at all.

McCain will probably fare much the same tonight. And they'll get a bump out of this.  America likes cheap theatrics; TV wrestling is still big here, after all. But in the long run... they got nothin'. And before long, that truth will be apparent to even the most blinkered of Red State faithful.

Something tells me AARP isn't next on her call list...

But if you want accurate cartography of power in modern-day Washington, you can't ask for a better relief map than this:

"'U.S. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin told the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC on Tuesday that she would "work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership between U.S. and Israel,' the group's spokesman told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday."

According to a story at MSNBC, she met with the board of directors of the American Israeli Public Affairs committe in her hotel room yesterday.

Palin is the governor of Alaska, with that state's business on her desk; she's being coached by a squad of foreign policy specialists who want to make sure she knows the Berlin Wall is long gone; and she's defending herself in a legislative probe back home. And don't forget: She's got a few household, domestic problems and a husband who thinks Alaska needs its own para-fascist seat at the UN.

Nevertheless, she somehow finds time to meet with AIPAC, the lobbying group of whose power we dare not speak. Oh... and the one with two officials under indictment for espionage. In gladhanding AIPAC she's in crowded - if not good - company.

"Stronger ties to Israel" is AIPAC's unofficial mantra, and is always a shared theme for all the guests at the group's annual conclave. It certainly was at this year's meeting in early June, when just about everyone who is anyone in Washington showed up to play toastmaster to the lion of the Levant - although it's difficult to imagine how much stronger and tighter those ties could be without sawing in half either one or both countries. As it is, there are some serious friction burns.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain were among the featured speakers, with Obama evidently given a chance to "prove himself" as a traditional Beltway Israel-booster. His speech was virtually indiscerable in its pledges of fealty from that of the event's other guests - vitually a who's who of Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue power-hitters.

AIPAC's lobbying is decidedly non-partisan. Last year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quietly stripped out of a $100 billion funding bill for Iraq a provision that would have required President Bush to seek congressional approval before launching any new war on Iran. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said in an interview there is a widespread fear in Israel about Iran: "It would take away perhaps the most important tool the U.S. has when it comes to Iran."

Somehow, I can't see Finland's lobby group punching up a few phone numbers and making something like that happen.

There’s a lot of unexplored wilderness in McCain’s atlas of political geography. He can pull a big surprise, as he did with his choice of Palin as running mate. Few saw that coming - just ask Tim Pawlenty. But for all his "trailblazing", one reliable certainty in McCain's modus operandi is paying homage to groups like AIPAC, who can do him the most good. Or the most bad.

To back up its congenial, pat-on-the-back approach, AIPAC has never shied away from negative campaigning, as well. It was instrumental in Howard Dean's demolition in 2004, and well-remembered is then-AIPAC president Thomas Dine's chilling “message” to other American politicians after the organization helped defeat longtime Illinois Senator Charles Percy in the mid-'80s.

The MSNBC story wraps up with:

"We had a good productive discussion on the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and we were pleased that Gov. Palin expressed her deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel," AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said. "Like Sen. McCain, the vice presidential nominee understands and believes in the special friendship between the two democracies and would work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership in a McCain/Palin Administration."

Any bets on whether she duplicates that kind of commitment - even to the National Rifle Association?

Could the McCain campaign's evident failure to fully vet vice presidential choice Sarah Palin indicate she was hurriedly pressed into service after previous picks turned down a ticket on the Straight Talk Express?

While it's true Troopergate and her daughter's pregnancy are small potatos in Alaskan political scandals (and the pregnancy issue is a particularly egregious talking point, as Obama noted yesterday), Palin must still measure up as a viable vice presidential choice on the issues roiling the Chief Executive's spot from which she could be but a heartbeat.

Aside from her utter lack of foreign-policy exposure, are there other embarrassments from her past and present? It seems, after all, quite a few Alaskan politicians have resumes that read like rap sheets.

The choice of Palin has show-business appeal (hopefully to offset the history-making cachet of a certain African American opponent) and she's touted as sop for recalcitrant Democratic PUMA's, but is she... well... a dreg? Is it possible the McCain crew took whatever they could get? ...That viable Young Turks in the GOP passed on the sluggish McCain bid?

Even with some obliquely scripted, spuriously valid polls indicating a neck-and-neck race, maybe ambitious Republicans chuffing in the bullpen see the future a little more clearly than McCain's media cheerleaders: McCain's currency as a straight-talking Maverick isn't so current when viewed amid his cocoon of lobbyists and alongside his evolution as virtual billboard for silk-tie armageddon. The 2008-vintage McCain evidently favors U.S. military incursions anywhere, anytime.

There are other incentives to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Republicans are fond of believing any possible Obama Era would only last one term before a cowed, embittered America - scalded in bubbly borscht of a left-liberal utopian nightmare - would roll rightward again. Even waiting eight years is possible for a Mitt Romney, Charlie Crist or even Mike Huckabee. Reagan was 70 when he first took the oath.

Even if McCain wins, he's left a trail of muttered asides that he won't stick out two terms - one is enough. He'll likely face a hostile Congress, at any rate, and even if he does change his mind, could face stiff competition in the primaries if his Presidential schemes founder, unfunded by Democratic domination of both Capitol Hill houses.

Reed Hundt has an interesting piece in today's TPM Cafe, noting that Thomas Eagleton wasn't fully vetted by McGovern's handlers before he was picked for the Democratic ticket in 1972. We all know how that ended up: Revelations of past psychiatric treatment bushwhacked his candidacy for a skittish party.

But Hundt's post also notes the number of Democratic heavy-hitters who turned down McGovern's feelers to join the campaign: Kennedy, Abe Rubicoff, Gaylord Nelson. He was even considering Leonard Woodcock(!) when Eagleton's name came up.

The Eagleton disaster could have been avoided with time - and more choices. Regardless of the illegitimacy of psychiatric treatment torpedoing anyone's candidacy, the fumble was another nail in the coffin of a haphazard campaign running against Nixon's well-oiled CREEP machine.

Something tells me a Sarah Palin - Red State credentials and all - wasn't on the top of anyone's list.