The week ahead in conservatism

How much more entertaining can the John McCain campaign get this week? Recent revelations will be hard to top.

Senator McCain, who once upon a time famously denounced Religious Right leaders as "agents of intolerance," has apparently acceded to their desires by setting aside his favored running mates for an unknown quantity whose main selling point seems to be her "social conservatism."

Unknown, as in unknown even to John McCain.

While Sarah Palin's private family life is her business, her public policy pronouncements are decidedly not, and it's more than a little ironic that an abstinence-only educator currently has an unwed teenage kid with a bun in the oven, while adding unintended new meaning to her own self-description as a "hockey mom."

She's certainly in no position to dictate her ineffective public sex-ed curricula to anybody else's children.

Then of course there is the McCain campaign's trumpeting of talking points that simply aren't true. She opposed a bridge construction when she supported it. She fought Senator Ted Stevens when she helped raise money and campaign for him. She eschewed federal earmarks while she lobbied Congress for them.

She rallied against corruption while she and her "first dude" fired administration officials to appease their feuding in-laws. She's a foreign policy expert by dint of the Aleutian Islands.

Now she's touted as ready from day one to take over the office of Abraham Lincoln while she's been playing at being Jefferson Davis.

Chuck Kopp, who Sarah Palin appointed as Alaska's top police officer after firing his predecessor and who she also had to get rid of two weeks later when she found out that Kopp had been reprimanded for sexual harassment, probably summed up the conservative devotion to Palin best when he testified, "While I have been portrayed in a negative light, my personal worth is found in the person of Jesus Christ, and not on the one who accepts or rejects me."

Quite so. Welcome to the faith-based public official.