Palin is "going rogue"

Politico's Ben Smith has a very interesting story this morning about the machinations evolving within the Palin-McCain campaign.

It all makes perfect sense. Palin is a massively ambitious person with national aspirations well beyond her current role, which is supposed to be as a McCain surrogate, essentially. But she's chafing at the restrictions imposed on her activities by McCain's inner circle.

Who could blame her? Even I'm sympathetic.

Things are going sour and Palin needs to protect herself from the taint of McCain's disastrous tactics cum strategy. The only problem is she's said a lot of idiotic things when afforded the opportunity.

Recently, after being asked by NBC's Brian Williams what she meant by "preconditions" in her attacks against Barack Obama's views on foreign diplomacy, she didn't have the slightest clue how to respond and simply retreated to her standard fearmongering boilerplate about "those who would seek to destroy America."

The GOP base of True Believers may love her to death and she's undeniably got an abundance of political skill but her alleged grasp of substantive questions is so comically shallow it's difficult to imagine her surviving a Republican primary in 2012.

More: She is a diva.