Palin out-drama queens Joe Biden

Every few hours it seems, the Palin-McCain campaign desperately adopts a new tactic, evidently as none of the others are working.

The other day it was procuring Joe the Plumber his 15 minutes of notoriety on the Fox News Network's 21st century version of Hee Haw, The Mike Huckabee Hour.

Now it's seized on some characteristically dramatic remarks delivered by a certain Joe the Senator at a fundraising event in Seattle over the weekend.

Needless to say, Delaware Senator Joe Biden's premonitions have already been grossly misinterpreted and abused by his veep hopeful counterpart, AK Gov. Sarah Palin.

In an interview with CNN consisting for the most part of her standard stump speech blather, Palin cast Biden's warning as a conditional syllogism: If Barack Obama is elected, then there will be an international crisis.

But that isn't what Biden said at all. What he was saying, in typical Bidenese, is that whenever a new American president is installed, there will be those who seek to "test his mettle," as Biden put it.

And the new president that is about to be installed, according to Joe Biden, is Barack Obama. It was an observation based in historical experience and would apply to any freshly minted administration, including one presided over by John McCain.

Nor was Biden suggesting that electing Obama as opposed to some other candidate will cause an international crisis, which is what the Palin-McCain gang is attempting to make him say.

In fact the AK Gov. said so explicitly, in reviving the ridiculous objections to Obama's stated willingness to engage in diplomatic talks with so-called hostile regimes, a policy perspective endorsed by five former U.S. Secretaries of State.

Palin claims, nonsensically, that doing so would "validate," for example, the prior shenanigans of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and furthermore precipitate whatever crises Biden was alluding to.

While there are definitely puzzling aspects to Biden's more specific propositions that warrant explication, Palin either didn't hear or didn't understand what he said. Willfully or not, who knows.

And she's certainly in no position to criticize Barack Obama for being an "untested" president. So is Palin, and so is John McCain.