Via TGirsch, Daniel Larison drinks the anti-Palin Kool-Aid, noting that while snarky comments from disgruntled staffers should be taken with a grain of salt:

Obviously, we should take what disgruntled McCain staffers dish to reporters with a grain of salt. They have an agenda, and part of it is to make her look even worse than she already does to deflect some of the criticism away from McCain.

A commenter noted that tearing down Palin does not necessarily reflect well on the guy who chose her, and Daniel quickly agreed that maybe there was some other goal here. On this point, and probably only on this point, I think Daniel had it right in the original post. The reality is that losing a Presidential election by six points does not make anyone look good. Unless you think the stars were aligned such that no Republican could possibly have beaten The One (or even lost to him by a narrower margin) then the inescapable conclusion is that the McCain campaign made major mistakes, the only questions being which ones. Making Palin the mistake allows the campaing the luxury of thinking that they did everything else right – or everything, really, since naming Palin was McCain’s personal decision, not theirs. And hey, if McCain himself did everything perfectly except one little boo-boo, surely that’s not a reason to fault the campaign for having worked for him. We didn’t all jump ship when the first Bush picked “potatoe” Quayle, did we?

Danel then proceeds to ignore his own cautionary note about grains of salt, and jumps right into the “Africa is a country” bit:

The claim that she didn’t know Africa was a continent is the sort of thing that almost sounds as if it belongs to a caricature of a person who knows nothing, but it seems remotely possible that it is true.

“Seems” is the new “experts.” It requires no evidence to back up the assertion that the speaker intends to make – it just “seems” this way.

Americans’ knowledge of world geography is notoriously poor, which does not excuse it in this case if true, but neither is it all that far-fetched.

Let’s see if I got this theory right. Americans generally are poor at geography, therefore, Americans generally don’t necessarily know that Africa is a continent, and therefore, Sarah Palin probably doesn’t, either. O-kay.

When that tack doesn’t pan out, Daniel proceeds to beat up a straw man instead:

The troubling thing is that I get the sinking feeling that a lot of people who want her to become the future of the party couldn’t care less about this. I can almost hear some dedicated pundits rehearsing the next defense, “Well, how many people understand that Africa is a continent? Do we expect our elected officials to understand the conventions originally invented by ancient geographers? Besides, technically, Africa is attached to the landmass of Asia and so you can see why she might have been hesitant to identify it that way.” A more aggressive defense might say, “Who cares about Africa? Palin is interested in helping this country.”

Pretty powerful stuff, until you excise the part based on a “sinking feeling,” the part no one ever said but Daniel “can almost hear,” or the made up statement about what a more aggressive (but as yet nonexistent) defense “might” say.

The claim about NAFTA seems hard to believe–how could a governor of Alaska not know which countries were involved in this agreement? Then again, this tends to confirm everything we have come to know about her lack of interest in policy details. These claims about her are so bizarre and yet specific that it is hard to dismiss them outright.

Note to self: next time you feel like making a bizarre claim no one in his right mind should believe, be sure to make that claim “specific.” Just be careful not to specify specifics that might aid anyone in verifying the claim. Don’t be specific about precisely what was said in which meeting on which date, and don’t even think of being specific about who else may have been at that meeting and might have a conflicting take of their own. No, just be “specific” about a few embarrassing details about what dumbass thing the person you’re trying to smear supposedly said, and voila: your outlandish statement is now credible because it was “specific.” O-kay.

UPDATE: Daniel responds to the Kool-Aid charges by helpfully informing his readers that he knows I am, but what is he?