I'm waiting for the other snowshoe to drop.

It's hard to believe that someone as politically ambitious as Sarah Palin would bail out of her first term as governor unless there were extenuating circumstances that we have yet to hear about.

If there is no scandal waiting in the wings, then Gov. Palin deserves to be thought of as a flake not fit for the presidency, regardless of one's political point of view.

Some of her admirers among the Conservative chattering classes are calling this a bold masterstroke, clearing the decks for her to come down here to the lower forty-eight and tour the cornfields of Iowa as well as the mill towns of New Hampshire.

She says she quit to pursue a higher calling. The irony is that another Republican governor, Mark Sanford, chose to pursue a lower calling, and he's still in office.

I suggest we sit tight and wait to see if this calling comes in the form of a subpoena.

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You have to hand it to Bristol Palin. Like her mom, she's an expert at turning a sow's ear into a silk purse.

All teens do stupid things. Bristol figured out a way to get paid for talking about her stupid thing, in the form of giving a public service announcement extolling (choke!) teen sexual abstinence.

I don't know if young Bristol's trying to help burnish her mother's image for a presidential run in 2012, but if I were Sarah Palin, I'd be trying to keep her out of the spotlight.

After all, Sarah's shooting for the Republican primary, with all those pinch-mouthed morals voters, and having an unwed teen mother in the family displays a decidedly liberal-style cavalier attitude toward what is good and proper.

But then, if you're Sarah Palin, the Great Foxy Hope for the Conservative Future, they can bend the rules a little. Bristol's "situation" becomes a joyous celebration of life.

Now, if we could just get the girl to fly to Vermont and marry a woman...

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It has always been a goal of mine to contrive a way to use Burkina Faso in a cartoon. Never heard of the place? Maybe you remember it by its former moniker, Upper Volta (although, to my knowledge, a Lower Volta has never existed).

Or, maybe you don't. I felt that the more obscure-sounding places I could list, the better the humor would work. In other words, forget Egypt or Algeria.

Having now fulfilled my lifelong career aspiration, there is really nothing left to live for, professionally speaking. That aside, my feeling is that the more Sarah Palin mentions how she was wrongly characterized by her handlers in the recent campaign, the more it will remind us, four years from now, that she had a reputation as a hopelessly ditzy fashion diva back in 2008.

Helpful hint to you rabid Palinophiles out there: Those places I named are all countries in Africa.

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Ah...just when we thought all the excitement of the campaign was over, and it was time to settle down and eat our lima beans while President-elect Obama dragged us through the fleshing-out of his cabinet...

Now comes the glass of fine liqueur at the end of a rich, multi-course meal for us political junkies. The Republicans unsheathe the long knives and begin the much-anticipated scapegoating of their own. She doesn't know Africa is a continent? Can't name the countries in NAFTA? He refused her pleas to play the Rev. Wright card? His henchpeople mishandled her?

One can only hope it lasts through the Transition, which the economic news is making drearier by the day.

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On Election Day, I had to be ready with several alternative cartoons, just in case. The deadline for the Opinion Pages was 1 a.m. Wednesday, and there were three contingencies.
No.1: Obama wins. No.2: McCain wins. No.3: They're still counting, and we don't know by deadline.

What you see here is the sketch I had ready for an eleventh-hour McCain upset. Obviously, I never had to bother to ink it because they called the election for Obama relatively early on, so we ran that cartoon instead.

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My colleagues on the Editorial Board and I remember clearly last spring, when John McCain sat before us in a small room and declared, with a straight face, that he would run a clean and honorable campaign, one worthy of the American people.

This must have been before the Rovian pod people took posession of his brain, although one could argue that his campaign has, in fact, been worthy of the American people. We'll see after Tuesday.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that he loses, he'll have to go back to the Senate. His own party will shun him for blowing the race with his craven choice of Palin--plus they always detested him, anyway. The Democrats will despise him for the name-calling, the robocalls, the whisper campaigns, and the gutter politics. That leaves only Joe Lieberman to eat Senate bean soup with, which is like sharing lunch with that droning U.S. History teacher in high school who taught by staying one textbook chapter ahead of the class.

Technical note: Normally, I draw using brushes, old-fashioned steel pen points and India ink. Today, I thought I'd try doing the whole thing with a ball-point pen, because of the detail. Plus, the adolescent in me thought it would be cool to draw a trebuchet.

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If you're like most Floridians, your opinion of Gov. Charlie runs somewhere between vanilla and French vanilla. He's a reasonably inoffensive, likable gent. Not exactly a barn-burner, but as a person, he's quite charming.

Compared to Sarah Palin, however, he looks positively Lincolnesque. Just try to put yourself in his shoes after he used his considerable prestige in our contentious state to pull John McCain's chestnuts out of the fire during the primary, when everyone had given his candidacy up for dead. This is the thanks he gets? Princess Needless Markup who played hooky during junior high civics class?

You can bet that if Charlie had been the VP pick, he'd have been able to tell Katie Couric what the Vice-President's statutory role is, and he wouldn't be dragging down the public discourse by calling his opponent a socialist, terrorist, Marxist teacher of sex ed to kindergartners.

That's probably why McCain didn't give him the job. Buck up, Governor. You're too good for it.

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Normally, I don't like to rely on so many words in cartoons, but I couldn't think of a more effective way to make the point about negative campaigning... without resorting to cliches (like avalanches of mud pouring out of the TV set).

Why not list, in simplistic terms, the way each side has tried to frame its opponent in our minds? When you lay it out this way, we really see how absurd this type of campaigning is when we're staring a possible depression in the face.

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Just when things are starting to settle in for the final grind to the finish line, somebody comes forth bearing a luscious little tidbit on a silver platter.

Evidently, the McCain campaign went through some bookkeeping legerdemain to make the $150,000 it spent on Sarah Palin's wardrobe legal (you see, the Feds take a dim view toward the purchasing of personal items with campaign funds). As if that weren't enough, her shopping assistant is the same guy who dreamed up the robocall campaign. It says something about what the McCain people think of Palin's judgment that they can't even trust her to choose her own wardrobe properly.

What, were they afraid she'd just take the hundred and fifty grand and go straight to Frederick's of Hollywood? That's a lot of bustiers.

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You don't have to be in the tank for one candidate or the other to be repulsed by what John McCain's vice-presidential running mate, Sarah Palin, has been doing on the stump lately.

According to news reports, she has incited her adoring crowds into yelling terms like "traitor," "terrorist," and "kill him" when she utters the name of her opponent at the top of the ticket, Barack Obama.

Nobody is against tough campaigning, but I think many would agree that this kind of rabble-rousing is beyond the pale. It is an attempt to awaken the ugliest side of the American character, and once one gets over the spine chills at the idea of what this kind of rhetoric could unleash in the body politic, one is overcome with sadness that a man as honorable as John McCain, who has given so much to his country, has stooped this low in his single-minded quest for the brass ring.

For, surely, it is John McCain who allows Sarah Palin to continue in this vein. His advisers may have seduced him with the siren song, "You can either be principled, or you can win," but had he not chosen to look the other way while she did his dirty work for him, it would surely not happen. He probably figures there is plenty of time to regain his integrity after he's elected, but we've now seen what he's capable of.

I liked the John McCain of 2000, along with many of my compatriots. I heard one wag on TV say, "Back in 2000, John McCain said there was a special place in hell for those Bush campaign operatives who smeared him. It seems that place is now in the McCain campaign, because they're all working for him."

Yes, it's all very sad.

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A note from Opinion Page Editor Tony Fins:

Following our Reject Corner posting this week, Chan took issue with my version of events. He points out, rightly so, that his comment about Obama and not seeing anything to criticize referred to the previous few days worth of news leading up to the drawing of the cartoon and not the entire campaign. That's true. Chan has drawn critical cartoons of the Democratic nominee throughout this election.

The larger point I was trying to make is that, as editor of the Opinion pages, one of my duties is to look at the broad menu of viewpoints and topics that we offer day-to-day. It's my role to make sure that the paper offers as comprehensive a take on political commentary as possible.

This is why I shot down the Palin cartoon. I felt that we needed more diversity of topics and themes that week. For the record, I thought the cartoon was effective and funny. Just ill timed, considering what we had printed the few days leading up to this one.

My comments:

I think Tony’s statement provides an effective response to those who feel that the Sun Sentinel rushes headlong into so-called doctrinaire editorial positions. Our Opinion staff and I, personally, have been accused of holding irrational viewpoints at all ends of the ideological spectrum. In fact, we arrive at the Sun Sentinel’s institutional positions through a collegial process that reflects the varied backgrounds of the members of our staff. Tony, as he has mentioned, maintains a sense of our overall balance and direction as our editor.

In my particular case, since I sign my work, my cartoons reflect my own point of view rather than that of the institution for which I work. I am not so irrational as to dismiss out of hand the viewpoints of those who disagree with me. In fact, a commentator’s maturity derives from his ability to incorporate new thinking and opinion into his worldview when it appears to make sense. This is essential to maintaining one’s credibility as a provider of meaningful opinion. I do not dispute that I have leaned more heavily, of late, on the candidacy of John McCain. This is because he has done such an effective job of executing the news-grabbing turn of strategy that begs for an editorial response (the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate being one of them).

As a testament to Tony’s remark about timing, the cartoon presented here--which was the subject of the aforementioned Reject Corner--will be running, appropriately, on the Sun Sentinel’s Opinion Page on Thursday, the day of the Vice-presidential debate.

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There is a delicious irony in this whole business about Sarah Palin. I can't remember in which play Shakespeare used the phrase, "hoist on his own petard," but it certainly describes Hillary's present situation.

If she hadn't hung on all the way to the end, if she hadn't made that bitter non-concession speech, if she hadn't talked about the need for "catharsis," then maybe those of her followers who remain disgruntled females might not have been up for the taking.

John McCain might have picked another boring rich white guy, and everything would have trundled along as expected. But, no. He picked a woman, and now Hillary finds herself too clever by half. If McCain wins, she won't be the first woman anything.

Now, she's forced to work her heart out for Obama, and sincerely, really sincerely (AAACK!), hope that he wins. And wait eight whole years now for her chance at the brass ring.

Even Bill, the political genius, couldn't have prognosticated this one.

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