Ah, don't you love Republican infighting? Not only was Sarah Palin's press conference an awesome display of her (frightfully deficient) intellect, but GOP governors were ticked off that she stole the limelight.
Frank Rich takes a closer look at the back biters in Sunday's NYT:
ELECTION junkies in acute withdrawal need suffer no longer. Though the exciting Obama-McCain race is over, the cockfight among the losers has only just begun. The conservative crackup may be ugly, but as entertainment, it's two thumbs up!
Over at Fox News, Greta Van Susteren has been trashing the credibility of her own network's chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, for his report on Sarah Palin's inability to identify Africa as a continent, while Bill O'Reilly valiantly defends Cameron's honor. At Slate, a post-mortem of conservative intellectuals descended into name-calling, with the writer Ross Douthat of The Atlantic labeling the legal scholar Douglas Kmiec a "useful idiot."
Rich goes on to illustrate in graphic detail the Republican crackup, concluding with an important warning:
The bad news for Democrats is that these are the exact circumstances that can make Obama cocky and Democrats sloppy. The worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead.
It's a good reminder that a certain amount of internal dissent is not only acceptable, but it's also necessary -- as long as the dissent is centered on substance. The problem the GOP has is that for the most part, their squabbling is as petty as was their 2008 campaign.