IF IT'S PALIN, GET READY FOR THE PUMA 180

Is McCain's choice really Sarah Palin? If so, be prepared: Every PUMA who furiously declared that Barack Obama shouldn't pick Sebelius or McCaskill or any woman other than Hillary as his running mate because it was unacceptable to offer a "substitute" for Hillary will now hypocritically lavish praise on Palin and say that McCain is infinitely less sexist than Obama. And the press will lap it up.

Oh, and the pro-choicers among the PUMAs will say that putting an unswerving opponent of abortion a heartbeat away from a 72-year-old melanoma-survivor president is meaningless, because ... well, er, um, because of some reason they won't be able to articulate.

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AND: I wonder how long the PUMAs are going to say "experience counts" after their hero picks a running mate "who has been governor of a small state for less than two years and prior to that was mayor of a town with roughly one-twenty-seventh of the citizens that Barack Obama represented when he was a state senator in Illinois." (Alaska has a population about a quarter the size of Brooklyn's. And the town of which Palin was mayor has a population of 7,738.)