Golly, that liberal media is tough. Newsweek puffs Sarah Palin to the hilt.  I could swear I heard Peter, Paul, and Mary singing "Puff the Magic Dragon" in the background as I read the article.  Newsweek even has a couple of cheesecake wilderness shots.

The hard-bitten journalism crew at Newsweek also makes it sound like Palin's a lock to run for president but hasn't decided how she's going to run a presidential campaign without doing any campaigning. Is Palin doing to run a stealth campaign where she swoops into a town or state without notifying anybody? Or is it going to be a Buddhist campaign where she sits on her porch in Wasilla (or is it Phoenix?) and focuses on her breathing.

Maybe we'll all be called upon to join Sarah in contemplation--"Sarah Palin is now breathing."

These are all questions that I'd like to see answered and that doesn't even get to the issue of what Palin would do if she became President.  But Newsweek itself was too breathless to address any of these issues. Maybe they were just too excited by their "exclusive access" to ask questions.

My own biggest question is whether Palin is going to bite the bullet and hire a living, breathing Republican to work for her campaign. Palin seems to have developed a phobia for all the consultants, campaign operatives, opposition researchers, and local officials associated with the Republican Party. She avoided them like the plague on her swing through the Eastern historical sites and didn't contact anybody in the Republican Party about her trip to Pella, Iowa ("an old Dutch town with the country’s largest working windmill") to see her campaign video "Undefeated."

To be honest, I can't blame Palin. Like a lot of Americans, I'm not particularly fond of the Republican political apparatus either.  The Republican consultant/campaign community is filled with disgusting people like Karl Rove of the gay-baiting Bush 2004 re-election campaign, and race-baiter Alex Castellanos.  It's true that warmongers like Richard Perle are out of style but they've been replaced by Islamophobes like Frank Gaffney.  These are the kinds of people who give mendacity a bad name.

But I really think that Sarah Palin has to hire at least one Republican if she's going to run for the Republican nomination.