I usually take my time at work as time to ruminate over things. Most of the time I am considering very alarming things about society and myriad things about civilization in general. One of those things I think about is Sarah Palin.

I don’t know what bothers me more—that Sarah Palin is an ostensibly useful idiot or that John McCain really prefers to have those kinds of people in his company, no less as his Vice President.

I concoct thought-experiments to help me finalize why she’s not so useful. If there were some kind of pageant going on and Sarah Palin were in it, I couldn’t imagine how the judges, after hearing her first attempt at confusedly uttering language, would take her for anything other than a pair of legs. But then I feel a chill go down my spine (literally) when I consider that maybe that’s why she’s actually had some success at it.

And if there were some small-town sports broadcasting station, and Sarah Palin were an unblinking talking head with a knack for memorizing facts and reading prompters, even then I couldn’t imagine the people in charge really ever considering her as someone who would know best about who they should love and when it is appropriate for them to be afforded the selfsame rights as everyone else.

The proverbial question has to be begged: has this woman any substance at all? Or does she have a knack for being cute and comely? If we look objectively at the occasions she has had to speak, what is left after the incredibly long run-on sentences, verb-noun disagreements and double-speak?

Take a single thought-experiment as an example of why I think there’s nothing there: Picture Palin in the white house, sitting around a ridiculously large table, withridiculously smart and experienced people in ridiculously expensive shoes askingher important questions about foreign polcies, and Palin, smiling and an extremelyrelatable hockey-mom, pausing after a question, as if she owned the time shewasted, to say, “I’ll get back to you about that.” Imagine the laughter.

Or imagine McCain sitting directly adjacent to her, who rails against Obama for “just not getting it,” interrupting the laughter—laughter that nature has designed to remove stupid people from conversations—to defend whom Bill Maher calls a “bimbo,” just like he did in the last weekend of September with Katie Couric, after Couric probed Palin about her comments about Pakistan.

Couric: Are you sorry you said it?

[McCain attempts to blame journalism for its attacks upon Palin’s comments]

Couric: It wasn’t a “gotcha.” She was talking to a voter.

McCain: No, she was in a conversation with a group of people and talking back and forth. And … I’ll let Gov. Palin speak for herself.

Palin: Well, it … in fact, you’re absolutely right on. In the context, this was a voter, a constituent, hollering out a question from across an area asking, “What are you gonna do about Pakistan? You better have an answer to Pakistan.” I said we’re gonna do what we have to do to protect the United States of America.

Couric: But you were pretty specific about what you wanted to do, cross-border …

Palin: Well, as Sen. McCain is suggesting here, also, never would our administration get out there and show our cards to terrorists, in this case, to enemies and let them know what the game plan was, not when that could ultimately adversely affect a plan to keep America secure.

Couric: What did you learn from that experience?

Palin: That this is all about “gotcha” journalism. A lot of it is…

Palin said something very specific about crossing national borders to wage war, but “this is all about” the journalism. Right.

Palin ends the topic by claiming that she is “ready with [her] executive experience as a city mayor and manager, as a governor, as a commissioner, a regulator of oil and gas.”

That she was mayor and governor of one of the smallest (per capita) towns and states (respectively) in the world, and the latter for less than two years.

We know her “road to nowhere” was a flop, her pipeline was a flop and that her thoughts on basic constitutional rights is, let’s say, not presidential.

I ask you all to think twice about even growing warm from her comeliness, much less giving it credence.