Palin always was a high risk / high reward choice. The nature of those sorts of choices is that they have a better than usual chance of turning out to be complete fuckaroos, which this one was.

Put it this way though: with incomplete information, absolutely no ability to vet or sit down with the candidates, and no access to inside information, I made two sound predictions about two fairly bold and not at all obvious political moves, and it turns out that the premiere and highest paid campaign consultants and strategists in the land were one step behind me. Hard to feel too stupid about that.

As to Palin, and Rojas’ comments: what throws me about the whole thing was, despite her protestations that this was in the works for awhile, it came out on a Friday before the 4th of July (not a time you would want to stage a political stunt if your intent was to maximize its impact), precisely nobody in the leak-like-a-sieve Palin-watch camps had any idea this was coming, and it was a thrown-together press conference with no notes where she literally just walked up to a podium and nonsensically rambled for half an hour. And, frankly, she seemed very rattles and scared. That’s why I keep oscillating towards a conspiratorial read too.

But, at the end of the day, there’s just no rational explanation that accounts for everything here. Which is why I’m leaning towards the totally irrational.

If it turned out she’d been boning Mark Sanford.

There’s no other way to make sense of the comments in the speech…the “no more politics as usual” stuff in particular.

Actually, even that doesn’t really explain the full incoherence of the speech. Either this was a decision made in haste or she’s dealing with some sort of serious emotional baggage while giving it.