The XX Factor: What women really think.

Toweling off

I, too, am fascinated by all of this postgame revelation, Anne and Emily. I'm having a hard time believing, though, that Palin—the governor of an American state surrounded by Canada—did not know what NAFTA was, nor that Africa wasn't a country. She's literate; her parents were teachers. It sounds to me like a sarcastic comment was taken as fact. That said, it's insane that we can even be discussing this; crazier still how O'Reilly leapt to her defense. As if the campaign didn't feel like satire to begin with.

Dahlia, while the diva-branding is surely sexist (like the c-word, there's no male equivalent), I'm not sure that the towel talk is, too. The fact that, as Newsweek has reported, when McCain's top strategists arrived at her hotel room to brief her for for the convention, she appeared wrapped only in a towel—well, that's pretty revelatory about how this woman uses her sex appeal as power in the most egregiously inappropriate circumstances.  I admit that I love the idea of such palling around with major governmental figures—if, say, we learned that Angela Merkel hangs with longtime advisers in her bathrobe, I'd feel giddy fondness. But this is another story, and if we're going to looking at a future in which Palin continues to sear our consciousness, I want to know how she plays her game.