Different rules.

They all used that phrase. “A smart cookie who isn’t afraid to tell it like it is.”

Credit where due: the GOP knows its audience.

They had cute hats.

As all the kids are saying...those lil' whippersnappers.

I can still remember the purple band-aids from 2004 at the RNC. Shameful.

Conservatives make it look easy. Democrats are communists. You can see Colorado from Kansas.

jumped to Obama/Biden (LOL - "O'Biden" per Sarah Palin) because McCain had recovered from cancer and his overall health might have felt questionable compared to the 40-something, healthy and fit Obama. If an equivalent to Biden had been McCain's VP pick, McCain might have won. Palin showed the public how poorly prepared she was to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Steve Schmidt's movie (Game Change) about the 2008 campaign showed that the voters were right.

One of the memorable quotes from the people who got tasked with trying to prep Palin was, "She doesn't know anything." I had fun wondering which way they might have said this -- "She doesn't know anything," or "She doesn't know anything," or "She doesn't know anything!"

It was true no matter which way you said it.

Tina Fey's paraphrasing, "... I can see Russia from my house..."

Such a bizarre campaign.

Democrats try to see what is real....Republicans feel what they're told.

In reality, it dates all the way back to the Kennedy-Nixon election in 1960, through Vietnam and Civil Rights to Watergate and Iran, but the REAL start of the decline was in 1981-1989, the Reagan "revolution"...

There is little doubt that the decoupling of compensation to labor output began in this period. There is NO DOUBT that the progressive tax system that had served to get us through the Depression without going to fascism, helped win WWII and then built the greatest upward mobility in human history from 1946-1960 was essentially killed off by Ronnie "VooDoo Economics" Raygun.

He did more to set the course of destruction than anyone...until the Shrub and his gang of thieves were annointed to the Presidency in 2001. That became the start of Raygun-omics on steroids - with Bush tax cuts eventually becoming the Trump tax cuts and the current trajectory of the economy and the national debt. Interest payments alone on the national debt have surpassed $1,000,000,000,000 - a TRILLION DOLLARS a year in interest payments alone. The cold hard truth is this - the United States WAS once a great industrial power that could manufacture the best products in the world and innovate new technologies as well as realize them in marketable products that made real impacts on lives - televisions, radio, autos, mobility, healthcare vaccines and treatments, productivity enhancing software options and more. That era is long dead and the only things the USA does now are create, market, sell and steal profits from debt (national, college loans, mortgages, and car payments) and military hardware.

Much of this is due to the slippery slope of idiocy that the Republican Party has been riding for the last 45 years. From Raygum to Read-My-Lips to Fool Me, Can't Get Fooled Again to Death Panels to They're Eating the Pets, its been a non-stop slip and slide into a real world Idiocracy. But we should never forget that it was Reagan that started it all, and just as the GOP sees FDR and the New Deal as the end of their preferred era - the Gilded Age, so it is with Reaganomics and Trickle Down.

The difference now is that after 40+ years of attacking and going after all elements of the New Deal, the GOP is accelerating the country into a divided future and a dystopian lurch towards fascism that FDR and the country rejected in 1933. These motherfuckers are back for a second bite at the apple and this time we are seemingly lacking an FDR-esque figure on the Democratic bench to ride to the front and save the republic once again.

I am reminded of the classic Genesis tune from the mid-1980s "Land of Confusion":
"Oh Superman where are you now? When everythings gone wrong somehow..."