“Hillary left 18 million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America. We can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.”- Sarah Palin

So, there we have it. It’s Governor Sarah Palin from Alaska who will help John McCain dodder up the stairs to the podium at next weeks RNC in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The announcement is only hours old and everyone has slotted instinctively in to their correct hole. Obama-supporting Democrats were first to drop, accusing McCain of pandering to the disgruntled Clinton vote. Not far behind them tumbled the media - using adjectives like ’spunky’ and ‘well dressed’ while finding themselves unable to resist masturbating over the fact that Palin is a former beauty queen with a lifetime membership of the NRA.

That’s right, media, John McCain had chosen Lara Croft as his running mate. If Lara Croft passed the Article II eligibility criteria and supported arctic drilling.

Left-leaning female voters, meanwhile, are as poleaxed as an Alaskan seal; catapulted onto a tightrope of loyalties - furious at the misogyny of the malestream media but all too aware they’re being played like the Bridget Jones Official Soundtrack on repeat.

The result? A flurry of blog posts and Twitter updates from intelligent, liberal women demanding that we at least give Governor Palin a fair hearing before writing her off as mere ballot-candy. The woman is a gun-toting, anti-abortionist who supports teaching creationism in biology class and drilling in the ANWR? At least give her a chance to explain!

On the right, meanwhile, female voters are perfectly content. Any why wouldn’t they be? They finally have a voice who isn’t Ann Coulter. Meanwhile male Republicans are trying to work out the correct pronunciation for VPILF. (It’s ‘Vee-pilf’)

And that, in a nut, is McCain’s strategy. He knows Sarah Palin is a dream candidate for a right-wing consituency which, at this stage of the game, cares far more about beating the black guy than they do about their candidates’ actual suitability to govern. All has to hope for now is...

1) That Obama and his supporters will be too tongue-tied to criticize Sarah Palin before it’s too late. (What on? Lack of experience? Possession of a uterus? Not being a Washington player? Owning a gun in Alaska? Drilling in her own state? STEP AWAY FROM THE MINEFIELD.)

and

2) That a white female candidate of any stripe might be all it takes to make embittered Clinton supporters wipe their eyes, blow their nose, put the spoon back in their giant tub of chocolate chip cookie dough Hagen Dazs, eject disc forty-three of their Sex And The City box set and decide that they might, possibly, perhaps, maybe, be ready to start dating again. Nothing serious. Just dinner and a movie. Just see where it goes. And that before they know it, they’ll be waking up naked in a Florida motel room on the morning of November 5th to the realisation that they were just the Republican Party’s battered rebound grief fuck. “But they said they’d call.” THEY WON’T CALL. THEY’RE OUT SHOOTING ABORTION DOCTORS.

The frightening thing is that - cynical and hideous that McCain’s choice is -  it might just work. It’s not like America doesn’t have form on making really fucking dumb decisions en masse. At least when a monkey arrived in Hartlepool, we (I say ‘we’...) had the decency to hang him rather than electing him to the highest office in the land.

Between now and November, all the rest of us can do - particularly we poor rest-of-the-world fuckers who don’t even have a vote in the matter - is hope to God that Democrats realise that Sarah Palin’s undoubted abilities and her high local approval rating are absolutely irrelevant.

What’s relevant - ALL THAT’S RELEVANT - is the reason John McCain - who, lest we forget, once called his wife a trollop and a cunt in front of reporters - has chosen a woman - any woman - as his running mate.

And that reason is simple. McCain cares ten times more about winning than he does about leading. And for that reason alone, he deserves to lose like no man has lost before.

And for that same reason - as she stands side-by-side with her new adulterous, misogynistic boss - Governor Sarah Palin should feel thoroughly ashamed of herself. Ashamed as a republican; ashamed as a woman; and ashamed as a human being.

Well, you know, that and the abortion thing. And the creationism in schools. And the drilling...