Let us bow our heads, my friends, and make short work of Sarah Palin: I won’t bother to repeat the details of her “unusual” family history, which promises to dip into the truly bizarre and probably unpleasant before long. Nor will I raise her dubious political story, from her duplicitous tale about the Bridge to Nowhere, and her attempted banning of books, on and on; rest assured all that will be thoroughly vacuumed in short order.

 No, my issue is simple enough, and it is this: The United States of America cannot have a vice president who believes in creationism, intelligent design, or anything other than basic science.

It’s really not for discussion. Sarah Palin, same with every American, is free to think whatever she likes. She can believe in the tooth fairy or whipped cream or zombies, not to mention any of our mainstream religions. However, regardless of her preferred belief, she cannot, as a matter of public policy and national security, attempt to impose those beliefs on any aspect of American life, from education to research, the military to business, the Constitution to the law.

That necessarily opens up to a broad discussion, but for the purposes of this short piece, I will focus on one slice of that topic: creationism versus evolution.

We have suffered through eight years of George Bush’s singularly destructive combination of stupidity and right-wing pandering, highlighted so vividly by his opposition to stem cell research, granting foreign countries and companies a clear path to scientific and commercial supremacy. We cannot compound the problem by allowing another fool, (whether fool by birthright or political calculation), to invest the executive branch.

No more. Let us be honest and smart, no matter how that cuts against the Republican Party, or the compliant media. Sarah Palin isn’t good enough for the U.S., not if we intend to not merely compete in this world, but continue to lead. I’m not saying she’s not intelligent enough, or educated enough, or even experienced enough. (Note: I’m also not saying she is enough of any of these measures, either.) I’m narrowing my criteria to one fundamental notion, and that notion is that we cannot afford a fundamentalist in, or anywhere near, the White House. She is not good enough. We might or might not deserve better, but we certainly need better.

Many in the saner levels of the Republican Party know this, and the angry whispering has reportedly been fierce. Hopefully, the press, desperately worried about being labeled unfair by the right, and the Democrats, equally frightened of being called insensitive, will gather themselves together and confront this nonsense head on. In the end, I believes they will, because this situation is too ridiculous and harmful and, above all, too obviously so, to sustain itself without Palin and her supporters self-destructing in an orgy of blaring idiocy and sanctimonious fury.

And when Sarah Palin is sufficiently diminished, revealed for what she really is, and what she really isn’t, then we can discuss whether someone who made such an reckless and willful choice for vice president possesses the maturity of judgment required to be the vice president’s boss.