Sullivan on Palin’s thinking Africa was a country, and the campaign that kept it quiet:

Now all I want to say here, ahem, is that they realized all this about this person within a few days of picking her and yet they went ahead for two months bullsh*tting us  … and risking the live possibility that she could be president of the United States at a moment’s notice after next January.

You know: I took a lot of grief for my pretty instant realization back in August that the Palin candidacy was a total farce. But when you cop to the fact that the McCain peeps knew most of that too very early on after their world-historical screw-up, you’ve got to respect and be terrified by their cynicism. I mean: country first?

And they only lost by a few points?

Because the conservative movement would have been just fine with a vice president, and even a president, that didn’t know that Africa isn’t a country.

I got a lot of krep for the assertion in last week’s print edition that Democrats think, Republicans feel. Lots o’ angry notes from conservatives saying no no no - I had it backwards.

But this latest round of info about Palin is my case in point.

Because let’s be honest - we had an inkling that she was this vapid early on. The Katie Couric interview wasn’t an exception - it was the rule. But I’ll tell you right now, today, there are conservatives out there saying that it still doesn’t matter that Palin didn’t know about Africa. That kind of “knowledge” simply is irrelevant in their world - she can find advisers to tell her that, look Sarah, Africa is a continent. These conservatives have faith in the things she does know, does believe.

Translation: Abortion is such an important matter that the country needs to elect someone opposed to it no matter how unknowledgable she may be.

A willingness to go along with neoconservative foreign-policy belligerence trumps all else.

Rush, I’m sure, will insist the story’s false - but even if it were to be objectively proven true, it wouldn’t change his mind. She was a movement conservative and that was what was, and is, important.

No thinking necessary.