Human beings like to analogize.

So I’ve realized that Sarah Palin is also a female Mike Huckabee. A folksy, culturally right-wing governor who will fire up the base.

And one of my friends on Facebook said that Sarah Palin is to Hillary Clinton as Clarence Thomas is to Thurgood Marshall.

This is in addition to her being Harriet Miers and Dan Quayle.

I alternately think she’s a joke and fear her. Or, rather, I fear what she might do for McCain. The base will probably love her (Dobson likes her), and she might increase evangelical turnout, and that really scares me.

But I can’t imagine the PUMA people supporting her. I’d think/hope they would be insulted that McCain thinks he can win them over just by picking a candidate with ovaries — as insulted as they’d have been if Obama had picked Kathleen Sibelius.

Andrew Sullivan continues to dig up good stuff. Hopefully news organizations will pick up all these mini-scandals in a few days after the excitement wears off, and they’ll suck up oxygen, and they’ll show that Palin wasn’t vetted properly and that McCain is a reckless risk-taker. We’ve already had one of those for the last eight years and we don’t need another.

Fivethirtyeight.com:

… picturing a young, attractive, kooky, female governor from Alaska who has an accent straight out of Fargo in the White House is going to be a much bigger leap for many voters than picturing Barack Obama there.

At first I was disappointed he didn’t pick Romney. Romney would have been so much fun to run against. And it’s possible Palin could fire up the base. Instead of aborting a Down-Syndrome baby, she Chose Life. She’s pro-gun, pro-creationism.

But this still seems like a total joke. Harriet Miers redux — she won’t make any major mistakes, but something just doesn’t seem right. This is an example of that vaunted “judgment” McCain keeps attributing to himself?