Discussing Alaska Governor and now Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, my mother remarked, "Well, we know how John McCain likes younger women. I wonder if he'll get tired of her, like he did his first wife, and then pick Katie Holmes."

McCain has chosen the anti-Cheney: a charming dame who paints houses and hunts Bullwinkle. She wears glasses and keeps her hair up and looks presidential, if the president you're thinking of is Laura Roslin on Battlestar Galactica. She also has a mean way with a firearm, which will attract the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider fans.

She's not an old white guy; she's not Mitt Romney, who is about as pleasant to look at and listen to as the death rattle of a dying moose, something Palin knows about. She doesn't completely hate gay people, she just doesn't think they should have equality.

Her governing experience is limited to a grand total of 750,000 people, Alaskans, who are totally cool eccentrics who trudge across the tundra and can deal with winters where there's nothing to do but get drunk and beat your spouse.

She's a ballsy choice but a completely transparent one, an acknowledgment that McCain desperately needs glamour and youth to offset his tendency to resemble a grumpy Wal-Mart greeter. Since politics is a fashion show anyway, McCain went ahead and picked the former second place Miss Alaska and turned the whole race into the swimsuit competition. Stepping over more qualified Republican women who are, alas, long past their beauty queen days, McCain went for a Vice President that potential horny old voters might have less than presidential fantasies about.

But here's the final deal breaker: she pronounces the word "nucular."