Bill Kristol's 11 pm Posting Now!

Just a word from the bleachers. In all likelihood, Sarah Palin will deliver a speech that will tear the roof off the Xcel Center tonight. Every single commentator on the cable and the networks will declare it a triumph. The base will exult at their Joan of Arc triumphing over the evil, despicable vile press, who have had the effrontery to ask a potential future vice-president of the United States basic questions about her life story and record. Such effrontery has now been greeted by a presidential campaign refusing to answer simple questions that anyone with access to Google can figure out. McCain's relationship with the press corps has hit the ocean bed - which is ironic, since McCain has given the press the wackiest and most copy-ready nominee in recent history.

Nonetheless, the GOP machine will ensure that her speech is great.

She just has to read it from a TelePrompter. It's not that hard. And the crowd will be lifting her up to the rafters. There will be almost nothing about foreign policy because she has demonstrated a total lack of even interest in it her entire life, and has no knowledge of it whatsoever. There will be plenty about drilling and oil and "reform" and an attempt to dress up what is unavoidably a very short career in a very distant and sparsely populated place into a template for the future of Republicanism.

And there will be a swing, as there often is, in the polls, maginified by a huge, temporary sigh of relief that the nightmare of the last five days have at least been lanced by an actual public appearance that is more than a quick intro. The GOP is an operation these days that creates its own reality. There were WMDs in Iraq. We do not torture. We are fiscal conservatives. We have won the Iraq war. You know the drill by now: just keep saying it again and again and refuse to answer questions and as long as you have God on your side, everything is okay.

And then it will start all over again. It feels like a decade since Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver. It will feel like a century between now and November. But no one will be able to complain that it has been boring.