Weak-sauce defined

What an incredibly thin and one-sided story by the Post on the Palin selection. You can almost see the McCain folks calling up the reporter promising exclusive access--except they just offered a bunch of anonymous quotes. Talk about hard dick and bubble-gum, the Post gave away premium inches and in exchange got a press release in disguise:

Far from being a last-minute tactical move or a second choice when better known alternatives were eliminated, Palin was very much in McCain's thinking from the beginning of the selection process, according to McCain's advisers. The 44-year-old governor made every cut as the first list of candidates assembled last spring was slowly winnowed. The more McCain learned about her, the more attracted he was to her as someone who shared his maverick, anti-establishment instincts.

Never mind that the McCain campaign, themselves, said that they would only make a pick after Obama made his. The real deal is that this is strawmanship posing as a nut graffe. The real question is how heavily was she vetted? Why did McCain only meet with her about the job once? Instead we get vague cliches like "maverick anti-establishment instincts." That phrase is so lazy, and so weak, that it borders on the offensive. As a quick aside, it's also--I think--one of the biggest reason blogs are giving mainstream media hell, right now. That phrase is exactly the sort of bullshit that Serious Journalists laughingly fling at each other on Sunday morning talk shows, only to retreat to their offices, the next day, and wonder why no one is reading them. Anyway, at least we have the cheetos-munchers over at TPM to sift through the stupidity: