John McCain has decided to completely ruin my Friday night plans of staying in, ordering a pizza, and ranting and raving at the television the way most people do during sports broadcasts or the way my dad does during the ten o’clock network news.

To wit, McCain is dodging the presidential debates in a feeble attempt to distract voters from his recent drop in the polls (because out-of-left-field stunts, like Sarah Palin, have worked for him before) and to try to make it look like Barack Obama doesn’t care about fixing his country (even though it was Obama who reached out to McCain’s camp this morning to suggest they write a bipartisan statement on the economy), thus buying himself some time to beef up on his econ and to be photographed looking stern and important in Washington (consequently distracting the media and the rest of Congress from the actual crisis they’re trying to solve), even though he (admittedly!) lacks an acceptable understanding of the global economy and really has nothing meaningful to contribute whatsoever.

Because that’s how McCain would lead this country in our time of need: by pulling media stunts to improve his own image, by shuffling papers in Washington, and by hiding and stalling when the going gets tough.

Where have we seen this before? Oh, that’s right … in the very same self-serving politicians that McCain is supposedly going to kick out of Washington.

The world knows that now, during this economic crisis, is actually the most important time for the candidates to defend and debate their plans and qualifications for the presidency of the free world, the way Lincoln did during the Civil War, and Reagan during the Cold War, and Bush during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (both of which he started!) (and he still won the election!).

But The Maverick is going to break from that precedent and … take a time out for a nap and a cookie. He may have invented the Blackberry – the very device that keeps the candle burning at both ends for millions of people — but he sure as hell can’t multi-task.

McCain forgets that it is the independents to whom he needs to pander in order to win this election. And if the independents are what they say they are, they’re going to see straight through this malarky.

Now Ole Miss is going to lose a lot of money if the debates are canceled altogether. So are we going to get a full two hours of Obama, then?

Or how about a debate between Obama and Palin? She has learned a lot in the past few weeks, and she has things to say! In fact, just this week, she sat down with Henry Kissinger and discovered that he can not, in fact, see England from his house. And just today, in her interview with Katie Couric, Sarah was oddly reminiscent of the infamous Miss South Carolina …

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and

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Maybe my Friday night isn’t ruined after all!

That was stunning, all right. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I feel stunned.

First, there was endless line of otherwise fairly intelligent Republican pundits who set aside their personal integrity in order to throw themselves on (or perhaps in front of) the Palin bandwagon. Even Rudy Giuliani championed her candidacy, though surely a lifelong New Yorker – and mayor of the city, during the terrorist attacks — couldn’t possibly take her and her small-town experience seriously.

Next came the Evangelicals, who were only too happy to embrace Bristol and her baby daddy, never you mind that scarlet letter poking out the front of her dress or the dirty details of the sin that put it there.

Not that they haven’t already overlooked McCain’s philandering. After all, he had just returned from Vietnam to find that his first wife, a former beauty queen herself, had gotten a little thicker in the thighs. Isn’t a POW entitled to a “get out of jail free” card on that piddly little commandment about adultery? He oughta be entitled to at least a little somethin’-somethin’ from the woman who would become, as she was last night, a perfect life-sized model for Mattel’s next big thing: Grandma Barbie.

And then, the main event: One Fargo-sounding hockey mom, staring vacantly at the teleprompter like a moose into the headlights, delivering her acceptance speech for the nomination for the vice-presidency of the PTA. Whoops! I mean USA.

Apart from the blatant lies about the facts of Obama’s experience and candidacy, Palin’s little Sarah-nade amounted to a 45-minute snark attack. I mean, had Giuliani not gone on for so long, she could have fit in those closing jokes about Obama’s mom, instead of ending so abruptly as she did.

And boy, oh boy, never was a candidate received with so much hooting and hollering from the oh-so-classy members of the Republican Party. Among whom, might I point out, there was nary an iota of pigmentation, of the hair (or what was left of it) or the skin (except for those two black guys they zoomed in on at the very end).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah.

Sarah, please! If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

Everybody knows that sarcasm is a way of deflecting an insult, and Palin’s mean-spirited attack did less to establish her as a bright and independently strong politician than it did to put her very much on the defensive, like a tenacious pit bull in lipstick who will just. Not. Let. It. Go.

I’m reminded of wrenching Molly’s jaws apart and shaking her entire head to knock free the slice of pizza she snatched from the countertop. Let it go! Loose! DROP IT! BAD GIRL!

Take it from a sarcastic person herself. I have had to learn the hard way that people don’t want to hear you bitching and moaning all the time.

Nobody likes a downer. Wipe that smirk off your face and say something positive.

Or not. Either way, Sarah Palin feels like a Christmas present to me. Unless people are even dumber than I thought.