Sarah Palin related gossip

OK. It seems Palin was worse than we imagined. It now seems Sarah Palin was more clueless than we imagined. It's being reported that:

• She didn't know that Africa was a continent. She thought it was a single country.
  
• She thought South Africa was just the southern part of the country of Africa.
• She didn't know the countries in NAFTA.
  
• She didn't know the countries in North America.
• She didn't know what "American exceptionalism" meant.
  

Here is Fox News report on her.



Here's the reporton O'Reilly factor. See how the Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron tears her apart while O'Reilly tries to defend her.

This and this are some excerpts from gossip reported by Newsweek (the article portrays McCain in much better light than Palin, citing cases where McCain actually vetoed negative ads). I have reproduced some of the stories on Palin below (verbatim):

• At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys' club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. "I'll be just a minute," she said.

• McCain himself rarely spoke to Palin during the campaign and aides kept him in the dark about the details of her spending on clothes because they were sure he would be offended. Palin asked to speak along with McCain at his Arizona concession speech but campaign strategist Steve Schmidt vetoed the request.

• Palin launched her attack on Obama's association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue. McCain's advisers were working on a strategy that they hoped to unveil the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and top adviser Mark Salter was resisting.

• NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family--clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

Meanwhile, Fox reports that Palin apparently refused preparation help for her interview with Katie Couric and then blamed her staff, specifically Nicole Wallace, when the interview was rightly panned as a disaster. After the Couric interview, Palin turned nasty with her staff and began to accuse them of mishandling her.

They also report that Palin would view press clippings of herself in the morning and throw "tantrums" over the negative coverage. There were times when she would be so nasty and angry that her staff was reduced to tears.