You really do have a sense that the wheels came off the Straight Talk Express today. Why they’d let Palin anywhere near a public encounter with James Dobson is beyond me. So, as Ambinder makes abundantly clear, the distance between the Republican platform and what John McCain himself supports with respect to the “life” issues is now on full display. Worse than that, it’s evident just how distant the “hard-core prolifer” (as Palin called herself) position embodied in the platform is from what even the likes of George W. Bush professed when running for president. So as if the $150k shopping spree and the freebies for the kids and the ongoing troopergate investigations and the continued failure to grasp the duties of vice president weren’t enough, McCain may actually have to address himself directly to where he stands on the issues of moment to his so-called base. Then there was that rather cogent Al Qaeda endorsement, which left the McCain surrogates in a position of claiming that the terrorists meant the opposite of what they said, which would of course go for that Hamas endorsement of Obama as well. Bye bye, that talking point. Meanwhile, as the stock market continues to tank and gas prices slip down to a point where “drill, baby, drill” seems like yesterday’s news, Obama’s stock was back on the rise. Altogether, it was the story of John and Sarah’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.