Are you kidding me? If she can't handle 6 weeks of coaching by the McCain media team she's not fit to be one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

they have watched her in the Alaska gubernatorial debate and her interviews as governor, from which they claim she is obviously smart enough to president.

Well, that explains how she managed to get elected Mayor and Governor. She's not actually a moron, she's just beyond her depth and cracking under pressure.

she only had weeks to prepare, unlike Obama, who has had many months of interview training

That doesn't hold water - she must have learned to pass an interview in her years as Councilwoman, Mayor and now Governor. Like Obama as community organizer, State Legislator and Senator.

given the short time she had to prepare for these recent interviews, the McCain campaign overdid it by trying to cram too many talking points in her and thus undermining her confidence

That is plausible - but then refer to the to pof this comment, and why do you need to cram talking points into her? Because the MCCain campaign knows she's an airhead or - worse - a dangerous right-wing fundagelical wacko and don't want her to speak her mind?

Did you see the "name a couple newspapers or magazines" segment of the Kouric interview?

A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith

About a week and a half ago there was a diary on dKos explaining Palin's management style with quotes from people who worked with her.

It'll be somewhere in the dKos hive memory, but I suspect given the deluge of all things Palin it would take about at least a couple of hours to pull it out from there.

There's enough from other sources - almost any source will do, and this is a good start - to prove that her management style is classically authoritarian, with a vicious mix of ignorance and limitless personal ambition combined with contempt and rage against anyone who doesn't support her.

With apologies to Godwin, but she really is quite the Nazi. She won't be rounding up people and gassing them, although no one knows how far her contempt for liberals and 'baby killers' really goes, because she's never had enough power to allow it free reign without consequences.

It doesn't seem to be an exaggeration that she'd be more than happy to start lobbing nukes at Russia at the slightest pretext, irrespective of the nukes likely to be lobbed back, because she has no ability to understand the inevitable outcome.

Look, I've had exactly ZERO weeks to prepare and no past experience of that kind of stuff, and I would do better in the Katie Couric interview, AND that includes the fact that it would take place in a foreign language with an accent that is not the one I have learnt and use, and that I find much harder to understand that the Kentish one I speak. We're not comparing her to Obama there. Merely comparing her to someone with a minimum level of intellectual curiosity and some command of the English language. She fails that test.

I can, of the top of my head, name quite a few US Newspapers even though I am European and, wait for it, quite a few that I actually read or have read.
If you allow me to include internet tribunes and blogs the list will just grow longer. Not to mention, er, stuff written in my mother tongue to which I am actually a subscriber.

I can explain without help from an interviewer that Alaska has borders with Russia and Canada (I can even explain why it's the most Northern, Western AND Eastern state in USA -explanations on request), and that (some -alas, only some) reporters found that a rather funny justification of foreign policy experience. Wait for it -I can understand WHY they'd find it funny.

Did I mention that I am not running for office, though?

Look, she can't even understand a simple question. The stuff about linking tax cuts with initiatives to create jobs when answering the opportunity of bailing out Wall Street in the middle of foreclosure is amazing.

Now, if your friends can't see that, I would stop trying to use logic. It won't work.

"It failed because Nacy Pelosi said some unkind things about George Bush in her speech"