Barry, I didn't mean for the comparisons to be "cheap". I never saw a picture of Palin before last evening, and honestly, my very first impression of the very first pic of her with McCain was, "Gee, that looks a lot like that old picture of Monica looking at Clinton with doe eyes." The more pix of Palin I see, the more I see a similarity in the shape of the face, the bangs of the hair, the eyes, the nose and, yes, the mouth.

Oddly, there's also a similarity in the age difference: Lewinsky is 27 years younger than Clinton, and Palin is 27-and-a-half years younger than McCain.

I'm not saying that this means Palin is doing anything unseemly; it's just a coincidence. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed it, and I suspect that political cartoonists and YouTube animators are going to have a field day with it!

Another coincidence they'll not fail to notice is that Palin was a beauty queen in her youth, just as McCain's wife Cindy was. (McCain's first wife was a swimsuit model.) It ties in with McCain's reputation as a wolf with an eye for tall, slim, attractive and ever-younger women. As he spends time campaigning with Palin, rumors with fly that his marriage to Cindy is on the rocks and that she's jealous of his attentions toward Palin and that those attentions are unprofessional and that the only reason the inexperienced-in-national-and-world-affairs Palin was chosen was because McCain had another sort of affair in mind, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

McCain can't possibly win with Palin as his running mate. Even if she's not confirmed at the convention and it turns out that picking a woman was just an empty gesture, he's just proven that he can't pick a team wisely, and he's disproven his contention that his team has stronger leadership experience than Obama's. If it had to be a woman, there are several female Republicans with greater maturity and far more impressive resumes from whom he could have chosen. For instance, if he wanted to attract female voters, moderates, environmentalists and the Northeast Corridor vote, he could have asked former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, who is 8 years older than his wife. But noooooo. Right now, McCain really does look like a dirty old man.