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Thanks a lot, Jon Stewart! This is why we can't keep nice ideals in this country.

Yep. She sure is working out like gangbusters with the electorate…

Palin's qualifications to be president now rank as voters' top concern about John McCain's candidacy – "ahead of continuing President Bush's policies, enacting economic policies that only benefit the rich and keeping too high of a troop presence in Iraq," according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

Huh? I didn't see that coming when I pasted that pull quote into this post before reading it. She's the main reason voters have for not voting for McCain? But that can't be! She's all folksy and hockey-mommish. I thought that America was mesmerized by her Tina Fey-esque small town charms.

Could it be that the shine is coming off the puck?

Fifty-five percent of respondents now say Palin is not qualified to serve as president, a five-point jump from the previous NBC/WSJ survey.

To be fair, those are numbers, and numbers are kinda related to science, I think. So, they're really not to be trusted.

You see, there's a whole 'nuther way of looking at this. She's setting campaign records that are just as important and difficult as Barack Obama's…

Mr. Obama's favorability is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years of Times/CBS polls.

Mrs. Palin's negative rating is the highest for a vice-presidential candidate as measured by The Times and CBS News. Even Dan Quayle, with whom Mrs. Palin is often compared because of her age and inexperience on the national scene, was not viewed as negatively in the 1988 campaign.

That might be true, but I don't think you can really compare Dan Quayle to Sarah Palin. For one thing, he wasn't a maverick. Nor a hockey mom. Also, he was neither a pitbull nor a tube of lipstick. Nor, as a candidate, did he ever state his intentions to reign supreme as the God Head of the Senate.

So, it's not really fair to compare their negativity ratings. I mean, there's a big difference between a incompetent vice-president and caricature of a incompetent vice president.

You see, she's not all about "inspiring confidence" or "doin' stuff good" or "not constantly making embarrassing mistakes on television."

She's about… Well, I don't know. Something else. Something that doesn't involve numbers or reality or stuff.

Update: Newsweek weighs in on the donkey scarf mystery.

Well, guess who showed up yesterday? Dan Quayle!

The former vice president said Wednesday that he's spoken with Palin since Sen. John McCain chose her for the GOP ticket in late August.

"I basically said, 'Look, just be yourself. You were selected by John McCain because of who you are and what you have done, and don't let them take anything away from you. Just go out and be yourself,"' he said.

Quayle said he sees several parallels between the 1988 campaign and this year's race: Neither he nor the Alaska governor were well known before being put on the national ticket. Both were criticized for not having enough experience for the job.

Yikes. So even Quayle, the national laughingstock himself, is drawing the comparison with Palin. And they've discussed this in person!

Maybe Quayle is injecting his tainted name into the race at this point as revenge against McCain, who clearly stole the name of his 2002 memoir ("Worth the Fighting For") from Quayle's 1999 literary masterpiece ("Worth Fighting For").

Poor ol' James Danforth Quayle (44th Vice President, 1989-1993).

Sure, he's no Jack Kennedy, and, frankly, he wasn't much of a vice-president.

His biggest political fight was an attack on Murphy Brown — which he lost. But he is, technically, underrated because he took a whole lot of crap from the media for being a moron, and, upon his exit from the political stage, it looked like his only legacy was that of being the hands-down stupidest person ever to be elected to office.

But… uh… in hindsight… the depths of electable stupidity can be plumbed much, much lower. So what, he misspelled "potato" and completely bungled-slash-proved the concept of a mind being a terrible thing to waste. Those are actually kind of insignificant. You cannot misspell your way into war, recession, global warming, and worldwide contempt.

And, hey, even though Quayle thought Mars was about as far from the sun as earth, at least he was a moron who believed in science.

And as far as Veeps go, which is worse: innocent stupidity or willful malfeasance?