I know, I know, late to the party on all this, but I have taken such viciously cruel enjoyment in the spectacle of our very own totally unbiased, completely politically neutral commentariat/mainstream news media pretzel themselves into Gordian knots trying to explain (with increasingly redder faces) to us dumb proles why Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is justly naturally qualified and specially ordained to rest her tuchas in the seat formerly held by The Fresh Prince of Chicago, but that Sarah Palin, as a sitting governor, former Mayor and office-holder in her local PTA just doesn’t have the experience to be the Vice President of the USA.

Seriously - I love watching them squirm. Mind you, I am sure that Ms. Schlossberg us a very nice person, and anyone who knows a bit of American history can think of any number of occasions where a surviving spouse or total stranger was named to fill out a suddenly vacant term of political office with no other qualifications than a family connection and a familiar name. It’s just that watching various sycophantic news-critters scramble for cover is so darned amusing; really, oughtn’t they have hesitated for a couple of seemly moments before breaking out the knee-pads and waving the palm-fronds and singing “Hosannah! A Kennedy is come among us, Hosannah in the highest, for it is Camelot returning!” That Ms Schlossberg came out among us and stood revealed (apparently - and I will give credit for her just having a bad day and worse advice) as a relatively inarticulate, upper-middle-class air-head, with absolutely no experience in political life other than just standing there and being ornamental, and not a shred of anything resembling a qualification other than her maiden name and a sense of nobless oblige - well, really, it was pretty funny. But then I have odd tastes in comedy - I thought Mr. Bean’s Holiday was funny, too.

The only reassuring part about this whole farce is that it instantly became evident to practically everyone, save those die-hard Kennedy worshipers outside the state of Massachusetts (all half-dozen of them) that as a tenable proposition, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg in the Senate flew about as well as a twenty-pound lead brick. Perhaps we are not as close to a house of lordly, hereditary nobles as I feared.