The mind of the demagogue is a foreign country. It has a strange culture, enemies that only the natives can see, a passion about the ridiculous and a blowtorch kind of sincerity that incinerates logical thinking. On Sunday, the custodian of one such blowtorch was on Fox News. I am speaking, of course, of Sarah Palin…

The fierce stupidity of this woman is hard to comprehend. It is the well from which she draws her political sustenance. It explains why she did not pause to wonder about the tape and the sheer impracticality of finding a sex offender in a crowd. This sincerity, uncomplicated by any sophistication whatsoever, is what fuels her considerable charisma. The fact that KTVA is only a CBS affiliate and the staffers not CBS employees did not give Palin pause. To her, this was Katie Couric’s CBS, the network she thinks so unfairly skewered her by asking, for instance, what newspapers she reads. It’s all a seamless conspiracy of them – they and them and those and them and all those elites who . . . she’ll show ’em.