Last week, Fareed Zakaria penned a widely circulated attack on Sarah Palin. It will stand forever as a warning against the impulse to make grand pronouncements too soon. It reads, in part:

Some commentators, like CNN’s Campbell Brown, have argued that it’s sexist to keep Sarah Palin under wraps, as if she were a delicate flower who might wilt under the bright lights of the modern media. But the more Palin talks, the more we see that it may not be sexism but common sense that’s causing the McCain campaign to treat her like a time bomb.

Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president. She is a feisty, charismatic politician who has done some good things in Alaska. But she has never spent a day thinking about any important national or international issue, and this is a hell of a time to start.

Wrong from beginning to end. Keeping Sarah Palin under wraps was obviously a tactical blunder (and a temporary victory for the unscrupulous media assassins who scared the McCain camp into thinking Palin couldn’t fend for herself.) The sexism belonged entirely to the critics. When Joe Biden reinvents American history, it’s attributed to a harmless personality quirk; when Palin stumbles Fareed Zakaria writes, “Is it too much to ask that she come to realize that she wants, in that wonderful phrase in American politics, “to spend more time with her family?” Classy, no?

Zakaria’s piece appeared in Newsweek six days ago, and it seems Sarah Palin has spent all six of them “thinking about any important national or international issue[s].” Last night she had Joe Biden so turned around on Arab democracy, he ended up expanding his historical fiction oeuvre to include the recent Middle East. There’s a month left–Zakaria may want to start pacing himself.