All day long, the cable networks and the blogs have been in a frenzy about how thoroughly John McCain “vetted” Sarah Palin. Was the vetting rigorous enough? Did his campaign vet her as much as it vetted Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty? How could the vetting have permitted this nomination to go through? Vetting, vetting, vetting! You would think that vetting was a Constitutionally mandated process, like a Senate confirmation, from the hysterical way in which the word is being tossed around.

All of this is just a way to keep harping on the Palin “scandal,” which is, trust me, a ratings getter on a slow day (and a clever way to try to stick a knife in McCain). No law says you have to vett. The purpose of “vetting” is to inform the campaign of any and every factoid about a potential vice president. It’s not a public business, and it’s of relatively recent vintage in any case, following Thomas Eagleton’s failure to tell George McGovern in 1972 that he had been (gasp) through psychoanalysis and Geraldine Ferraro’s failure to inform Walter Mondale that there were mob issues with her husband and drug-dealing issues with one of her adult children.

These pious intonations about the vetting process on the part of media professionals who will, almost to a man or woman, vote for Obama verges on the parodic.  If, as the McCain campaign says, he knew about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy before he offered her the job, then the vetting was done right there — because what could be bigger than that?

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