Snow Job.

After Alaskan governor / Republican V.P. nominee Sarah Palin—above, with youngest daughter, Piper, and John McCain—gave her presentation at the Republican National Convention last week, like you, I kept getting asked what I thought of the speech.

“Oh: It was a great speech,” I’d respond, utterly serious. “A great speech.” A beat. “It was complete nonsense. But it was a great speech!”

Because I run in limited circles, and don’t get out much, the people who questioned me also tended to agree with me, so I didn’t have to mount a rigorous defense of my charge.

The New York Times‘s Frank Rich, right, however, is not so lucky. But neither are his opponents, and they inevitably fall to the blow of his saber-like pen, as with this evisceration from earlier this week, “Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage”:

We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.

She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

How long before we learn she never shot a moose?

Of course, this was even before his paper’s take on last night’s horrifying interview with ABC News’ Charles Gibson, right:

At times visibly nervous, at others appearing to hew so closely to prepared answers that she used the exact same phrases repeatedly, Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of “anticipatory self-defense.”

At a separate event on Thursday, a deployment ceremony for her son Track and thousands of other soldiers heading to Iraq from Fort Wainwright, Alaska, Ms. Palin told them they would be fighting “the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

The comments sounded reminiscent of the disputed connections the Bush administration once made, but no longer does, between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks. But a senior McCain campaign aide said Ms. Palin did not believe Saddam Hussein played a role in the attacks.

Talk about four more years of the same: Did anybody notice that the arctic governor pronounces the word “nuclear” the same way Bush does: “New-cue-lurr”?

Somebody please call for help. Whatever happens in November, the adage remains true: People always get the leadership they deserve.