This is the closest I’ve come to hurling

When you’re working out in a vain and vapid attempt to get huge, you push yourself well beyond your capabilities both in weight and intensity. And when you finally get yourself into the outer bounds of your natural abilities, your body responds two ways: getting pumped and fighting back. The pumped part is awesome, but the fighting back part involves shaking and varying degrees of nausea. I’m not disciplined enough to push myself that far on my own, which is exactly why I hired a trainer. And today, after a high-intensity three-part chest superset followed by a high-intensity three-part biceps superset, it took a lot of effort to get my protein shake down without gagging. And now I can hardly hold my hands still enough to type this. Woo-hoo!

When you’re working to convince the electorate that you have the basic skills required to lead the country, you say and do thing that demonstrate integrity and instill confidence. And you go out of your way to make sure you don’t come off as a two-person clusterfuck of ineptitude, mendacity and desperation. Yesterday alone, Sarah Palin moose-in-the-headlightsed to America that she has no idea how hard John McCain has fought against financial oversight over the last quarter century, though she kept insisting he’s devoted his professional career to financial regulation and reform. And McCain, who just a week ago insisted that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong,” is suddenly suspending his campaign under the guise of trying to repair the economy, which he’s now describing as “about to crater.” Which tells us either that he’s spent 26 years in Congress with no workable understanding of economic science or that he’ll readily stoop to the most transparent political stunt to distract the electorate from his culpability in our economic meltdown.

McCain and Palin are political ipecac. But they don’t even offer the side benefit of making us look better. And the fact that they have even one supporter outside their immediate blood relatives makes me embarrassed—and scared—to be American.