Everyone’s onto this: an embarrassing screw-up, right smack in the middle of McCain’s speech. What first appeared to be a green screen, it showed what could have been a luxurious mansion owned by John Cindy McCain. It was supposed to be Walter Reed Military Army Medical Center. It was really Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood. (Hollywood? McCain’s an elitist!!) Bizarre error, considering that Google Image has great high-res images of the medical center; how they screwed that image up is rather surprising. Not just that one person got it wrong, but that they either (a) had only one person checking what went on the screen behind McCain, or (b) they had lots of people and no one caught it. Once again, a lack of preparedness and responsibility.

The McCain campaign can’t go very long without yet another screw-up. Not that we should get over-confident, but neither should we worry too much. McCain just had his convention. When that’s over, things will get a lot tougher for him–and the Obama campaign is running things pretty well, going after McCain and not Palin, showing the kind of restraint most of us have not had.

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So, now that the convention is over and Palin does not have the excuse of training and practice for her speech, of course she’ll be appearing in public and answering questions, right? Weellll, maybe not. If these reports are correct, she’s going to “hole up” in Alaska. On the surface, she’s doing it to see off her son. More likely, they want to keep her away from an unscheduled moment in public until they can get her trained well enough not to make a wrong move. After the Campbell Brown incident, they’re probably scared to death some uppity reporter will try to ask Sarah a question she can’t answer well. I think they know how paper-thin her popularity is outside of conservatives, and what propensity she has for lying, badly. So no wonder they’re hiding her.

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John McCain a few weeks ago: “I still believe the fundamentals of the economy are strong.” Reality: Unemployment hits 6.1%, a 5-year high.

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Obama faces off with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, and handles himself very solidly in the face of strident attempts to attack and/or catch Obama in a slip-up. (Seriously, watch the interview–if any reporter treated McCain with such snide disdain, the McCain campaign would go nuclear and viciously attack the reporter, the network, and anyone else with a ten-mile radius.)

Now it’s McCain’s turn to appear on Olbermann. McCain? McCain??

Hmm. The War Hero™ seems a bit chicken. Obama can take it; McCain can’t. Maybe he can send in his #2.

Oh, wait, I forgot, she’s hiding out in Alaska, too afraid to talk to anyone in the media. Put her up against Olbermann, and we’d see her “foreign policy executive experience” go up in flames in ten seconds.

So much for the idea that Palin is more capable than Obama.

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Finally, a note: the McCain’s aren’t elitists, and here’s why: not because they only use four of their seven or maybe ten homes, not because McCain likes to ride nine-car motorcades to pick up his grande cappuccino from Starbucks. The proof comes in the fact that during the convention, Cindy McCain wore an outfit and accessories priced at roughly $300,000. That proves they’re not elitist: with “rich” starting at $5 million a year, Cindy was slumming it in an outfit barely worth chump change.