In this case, Sarah Palin is the party head, and a fully bipartisan council made up of 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats judged that Sarah Palin abused her power while governor. While some of her actions were excusable, many were not. And while the council made no recommendations for action–and there may well be none forthcoming–it did state rather definitively that Palin broke ethics laws. The problem is, Republicans have been doing so rather blatantly for years, and as we have witnessed, no one ever gets sent to jail for it, and few ever even get indicted. If they do, then they just fail to respond to the indictment, and Republicans in executive authority don’t act on it.

As usual, there is a double-standard at work. Republicans have promised investigations and perse prosecutions of Democrats if they maintain power–McCain, for example, promised to take legal action against Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, and maybe even Obama as well. But if Democrats are elected into power, then they had better not even dare think of taking any legal action against any Republican, no matter how solid the evidence that they broke scores of laws–because such investigations would just be political payback. A beautiful system–we won’t prosecute our own crimes, and if anyone else does, it’s playing politics.

Perhaps this focus on the fictional Democratic “responsibility” for the banking crisis is McCain’s way of distracting attention away from the fact that his VP candidate broke the law (joining McCain in doing so, after he broke FEC laws earlier this year). Or maybe he’s just flailing about–goodness knows that there’s little else he can do at this point.

Or maybe McCain was comfortable with Palin for just this reason, that she had scandals lurking–after all, Palin is simply keeping the faith here, doing what Republicans do. It’s not as if Troopergate was unknown before McCain chose her–even with the most cursory of vetting, McCain still had to know about this. Maybe having the goods on her was considered a good point for them from the start–a handle of control, but something they felt they could get settled quietly if they needed to.

Hard to say. But like I said, Palin is simply echoing Republican tradition here. This is what they do. Which is why the GOP faithful won’t even blink at this. They don’t care if their leaders break the law; they believe in the Colbert-like fashion that the narrative is what is “real,” and the narrative says that Obama is a terrorist traitor, whereas McCain is a 100% honorable war hero and Palin is a pure-as-snow Alaskan hockey mom with impeccable morality and credentials. So the faithful won’t even notice this, except possible to dismiss it as an “attack.”

But the moderates are less bound to the narrative, and will probably notice this quite a bit more. So the margins of victory for Obama stand to be pretty big unless something rather astonishing happens. Even if the GOP does control the voting machines, they might not be able to do anything anyway–no narrative about getting the base out in numbers could make the numbers change that much.

Not that they wouldn’t try.