Carl Bernstein argues in The Palin Pick — The Devolution of McCain that America’s security will be in danger if left to the GOP’s VP candidate:

Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed — by his own professed standards of duty and honor — a singularly unpatriotic act.

“I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war,” he has said throughout this campaign. Yet, in choosing Palin, he has demonstrated — whatever his words — it may be permissible to imperil the country, conceivably even to “lose” it, in order to win the presidency. That would seem the deeper meaning of his choice of Palin.

Indeed, no presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country’s security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate.

I certainly agree. From a security perspective Palin clearly is unfit for office. Moreover, for all her redeeming qualities, she serves primarily as a token to the extreme right and to the “poison” of fundamentalists:

Above all, the John McCain I covered in 1999-2000 was — he said — convinced that two factors were undermining the interests of the United States: its cultural wars, causing political gridlock in Washington and civic discontent across the land; and the unbending agenda of the right-wing of the Republican party that, in his view, had been captured by the Christian conservative movement and bore disproportionate responsibility for the poisonous state of American politics. Exhibit One: the scorched-earth campaign that George W. Bush was then waging against McCain’s insurgent run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Yet, McCain, is, in fact, running the kind of campaign against Barack Obama that George Bush ran against him in 2000, which he regarded rightly as dishonest, dishonorable and diversionary in terms of the truth about him and about the nation’s problems.

Will he sacrifice the long-term security and stability of the country just to win an election? Does he think his dubious deal with the fundamentalists will give him any freedom or independence once he is in the hot seat? That was not how things turned out in Iran.