Roger Cohen wrote an editorial on Palin, risk and national security:

I know one thing: this is no time for further gambling. John McCain rolled the dice on Sarah Palin. I’m grateful to Bob Rice of Tangent Capital for pointing out that the actuarial risk, based on mortality tables, of Palin becoming president if the Republican ticket wins the election is about 1 in 6 or 7.

That’s the same odds as your birthday falling on a Wednesday, or being delayed on two consecutive flights into Newark airport. Is America ready for that?

The lesson of the last eight years is this: when power is a passport to gamble, people can end up seriously broke or seriously dead.

There is one capable, sober guy in the Bush administration: Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He recently said that U.S. forces in Iraq had to learn counterinsurgency on the job. “But that came at a frightful human, financial and political cost,” he noted.

Gates warned that “warfare is inevitably tragic, inefficient.” He urged skepticism of any notion that “adversaries can be cowed, shocked or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.”

In short, he lambasted the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush war effort for its gambler’s irresponsibility. The financial equivalent of reckless “Shock and Awe” has been “Sub and Prime.”