I stayed up to watch SNL last night and it was, after a few brilliant weeks, back to the lame and boring (and politically inconsequential) schtick it's been stuck in for a generation.

Every bit of press that SNL has received in the past few weeks has been due to Tina Fey's brilliant and subversive take on Sarah Palin. If Obama wins, and that seems almost a certainty now, he owes a great deal to Tina Fey, who single-handedly took Palin out of the game. Well, actually she had a lot of help from Palin herself.....

Last night's show was weak. Sarah Palin was wooden, the scripts were dumb, and everyone seemed uncomfortable having Palin on the set. Sure, their ratings were through the roof but it was (myself included) the kind of crowd that gathers to see a geek bite the heads off chickens: a freak show. No one sticks around afterwards.

I tuned in hoping that the audience would boo this vicious, climbing, political hack- but no one did. I should have known that they would applaud her efforts and give her a brief moment of legitimacy. The McCain camp knew it too, and that's why they let her out of the motel room for a few hours.

As Joe Strummer said, ' If Adolph Hitler flew in today, they'd send a limousine anyway'......