All that is necessary for you to know who Billy Mays was is to have lived long enough to suffer a sleepless night. You toss. You turn. You got up and went to the fridge for a glass of milk. Maybe you grabbed a cookie, or decided to make a sandwich from some leftovers. And nothing working, you turned on the TV. Before long you encountered a break for a commercial, and there he was. "Billy Mays here! For the incredible Mop-O-Matic!"

The universe's greatest pitchman of all time. "And for the low, low price of $19.95 you not only get blah-blah-blah. But WAIT! If you order now, we'll also include a second "Mop-O-Matic,' but we'll also include blah-blah-blah." You wonder to yourself, "Who the hell buys this stuff?' knowing full well a lot of people must, or there'd not be a Billy Mays.

Do not ask me how, or why, but I actually viewed a post-mortem clip of the Oprah Winfrey show that featured the Sarah Palin interview. What got me was not anything Ms. Winfrey asked, nor anything Palin said, but the ga-ga looks on the faces of Winfrey's audience. I couldn't determine whether they were of "When Harry Met Sally"sexual orgasms or . . .. What, exactly? I just couldn't tell. But I can tell you that I'd seen the expressions before, numerous times, among those who jammed the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign rallies. And, given the ex-Alaskan governor's complete ineptitude for the office she was seeking, it was each time as apocalypse terrifying as it should be to any non-comatose thinking person.

I'm debating with myself to insert the analogy. Nonetheless, against perhaps my better judgment I will propose that Terri Schiavo manifested more genuine depth of thought while lying prone in the depths of her near-death comatose state than did anyone in Oprah's audience, or in any who attended the GOP candidates' rallies. Because the entire Schiavo family affair was so tragic -- the way it was played out on the national stage, with President Bush rushing from clearing the bush from his Crawford ranch to fly back to Washington aboard Air Force One, to sign a bill the Republicans had pushed through, that insinuated the federal government in what even the least decency would have left as a very private family matter -- that the grotesquerie of what the country is now experiencing with Palin-writ-large-and-ubiquitous, and the idolizing she's getting from so many the analogy isn't at all inappropriate.

As to my first awestruck query, "Who the hell buys this stuff?" the very same question is forced relative to Sarah Palin. Buying a Mop-O-Matic is one thing. Buying Ms. Palin as somehow equipped to confront and deal with anything more challenging than apple-cheek smirking while hawking her moose-pie recipe should send shudders down the spine. Every functioning grey matter cell in the US was wracked in apoplexy through the 2,292 days that were the incomprehensibility that was the Bush administration. So we know it can happen, that a majority of American adults can actually put aside every intelligent inclination to put the pilot's wheel of the ship of state into the hands of a total nincompoop.

Alaska's rueful rogue told Winfrey that she felt Katie Couric's question, "What do you read to stay up to date?" was "inappropriate." Palin said she thought the interview was going to be "You know, like two working moms talking about the problems of mixing work and home." What? What??!!! The lady was asking the American electorate to install her into an office that, as Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford learned, could put the codes to the entire US intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile inventory under her sole control, and she felt a question about what her news sources were was "inappropriate."

And entire segments of the American electorate are with Palin; "Yeah, that was a gotcha question, completely inappropriate."

Billy Mays lives.Some folks -- too many anyhow -- will buy anything.