Time Travel With Wonkette To The Marvelous Day When John McCain Picked Sarah Palin, America's GILF

Following Willard Mittsworth Moneybaggs Romney IV's introduction of his exciting Veep pick, Paul Ryan, Your Wonkette presents a look back at the heady days of 2008, when enfeebled man-who-would-be-king John McCain invigorated his moribund campaign by choosing as his running mate an exciting fresh face with impeccable conservative credentials, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin. While news outlets around the nation asked themselves, "wait, WHO?" Wonkette readers were already well aware of who she was:  Alaska's GILF, the hottest Maverick ever depicted in LEGO (which, as nerds, we know is a singular mass noun; the individual little pieces are not "Legos," but "bricks" ... which is what most of us also shat at the thought of the empty-headed moose-shooter being a heartbeat away from the Presidency).

So join us on a trip down memory lane as we present the blogging equivalent of a clip show. Hey, remember the time we went to Alaska and became frenemies with a crazy lady?

• Within days of her elevation to America's Hottest Governor, we discovered that Palin had been Miss Wasilla in 1984, when, uh, she was also going to the University of Idaho, so huh?

• Our in-depth vettening of Palin also discovered that she had played basketball wearing tube socks and eaten moose burgers, which we were terribly disappointed to learn was a euphemism for actually eating burgers made of ground-up "moose meat." Which was also sadly literal, too. We also found the most iconic image of the Ice Road Governor in her natural habitat. 

• We also discovered Sarah's serious policy side, like her budget-saving decision to sell Alaska's unnecessary executive jet on eBay, a move that, foreshadowing her later mastery of fiscal conservatism, the state actually lost money on. 

• By March of 2008, with our usual prescience, we recognized that there was no way in hell that John McCain could pick the GILF as his running mate, because she was preggers, and what kind of new mom would drag her children around on the campaign trail? Then she went and had that baby and gave him a weirdass name,which was forever enshrined as "your post has been deleted by the site administrator." 

• Like everybody else, we were just plain blindsided by McCain's actual choice of Palin, probably because he didn't have an app that would give his supporters total firsties on the Veep choice. We were recovered sufficiently to liveblog her national coming-out party, where we discovered that she was a mom and couldn't pronounce "heroism." Oh, the memories!

• By the end of the same day, we knew about "Troopergate," and then a few days later we learned aboutBristol's impressive fecundity. The rest, as you know, is History. 

Whatever else we can say about Paul Ryan, we can guarantee that he will not be nearly as entertaining.