If your reading habits are anything like mine, the video of Carl Cameron telling Shepard Smith that Sarah Palin doesn’t know which countries are signatories to NAFTA, thinks Africa is a country, obstinately refused to prepare herself for her interview with Katie Couric (because who among us could name the periodicals we read without at least a cram session?), and threw “temper tantrums” over critical press, probably popped into your RSS feed a comfortable 150 times in the last couple of hours. As Daniel Larison observes, this is not the most auspicious day for anti-anti-Palin conservatives.

Never fear, though; Erick Erickson and the RedState Team sprang into immediate action:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.

---

P.S. – Did I ever tell you how RedState was able to stock Gov. Palin’s campaign plane with twenty of these?. We were glad to. And we were glad not to mention it at the time. We are rooting for Sarah Palin. Don’t make us add you to our list. Do you really want to be next to Kathleen Parker in the leper colony?

Frankly, I’m confused. The whole point of calling the exile you intend for your enemies a “leper colony,” one would think, is to create the impression that it’s an unpleasant place to be. But the informed, rational worldview of Erick and our other intrepid heroes rests on the premise that the rewards of pulling a Brutus, Cassius, or Judas on the infantile Imperatrix of the North are simply irresistible to those of weak-will and debauched virtue. I thought we had established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kathleen Parker, David Frum, Christopher Buckley, Ken Duberstein, Kenneth Adelman, Colin Powell, Peggy Noonan (possibly), David Brooks, Jeffrey Hart, Ross Douthat, anyone who has written for Culture 11, et al., could only have criticized Sarah Palin in order to secure invations to exclusive cocktail parties in tawny neighborhoods of Manhattan and Washington, D.C. (though granted, in the case of the ladies on this list, they clearly criticized Mrs. Palin in part because they were jealous of her looks).

In any event, Erick did stumble onto a very solid bit of inferential reasoning. One can only “make” someone a leper, short of bio-weaponization techniques a bit beyond even RedState’s competence, by contracting the infection and then transmitting it. Now of course, leprosy is a particularly nasty bug, and it’d be asking a lot of RedStaters to get themselves sick with it. But this isn’t just any political cause; we’re talking about the long-term viability of the woman who is guaranteed to lead the GOP to crushing victories in at least half the states that border Appalachia, and crushing defeats absolutely everywhere else. No burden is too heavy to bear to see to it that Barack Obama breezes to a second term effectively unopposed.

There is a Catch-22, however. What with all their limbs falling off from the leprosy, it’s going to be awfully hard to “track down” able-bodied traitors to the project of running candidates for office whose sole qualification and entire platform consists in seething, ugly, and all-around pitiable resentment of an increasingly large majority of the country.

UPDATE: If you’ve even been a mild fan of Palin, you especially need to read Mark Kleiman right now.