Whither Sarah Palin? Lampooned and sidelined, she has arrived back in Alaska as the public back-biting begins in earnest.
"My plans for 2012 are to get Trig enrolled in kindergarten," she insisted to the TV cameras, while "offering herself as its [the Republican party] saviour".
Inviting Palin on board was always John McCain's big gamble. And she blew it for him, exit polls suggest.
According to CNN, exit polls indicated that 60% of voters believed Palin wasn't qualified to be president. Just 38 percent said she was.
And so to the fingerpointing, almost all by unnamed McCain aides.
Palin's people didn't tell McCain's advisers that her phone conversation with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was a prank call, says one, the New York Times reports.
"Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. Ms Palin, who laughingly told the prankster that she could be president 'maybe in eight years', was the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and Mr McCain's."
Another McCain insider says that he only spoke to her "occasionally". [They barely knew each other, of course, before Palin was chosen as McCain's running mate].
Over to Fox News, where correspondent Carl Cameron, citing McCain aides, says that Palin "did not understand that Africa was a continent and not a country". Nor, he adds, could she name the three countries [Mexico, the US and Canada] which are part of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Newsweek finds space in its story about how hackers compromised Obama and McCain's campaign computers to provide further revelations about Palin's shopping spree.
"While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as 'Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,' and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books."
