The myopic editorialists at the Los Angeles Times must think Sarah Palin defeated Joe Biden in Thursday night’s vice presidential debate. Their post-debate editorial, when read between the lines, indicates as much:

Gov. Sarah Palin shared a stage with Sen. Joe Biden and for 90 minutes skirted the edge of the abyss but avoided the plunge. Luckily for her, their debate Thursday night avoided serious civics — no questions about Supreme Court rulings and only the briefest exposition on what constitutes the vice presidency. She did nothing to arrest her slide from phenomenon to embarrassment, but her conservative supporters, many jumping ship in recent days, can take solace that she correctly pronounced the names of several world leaders.

In avoiding catastrophe, she was aided by Biden, whose looping answers drifted along a current known only to him. His best friend was the clock.

[T]hese two candidates — aided and abetted by the singularly inarticulate work of moderator Gwen Ifill — combined to produce one of the worst debates in modern American presidential history. [emphasis my own]

If Joe Biden had won the debate, the paper would have used it to reinforce the media’s sloppily crafted image of Sarah Palin as a rube from the outback blinking in the big city’s lights. Palin won the debate, so it has become, in their resentful prose, a tear in the political fabric, a mistake which just should not have been.

Joe Biden’s “best friend was the clock,” the editorialist writes. Well, that moderator, Ms. Ifill, turned control of the time over to him, so it was planned that way; however, you will catch me being digressing never again. In this piece.

“[O]ne of the worst debates in modern American presidential history.” How far back do these clowns go? There was Bensten-Quayle in 1988, remembered only for a rehearsed insult. What about Dole-Mondale in 1976? More recently, relatively speaking, that was Gore-Kemp in 1996. Last night’s debate kept us awake and attentive; these others, not so much.

In the end, Biden left voters with a more constructive vision of the government and a more compelling case for how it has failed the nation under President Bush

WRONG. In the end, actually, Joe Biden left myopic editorialists as purblind as expected. Sarah Palin won that debate. The governor of Alaska captured our attention and made her case directly to us. She was compelling, refuting those lefty commentators who would turn her into an ugly caricature reminiscent of what they did to Admiral James B. Stockdale, a brilliant American hero branded by the media as clueless boob after his 1992 veep debate.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, lied.

And as a personal aside, it was refreshing to see someone stand in front of a rapt national audience for 90 minutes and offer in debate a conservatism without footnotes or caveats. I doubt she would appeal to the coarsened lefties who demand je ne sais quoi from their leaders – because they don’t know what – but I would hope that was not a goal. She did appeal to those of us who like to hear things in non-doctrinaire terms and who want to change the tone and discourse in our nation’s politics which has been percolating since, I’d estimate, Al Gore tried briefly to steal the 2000 Presidential election with hanging chads in Palm Beach County.

Sarah Palin won last night’s debate.