Cowardice, Incompetence, Or Just Plain Senility?

I'm actually not all that outraged that PBS talking head Gwen Ifill will be "moderating" tomorrow night's Sarah Palin-Joe Biden smackdown.  Certainly not surprised.  Yeah, she's written a gushingly adoring prequal book on the upcoming Hussein presidency, so she has not just the usual ideological conflict of interest that any Enemy Media jackal would bring to this role, but a financial one as well.  If anything, the wonder is that she isn't moderating one of the three McCain-Obama bouts so that she could throw her panties directly at the feet of the man she had a prominent hand in depicting as the Heathcliff Huxtable of the Beltway.  But really, would Chris Matthews or Bob Schiefer or pretty much any journo outside of Fox News be any less likely to start off the debate by asking Governor Palin when she stopped masturbating herself with severed moose antlers under the table at gubernatorial policy meetings?  The fact that Ifill is black, and therefore officially immune from any and all criticism for any shafting of Barracuda that ensues - any and all criticism PERIOD, actually - is putrid icing on a really rotten cake.

But I am somewhat taken aback by this:

I confirmed for us here on GretaWire: the McCain campaign did NOT know about Gwen Ifill’s book (I think I told them when I made my efforts - emails about midnight - to find out!) I am stunned….the campaign (actually both) should have been told before the campaign agreed to have her moderate. It simply is not fair - in law, this would create a mistrial.

They didn't know?  The negotiations for and vetting of debate moderators and other stipulations took place as much as two months ago; Ifill's literary fellation of The One was announced back in July.  How could Team Sith possibly not know about this?  Does nobody ELSE in that campaign know how to email, or use Google?  For a shop that was on its way to winning the unwinnable before Wall Street collapsed, I find that more than a little implausible.

A/P's theory is more believable, though no less teeth-gnashingly aggravating:

[I]s this a case of Team Maverick deciding that the racial demagoguery they’d get from the left for trying to have her removed because of a pro-Obama book made it simply not worth the aggravation?

Y'know, given the ubiquity that Barack Hussein Obama's race is going to have in his administration, and the PR weapon of mass destruction that it will be used as against any and all criticism of his decisions, actions, rhetoric, and policies over the next four years, if a Republican presidential candidate is too chicken to incur the Left's racial demogoguery over the choice of a hopelessly ethically compromised moderator in a vice presidential debate before False Messiah ever takes office, should we start taking bets on whether the GOP will even have the courage to field a candidate against his re-election bid in 2012?