This hockey-mom is about to go nuclear.

It is pant-crappingly scary when some gun-toting, radical christian fundamentalist, former beauty-queen with a dubious political track record and zero foreign policy experience starts to talk about getting into a fight with Russia.

If Vladimir Putin looked into the eyes of George Bush and saw a weak, feckless idiot, what will he see when he looks into the eyes of Palin?  A hockey-mom with launch-codes, no foreign policy experience, fanatical beliefs far more excessive than those of Sayyid Qutb and the hubris that makes her think she is even in Putin's league as a head of state?

Put yourself in Putin's place.  Apply hawkish republican reasoning to the situation from his point of view.  Here you have a foreign super-power talking about armed intervention in your back yard.  Under the command from someone who believes she is talking to God.  Would you show restraint?

How would you feel if a military superpower, like Russia or China, started showing up in South America?  Meddling in conflicts in the back yard of the United States?  How would you feel if you knew this person held religious beliefs that we usually associate with less enlightened times.

You would be very uncomfortable.  Not only with the interventions in your back yard, but with the highly dangerous unpredictability of someone who is out of touch with reality.

The Russians are scary.  But at least they are not threatening with military presence in locations directly on the American mainland borders.  Nor are their leaders afflicted by irrational religious madness.  Nor are they lightweights.  They may lie, deceive and oppress -- but they are competent totalitarians.