One presumes that he found much to object to in her 15 minute or so speech, which was painstakingly transcribed by AK Muckraker (who earned her place in heaven on this one). Palin never has been an adherer of the "I came, I saw, I conquered," sentence structure. But some of them the other night were doozies, like the following:

The mixed messages then the confusion and now frustration, disenchantment with the disenchantment from our own government, and look what happened when here in Alaska my administration, I vetoed the stimulus package, some of the dollars with obvious big government strings attached, and shoot, I just about got run out of town by some...

(Here's an hysterical piece in Slate about diagramming Palin's sentences).

But Palin's rhythm and diction isn't what concerned Clarke when she said the following:

"Some in Washington would approach our economic woes in ways that absolutely defy Economics 101, and they fly in the face of principles, providing opportunity for industrious Americans to succeed or to fail on their own accord. Those principles it makes you wonder what the heck some in Washington are trying to accomplish here."

No. He actually looks at the substance of what she says. Here's how he put it:

"Wow. Whatever else might be said about Sarah Palin, I hope we can all agree that there's absolutely no reason to take her seriously as a fiscal conservative. In particular, that line about 'industrious Americans' succeeding and failing of their own accord made we want to take a look at the federal dollars Alaska receives per resident relative to its federal tax burden. So I went and made this chart."

Guess what the chart shows? Click here to see it for yourself.