Republican Vetting

So I have just gotten back from an amazing labor day BBQ in Boston, and didn't really have time to do a lot of posts about the end of the democratic convention. I was set to write a post about Obama's 40 million viewer speech, but I can't pass up the recent rash of events around Sarah Palin. Since I drove to Boston I had about a 6 hour car ride. In the time period on the hourly news breaks I heard the following stories surrounding Sarah Palin: 1) an interview she gave a few months ago in which she was asked if she was interested in the VP position and responded that she couldn't know until someone told her what the VP did on a day to day basis; 2) that she is being investigated for possibly getting a Alaska State Trooper fired for divorcing her sister; 3) that she only got a passport last year; and 4) that her 17 year old daughter is 5 months pregnant and unmarried (although the daughter is supposedly going to be marry the father at some point in the future). By the time I heard the fourth I felt like I was on the all Palin all news station. 

While none of these stories are astronomically bad for the McCain Campaign (Clearly the last is both positive (she kept the baby) and negative (she had sex before marriage and in high school), I find myself wondering what the heck happened to Republican vetting. The Republicans are claiming they knew all of this before Palin was named to the ticket, but I am finding it hard to believe. Also, considering that she has not even been on the ticket a week and we already have 4 negative stories on Palin, I really have to question whether there was even a full vetting process at all. The first rule of being a VP is do no harm and it clearly seems like Palin is violating this rule. I don't know what else is going to happen, but its hard to say that things are going well out of the gate.