Considering the poll numbers of Donald Trump and Ben Carson, we all owe Sarah Palin an apology, don’t you think? 

You remember Sarah Palin, right? She was a bear-meat peddler who briefly governed the petro-socialist state of Alaska. I think she once hired a hit man to kill a rival cheerleader. Okay, I’m not sure about that part. That might have been the plot of a Lifetime movie I watched once in an airport lounge. But it still brings her to mind, doesn’t it?

I can still recall those halcyon days of 2008 when a Sarah Palin took the stage at the Republican National Convention and won the hearts and minds of those white Americans who were waiting for a spiteful poseur to express their grievances in a pre-Duck Duasty version of a Maoist “Speak Bitterness” meeting. Scrutiny did not become her, however, and Palin was eventually voted off the island due to her sheer idiocy and meanness, exiled to Elba or Arizona or somewhere. Now she’s merely a hologram of hate, activated occasionally in her camera-filled basement.

Those standards of basic competency, decency and honesty are longer with us less than a decade later, so on behalf of everyone, I’ll offer a mea culpa: Sorry, you horrible person, that you aren’t the dangerously unprepared nutbag to capture the imagination of white nationalist half-wits this time around. Take solace in knowing that this year’s models and their overt bigotry have served to redeem you from the absolute worst to almost the absolute worst, the way you once managed to make Dan Quayle seem interchangeable with Thomas Jefferson. You wore your simple mind on your sleeve but at least not on your hat.

From Eric Bradner’s CNN report on the GOP campaign, a modern story of belt buckles and pharaohs:

[Trump] said he hopes Carson “comes out great” from the scrutiny.

But Trump also implied that Carson’s story about attempting to stab someone in his youth — only to have his knife broken when he hit a large belt buckle — was hard to believe.

“Belt buckles really pretty much don’t stop stabbing,” Trump said. “They turn, they twist, things slide off them — pretty lucky if that happened.”

Trump said Carson’s description of his childhood temper as “pathological” is disturbing.

“It’s a serious statement when you say you have a pathological disease, because if I understand it, you can’t really cure it,” Trump said.

Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, Trump also cited Carson’s belief that the pyramids were built to store grain as another reason to question his judgment.

“So, you’re talking about storing grain in the pyramids. Well, they have very little space. They have space for small rooms, where the pharaohs had their coffins and where the pharaohs were buried, essentially,” Trump told host John Dickerson. “So, a lot of — a lot of things are going on. And I don’t know. I just don’t know what to think. I hope it — I hope it works out fine for Ben. I just don’t know what to think.”•