To go through the 9,800 word profile/excoriation of Sarah Palin by Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair and Fisk it line by line would take an enormous amount of time and space, and probably more time than you’re willing to devote to reading it. So for now, the low-lights:

Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. “What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded?”

I’m still looking for any quote from Palin at any time where she expressed pride in what she does not know. The closest we come to in the article is an anecdote in which she tells a gubernatorial rival that she’s amazed at his command of “facts, figures, and policies” but then looks into the audience and wonders whether any of it really matters. We don’t know which “facts, figures, and policies” she’s referring to, but we have all seen detail-heavy speakers incapable of communicating a core message. Keep in mind that the current president was elected on a core message of “hope,” “change,” and “yes we can.”

What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life?

Again, four years in the Senate, two of which were spent campaigning, is considered proper preparation for the presidency; two years as governor is somehow scandalously little experience to be vice president.

Her first trip to Washington since the election was to attend the dinner of the Alfalfa Club, an elite group of politicians and businesspeople whose sole function is an annual evening in honor of a plant that would “do anything for a drink.”

Ah. How the group got its name is very important to this story; otherwise it might that Palin appeared at a traditional get-together of prominent political figures, instead of the insinuation that she’s hanging around with a bunch of lushes. The fact that President Obama spoke to the group* is strangely omitted.

Also with Coale’s help, Palin formed the grandiosely named Alaska Fund Trust, to defray a reported half million dollars in legal expenses arising from a slew of formal ethics complaints against her in her home state—prompting yet another formal complaint, that the fund itself constitutes an ethical breach.

The fact that Palin is now 15 for 15 in having those “formal ethics complaints” dismissed as groundless would seem to be somewhat relevant. Come on, man. You can think Sarah Palin is a terrible governor, and should never have been McCain’s running mate, etc., and still think these frivolous complaints are an expensive waste of everyone’s time.

Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life—neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own.

Okay, admit it. You just wanted to get the name “Anna Nicole Smith” into this piece.

The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection.

Tell me that when a Palin relative performs a rhythm-and-blues show in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Palin worked hard, and the results were adequate. Palin’s winking “Can I call you Joe?” performance against Biden was nothing like a disaster.

In this kind of a profile, this is an admission that she won the debate.

In fact, it seems to have emboldened her enough that the next day she openly voiced disagreement with the McCain team’s decision to pull out of active competition in Michigan.

Indeed, she outrageously voiced her disagreement by responding to the Michigan pullout with, “Oh, come on, do we have to?” Mutiny! (By the way, that early pullout and its effect on the state Republicans’ morale is partially blamed for an abysmal showing for the GOP in down-ticket races.)

The irony is that there’s room in this world for a profile that is critical of Palin, but that preferably didn’t begin with the supposition that she is the root of all evil in the political world.

She has been living in the eye of a hurricane since last August, and has become one of the few figures subject to the scrutiny of both the political media and the celebrity-industrial complex manifested in People and Us Weekly. Almost overnight, she’s gained millions of devoted fans and furious enemies. That has to be a horrific environment to make tough decisions in. She may not run for reelection as governor, which seems like a serious mistake if she aspires to national office. (I would argue that Mitt Romney’s 2008 bid was hampered by the fact that he had only served one term; the flip-flopper label deteriorates in the face of a clear and lengthy record. You become much more of a known quantity in that second term, demonstrating that successes in the first term weren’t a happy accident.)

Palin may run for president in 2012, which could very well be a mistake. Her current public reputation and support is probably just enough to win the GOP nomination and then generate similar electoral college results as 2008. As a GOP strategist put it to me a few months ago, “The perception of Sarah Palin will change when the reality of Sarah Palin changes.”

I find my toddler son exhausting; I can only imagine a life running a state while caring for a son with Down syndrome and a son in Iraq and a daughter who is a new mother in the sharp glare of the public spotlight and a grandson and another daughter suddenly appearing in David Letterman’s routine. This may not be the right time for another go-round in a multi-year process in which vast swaths of the political world will aim to see her torn down to nothing. She’s 45 years old; it’s not like the window is closing.

But it’s her call, and time will tell.

*Obama told a good joke in that appearance: “This dinner began almost one hundred years ago as a way to celebrate the birthday of General Robert E. Lee. If he were here with us tonight, the General would be 202 years old. And very confused.”