Illustration by Risko via MSNBC screen capture

Sarah “little shop of horrors” Palin continues to be fueled by drama. You can say a lot of things about Gov. Palin, as Todd Purdum’s delicious Palin take down proves. But playing the political victim has certainly gotten Sarah a long way. But with Gov. Sanford’s meaning of “is” is meltdown, someone who was considered the conservative’s darling for 2012, Palin looks positively serious.

However, make no mistake about it, the last thread on the McCain team straight jacket has been pulled and with it full tilt warfare has broken out.

It begins with Palin’s pal Bill Kristol, who was not content on taking the Republicans down over Iraq, but has widened his lock and load leveling gaze on past grievances he has on why McCain-Palin went down, not able to let Steve Schmidt off the hook for his part:

…Perhaps Steve was nervous someone would finger him for the Purdum piece. One reason people might do so is this passage in Purdum’s article: “All the while, Palin was coping not only with the crazed life of any national candidate on the road but also with the young children traveling with her. Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.)” In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt.

Steve Schmidt on Kristol:

Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign. … After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”

Randy Scheunemann goes after Schmidt as well:

“Steve Schmidt has a congenital aversion to the truth,” Scheunemann said. “On two separate and distinct occasions, he speculated about about Governor Palin having post-partum depression, and on the second he threatened that if more negative publicity about the handling of Governor Palin emerged that he would leak his speculation [about post-partum depression] to the press. It was like meeting Tony Soprano.”

At the foundation of all this spit flying sits Todd Purdum. The same response towards Purdum happened when he let fly on Bill Clinton. He’s an equal opportunity political star shooter, having the impact of disabusing anyone of the notion that our political hot shots are anything other than human. That’s a very good thing, especially with the likes of Sarah Palin taking narcissism to a new level.

When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

Smelling salts, please.

Purdum’s piece points to many troubling bits of behavior that defy defense, with one getting a lot of attention from all angles.

But there were ominous signs—indications of an erratic nature. This is the third thing McCain could have discovered about Palin—a woman, after all, who kept a pregnancy secret for seven months, flew all the way home from Texas to Alaska with a near-full-term baby while leaking amniotic fluid, and then finally drove the 45 minutes from Anchorage to a hospital in Wasilla, all so that the child could be born in the 49th state.

Who reacts like this in such a dangerous point in your pregnancy?

With all sorts of other points discussed, including aides wondering whether Palin’s erratic behavior was due to “postpartum depression.” Purdum doesn’t stop there, however:

Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly.

Now it’s official. Sarah’s a narcissist. She’s got lots of company.

Drama queen is the title that fits her most aptly at this point, but that’s not her main problem. Sarah’s real trouble is she’s lugging around way too much stupid that still hasn’t been dispelled.