By Leonard Doyle

The skewering of Sarah Palin as a cultural benchmark for Middle America never ends. Thanks to Palin herself  Saturday Night Live’s crusade to turn the plucky small-town mayor and would-be vice president into a national joke is fast gathering pace. What's extraordinary is that a  whole chunk of the latest script was lifted straight  from her fumbled interview with Katie Couric. If this was a dictatorship Tina Fey and Amy Poehler would be behind bars being tortured in Gitmo by now. As the commentator Andrew Sullivan writes: "How does McCain win an election with a national joke as his running-mate?"