It has been many years since I read Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but it has banged around in my brain for several hours since the 2008 debate between the Democratic and Republican nominees for Vice President.

Emma Roualt has grown up on her father's farm and been well schooled in the local convent. She has learned her lessons well, both from her teachers at the convent and the livestock on the farm. Prepared for the greater world beyond the family farm, she happily accepts the advances of the recently widowed doctor who has treated her own widowed father and is taken away from the plodding agrarian life to the bourgeois life of a physician's wife in a nearby village.

Several years later, after spawning a family for her husband, she is swept up in the thrill of higher society than her husband can provide and launches a promiscuous life of heady but unseemly consort with men who are in fact above her in station and taste. The end is ignominious and disastrous, for her health, her family, and her poor trusting husband.

Sarah Palin has had the benefit of a rural upbringing, where she has learned from nature and those around her who have taken their livelihood from nature.

She has entered politics and progressed from the small village to the larger town to the heady world of national politics. She has by all accounts put forth by her supporters blossomed more at each climb up the ladder and proven herself up to each increasingly important challenge; business woman, mayor, governor, . . .

With her wagon now hitched to the great war hero and self-proclaimed political maverick, she has launched herself headlong into a marvelous affair of political gamesmanship and intrigue.

But as with Emma Bovary's sad experiences with the extramarital men in her live, Sara Palin finds her star hitched to a wagon increasingly devoid of actual principles, sinking in an ever widening spiral of deceit, deception, and desparation. John McCain is both her Rudolphe Boulanger and her Leon Dupuis.

Sadly for poor Sarah, her boulanger has sent forth into the market place a series of half baked and underleavened loaves of tin eared policy pronouncements and increasingly harshly flavored concoctions that only vaguely resemble the lovely pastries he once was able to serve up to capture the imagination of the body politic.

No Rudolphe, John McCain has left her with a basket of apricots that have seen better days; bitter fruit without so much as a note at the bottom to tell her to whence he has fled, leaving her holding the rancid basket and nowhere to turn but platitudes and Rovian phrases that become ever more hackneyed with each retelling.

John McCain also is her Leon Dupuis, a complicated caricature of two decidedly different people and concepts. Leon, the lion, the courageous war hero who has returned home to rail against the excesses of government and the special interests that so sully the political realm that had sent him and his fellows off to do battle in the jungles of southeast Asia. Striving to overcome these entrenched forces, he has spent a lifetime seeking to make it all right.

Sadly, now that he has reached out and pulled Sarah into his quest, we discover that he is more closely linked conceptually to the former Belgian publishing company, Dupuis, that specialized in comic books. Later in its history, it engaged in an early version of cross marketing, selling puppets of its comic characters. And so we see our stalwart Sarah, her strings pulled by the handlers of the heroic Leon, fallen to comic book character.

Like Leon Dupuis and his Emma, John McCain has pulled our Sarah into a depraved campaign of distortions, half truths, and a few outright lies. And Sarah, only too happy to enjoy the exciting and daring life as his running mate, albeit in a more platonic context.

Will our heroine Sarah go to the same fate as Charles Bovary's Emma? Stay tuned. But those who would, as Governor Palin seemed so intent on doing tonight, ignore history as an inconvenient harbinger of future outcomes, are indeed often doomed to repeat it.

Tina Fey, if you're reading this, you may use it in your next SNL sketch!

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