Sometimes VDB can only wonder how a crack organization like McCain 2008 could possibly lose a national election. So much awesome strategic brainpower, brought to bear so very strategically and awesomely. Case in point: Michael Goldfarb, Deputy Communications Director, who blogged officially for the McCain campaign. In a powerful and hard-hitting interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Goldfarb uses a Jane Goodall/Ape Sex metaphor to explain what he considers botched reporting on Palin.

Says Goldfarb, “When you have The New Yorker write a story about how Sarah Palin was selected . . . well, that was like Jane Goodall going in and writing about fucking apes mating in the jungle — they don’t know what’s going on.”

As we said, difficult to see how you could fail with a Communications Director so fluent in the metaphors of animal copulation.

Still, and here we get into VDB’s own particular areas of expertise, the metaphor of the anthropologist watching “fucking apes mating” does slide into a bit of ambiguity in the final clause, “they don’t know what’s going on.”

Suddenly the reader is confused: does Goldfarb mean that Jane Goodall/The New Yorker doesn’t know “what’s going on,” or does he mean that the “fucking apes” themselves don’t know what “the fuck” they’re doing? In other words, are the apes/McCain campaign actually mating or are they “fucking it up” beyond all repair somehow?

But of course, given Michael Goldfarb’s unimpeachable national cred and his rising star as a political strategist, we should probably assume that he means all of the above, that his seemingly off-the-cuff profanity-laced ape-sex metaphor is deliberately ambiguous and only seemingly crude and nonsensical.

Goldfarb, in a calculated display of rakish postmodern irony, suggests that no one, in politics, knows what the fuck is going on, or who is fucking whom.

Brilliant, Michael Goldfarb.

We look forward to your insightful press releases on behalf of Palin 2012, and whatever animal sex metaphors with which you choose to instruct us at that time.