The Right is splintering into McCain and Palin camps. C’est une hoot.

Faux News, a wholly owned subsidiary of the upper echelon of the Republican Party, is leading the charge against Palin.

Even I think the “she’s so dumb she doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story is farfetched. The larger point is that the string-pullers want to make Sarah Palin the scapegoat. They are swift-boating their own.

The puppets are not having it. Erick Erickson of Redstate announces Operation Leper:

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.

I think the whispering campaign is being facilitated from higher up than the McCain campaign, but that’s a hunch. I’m not exactly a GOP insider. Certainly most of the whispering is coming from the McCain campaign, but if higher-ups didn’t want Palin to be the scapegoat, you know Faux wouldn’t be repeating the whispers.

My sense of things is that most of the Right blogosphere is siding with Palin, not McCain. But there is disintegration among rightie bloggers, too. For example, there has been some sort of falling out between Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged. I don’t quite understand what’s going on with this, but there it is.

I may not be a GOP insider, but I do know that the talking points memo that went out from On High to the GOP minions yesterday had these two bullet points:

• Warn Democrats that they’d better not pursue a culture war.
• Warn Democrats that they’d better not push for card check.

I know this because every representative Republican bobblehead on cable news yesterday brought up these two points. And I believe these are points that otherwise would not have been on anyone’s mind yesterday, especially card check. If you haven’t heard about card check, go here for an explanation.

Regarding culture wars, I wonder if the GOP realizes that the anti-reproductive rights movement could be turning into more of a liability than an asset. The alliance with the so-called “pro life” crowd certainly didn’t help the GOP Tuesday. I’m guessing there are closed-door discussions going on right now about whether to cut the cord, so to speak, with the Fetus People. If the FPs are dumped, they will be dumped slowly and gently and gradually so that nobody, including them, notices.

However, my first prediction for 2012 is that by then abortion as a national issue will have quietly been forgotten. It might not survive to 2010, in fact. It will still have potency in some states, of course, but it will be kept local. Unfortunately, fighting same-sex marriage will be ramped up to take abortion’s place as the “central front” of the culture wars.

More interesting fallout:

Take a look at the “McCain Belt” — places where McCain did better than Bush did in 2004.

The map linked above inspires dumb hillbilly jokes, and as a hillbilly-American myself, I know a lot of ’em. But I will refrain. For now.

This will not surprise you — the “Impeach Obama” campaign already is underway.