Caribou Barbie=Silky Pony?

Lack of chemistry? Now, given this is an entirely subjective reading on the part of Chuck Todd, I'm seeing shades of Kerry-Edwards here. Youngish, pretty, charismatic, obscene expenditures on coiffure or couture...

...but most importantly, the lack of chemistry. Is she aiming for a 2012 run? People seem to think so. But I'm not thinking it'll work. God willing, the Famous Air Pirate and the Beauty Queen will lose in two weeks and, in four years, she'll face some of the same problems as Edwards. That is: she'll still have little more than charm and red meat for the Base to run on.

Oh, sure, some neocon or theocon will take her under his carrion-smelling wing, try to tutor her in the ways of wickedness. She'll probably do some speaking tours on the SuperChurch circuit in between texting with Kissinger and hitting up AIPAC and PNAC gatherings to bone up on her bona fides. She'll likely seek a second term up in Seward's Icebox and win. All the while coyly dodging questions about disagreements within the campaign and whether or not she'll run again:

"Oh, you know, you get two independent minds on a ticket and there's bound to be some disagreements. Would I have done things exactly the same way? I don't really see any point in looking back. What I'm trying to make sure I do is keep my eye on the prize in ensuring I'm doing the best job I can to protect the people of this great state from what I truly believe will be destructive fiscal policies under this president. Am I going to run in two years? Oh, now let's not put the sled before the dogs here. I'm governing Alaska. It's a great job and I can't say what the future holds..." U.S.W.

And then, come 2011, she'll still have her ready made base of support. All revved up and ready to face Mittens. She's free and pretty compared to his stiffness and artifice. And then both of them get surprised all to hell by Bobby Jindal.

Let's talk more on this Republican Nova stage, though...

Obama Ferrets out the Hard Freak...

This is a fabulous consequence of the Obama candidacy, and I wonder if the same effect could have been engendered by a Hillary-Bayh ticket. Check out Minnesota rep Michele Bachman on Hardball, the weenie is at 5:45.

This is an object lesson in how not to realign your party, people.

Pity Michele. She's just been sent out to echo Palin. All she has to do is stick with the topic: BHO's alleged associates. But Matthews knows what's at the end of the argument, that it's about character, that we're talking about BHO himself, not Bill Ayers.

Getting people to talk about Obama is a centrifugal question: the heaviest freaks get separated from the party they hide themselves in. I saw this happening in the Inquirer last year, where white working-class dudes, who spend all day on the docks with their black working-class cohorts and buddies, all of a sudden had to air their real racism before all and sundry. Something like this happened when HRC said "hard-working Americans, white Americans," back in the day. And poor Michele. Just caught in the gears of a media machine she pays no attention to:

Bachmann said Tuesday she probably should have watched "Hardball" to see what it was like before she went on it.

So please, hard-working people of Congress, white people of Congress, please, let us know now what you think of Senator Obama. Please let us know if you do not read newspapers, watch cable TV etc., and if not, why not. Is your response from Paul's Romans? Is this a be-ye-not-conformed thing? I need to know. Because tight-faced white women with crazy smiles are still uttering shibboleths about "liberal leftists," "socialized medicine," "real Americans," etc., and holding forth on what's in Article I. I mean damn, before this election, would you have believed that any elected official could get away with not knowing what Hardball is? Is the governor of Alaska strategically expanding the role of the vice-president, or does she just not know better?

BTW, how does Jeb Hensarling feel about the imminent purge of one more know-nothing freak from the ranks? And is there a Democratic purge coming any time soon? When can we ice John Dingell and Dennis Kucinich? Trust the centrifuge!
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Getting mav'ricky...Todd Palin as Lady MacBeth...

Clearly, McCain is a rotten corpse, and is slowly being wiped off the map. The electoral map. Sarah Palin is slowly disposing of him, going, as Dickerson says, rogue. What I thought was a simple conservative realignment is more complex than that, and weird questions linger about Caribou Barbie. Namely:

Is she intentionally or unintentionally off-message? My guess is the latter. When perplexed, she punts. How else do you square her position on rewarding the DPRK with her abstinence-only diplomacy? She doesn't have a guru, she's flying blind, there's no way she's capable of orchestrating something as diabolical as a stab-McCain-to-run-in-2012 reverse.

Why did she pummel McCain on gay marriage? She has the right on lockdown. (Okay, except for Roanoke, Virginia.) Shucks, somebody out there is so fired up by her candidacy that they're illegally killing bears and dressing them up in Obama gear. Dissing McCain for her own benefit is such a surreptitious kick to the balls.

Did someone tell Palin that McCain wanted to give her the ax, sending her into a flurry of preemptive strikes and gross, confusing incompetence, leading to her ultimate downfall? Is this like Throne of Blood?

What all this boils down to is the original and abiding question of Palin's candidacy: why her? I've had the feeling that she was simply the only person McCain called who said yes. I never bought the arguments for doing something mav'ricky, for rallying the base, for attempting to appeal to the Femmes d'Hillary. Thin gruel. There are plenty of intelligent, qualified Republican women (I will never call Olympia Snowe Lobster Barbie); McCain's been pandering to the right for two years at least; he knows as well as anyone that the change-meme is Obama's property. Rationalizations. Palin answered the phone. Since, you know, she doesn't read the Jewish media outlets, she was the only person in America who thought being Walnuts' VP was a smart career move.

And now the question resurfaces, only she asks it of herself: Why me? Why isn't Tim Pawlenty stuck on this Ferris wheel?

There is, however, a light at the end of the shitstorm for Sarah Palin. Ted Stevens is done. Whether he gets elected or not, or is elected and resigns mid-term, the days of his funnelling contracts to friends and countrymen are over. Someone is going to run for his seat before 2014. Now, were you Sarah Palin, wouldn't you rather be junior Senator from Alaska than be John McCain's vice-president?
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More on this later, but...

Oh Hell Naw You Didn't

Alright, so I live in Columbus OH now. And I just saw this commercial on the ABC affiliate, and it's funny, because I never would have pegged BHO as Nixonian:


At least they can't call him inexperienced AND a crafty kombinator at the same time, right?

Also, notice the strategic mispronunciation of "renege." As Overheard in New York has told us before, you don't re-nig on something. You re-nig-er, you.

Anyway, I got interested in who's paying for this. The ad very briefly flashed The Denver Group, which is a batch of concerned Femmes d'Hillary who evidently at the last possible second have decided, for no other reason than that it looks like BHO might actually win the election, to bolt the party and back the party of War in Iran and Drill to Prosperity. That makes me upset.

So I wanna know who the contributors are, because Roxanne and Virginia's 750 bucks did not buy that ad.

Since you claim to speak for a "disenfranchised" and obviously aggrieved minority, but a group, in any case, of individuals, more to the point who stand for "principle," surely, Heidi Li, you'll tell us who pays the rent.

Send shout outs, etc. to Denvergroup@gmail.com.
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At the Heart of the Quasar

The first thing to understand about Jeb Hensarling, head of the RSC, R-TX 5th district, is that he is going to operate as a sleeper for a long while. This is going to allow him to figure out some things, and sleep off others. For instance, he'll be able to figure out how to pay for an undefined committment to Iraq without raising taxes (A: Economic Growth! Like in the 80s!). He'll be able to evade questions about his weirdly specific interest in defending online poker sites. And he'll be able to work out his relationship with Green Mountain Energy, a greenwashing business (selling incinerator-generated electricity as wind-and-solar, among other crimes)that savaged McCain in 2000.

Unless Green Mountain goes Enron, or leaks dioxin into the East Texas atmosphere, Jeb, former VP, is safe. Even a Keating-Fiver can run for president! (DIGRESSIVE, BUT IMPORTANT: Now, whether 'Merkins will trust said Keating-Fiver with their money is another story. And the point there is not whether anyone remembers the old transgression, but whether the transgressor can demonstrate new competence. For McCain, character is the real issue: swayed by his own vanity, he leaned on a regulator on Keating's behalf. Swayed by vanity, he divorced his crippled wife, married a beer-distributionship heiress, picked Palin, dissed Letterman. He's John McCain, (R)-The Media. Vanity is the source of McCain's petulance toward Obama, as if he's mystified that anyone could mistake his hammy quips and tin smile for charisma. It's an illusion: a corpse running in a war-hero's suit. As the authors of Ecclesiastes tell us, hevel hevolim, vehakol hevel, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. END.)

But what I see in Hensarling -- though at this early date, who really can evaluate his character with certainty? -- is not McCainiac. McCain has always been obsessed with his own mythopoesis: thus the image of his body as a reliquary of torture, the arms not lifting, the hair prematurely white, the teeth mangled, the knees crushed. Hensarling, again, at this stage, is a loyal jihadi; one who believes in his body as the vessel for a cause. Witness the selflessness of his "Why I opposed the bailout." This is career-making writing: an even cadence, an appeal to reason. If he were a Back Bay Democrat instead of a SE Dallas Republican, he would need change but one word, probably "subsidize" for "socialize":

"In my heart and in my mind, I believe that this plan was fraught with unintended consequences, would force generations of taxpayers to pick up the tab for Wall Street losses and could permanently and fundamentally change the role of government in the American free enterprise system. [...] Once the government socializes losses, it will soon socialize profits. If we lose our ability to fail, we will soon lose our ability to succeed. If we bail out risky behavior, we will soon see even riskier behavior."

Now, when the bailout passed, he was capable of escaping, because it's the ideas (or, cynically, the soundbites) that are important, not Jeb of the Texas Fifth, and he can fade into the background with a hiss about the "slippery slope to socialism."

The past may hold other road work for his future. Back in 2005, Jeb was on the forefront of financial deregulation; broadly speaking, deregulation is one of the causes of our current situation, n'est-ce pas?. But in effect -- and fact-checkers, please check -- his 2005 bill was written to provide to credit unions, S&Ls and small community banks the same benefits that financial services giants got in the 2004 version of the bill. If we were in the business of spinning for this guy, it would be easy to say that in both these cases, Jeb was on the side of Main Street against Wall Street, was ensuring a level playing field, was for the David-banks against the Goliath-banks, etc.

Again, ideas are paramount, and the RSCers have been busy for a while. In May they could tell their party was going to reap the whirlwind, and called for a restatement of principles. The best part of this little manifesto is the sense of self-awareness buried in there, as if he's saying to his peers: "Fine, go home and run against 'Washington,' just remember you're It." Bring on the self-flagellation:

"And [Americans'] anger boils over as they watch politicians in Washington point fingers at each other, launch politically motivated investigations, waste money on wasteful pork barrel spending, and reward special interests over the national interest — while consistently failing to provide solutions to the real problems that they face each day[...]The time has come to move beyond empty political rhetoric and to revitalize our contract with the American people."

So, Q: Is Hensarling too devout to be successful? That is, when his balanced budget noumenon hits the defense appropriations phenomenon, which one yields? Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp all lost. (A: I don't think so. The man has admitted that reforming the budget process is unsexy. I think he defines success differently than other politicians.)

Q: Is he then unlikely to win hearts and minds even if he wins his ideological turf-war?

Q: Is any of this stuff even plausible in the face of a trillion-dollar deficit and endless war?

Q: And by the time BHO is done remaking government, isn't the Phil-Gramm-budget-hawk-model going to look awfully vestigial?

Q: By the time we've set up a national Infrastructure Investment Bank (whereby gov't subsidies stimulate the production of physical objects that we sell to other people in the World War on Carbon Emissions), isn't the notion of tax-cuts-as-stimulus going to look like what it is, i.e., endlessly dosing a dead heart with atropine?

These are my concerns, Jeb. What I'm hearing on the radio telescope, it's either a faint persistent signal, or just static...
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Hagelwatch...

I missed this piece in Slate last week, but here it is: Chuck Hagel, deployed properly, could win North Omaha for Obama, giving him one of NE's five electoral votes. And with the GOP pulling out of Maine, there'd be no counterweight McCain-district-in-Obama-state...but all this is academic, as we're talking about a coast to victory...boat drinks, gentlemen...

Hagel endorses Obama, hits the stump five days before election...
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Joe the Plumber....

How many interviews is this guy going to have up until the election? Jeez, it's like we're trying to make this movie real...

Jou wanna leef like da'? Like some kinda cheep...Baa Baa

In the aftermath of the rapidly floundering attempt to link BHO to the Weathermen, re which I can't wait to watch Walnuts get all fusty and unhinged tonight as he promised to once more try the Obama-is-a-terrorist waters, there emerges a late entry in the right-wing-counter-terror-as-career-strategy-meme: it turns out that McCain and Lieberman are quislings for Cuban radicals! While campaigning for McCain, he promised to pursue a presidential pardon for Eduardo Arocena:

Arocena is the founder of the notorious Cuban exile militant group Omega 7, renowned for a string of bombings from 1975 to 1983. Arocena was convicted of the 1980 murder of a Cuban diplomat in Manhattan. In 1983, Arocena was arrested and charged with 42 counts pertaining to conspiracy, explosives, firearms, and destruction of foreign government property within the United States. He is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison in Indiana. His targets included:

Madison Square Garden (he blew up an adjacent store);

JFK airport (Arocena's group planted a suitcase bomb intended for a TWA flight to Los Angeles—in protest of the airline's flights to Cuba. The plane would have exploded if not for the fact that the bomb went off on the tarmac prior to being loaded);

Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center (causing damage to three levels of the theater and halting the performance of a music group from Cuba);

the ticket office of the Soviet airline Aeroflot;

and a church.

He also attempted to assassinate the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations.

So while McCain is busily denouncing Barry's domestic leftism, Lieberman is getting it on with "freedom fighters," like Furs jou get de money, den jou get the power, den jou get dee weemen...Ileana Ros-Lehtinen beware!
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Save yourselves...

I don't get this. The NYT finds itself duty-bound to vet the McCain campaign's allegations of a nefarious Obama-ACORN connection. This neither-nor criticism effectively grants some right-wing-rant about Those Ones stealing the election equal time with mere facts from Barry's CV. The NYT covers the story about BHO's connections without questioning the legitimacy of the allegation that those connections are themselves dubious. Slate covers the "Q: What's wrong with ACORN?" angle, but sticks to interviewing the people who put a bounty on ACORN's head in the first place.

Okay, so big deal. Small ripple. Never mind that it's this kind of acrobatic accomodation of the far-right that got Judith Miller's Iraq stories printed. Never mind that Ed Murrow figured in the '50s that all opinions are not equal: when covering a lynching, do you make sure to give the local Grand Wizard equal time? Never mind that if so-called bastions of the liberal media have to kowtow to the right fringe now, what lengths will they go to to protest their innocence once Republicans are out of power and spoiling for a fight? Seriously, look at how they savaged Jimmy Carter, for no other reason than to prove they didn't just hate Nixon.

I hate to think that I've become a one-issue bloggist, but the discovery of the Hensarling Quasar (alternately, the incipient Fourth Red Shift in American politics) has become a unifying theory for the McCain Campaign. Why pick Palin? Why harp on Ayers? Why holler about ACORN? In a time of national crisis, the campaign decided to run sludge ads? (The last Ayers ad I saw, btw, was far more savage than the flip-flopping Kerry ad from 2004. See? Isn't that cute?)

The people who are working on his campaign clearly expect to work for someone else: what's their best-case scenario? One term, followed by a Palin 2012 run? The man has lost a 14-point lead in North Dakota; he's clinging to West Virginia by 2 points; there is no future for you, staffers.

Again, at the risk of being prolix, if McCain wanted to win the election, he would have never run the Ayers-meme. Clearly, he has no interest in winning the presidency, as at this point who would? Presumably, he has a crock pot full of Wright-meme ads, ready to rock, so that by 2012, there will be a core of wounded free-marketers with exaggerated senses of entitlement for the Palin-Romney ticket, all shouting about black separatism, reverse discrimination; weeping about how McCain was martyred and how they was robbed.

Running on McCain's corpse is more profitable than running beside it.
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Lilibetcha!

The Obama campaign announced that Lilibet Hagel, the wife of Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, will accompany Michelle Obama at Wednesday night’s final presidential debate.

Quick thought... is the Obama campaign holding back on a Hagel endorsement until a more opportune time? Hagel's not really going to sit on the sidelines for this one, is he? When do they come out with it? After the debate? Week before the election? Special event to steal that one electoral vote in Omaha or somewhere? Only the Shadow knows...

Play this at about 3:50...

I saw this on Global Dashboard:



This bitch's harebrained wildness I colossally underestimated. Her joke candidacy must end. I don't care what the crypto-fascist fringe has to say, some 100 retired assholes in Wisconsin -- WI kiss my ass: Milwaukee is your crown jewel? 'You fucking kidding me? -- I don't care if Troopergate does martyr this mushmouth ass-tosser, thereby throwing the election to Walnuts. Don't matter. Dick Cheney knows god ain't start war in Mesopotamia, but clearly he(Cheney)'ll countenance the diversion. Who wouldn't?

Revisionists, beware! When we get to 60, we're shipping all your asses to the Hague!
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Well kids, we're fucked; run the Obama-Hates-Babies ad...

I realize this is going to provide aid and comfort to the know-nothing Bob-Barr fringe -- essentially, women in parka vests with coolers of rain water and grain alcohol in their camper-back pickups, busily protecting our precious bodily fluids --but this ad started running in Ohio yesterday, 10/7, night after the debate, during the news hour:

BHO is up 14 in Pennsylvania, up 10 in Wisconsin, up 14 in Minnesota, up 6 in Colorado, up 7 in Nevada and ahead by a couple in Ohio, Florida and Virginia. Obama has a plus 19 favorable. In order to win the election, McCain has to sweep 8 toss-up states (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida). To repeat: Barry only has to win a state larger than Colorado. Stakes is high.

What's interesting to me is to see what McCain does when cornered, and to figure what that means for his party: it's clear that, in a tough spot, he's decided to swing to the right. Bad debate fixed with abortion ads. Bad VP debate fixed by domestic terrorist smears. Bad economy fixed by accusing FNMA and FMAC of loaning too much money to poor, inner-city black folk. The preconditions-meme, the government-chooses-your-doctor-meme, usw; all the familiar tropes of 1990s AM radio on an eternal-return.

Now, what that means is that McCain has adopted a revolutionary posture. Like the SI said, revolutionary language (or punk rock, for Greil Marcus) brings the unsettled debts of history back into play. 1990s revanchists evidently believe that their concerns remain incompletely addressed. And there's a case for that. But there's no real way to pay them their ransom; when public discourse is held hostage, the price of release escalates every time it is met, (e.g., the NRA radicalized gun ownership in the late 1970s via the specter of government raids on private homes; then by fighting mandatory gun-locks, mandatory gun registration, background checks on purchasers, handgun bans in inner cities. Their demands are now so acute that even Pennsylvania's proposed one-gun-a-month law was treated as a mortal danger and scuttled.) thereby making the tactic profitable so long as the stakes are low, and incremental gains tiny.

If your movement calls for France to reclaim the Ruhr valley, your movement will fail; if your movement calls for the full funding of French-language private schools in Alsace, then you can work your way east. Likewise, no one wants to overturn Roe v. Wade; they want to stop clinics that promote abortion-on-demand, stop spending tax dollars on contraceptives overseas, and protect the babies that survive partial birth abortion.

THUS, the ad above. Barry clearly voted against the Illinois law because he refused to be baited by the fringe right. Let's recall that less than one percent of all abortions in the US occur after 24 weeks; extraction-and-dilation accounts for a fraction of that; what Illinois zealots believe to be botched E&D would account for a fraction of that number. If that number exists at all. The whole intent of the law was to scare providers into no longer providing. If doctors think they'll lose their license for a one in a million mistake made in a one in 10,000 procedure, they'll do the math; if insurers see a risk, no matter how infinitesimal, they will kill said risk.

The capstone in the right's strategy is to gradually push all women wanting abortions into late-term, high-risk procedures: 87 percent of all American counties have no abortion provider; 60 percent of all women delay abortions. If there's no Plan B, if there's abstinence-only education, if there's intense public disapprobation of abortion, women get funnelled into the high-risk procedures. Then, all the right has to do to de facto outlaw abortion is to outlaw the high-risk procedures. Viz. the Guttmacher Institute.

I mean, that's the theory. Again, the whole point of fighting on the fringe is to keep the issue alive. The point is to fight, not to win. The vast majority of women who have abortions do so for economic reasons. To tangle with the main causes of abortion would be to tangle with poverty. This ad is to bring out the base (in both senses of the word). Running this ad, at this time exemplifies the McCain-Palin retreat-to-the-right, and their preparation for the advent of the Hensarling Quasar...
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I didn't say "Bomb, Bomb, Iran," I said "Rock the Casbah"...

Obama had two replies. First, he wasn't calling for an invasion of Pakistan—just for "taking out" Osama Bin Laden if we had him in our sights and the Pakistanis couldn't or wouldn't do it. Then he won the round decisively by remarking, "This is the guy who said 'Bomb, bomb Iran,' " who called for "the annihilation of North Korea," and who, after we ousted the Taliban from Kabul, said, "Next up, Baghdad." That's not talking softly. (McCain's response, that he was just joking with an old veteran friend, was, first, not true—he said it in a public forum—and, second, quite lame.)

Yeah I was wondering about that lame excuse. I mean, for my money, it wasn't the most outlandish, nor the most important/heavyweight misdirection Walnuts used in the town hall, e.g., he will fine you, he will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, (at 02:03)

he was wrong on Russia (btw, we're all wrong on Georgia; are Georgians sniping at Russians as they (the Russians) leave?).
Right, sod all that. Where is this "Bomb Bomb Iran" thing? Murrell's Inlet, SC? Listen to the wackjob fascist asking the question: When do we airmail Tehran? Poor Walnuts had to do something...I actually think the Barbara Ann thing is hilarious, and it's going to be in my head for the rest of the afternoon. We out here at the 'Steer already understand that the Famous Air Pirate is off his gourd, so the joking about nuclear annihilation thing is, we feel, to be taken in stride. Like the man says, get a life; Politics has no real-world application, right?
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If only Lil Chuckie had worked for Blackwater...

Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, founder of the Demon Forces (officially referred to as the Anti-Terrorism Unit) is in the Hague. His son Chuckie McArthur Emmanuel, born in Boston, in in Miami facing prosecution under 18 USC 2340A, the extraterritorial torture statute. In Liberia in the late 90s,

Mr. Emmanuel selected and shot [three men] in the heads [sic]. He then ordered their bodies to be dragged away and displayed two of the heads at the checkpoint posts,

you know, among other counter-terrorist-spring-break activities...

Q: Is his defense attorney smart enough to make use of exemptions to US torture law to get Chuckie off?

(Chuckie's trial in the US, btw, might have been mooted by extraordinary rendition; can't we just call this guy a terrorist and ship his ass to Syria and pull out his fingernails?)

I mean, it's tricky, but this is what the guy is paid for. It all hinges on his status. Emmanuel, clearly considers himself an anti-terrorist operative. It's clear that the USG doesn't want to deport/extradict him, so there's no real loss by his claiming to be a paramilitary fighter, or a civilian contractor working for the Liberian (i.e., his pop's) army. At the time of the atrocities, the nearest thing governing the actions of American civilian contractors was MEJA (Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, 2000), which covers any American employed overseas by Department of Defense. Commit a felony, you're tried in the US. There were, until last year, holes:

The holes in MEJA became especially apparent during the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2004, when a civilian interrogator from Titan Corporation and a civilian interpreter from CACI International faced no punishment, despite their implication in the official report.31 These civilians were technically working for the US Department of the Interior, rather than the DOD, thus shielding them from MEJA’s reach. Their military colleagues had no such protection from courts-martial, however.

So, to rephrase the Q: Is there light between being an American torturer abroad and being an American civilian contractor not employed by DoD?
And, Q: Since we've spent so much time cobbling ways (way, way, way, way, way, way) for non-soldier torturers to escape prosecution by a "host country," or indeed, by anyone, where's the sympathy for the Demon?
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The Backwards Way looks forward...discovering the Hensarling Quasar...

Not to refry the VP debate or anything, which in this 49th hour of coverage has finally gelatinized into a tight bolus of conventional wisdom (Palin did not trip over her shoelaces; Biden did not push her face into the mud), but I can't shake my ideological middle-ear back into alignment. There were steeplechase moments on both sides (Biden triangulating on gay marriage, Palin's "darn right it was those predatory lenders,"), but the strategic-level outburst of cognitive dissonance, the peal of feedback in my polisci-lizard brain was in the tandem pronouncements:

"We do need the private sector to be able to keep more of what we earn and produce [sic]. Government is going to have to learn to be more efficient and live with less if that's what it takes to reign in the government growth that we've seen today."

and,

"And the rescue plan has got to include that massive oversight that Americans are expecting and deserving."

Or this pair:

"Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you're not always the solution. In fact, too often you're the problem so, government, lessen the tax burden and on our families and get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper."

and,

"We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings [...]"

If you believe, with John Dickerson, that this debate was about rebranding Sarah Palin for future use, you have to square these statements. This is the Republican VP candidate calling for massive regulation of financial markets alongside massive deregulation. My brain, together with my hair, stood on end! WWMilton Friedman D?

Never mind that Palin is participating in the same overt hypocrisy of Reagan's "Government, you are the problem," pretending that government is something you can be in and not of, something you seek but won't accept, (also, necessarily, presuming that government is something other than the things we choose to do together), etc., the way that diehard evangelicals read the Letter to the Romans' "Be ye not conformed to this world, but be transformed," and find free license to run a child-rape cult...Again, never mind all that. Never mind the soggy logical turf her handlers are inhabiting there. What kind of party brand can you build on this?

What I would have given for Biden to have started autistically screeching "Fuzzy Math!" or "Voodoo Economics!" Clearly, we need a shock into awareness. The party brand -- listen up, Mitt! -- that is built when you promise to shrink government while maintaining an open-ended war in Iraq, while increasing non-emergency approprations for defense, USW, is the Bush-Cheney brand. It is deficits don't matter. It's this kind of pigeon shit.

Maybe it's an Eastern thing, like "Spending and tax cuts are the father and mother of the ten-thousand things," but my guess is it's far from it...

IF, on the other hand, you struggle to comprehend why anyone thought this a successful appearance for SP (at 01:19 here, she called Al Qaeda Shiites:

she said the trouble on Main Street was trickling up to Wall Street (which she didn't mean to say, clearly, but is true nonetheless), and this is recalled off the top of my head, God knows what other horrors lie in that transcript), then the above are just parts of a cynical "Sure, you can have your cake and eat it, why not?" gesture.

No Republican president has ever shrunk government and none ever will. We all know this. But the only thing worse than a will-wank-for-coins tactic is a will-wank-for-coins tactic that doesn't work. The tax-cut-spending-increase bait-and-switch will crash the Republican party (and looking very far ahead, the thing I really fear is a hard nut of a latter-day GOP emerging when this party goes -nova, the remaining True Believer fiscal conservatives sloughing off the excess gas of the past 14 years to become a mighty quasar, a radio beacon audible throughout the universe; those guys are more comfortable on AM anyway; the Hensarling Quasar is a metaphor pret a porter).

Either the tune is going to change, or Jeb Hensarling will be the only one standing When the Revolution Come...
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Should the Worst Happen...

Sarah Palin is not a blithering idiot. She is only woefully underprepared to speak on the issues facing our nation. She can speak in broad terms. She can speak in terms of "Protect America" and "Stand With Our Allies" and "Defend Freedom," but, when asked for specifics... for "tactics," if you will, she falls flat. Therefore, Biden shouldn't have to win this debate, for Palin will lose it for him in a manner like unto my beloved Lakers this past summer. Woefully unprepared, green, with potential, but undeveloped.

But, should the worst happen, and she prove herself likeable and not fumbling. Should she come out and shine and not answer questions but still look goll-darned likeable while she's not answering questions... well, the "Liberal Media" will jump all over it. 

• Could she be the comeback kid for McCain?
  
• New Life for the McCain campaign? 
  
• Palin resuscitates the race?
  

Und So Weiter. And the polls may shift a bit, and McCain may gain some in the battleground states, and the talk will shift back to What Can Obama Do to Counter Palin, the Thorn in His Side? etc etc etc. 

Before any of that has the chance of happening, I just want to predict--should Palin do moderately okay--a surge for McCain which will be quashed following the next presidential debate. This is an easy prediction, but I just want it on the record. 

Hitting is timing, Joe...no need to pull the ball...

Dude, I loved that Chris Webber clip so much, here's an analogue:

Man set a breaking ball down and in, where ostensibly no righthanded hitter can do anything with it, and Manolo somehow gets the bat head out in front of that thang and we out. Peace. Folks said he wasn't a team player, that he'd lost the heart to compete, that he was a showboat, that he couldn't play left field, that Youkilis should have messed up his face back in June or whenever...I say he's a consummate veteran who understands the task at hand, that nothing matters until the end of the month when the champion is crowned.

Does any of this sound like Joe Biden? Blowhard, slacking off in the Senate, picking silly fights with people (A noun and verb and 9/11? Isn't 9/11 a noun?), prone to fits of pique. The only lesson of Manny Ramirez' career that Joe needs to learn, really, is to smile...your job is the greatest game in the world, you will go down in history either as a bum or a titan. Choose.

And the baseball metaphor I'm thinking of, I suppose is actually from the West Wing.

Bartlet: You think the strike against me is people don't like the smartest kid in the class.

Ziegler: It's not a strike unless you watch it as it sails by.

Seriously, Joe, you can get the head out in front of a bad-looking slider. Crush 'em...
--
ds

Laugh to keep from crying (havoc and letting slip the dogs of war)

This is past absurdity. It's like one of those jokes on Family Guy. You know: Peter hits his knee and then sits on the ground and winces and moans for like two minutes. It goes from being WTF? to being chuckleworthy to being hilarious at how long they're drawing it out to being OK when are they done with this to being Okay, it's funny again.

Yeah, it's like that. Except there's no commercial break. Except it's real. A number of commentators have pointed out that Palin's appeal is that she's "one of us." (oneofus. oneofus. oneofus.) Don't read much beyond the local paper--mostly the funnies. love that Sally Forth--but gosh darnit, if we just got some reg'lar folks in the Oval Office and cut through the horsehocky, by gosh, we could get this country back on the right track-- and get rid of them Messicans while we're at it.

(Me? I'm in the John Stewart camp: I want a president who's Embarrassingly Superior to me. But what do I know? I'm typing this on a Macbook, smoking American Spirits and tabbing between Blogger and The Atlantic.)

Yeah, Palin's for real. Her stunning ignorance as to any matter outside of Alaska and the rearing head of Vladimir is real and very much in line with oneofus status in a nation in which something like half the populace hasn't finished a book in the last year. No laugh track for her, though. The laughs--to keep from crying--should be saved for when she tries to appoint Judge Joe Brown to the Supreme Court in a year and a half after McCain's face falls off.