The Shocking Toolness of Ben Nelson

Conservative Democrats have misinterpreted Barry Hussein's call to post-partisanship as surrender to the right. They do so at their peril.

Particularly the 8 or 9 Senators who hijacked the stimulus package this week, stripped 40 billion in education funding out of it, and then crowed on the floor of the Senate, with Ben Nelson (D-NE): "We trimmed the fat, fried the bacon, and milked the sacred cows."

Memo: this is not 1992. Big government is not over; really really big government has hardly begun. Ben Nelson will get on board now, or he will watch the unemployment lines grow.

Here's Ben on C-SPAN no longer really crowing. I can only pray that Rahm Emmanuel beat his ass with a big staff, right there in the Oval. Seriously, any money spent is money spent. Doesn't matter if you pay highway construction workers or MD's. This is Steven Pearlstein talking to Nebraska's freshman Senator, Mike Johanns:

Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services -- a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus.

Democrats, we're watching you. The less you sound like Steven Pearlstein, and the more you sound like Herbert Hoover, the more shock and awe you can expect come the next election cycle.

A nation of fourteen-year-old Obama-heads will all be 18 by 2012, when Ben Nelson is up for reelection. So enjoy your breakfast, Ben, because the kids who went to the shitty public schools you vouchsafed them are going to steal your lunch.
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Notes on Barry Hussein, Fat Hitler, Other Divagations

This is how it feels to win an election. Forgive ds, but this is an entriely new feeling. The first real election I was aware of, to the extent that I felt real heartbreak, was 1994. Failure ever since; we can argue the merits of 1996 or James Jeffords' defection, but the fact remains that I have never seen a tidal wave / tsunami / landslide / metaphor-worthy election.

McCain's concession was the only eloquent thing he's said since he fired Mike Murphy. I'm betting Murphy, or one of the heads from 2000 wrote it. Even the phrases encapsulating the seed of a future "Racism Is Over" tactic were glorious. A cynic would say necessarily so. Still:

But we both recognize that, though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound.

...is not half bad for the guy who voted against Martin Luther King Day. Had sentiments like these come out six months ago, McCain would be president. Surely, the fact that this dude can only be gracious in defeat, and is petulant the whole rest of the time, this is the hallmark of political failure, Cf. Gore, Albert Arnold Jr..

Another note: Keep David Axelrod off the television. He looks like a communist Mike Ditka. He looks like Fat Hitler. A head out of The Jungle. Face fit for radio. Like he never missed a meal. Like he could fish Lake Michigan with his head. All Chicagoans are like this. How do they make it in the World?

Nuhs like to think Palin is done, but I disagree. I think she's just got a taste. Does she run for Ted Stevens' seat? (Again, this is assuming Begich doesn't pull a couple thousand votes out of his hat. Also assuming that Stevens a) dies, b) resigns, c) is refused a seat in the Senate, as a convicted felon. Article I, section 5: "Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members[...]." I remember this from the noise about possibly not seating Ollie North in 1996...) I think she wants all the perks of office, with none of the scrutiny, and given Stevens' example, the Senate is the place to be. Keep the oil flowing, not really do shit.

But the real questions are all about the mid-term election. Largely, this is because we can't think about 2012, though we try, until 2010 is sorted. And really, what are the Democratic prospects in 2010? The speculative economy is broken. We would be able to speculate on New Energy, if the Obama energy plan were operative. So find me 100 billion dollars in the federal budget.

Iraq? Trick is that incremental drawdowns of troops don't proportionately draw down costs, Cf. Congressional Budget Office, 10/24/2007. Veterans cost money too, for starters, and the infrastructure already in country has a flat cost that ain't going nowhere. Let's be charitable and assume that the drawdown gets us to 6 billion a month down from 10. The president-elect has committed to a troop surge in Afghanistan. There go your savings.

Increase marginal tax rates, right? Without 60 in the Senate, without the right bundle of tax cuts to sugarcoat it, without some way to round the corner on all those conservative congresspeople we just elected, it ain't happening. Seriously, is Periello, assuming he makes it into Congress from the VA 5th, going to raise anybody's taxes? A sugarcoated marginal tax increase is good policy any damn way, don't get me wrong, Teddy Roosevelt caught all kinds of shit for the progressive income tax, we know this, but do middle-class tax cuts result in increased federal revenue? Which, remember, is what we need to solidify the economy, get elected again, and really get some socialism on...aw, did I say that out loud?

For real. Show me the money. The first 100 days are economy days. Taxes alone will take 100 days. The "mandate" was historical, in that the election had an historical purpose. But that purpose is acheived, and 2010 is back to ordinary politics. I'm talking to you, Fat Hitler.

Seriously, this could be a Jimmy Carter presidency. It should not be.
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Various adventures of McCan, Famous Air Pirate...once more crashing his own plane...

Whoa. About that debate that Walnuts promised not to go to...also re: which see Letterman on getting stiffed...did McCain actually say that he would veto every spending bill that came across his desk? I was at a party at Skylab, watching it on a 9-inch b/w TV, so I had to check the transcript...

As president of the United States, I want to assure you, I've got a pen. This one's kind of old. I've got a pen, and I'm going to veto every single spending bill that comes across my desk. I will make them famous. You will know their names.

Ohhh you have to love this week: McCan the Air Pirate (last week I read DFW's essay collection CtL, which has a long-form 2000 campaign piece called "Up, Simba"), hero to the Vietnamese, lies to David Letterman about when he's leaving New York (which is forgivable, because a man has to sleep sometime), flees to Washington in a pale attempt to off the debate (to which BHO said, This is not Nam; here there are rules), plainly realizing that Palin ain't gonna hack it (and what if she doesn't, what if she's a Harriet-Miers-esque smokescreen built to make an unpalatable choice seem palatable just because said choice will actually know you know some things, and if so who is this masked man, and if campaigning in the internet age has sped up the news cycle such that a VP resignation would be destructive for about 48 hours, why not just nominate the obnoxious dude first and let the controversy fade, which brings us to the conclusion that McCan, Air Pirate's real VP is not noxious to the electorate, he's just cranky and boring: he is/will be Joseph Isadore Lieberman), and while negotiators are wringing concessions from Bush (inlcuding caps on executive pay for companies in the New Fund, an equity stake for the American people, extended bankruptcy protection and payouts to homeowners, all of which at week's beginning were poison pills for the WH, all swallowed without complaint by Thursday night), McCan the Air Pirate sweeps in and conjures some far-right Sedona caucus, growing up Rep.s from the ground like Cadmus, whose terroristic threats include the scuttling of all consensus in favor of some far-fetched insurance scheme (Q: If a bank doesn't have the liquidity to lend to another bank because so much of its shit is in credit default swaps, why do you think it has the liquidity to buy insurance from the USG to cover its assets? And a follow-up Q: In the event that the assets covered by this new insurance are unsaleable, isn't the USG more broadly on the hook for covering their full, i.e. original cost? And if not -- assuming we write the coverage to pay companies say 9 cents on the dollar when their swaps hit 0 -- isn't that paltry amount of protection just going to shock the system further? In other words, whose ass-brained idea was this? A: Eric Cantor (R-VA), Paul Ryan (R-WI), et alia. Q: Cantor?! No f'n wonder!), which within hours was scaled back to demanding insurance be only a part of the overall bailout (which is kind of like AQIM capturing a French diplomat, demanding a total retreat of all Algerian gov't forces from the countryside, then settling for a plate of babaghannouj. Send any thoughts on spelling of babbaganoush c/o the Editors, Dark Steer, 1 Terminal Plaza, Cleveland OH); if that didn't constitute an awesome week, then the burgeoning media interest in SP would make it so: Palin got zoning aid, gifts.

If that weren't enough, there are some serious acts of cognitive dissonance in McCan's bran that need to be addressed. For my money the most serious is the one going on between the personal-responsibility-fiscal-probity wing and his maverick-bozo wing. (This is fundamentally a subset of the Big McCain Question: What is it to be a Maverick? Does being a maverick mean making deals with your opponents when your party demands absolute fealty, i.e., is the maverick a pragmatist? Or does it mean bucking the demands of everyone and snarling the works until you get your own way [a la E. Cantor], i.e., is the maverick a fanatic? Seriously, I don't know what you mean by The Original Mavericks. Are we selling jeans?) Witness twice in the debates, McCain's assertion that the system corrupted the people, not (as it is in fact) the other way round:

We Republicans came to power to change government, and government changed us. And the -- the worst symptom on this disease is what my friend, Tom Coburn, calls earmarking as a gateway drug, because it's a gateway. It's a gateway to out-of-control spending and corruption.

And we have former members of Congress now residing in federal prison because of the evils of this earmarking and pork-barrel spending.

Okay, first of all, has Tom Coburn ever smoked weed? That's interesting. But what I really like is that "government" and "spending" are entities that exist outside of individual agency. Government changed Republicans. Spending put people in jail! If only Bob Ney had known about that line of defense at his trial! Nevermind the obvious hypocrisy: when Republicans game the system, it's the system's corrupting influence; when Democrats do it, it's "Chicago-style politics." Which I didn't know was a thing; deep dish, sauce on top politics? Second:

Maybe to Senator Obama it's not a lot of money. But the point is that -- you see, I hear this all the time. "It's only $18 billion." Do you know that it's tripled in the last five years? Do you know that it's gone completely out of control to the point where it corrupts people? It corrupts people.

That's why we have, as I said, people under federal indictment and charges. It's a system that's got to be cleaned up.

I have fought against it my career. I have fought against it. I was called the sheriff, by the -- one of the senior members of the Appropriations Committee. I didn't win Miss Congeniality in the United States Senate.

Seriously, who was the last conservative to run on a platform of taking a mulligan on personal responsibility? William Jennings Bryan? Didn't Americans screw themselves to that Cross of Gold? Walnuts sounded like he was reviving the Temperance movement, blaming the ills of Washington not on the people in it, who are of course his friends and neighbors, but on some extra-human miasma, and he might as well be blaming Demon Rum for the evils of our age...dead in the water...
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Once you're off black...

...you never go back. (via the indispensable Juan Cole):

Why wouldn't the Kingdom want to squeeze the maximum out of customers? The Saudis have long memories and recall how high prices can cut into consumption; it happened in the 1980s and it's happening again now. Any threat to oil's leading role as a source of energy is a big worry for a country that sits on reserves of some 260 billion barrels. "We are concerned about the permanent destruction of demand," says a senior Saudi official. "Those who buy hybrid vehicles are not going back to SUVs."

This from Business Week, in an article titled "Saudi Oil, OPEC's Ire," or, maybe, "Once You Go Black, They Never Want You to Go Back."

The Saudi opinion as to American oil consumption, of course, contains No Surprises. Keep them Yankees hooked on their quiet lives and handshakes of carbon monoxide. Fine. How to turn this to politicadvantage? Easy... we stick BHO in Detroit. Speech to an auto workers' union.

"I was reading Business Week on the drive over. You know, they had an article about the Saudis and how their economy is affected by oil prices. And a Saudi minister said... and I'm quoting here... He said "Those who buy hybrid vehicles are not going back to SUVs." [crowd alternately boos and cheers] Now I don't know about you, but it sounds to me like even the Saudis know the way forward for America in the 21st Century. That's why I supported extending aid to the American auto industry so that we can build the cars of tomorrow and jumpstart our economy. That's why I'm calling for investing American tax dollars to make sure blah blah blah..."

Seems so easy. Just wanted to point that out. I'd love to see BHO set out in plain terms exactly how futile the Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less movement is. Say yeah we're going to drill, but it's not our top priority. Twist the blade in Palin, who said we could drill our way out of the problem. Really set out what a 21st Century American energy economy would look like... I think it's coming, and I think it's the knockout blow.

Changing the electorate...lightning war

David Plouffe utters every politico's pipe dream; rather than sit idly watching the electorate change, change the electorate with massive voter registration. Since newly registered voters (purportedly) turn out more than others, massive registration equals massive turnout. Get the citizens of Gary IN to turn out, and Indiana breaks for BHO by 2 points, and the rubes down south are left scratching their heads.

Let's leave aside a few questions, but state them up front: By how much do new-registrees outvote old-registrees? Plouffe didn't say. Doesn't the candidate's identity make it easier to recruit new, once-disenfranchised voters? That is, isn't the registration blitz just a follow-up to Barack's innate crossover appeal? Is any Democrat registering new rural white voters, for instance? What does a candidate owe the newly-enfranchised? Why should the newly-enfranchised trust this candidate more than others? Why, if you're so confident in the power of grass-roots democracy, would you sponsor such a top-down action? Hasn't the GOP already figured out how to screw with that key disenfranchised poor-urban-black vote that Plouffe wants to turn out?

But my real problem with this plan is its implicit laziness, its complicity in preserving the same old remarkably profitable politics.

Ideally, a candidate changes the electorate -- that is, the people -- through his powers of persuasion. Blitzing the registrar is a tacit admission that not enough people are going to be persuaded. When you can't change heads, change the head count.

Registration blitz inverts the relationship between people and their elected. In this scenario, the candidate selects his people and imagines or demands their allegiance.

Registration blitz elides historical and social reasons for disenfranchisement, presuming that everyone who doesn't vote has been manipulated/discriminated/coerced out of it. Black precincts in Philadelphia have half to a third of the registered voters that white precincts have, and even those voters turn out at just over 35% on average. Philadelphia gets news coverage for having separatist movements, but the real story is that America has been engaged in a low-grade secession/quarantine action ever since 1968. It's protest by dropping out. Why should Plouffe expect to skip his history lesson?

(A side note on social reasons for disenfranchisement: When I had jury duty in February 2007, the presiding judge came to tell us all to get our friends to register to vote. "Don't disenfranchise yourself just to get out of jury duty." My white ass was shocked that anyone would consider not registering just to get out of jury duty...for an instant. Then I remembered what the rest of Philadelphia looks like, how voting hasn't changed shit, and how very much jury duty sucks...and I began to understand. I think it's a lazy, shiftless response, but not totally unwarranted.)

So Plouffe should make a deal: for everybody who registers this cycle and then gets called for jury duty, an Obama volunteer should take their spot. Civic responsibility needs an examplar. You can't hector people into enacting democracy, any more than you can choose who votes for you...
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All roads lead to Hanoi...

I can't believe how easy it is to goad McCain's people into talking about Vietnam.

Earlier this morning, I figured the relevant meme would be "Senility."

I think — I'll have my staff get to you [...] It's condominiums where — I'll have them get to you.

Sure. I'm so old and pampered that I have to have my staff get back to you for a one-word answer? That's the senility-meme.

But by now, it's the Vietnam-meme. McCain can't handle his finances himself because he's a POW. Here's Brian Rogers for McCain:

This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison

Oh shit! Ha ha ha! I'm not sure there's anything more to say here...McCain's people now have to explain the intricacies of Illinois property- and campaign-finance law if they want to talk about Rezko. Meanwhile, cheap jokes about McCain losing the keys to his condos abound...
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Evan Bayh at 2-1...

I think BHO's VP is Bayh for a number of reasons. That is, unless the roll call inspires some kind of divine rage in the Old Ladies' Caucus and they turn into the Fedayeen Hillary...

Everyone up Phila way is excited about Joe Biden, pointing to his speech on Georgia, etc., which to our mind should argue for his being SecState. And if that's not enough, how about that olde "clean, articulate" quote?

As for the Virginian who's getting all this play today, when Tim Kaine ran for mayor of Richmond, there was a whispering campaign about his being a closeted homosexual. So imagine BHO picks him and he gets McGreeveyed; Kaine has to make an "I am a Gay American" speech, and we spend the rest of the fall in a McGovernlike VP limbo...BHO is unafraid to subvehicularize: ask Jim Johnson, Jeremiah Wright, Wes Clark, Ludacris, et alia, and the faintest whiff of controversy will kill off the Kaine flirtation...Witness the larger argument against TK here...

Bayh. Obama-Bayh. Political neophyte alongside scion of Indiana dynasty. Indiana, Republican since forever is actually in play...Virginia is not. Virginia belongs to Obama...ergo, Bayh.

More on McCain Housing later
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Quantum static or something...

...is interfering with our ability to confindently assay predictions on the condition of the electorate...in case you couldn't tell, I've given up on calling this election. BHO might be sitting on a natural straight, leading in states that would add up to 273 electoral votes, etc. But we're so close to the event that our instruments distort its shape.

If K and John Dickerson are right, the electorate shouldn't groove on the Paris-Britney ad. Not just because it violates the prohibition on infantilization of Barack. But because it's old hat. BHO has been a celebrity for a while, remember? Here's Dickerson:

The “One” video shows a clip of Obama describing how on Election Day, “a light will shine down … you will experience an epiphany, and you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack.” You could argue that he wasn’t really being self-deprecating, he was actually cloaking his own Messiah complex in a humorous guise. But either way, he was there before McCain.

Except that the attack is paying dividends...let's ignore the wobbly validity of Rasmussen's "Do you trust X to do Y?" formula. (Saying "I trust Richard Nixon to cover his own ass," is not the same as saying "I trust Richard Nixon." But if you listen to Ras, more Americans "trust McCain on the issues." Not deceptive, just an epistemological leap.) When Americans think of the President fulfulling banal duties such as "negotiating trade agreements," they don't want to see Paris Hilton in his plug-in-hybrid Escalade. No Department of the Interior for you either Ms. Spears. Justin Timberlake may still be a dark horse candidate for Treasury...

AdAge helps us stay grounded -- as if the hailstorm of Rasmussen's reminders didn't convince us already that Americans are quasi-Fascist nativist religious freaks. Aghast, we turn the page for the crosstabs, thinking, Who are these rubes? Where do they congregate? -- the ad functions because it has the crack-like properties of all great advertising. You hang on for the kicker: Obama will raise taxes and you will pay more for oil.

Personally, I think this is a blip in the polls. Walnuts is still like a lunar rover, marooned, barely picking up signals from the home base, travelling a desolate landscape with only Rovites to accompany him...Will BHO take the time to remind voters that his opponent is one mescaline hit away from being Mike Gravel? I'm still waiting for the "This isn't the John McCain I had come to respect. I don't know who to trust anymore..."-spiel...

One final note: Presumably the purpose of the bizarre early attacks on Barack was not to damage him directly, but to broaden the scope of possible attacks. Never mind that BHO is not a Muslim, does not wear a turban, sings the anthem, waves the flag, pledges allegiance to the United States of 'Murkka, etc. The mere fact that the slurs got such wide play, and took so long to debunk means that the little lies can just slip in under the radar. I can hear the moderate tone already: "Look, I know he's not a terrorist. But he will raise the price of gas..."
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Tim Kaine is not the dude, Barry...

No no no. This is a bad idea. Let's see about shutting down the Barack-Obama-Tim-Kaine rumor mill.

On the surface, Tim Kaine is a perfect match. The bumper stickers can say "O-K!" He was the first governor to come out for Obama. He ran on a platform of "smart growth" and "bipartisan solutions" -- thin gruel, but Virginia lapped it up, and it's perfectly of a piece with BHO's efforts to "overcome divisiveness." He's a Catholic, and thus opposes both abortion and capital punishment. On the stump, he's basically a non-entity, perfect for the Bucket of Warm Spit job. Anyway, so-called pragmatists will swoon over the possibility of recruiting this pro-choice Southern governor with middle-brow concerns: traffic, budgets, resources, crime.

There are numerous problems with this scenario, and they are all largely functions of the idea that a successful politics shoots for the mean of public opinion; that in order to get 50%-plus-one, you just tailor your message for the fifty-first percentile of human consciousness.

Confusion for seniors. Listen to it for a second. Johmmcain. ObamaKaine. Exit pollsters' nightmare...

Overkill. Virginia is already "in play." Kaine can't make it more "in play," and he's too much a carpetbagger and neophyte to guarantee it'll hold for Obama. And by itself, Virginia is transforming into New Jersey. Let's not gild the lily, shall we?

Obama needs a feral hound. Kaine is a namby-pamby. BHO is still being flogged for being a namby-pamby. We want two guys getting knocked for being incapable of making The Hard Decisions? Where is the Lyndon Johnson on this ticket? The John Nance Garner? The Spiro Agnew? Where is the advocate of muscular politics? Who is Obama's Cheney?

The biggie might actually be Kaine and wind. Kaine took in $135,000 from Dominion Power and is in turn backing a new coal-fired power plant for Wise County. Wise is too downtrodden a place to protest much, and coal is the last good job in Southwest Virginia. [Cf. WVTF on the Last Clinic in Galax. (mp3)] But BHO had better expect talk about The Shafting of Wise County; how, in effect, Kaine Administration policy is to redistribute income from the poor, rural Southwest and Southside to the rich, exurban North.

Kaine, to fight back, had better talk about wind...should be in this pdf somewhere..."there are environmental and community-related challenges" (p.81) to putting wind turbines in super-windy Highland County...

Will Kaine sit on wind in favor of coal gasification? Probably. Since he's found ways to strip-mine in the guise of producing "scenic vistas":

The “coal synergy” partnership will allow Alpha Natural Resources and Pioneer Coal to mine coal along the corridor and prepare a highway-worthy roadbed [...] coupling surface coal mining with building a highway.

Fuggedaboudit: BHO likes corn anyway...

Finally, that abominable State of the Union riposte. Cilizza is too kind; Tim Kaine's nervous tic does not make him look like The Rock. He looks weird; his writers suck; he's still learning the teleprompter, but that's all style. The content was the killer. Kaine lacks the Clintonian understanding that comforting the inconsolable does not jive with self-congratulation. You can't just go Katrina, Iraq, economy, then:

[...]we're moving ahead by focusing on service, competent management and results. It's all about bringing people together to find common-sense solutions to our common problems.
That's how we in Virginia earned the ranking of America's "Best Managed State."

It's tantamount to saying "I manage results for your pain."

In sum, Kaine represents the Built for Solutions, politics-of-no-politics that Mike Bloomberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Warner and Webb have been pimping for the bulk of this decade. It is the first baby step into the abyss of single-party government. No one can disagree with solving problems! The public, satisfied, retreats from political life. The political class proceeds to identify problems, develop and implement solutions...

The process is only halted when we remember that the cult of "competencies and skillsets" hides a little Auschwitz; that every solution is always already a Final Solution...
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Welcome to the Fudge Haus...

Once more blurring the line between the campaign as high-meta Kaufmannesque "comedy" and, as Bumiller sees it, the campaign as paean to ineptitude, John McCain was in Columbus, Ohio's German Village yesterday at a place known as Schmidt's Restaurant und Sausage Haus. OMFG. I can't stop peeing my pants.

BHO was in another place, doing something else. Whatever it was, it was not funny.

Walnuts even gave a press conference in front of a sign that apparently said "Fudge Haus." I couldn't read it from the AP video, because of the tacky gold paint and faux-Gothic lettering.

While there, he was able to sample the "Bahama Mama sausage and jumbo cream puffs." Perhaps at the same time.

While Barry unfurled a cosmic vision of brothers and sisters breaking boundaries, John ate a quarter-pound stick of swirly marshmallow fudge, saying, "Here, in my mouth, ebony and ivory live in perfect harmony," and "People, listen. Fudge knows no boundaries."

In reality, McCain was there to woo German-Americans, a key demographic unfortunately alienated by the 1930s crackdown on German-lanugage schools, the elimination of German community groups and sympathizers like the Silver Shirts, the mocking of German cuisine, and the firebombing of Dresden.

Columbus resident Otto Schneemann reflected on this: "Above all, the will of the people, including our demand for living-space (lebensraum), must be met and adhered to!"

Ohh, I can only laugh but so much. The midwest is a crazy Teutonic place, full of hunting lodges, deer heads, red leather. Among the populace, a grim hunger for the apocalypse. Faced with this lala-land, McCain could either walk Lindsey Graham around on a leash with a knife in his own teeth, or suck it up and face the wurst. The awful wurst...
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[His] art of war is unknown...

"Horizon" don't beat "timeline". I mean, "Surge" beat "escalation," sure, but with a bigger stage, BHO's gonna call it tomayto-tomahto in that commonsensical way and that'll catch on. Horizon-potayto, timeline-potahto, he's been saying we should call the whole thing off the whole time.

Thing is, the semantics don't matter much, because we're seeing a repeat of what happened versus Hillary. Back in the debates, there was a stone-cold killer moment wherein one BHO, in the parlance of our times, "owned" one Hillary Clinton. An addendum, one supposes, is necessary for Ye Olde Dark Steer Theorem #4432: You underestimate Barry Hussein at your peril.

Walnuts, et al. got what they wanted: they'd raised the rhetoric to the point where BHO had to go to Iraq and make a big deal about it. Unfortunately for them, he used the opportunity to turn the trip into a global jetsetting romp wherein he... well... looks... presidential. Littman, over at HuffPo, gets it perfectly:

All John McCain has done, with his childish taunting of Obama, is create a situation where Obama has now gone overseas; been seen with General Petraeus smiling, looking Presidential; been photographed with world leaders who seem excited by the prospect of an Obama Presidency, and shown, by images, that he fits in just fine on the world stage; and, of course, Obama has taken all the media attention with him when McCain is desperate for media coverage.

If McCain's team wants any chance of winning, they've got to stop underestimating this man. He and his team are excellent at goading opponents into hubristically overplaying their hands--see frontheavy spending from Clinton camp and redfaced Bill Clinton. The dominant media narrative is that McCain's the one heavy on foreign policy cred. Well we've got a week plus of footage of BHO politickin' daily with diplomats and not just looking like he belongs, but exceeding expectations as he goes. Meanwhile, Walnuts looks the fool mixing up brown people geographies, all the while trying to figure out how he's going to address the issue that's going to dominate the political discourse this fall: the shit sandwich that is the Bush economy.

And, on that note, a question: The quieter Iraq gets, the more people focus on their pocketbooks; so is the prevailing wisdom that "progress" in the war is good news for Republicans...wrong?

We got it sewn, The Firm art of war is unknown
Lower your tone, face it, homicide cases get blown
Aristocrats, politickin daily with diplomats
See me I'm an official mack, Lex Coupe triple black
-AZ, "Affirmative Action"