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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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. 

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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Will He Hide Behind Her Skirt?

Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall gets it right in a simple question:

Will John McCain bring Sarah Palin to the debates with Obama?

Hits on a major belief of mine about this campaign: the polls will stay close until the debates, and then I believe you'll start to see BHO pull away. More later on that.

What the fuck does anything have to do with Vietnam?

This, too, is going to get old very quickly:

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions.

“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

One half expects him to admit to having "dabbled in liberalism... not in 'Nam, of course."

Issue is this: Walter here can only ride the POW thing so far. He's used it in political ads, of course. But he's also used 'Nam as a proof of his economic bona fides:

HOOK: I want to start with Senator McCain.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the importance of leadership and management experience. What makes you more qualified than Mitt Romney, a successful CEO and businessman, to manage our economy?

MCCAIN: Because I know how to lead. I know how to lead.

I led the largest squadron in the United States Navy. And I did it out of patriotism, not for profit.

And I can hire lots of managers, but leadership is a quality that people look for.

And I have the vision and the knowledge and the background to take on the transcendent issue of the 21st century, which is radical Islamic extremism. I've been involved in every single major national security crisis since -- in the last 20 years. I'm proud to have played a role in those, and I'm proud to have played a role in making sure that we didn't raise the white flag and surrender in Iraq, as the Democrats wanted us to do and we would have done if we had set timetables for a withdrawal.

So, the fact is -- so the fact is that I have the qualifications and the knowledge and the background and the judgment. I don't need any on-the-job training.

MCCAIN: I had the great honor of serving this country in uniform for 22 years.

I had the great honor of being inspired while I was in the prison camps of North Vietnam by the news of a governor and his wife who cared very much about those of us who were in captivity.

And when I came home, I was inspired by him, and I voted for him, and I supported him, and I was proud to be a leader in the Reagan revolution -- I mean, a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution, as we fought these wars together with unshakable courage and principle. And I'm prepared to follow in his tradition and in his footsteps.

Quoted at length to demonstrate the painfulness of the moment, since the video's a bit harder to come by. That was a ramble of at least a minute, maybe two. Not only does he bring in 'Nam to talk about the economy, but he doesn't even answer the question. Seeing it live was cringe-inducing. Seeing it happen again during the debates will be even worse.

Back to 'Nam, though. This is going to be Saturday Night Live fodder by October, because they won't stop pushing it. That quote at the beginning is indicative of the way it's going to go. It's just the thing he and his campaign most naturally fall back upon.

More later...