Bob Kaplan sees a proximate cause for Pakistan’s ISI fomenting terror in Afghanistan:
The Karzai government has openly and brazenly strengthened its ties with India, and allowed Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif. It has kept alive the possibility of inviting India to help train the new Afghan army, and to help in dam construction in the northeastern Afghan province of Kunar, abutting Pakistan. All this has driven the ISI wild with fear and anger.
I missed this story from Tennessee in my time off:
According to the News-Sentinel, Knoxville police department investigator Steve Still wrote in the search warrant that Jim David Adkisson, the man who was arrested in the rampage, went to the church "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets."
Adkisson, who had served in the military, said "that because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement he would then target those that had voted them in office," the search warrant states. Among the items seized from Adkisson’s house were three books: "The O’Reilly Factor," by television commentator Bill O’Reilly; "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder," by radio personality Michael Savage; and "Let Freedom Ring," by political pundit Sean Hannity.
There are nutters everywhere. Giving them rhetorical ammunition to hate whole groups of people is dangerous.
Here you have the current message of the McCain campaign from no less an authority than Rick Davis:
"Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand ‘MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew—Black Forest Berry Honest Tea’ and worry about the price of arugula."
They really played the arugula card? For all McCain’s personal qualities, we’re learning that the machine behind the GOP simply re-makes the campaign in its own Coulterite image. Instead of actually fighting on the core questions – how do we get out of Iraq with the least damage? how do we get past carbon-based energy? how do we tackle al Qaeda’s new base in Pakistan and within the nuclear-armed Pakistani government? how will we reduce the massive debt bequeathed us by the Bush-Rove GOP? how do we restore the Geneva Conventions? – we are debating people’s cultural insecurities and food choices.
The slow collapse of conservatism as a coherent governing philosophy is not unrelated to this. If you never want to fight campaigns on policy, why bother crafting any?
Take it from George:
From Obama, such tropes, although silly, are not menacing, any more than they were from Ronald Reagan, who was incorrigibly fond of perhaps the least conservative, and therefore the most absurd, proposition ever penned by a political philosopher, Thomas Paine’s "we have it in our power to begin the world over again."
No. We. Don’t.
Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, Canada, 9 pm.
An interesting defense of their relative discretion:
These sort of crapulous stories are next-door neighbors to the sleazy negative advertising that, well, John McCain has been accosting us with. They feed the notion that politicians are just a bunch of soulless, egomaniacal dolts without a high-minded–whoa, almost said bone in their bodies–pick your allusion. One of the worst results of the past 30 years of the Reagan pendulum swing is that the politicians-as-perverts meme fits quite neatly into the government-as-problem-not-solution meme. Given the problems we’re facing now, this is not where we want our national discourse to be.
A bacon alarm clock:
…the Wake n’ Bacon alarm clock is different from your average variety clock in that it doesn’t use sound or harsh vibration to arouse a weary sleeper. Rather, the unit cooks a slice of bacon for you to fill your bedroom with the smell of breakfast.
McCain used the metaphor first, as Jed Lewison points out. Here’s the ad from late June:
Out here on the Cape, I’m reminded always of the existence of the moon and stars. The big skies and the distance from major cities brings them to the foreground of the night sky in ways you just don’t see in D.C. It doesn’t surprise me that some people have found sleep disorders emerging from urban mankind’s banishment of the darkness of the night sky. From a 1996 Cullen Murphy article on modern sleep patterns:
…the implication of electricity in the sleep deficit seems hard to argue with. Whatever it is that we wish or are made to do–pursue leisure, earn a living–there are simply far more usable hours now in which to do it. Darkness was once an ocean into which our capacity to venture was greatly limited; now we are wresting vast areas of permanent lightness from the darkness, much the way the Dutch have wrested polders of dry land from the sea. So vast are these areas that in composite satellite photographs of the world at night the contours of civilization are clearly illuminated–the boundaries of continents, the metastases of cities. Even Wrigley Field, once a reliable pool of nocturnal darkness, would now show up seventeen nights during the baseball season.
In the United States at midnight more than five million people are at work at full-time jobs. Supermarkets, gas stations, copy shops–many of these never close. I know of a dentist in Ohio who decided to open an all-night clinic, and has had the last laugh on friends who believed that he would never get patients. The supply-side theory may not have worked in economics, but it has certainly worked with regard to light: the more we get, the more we find ways to put it to use. And, of course, the more we get, the more we distance ourselves from the basic diurnal rhythm in which our evolution occurred.
The Dish 