Hard to improve on Chris Bodenner’s take here. Yes, Obama did, in such a casual, insubstantial way that I buy his defense that that wasn’t his main point. But the McCain camp’s seizing on this sliver of an opening was impressive, if not too elevating, as a campaign tactic.
So far, my hope for a substantive, elevated debate between Obama and McCain has not exactly been borne out, has it?
Yes, the last couple of weeks of the campaign, even from my remote perch, were pretty uninspiring on the GOP side. Here’s my brief take, for what it’s worth. Obama’s fortnight was an objectively miraculous one: Maliki and then (almost) Bush endorsed his withdrawal timetable from Iraq (game, set and match to BO), he conducted himself with foreign leaders flawlessly, burnished his international rep, and proved the force of his soft power potential. (By the way, 200,000 in Berlin was less, it seems to me, about the celebrity of Obama than about the disaster of Bush-Cheney. Obama is the vehicle for the world’s hope for the return of the America they remember.) But the flipside of this kind of success is always an attempt to take the dude down a few pegs and I can’t get too worked up about that. Of course a candidate being greeted the way Obama was in Europe will prompt a raspberry from the back-row when he gets back home. I don’t see anything that awful about that. It’s actually quite healthy in a democracy.
Still, it also had the hallmarks of the usual boomer dust-ups. The arrogant-celebrity meme is a variation on the usual Rovian fare: empty of actual policy substance but evocative of playground loyalties and resentments. Basically, McCain called Obama a girl, to appeal to the jocks, and then called him arrogant to flatter the nerds.
Paris Hilton is a two-fer. Choosing a female celebrity is integral to the usual attempt to feminize the Democrat. I could see nothing racist whatever in the message, mind you, but it was, as Weaver noted, pretty asinine.
Less asinine was McCain’s two-pronged lie that Obama would rather lose a war than a campaign and that he snubbed injured troops in Germany. The former is repulsive and you can tell McCain knows it because he has a weird habit of saying it and then grinning broadly and humming a little to himself as a semi-laugh. He doesn’t own the statement even as he says it. The charge itself is about as uncivil as it is possible to be, close to calling Obama treasonous, right? And the troop snub jibe is simply, demonstrably untrue, as the McCain camp was forced to semi-concede.
So McCain’s main moves these past two weeks have been either childish or disgusting, and both times he has signaled he didn’t really believe his own message.
He doesn’t seem like a serious president to me.
(Cartoon from yesterday’s WaPo by the great Tom Toles.)
Eddy, at low tide, yesterday.
"Well, yeah. I’m kind of on the sidelines, but I can’t do golf and all that stuff anymore. But life is good. It’s wonderful, and it’s great having the family up here in Maine, and all is well. Do you see our man Ailes at all?" – former president George H.W. Bush, to Rush Limbaugh, on the air, last week. He didn’t realize he was being broadcast.
I missed my occasional K-Lo hathos:
Today marks 20 years of excellence in broadcasting. I think you know the well of my respect for Rush Limbaugh runs deep — and you know that I am not a rarity. He drives the Left mad because he is so effective. And we are a stronger movement because of it. He’s a man in love with his country, grateful to his Maker for the opportunities and gifts he has. He’s a human model of hard work and humility and a master entertainer. Now, perhaps, more than ever, he’s a treat and a treasure. Congratulations and thank you, Rush!
South Park offers up the full non-censored version. I’m not sure TV usually puts out director’s cuts of shows.
I can’t remember when I last unplugged quite as effectively as I did the past two weeks. For a week, no email; for another week, only marginal reading of the web. The come-down wasn’t too brutal, as I slipped into a bit of a coma for a while. And the feeling of free-floating freedom that being a normal pre-web person provided was a bit of a revelation. You can get lost in these here Internets. Sometimes you need to clear the mental horizon of all protruding objects and breathe a little to remember what being human used to feel like.
I did my usual mini-retreats into the dunes and beaches of the Cape. What I find I crave after months of intense blogging is solitude. This may sound weird since a blogger is usually physically alone. But never mentally. In fact, being in the thick of the blogosphere is to be bombarded with company, loud and quiet, polite and rude, always begging for engagement. You can be on the end of a wharf in Provincetown and still feel as if you’re in downtown Manhattan or central London. So I headed out to the beach, sans husband and dogs, for a temporary vegetative state. I took a photo of my veg-station above one day last week. It conveys the general idea.
I did some reading and writing. Ron Hansen’s "Exiles" was right up my alley. But Jane Mayer’s "The Dark Side" stayed with me. It’s the most important book yet written about the Bush presidency. Perhaps it was seeing "The Dark Knight" at the same time, but if you read that book, absorb what is tells us about what has happened to this country these past seven years, and then read or watch this election campaign filter through the ether, it is hard to avoid a sense of deep concern about where we’re headed. We have war criminals as president and vice-president, and a constitution staggering after one serious terror attack. But the campaign is about whether Obama is like Paris Hilton.
The threat of Rove and his ilk is not that their petty, deceptive and irresistibly subjective tactics are evil in a petty, deceptive, childish kind of way. It’s that their venial sins distract from their mortal ones. It’s the mortal ones we have to be worried about. And the mortal ones that they are getting away with.
Well, I might as well get started back today. But a word of thanks to Patrick Appel, who ran the site while I was away, and posted so often, and tended to the guest-bloggers. Blogging at this pace is not as easy as Patrick makes it look, but Patrick is fast becoming a master of the art. I couldn’t do this site without him and you now know a little better why. Chris and Jessie are two other Dish alums, and it’s a source of some pride that they grow up so fast into bloggers in their own right. Thanks also to Daniel and Hilary, two of the sharpest, most civil and yet penetrating bloggers on the Internet. Reading the Dish while not writing it is slightly weird, like renting out your house to strangers, but their mix of passion and nuance and insight was a pleasure to read.
I’m back now. And the beat goes on.
Pulau Penang, Malaysia, 6.30 pm.
By Patrick Appel
Andrew will be back tomorrow. As always, I’ve had a great time filling in. Many thanks to Andrew, the guest bloggers, and all the readers.
By Chris Bodenner
A huge and humble thanks to Andrew for giving me the opportunity to help out with the Dish. I had a blast, and thanks for all your feedback, readers.
The Dish 