Month: September 2008

Mercifully, Henry Blodget summarizes the bailout bill’s key points and turns them into English.

That’s the refrain coming from the usual suspects. My question: how does Bill Kristol know who Palin is at all? I think he met her once – the same level of scrutiny that McCain gave her before deeming her fully qualified to take over the Oval Office at a moment’s notice. We have no real evidence that she isn’t being herself in these cringe-inducing performances. Her pre-veep performances don’t show her any better. And the real test of this, anyway, would be a real press conference, with follow-ups. But that, incredibly, won’t happen. For the first time in American history, a candidate who could become president will not have a press conference in the campaign! No, you’re not hallucinating. Welcome to Vladimir Putin’s idea of election campaigns in America.

The truth is: Palin was a concept, a great concept, if you live for political gimmicks, tactics and drama, as Kristol and McCain do. But if you’re actually hoping for a president capable of making decisions in a crisp, yet reasoned and fair way, why would anyone pick a total newbie with a history of pathological lying, small town vindictiveness and religious extremism? Conservatives used to be marked by a skepticism toward airy concepts and an eagerness to understand actual reality.

Kristol, in this sense, is a degenerate form of intellectual and a particularly anti-conservative apparatchik.

He has long since stopped thinking about ideas and reality, focusing on short-term tactics and marketing for his company brand, the GOP. He has lots of brilliant ideas that may or may not have any basis in reality – Saddam’s WMDs, the lack of sectarian tension in Iraq, a belief that Arab democracy could spring up overnight come to mind from his now laughably bad book, "The War In Iraq". For Kristol, Palin was just such a marketing concept to sell the new war with Iran and a deeper occupation of Iraq – out of a genuine but misguided fear for Israel’s security. The trouble is: just as with the Iraq war, the facts on the ground simply deny his dreams.

So like most elite intellectuals, and unlike actual conservatives, Kristol simply clings to his abstractions, even now, even with so many dead bodies and tortured prisoners lying in his wake. One day, Paul Johnson should write a book about him.

Wolcott slams Brooks:

It’s the conservative men who are now the most condescending to Palin, treating her gaffes and knowledge gaps as trifles because she brings something fresh and telegenic to the ticket. Today on Chris Matthews, David Brooks, setting the bar so low for Palin a cricket could hop it, lamely defended her as "smart" and said that if she improved in her debate with Biden, she might rise to the level of "mediocre," the shruggy wave of his hands indicating that mediocre was enough to pass muster with him.

David was positively giddy when she was first unveiled. I aired my disappointment with his defense of the indefensible last week. The point is: the debate may make a difference in the polls. Who knows? Maybe her regular-gal act could work for 90 minutes. But serious people concerned about the fate of this country do not back sub-mediocre candidates for the presidency at a time like this. Shouldn’t these people put country first?

Now Mitt is saying it. Be careful what you ask for, guys.

Taxi To The Dark Side premieres on HBO tonight at 9 p.m. (ET/PT), 8 p.m. (CT). I wrote about the documentary here.

Heh:

Thus for McCain, a full day and night after the exposure of his shaky running mate to such ridicule, to make the same mistake himself in Oxford, Miss., was really something to see. It was even worse if you heard it on radio, as I initially did, than if you saw it on television. (You can hear that geezerish whistle in his pipes much more ominously than when you are looking at his elderly face.) Anyway, on the same question of "without preconditions," he walked into Obama’s tersely phrased riposte, which was to quote Kissinger in precisely the same way as Couric had already done.

McCain looked and perhaps felt a fool at this point, and may have been only slightly cheered up when Kissinger told the Weekly Standard after the debate that he after all doesn’t, at least not for this precise moment, "recommend presidential high-level talks with Iran." Which, when compared with his earlier remarks, makes it seem that he has no idea what he currently thinks and should either be apologized to by, or should apologize to, either Sarah Palin or Katie Couric, or conceivably both.

A reader sends along this anecdote of a senior white dude:

I went out canvassing yesterday and am going again on Saturday. I have had some remarkable experiences. I approached 2 tall black young guys who were walking on the street I was canvassing. One was without his shirt and when he turned around, I saw he had 2 tattoos on his chest – 3 inch letters, one word HATE, the other PAIN. Yikes!

I asked them if they were registered – yes, both of them said. I asked if they were going  to get to the polls: yes they were. As I walked away, the tattooed guy says, "Thank you, sir, for supporting Obama".

It was a stunner on several levels (thanking me; ‘"sir"; the look of appreciation of a kid, not a gangster…).

Know hope.

Kottke points me to this article by David Chang:

The machinery that’s pumped so much meat into our lives over the last half century was never built to last, and now it’s breaking down big-time. Feed is more expensive. Gasoline is more expensive. Milk, rice, butter, corn — it’s all going through the roof. And for the foreseeable future, it’s not coming back down.

The Economist on the final deal:

None of these concessions seriously cripples Mr Paulson’s flexibility or the programme’s appeal to the industry. He can structure the warrants to be painful or painless. The provisions on executive do not seriously hinder companies’ ability to hand over fat paycheques. The prospect of higher taxes five years from now should not affect a firm’s decision on whether to participate today.

“The highest priority is restoring liquidity to the markets,” says Scott Talbott of the Financial Services Roundtable, representing financial companies. “Companies will participate in the programme even with the restrictions.”

Big questions remain about the programme’s implementation. One challenge is figuring out how to acquire the myriad of mortgage-related securities now clogging the financial system without being ripped off. An even bigger challenge is moving fast enough to create a firebreak against the raging crisis.

 

If I were a House Republican, I’d vote yes, but scream no.

"All Governor Palin should insist on, after the desperate editing of her words by Gibson, is that every interview be live. And, if they’re all disasters, they’ll wind up like Biden’s gaffes or Clinton’s adulteries. As Stalin remarked in another context, one is a tragedy, a million is a statistic," – Mark Steyn.

I’m still a little amazed that even the most hardcore Republican hacks can’t see what an almighty mess they’ve got on ther hands. But they’ll be ready an instant after the debate to say that black is white if they have to.