Month: September 2008

Joe Gandelman:

All she has to do in her debate with Democratic Sen. Joe Biden is to put in a credible performance and not make any gaffes.

Just get some popcorn and some dramamine and we’ll all get through this together.

"After reading my opinion column in the Anchorage Daily News this morning, fellow Alaskan blogger Tom Lamb, asks "Why is it that Andrew Halcro who is so critical of Palin, wanted to be on the same ticket with her."

That’s an easy answer; because I believed Sarah Palin had the qualifications to be a terrific Lt. Governor. And watching her struggle to give coherent answers on the national stage, I believe more today than ever before she has the qualifications to be a terrific Lt. Governor," – Andrew Halcro, former Republican candidate for governor of Alaska.

Byron York argues that a full-fledged base-oriented propaganda push that by-passed the networks would have "worked" better. It’s always a little chilling to read a journalist extolling pure spin from the powerful.

K-Lo has a new motto. Kristol is on-board.

Brad Plumer speculates:

Wall Street’s woes are making it less likely that Washington will take up major climate legislation anytime soon—and that’s not just because lawmakers are spending all their time focusing on the economy. Banks like Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan have long been among the most ardent and influential supporters of setting up a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, since they stand to profit greatly from the opening of a new commodity market in pollution permits (estimates of the value of the new market are as high as $3 trillion). Now, though, with an enormous question mark hanging over their own futures, the Wall Street giants’ support for a carbon-trading scheme may well become more tepid.

No tears here. I’ve come to believe cap-and-trade won’t be worth its cost.

"The decision to give the federal government the ability to nationalize almost every bad mortgage in America interrupts this basic truth of our free market economy. . . . Before you vote, ask yourself why you came here and vote with courage and integrity to those principals [sic]. If you came here because you believe in limited government and the freedom of the American marketplace, vote in accordance with those convictions," – Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana.

My view on the first weekend was that Palin was the most reckless pick in modern American history. That’s becoming pretty much the consensus three weeks later. Here’s Carl Bernstein, echoing Fareed:

No presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country’s security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate.

The key thing about Palin is what it tells us about McCain: unfit to be president.

Let’s remember, shall we? An unprecedented and major crisis – which the president says could destroy the country. The answer? Appointing a member of his administration to have near-total power over the enterprise, unfettered by checks and balances, with unlimited resources to dispense with as he wants. Yes, there’s some oversight in the package that has emerged today – but not much:

"The administration’s original proposal was a non-starter," Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said this afternoon. "They wanted a blank check and we couldn’t give it to them." At the same time, Paulson will get direct hiring authority for building the staff that will carry out the bailout, the ability to set regulations, and the power to designate financial institutions as agents of the government.

I understand that something almost certainly had to pass. But the impulse behind the Bush administration’s "strongman" approach to government is as dangerous in the economy as in the war:

It is now extremely clear that, in the run-up to the Iraq war, Congress and the press failed in their duty. We were much too credulous toward an administration’s certainty in the face of great peril. We let deliberation cede to pure action. When reality started to seep through the propaganda, the administration responded by smearing the press, demonising the opposition and running election campaigns on the basis of fear and deference to presidential authority. In the face of the current economic crisis we surely mustn’t make the same mistake again. We have to demand transparency, deliberation, debate and factual data. We must not be rushed into anything rash. Handing a financial dictator a trillion dollars to do with as he wishes is not a democratic impulse; it is antidemocratic.

This is a critical moment for real conservatives to stand up and be counted.

Edmund Burke, the founder of Toryism, was concerned above all with checks on concentrated power. Nothing appalled him more than naked, unchecked executive power – as the third and fourth US presidents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, also understood. And yet that is what has consumed the American constitution for the past seven years, aided and abetted by so-called conservatives who have let fear override reason, power trump freedom and terror displace the rule of law.

In some ways what we are seeing now is also reassuring. It is the end of a great, recent American illusion. The illusion that you can delegate self-government to a great leader. You can’t. The illusion that wars are won purely by saying they can’t be lost. The illusion that you can borrow and borrow and spend and spend and the day of reckoning will never come. But that day is here. And it is long overdue.

In the resistance to the bailout from men like Cantor and Pence, we may be seeing the saplings of the conservatism that could emerge after what may well be the Big Liberal Leap of the Bush-Obama years. Well, I guess you’ve got to start somewhere.

(Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty.)

An image from Sarah Palin’s id.