Month: September 2008

Beijing, China, 6.05 pm.

Kristol seconds K-Lo:

As for the question of Friday night’s debate, which some in the media seem to think more important than saving the financial system–if the negotiations are still going on in D.C., McCain should offer to send Palin to debate Obama!

Thanks, I guess, for that $700 billion bailout estimate:

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

David Frum asks:

Is the year that the U.S. government will have its first trillion-dollar budget deficit?

As Karl Rove once said: "deficits don’t matter." To today’s Republicans, there are no deficits. Just the reality they insist upon, and the fight against libruls.

This eternal Peter Sellers parody of a politician unable to say anything but forced to say something has somehow more salience right now:

My friends, in the light of present-day developments, let me say, right away, that I do not regard existing conditions lightly. On the contrary, I have always regarded them as subjects of the gravest responsibility and shall ever continue to do so.

Indeed, I will even go further and state quite categorically that I am more than sensible of the definitions of the precise issues which are at this very moment concerning us all. We must build, but we must build surely.

Let me say just this: If any part of what I am saying is challenged, then I am more than ready to meet such a challenge. For I have no doubt whatsoever that whatever I may have said in the past, or what I am saying now, is the exact, literal and absolute truth as to the state of the case.

I put it to you that this is not the time for vague promises of better things to come. For, if I were to convey to you a spirit of false optimism, then I should be neither fair to you nor true to myself.

But does this mean, I hear you cry, that we can no longer look forward to the future that is to come? Certainly not!

Voice from the audience: What about the workers?

“What about the workers?” indeed sir! Grasp, I beseech you, with both hands the opportunities that are offered. Let us assume a bold front and go forward together.

Let us carry the fight against ignorance to the four corners of the Earth, because it is a fight which concerns us all.

And now, finally my friends, in conclusion, let me say just this.

All you can say is: unbelievable. Except it’s true. She is the vice-presidential candidate of a national political party. Seriously:

Gideon Rachman of the FT:

If McCain had been conducting a campaign of utmost sobriety and deliberation up until this moment – I think calling the debate off might have worked for him. The trouble is that in the past couple of weeks, he’s given the impression of making spur of the moment pronouncements and decisions. So at the beginning of the week, he is announcing that the US economy is fundamentally in good shape. By the end of the week, the crisis is so grave that it would be a dereliction of duty to honour his commitment to one of the hallowed traditions of a US election – the presidential debate.

A reader writes:

The Couric interview reminded me of an episode in the 5th grade when I tried to fake my way through an oral presentation on a book I hadn’t read.  Neither of us pulled it off.

The latest tracking polls suggest the American people aren’t buying it. Maybe they’re finally waking up. If they do wake up, if they see what has been done in their name these last seven years, the rage is going to be very, very hard to contain.

So McCain’s pledge to suspend his campaign until a deal is reached will never actually happen (since he hasn’t suspended it yet)? It was all pure drama and distraction? I guess it was, whatever Bill Clinton tries to say.