Month: September 2008

Bill Kristol on Sarah Palin. All he writes about in this piece of propaganda is electoral strategy and the people he hates in the media. In a week, he hasn’t said a word about Sarah Palin’s foreign policy views. I know she’s being safely indoctrinated by Joe Liebermanand AIPAC as we speak, but the fact that Kristol, like the rest of us, has not yet been able to point to a single view of hers on foreign policy in her entire life, is eloquent enough. Aren’t we at war? Isn’t he supposed to care about national security? Is everything about pursuing power by any means to him?

"I hate to admit it, but a skinny white chocolate mocha is my staple in the morning," – Sarah Palin, in the WSJ glossy supplement out this weekend.

Now imagine if the Democrats had a vice-presidential candidate with no record of any views on foreign policy and whose favorite morning snack was a white chocolate mocha. Do you think Rush Limbaugh would be calling it a brilliant choice? Her workout pitfall? Drum roll:

"Being pregnant every few years. If I get lazy and go weeks or months without exercising it’s not because of circumstances but because I’m being less disciplined. Shame on me."

Huh?

"Every single human being has the right to a fair trial and to be treated humanely by their captors.  John McCain, of all people, should understand this.  He was a prisoner of war.  On the one fundamental issue that his entire campaign is centered around – the character-building experience of his POW stint – he gets it wrong.

America cannot be a shining beacon of light in the world when we condone policies of treating our enemies with the same standards as the Viet Cong treated their enemies…

Every criminal, no matter how heinous their crimes, deserves humane treatment and a fair and expedient trial. Period. That is a fundamental human right.

When you’re giving the central speech of your party’s convention, to make a joke out of it makes a joke out of me. Not just as a (former) Republican, but as an American. This morning, I donated $250 to Barack Obama’s campaign," – a former Ron Paul Republican.

Tyler Cowen reconsiders the benefits of drilling.

Popoyo, Nicaragua, 5.15 pm.

… and politics is religion. With Sarah Palin, America has taken one very large leap toward a completely theocratic politics. For Palin, as for Rick Warren, there can be no distinction between politics and religion: all politics is subject to religious guidance and that guidance is to obey the literal truth of everything in the Bible:

In the address at the Assembly of God Church here, Ms. Palin’s ease in talking about the intersection of faith and public life was clear. Among other things, she encouraged the group of young church leaders to pray that “God’s will” be done in bringing about the construction of a big pipeline in the state, and suggested her work as governor would be hampered “if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with God.”

She also told the group that her eldest child, Track, would soon be deployed by the Army to Iraq, and that they should pray “that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God, that’s what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.”

Everything in her worldview must be according to God’s plan, and God’s plan is revealed without any ambiguity whatsoever in the literal words of the Bible, Old and New Testament. There is no detail too small, no policy too obscure, that isn’t vetted through this filter. This is the fundamentalist psyche in its most extreme form: think Bush but less intellectual. Think Bush’s evangelical tradition combined with speaking in tongues and a belief in the Rapture. Yes, this is now conservatism. If you want to explore how it came to this, I gave it my best shot here.

The North Carolina Senate race turns mean, and weird.

Frum again:

George W. Bush had very slight executive experience before becoming president. His views were not well known. He won the nomination exactly in the same way that Palin has won the hearts of so many conservatives: by sending cultural cues to convince them that he was one of them, understood them, sympathized with them. So that made everything else irrelevant in 2000 – as it seems again to be doing in 2008. I do credit George W. Bush with great feats of leadership. In particular, I think his refusal to quit Iraq in 2005-2006 when everybody was urging him to, his insistence on fighting through to success, will be seen as a triumph of strength and conviction that saved the US from potential disaster. But he lacked other important aspects of leadership which is how we got into the mess from which he needed to rescue the country and himself…

I am not denying that Sarah Palin may have great skills. She may well. I am insisting that neither you, nor I, nor John McCain has any valid reason to believe that she does. This is not an argument about the attributes she lacks. It’s an argument about the information we lack. I am pleading with my fellow conservatives: Please demand more and better knowledge before you commit yourselves to a political leader. That’s all.

This decision is not worthy of a great power. Whatever skills Palin may turn out to have, however fabulous a person she may turn out to be, even if she becomes the Eva Peron of Christianism, McCain

had no idea when he picked her.

He winged this. That’s the critical, unavoidable, devastating point.

John McCain has demonstrated with this insane decision that he is unfit to be president of the United States. This was an act of near-criminal negligence. If he can behave this recklessly and impulsively with this decision, the idea of allowing him to become president of the United States is only a smidgen less terrifying than thinking of Palin in that position.

Whatever few doubts I may once have still had about this election, they are resolved now.

Obama has to win. The alternative is unthinkable.

Josh Marshall: