Month: November 2008

Rich "Starbursts" Lowry does a McCain post-mortem:

The split over Palin, of course, poisoned everything at the end. One of the dividing lines was between her communications team and the policy advisers. The communications team seemed to consider her a dolt, while the policy people—like Steve Biegun and Randy Scheunemann—were impressed with her and her potential. As one McCain aide told me, "It’s the difference between considering her someone who lacks knowledge and someone who is incompetent, and they [the communications aides] treated her as the latter."

But this is to my mind the most revealing quote from a Palin defender:

"Look, she wasn’t ready for this, obviously."

If she wasn’t ready for this, how was she supposed to be ready to be president? And if she wasn’t ready to be president, why did you pick her?

The focus in all this – apart from getting closure on some factual questions – should be on discovering who vetted, or didn’t vet Palin. This was massive political malpractice – and it’s McCain’s, Davis’s and Schmidt’s responsibility. Thank God these incompetents and risk-takers will not run the country.

A reader writes:

Yes! You nailed Kristol’s “world-weariness to outrage." I’ve been trying to find a succinct way of expressing it. “Oh, come on now, none of this matters!” It’s his constant refrain whenever he’s asked to defend something awful (socialist! secret Muslim! terrorist pal!) one of his protégés or heroes says.

He believes in nothing and therefore thinks no one else believes in anything either.

That’s a pretty accurate description of one kind of Straussian. Except they simultaneously claim to be the last defenders of objective truth.

From laying pipes to sucking thumbs. JTP has a new website.

David Biello summarizes a new study:

If you thought you were eating mostly grass-fed beef when you bit into a Big Mac, think again: The bulk of a fast-food hamburger from McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s is made from cows that eat primarily corn, or so says a new study of the chemical composition of more than 480 fast-food burgers from across the nation.

And it isn’t only cows that are eating corn. There is also evidence of a corn diet in chicken sandwiches, and even French fries get a good slathering of the fat that makes them so tasty from being fried in corn oil.

"Corn has been criticized as being unsustainable based on the unusual amount of fertilizer, water and machinery required to bring it to harvest," says geobiologist Hope Jahren of the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, who led the research. "We are getting a picture of the American diet on a national scale by using chemistry, which is quite objective."

(Hat tip: 3QD)

San Francisco, California, 6.43 am.

A reader tracked down one of the first mentions in the press of Sarah Palin. From the Anchorage Daily News, April 3, 1996:

Sarah Palin, a commercial fisherman from Wasilla, told her husband on Tuesday she was driving to Anchorage to shop at Costco. Instead, she headed straight for Ivana. And there, at J.C. Penney’s cosmetic department, was Ivana, the former Mrs. Donald Trump, sitting at a table next to a photograph of herself. She wore a light-colored pantsuit and pink fingernail polish. Her blonde hair was coiffed in a bouffant French twist.

”We want to see Ivana,” said Palin, who admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer, ”because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”

That’s not what she told Katie Couric, is it?

Austin Bramwell responds to Ross. He captures something about the mindset that has captured the Republican "movement":

Ross correctly observes that it’s possible both to build a movement and to influence those outside of it.  Again, he cites environmentalism as an example. Again, there are crucial differences between the conservative movement and a movement like environmentalism.  Environmentalists have never sought to create a counter-establishment. Rather, they try to supply establishment institutions with environmentalist ideas.  Conservatives, by contrast, have sought to create a whole alternative institutional world.   

The movement offers entire career tracks for aspiring conservatives. Moreover, the movement preaches hostility to non-movement institutions. From the moment a movement conservative starts his career at his college conservative paper, he learns to conceive of conservative organizations as the City of God and traditional establishment institutions as the City of Man. The two Cities, he believes, are antagonists. Hence, movement conservatives have not generally succeeded in reaching sympathetic outsiders – if anything, they have actively sought to alienate them.

Felix Salmon is worried about $2 trillion behemoth Citigroup:

Citi might well turn out to be Hank Paulson’s largest and biggest headache. There’s no one he can sell it to — it’s far too big already. Which means that Paulson’s only real option, if things deteriorate much further from here, is nationalization. Bits of it could be sold, at a price — the retail bank to Santander, perhaps; other bits to JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs — but the losses to the taxpayer would be enormous, and the disruption associated with breaking Citi up and then trying to integrate the pieces in the middle of a major financial crisis would likely be devastating to the economy.

Have a great day.

A judicious tribute:

I loved hearing from him about oddball "practical" matters. For instance, height: he appeared to be nearly 7 feet tall, and explained to me (6’2") that up until 6’6" height was an advantage, but after that it was a big inconvenience — door frames, beds, airplane seats. Or, getting ready for book writing bursts: He said he removed complications from his life while writing by having exactly the same food at every meal, so he never had to waste time deciding what to eat. He was a tech enthusiast, and the most passionate Mac advocate I have encountered.