The Dish

Danielle Crittenden watched a Palin speech in Ontario:

If you tried to parse it, you couldn’t. There was not a single memorable line, not a single new political idea, not a single proffered solution beyond the cliché of “needing new solutions.” And when the moderator “opened the floor to questions, guess what?  Even those questions had to be written down by the tables and submitted in advance, to be selectively chosen by the moderator.  Our table mischievously submitted, “Who is your favorite Canadian Prime Minister?” but for some reason it wasn’t asked.

Here's a passage from the speech:

I’m wanting to, though, kind of shift away from the political. I’m just getting off the trough from doing a lot of Tea Parties across the US, man those are a blast. They’re rowdy and they’re wild and it’s just another melting pot, there’s just diversity there and all walks of life and all forms of partisanship and non partisanship just wanting good things to happen in this part of the world. It’s been a blast. The shift from the political, so now that I have that shift from the political but still have that desire to talk about the economy and talk about energy and resources and national security and all those things. I was telling Todd, okay, this is like [inaudible] on the vice presidential campaign trail, where you never really knew what you were getting into when you get into that line before you were interviewed. Obviously, sometimes I never knew what I was getting into in an interview. Obviously!

Obviously! It's like some kind of id with a gerund-propagator. Saletan's reading of her brand:

Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp.

She’s been going around to Tea Party rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully unaware that the imperial arrogance she’s preaching isn’t how the American founders behaved. It’s how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin represents everything the original Tea Party was against.

Bernstein's feeling:

For a normal candidate in a healthy party, Palin's cashing in would be a pretty strong indication that she will ultimately pull back from contesting the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2012.  Since neither applies, here, I recommend Andrew Sullivan's comments; he thinks she's a formidable candidate for the nomination (see also Chris Bowers).  I'm not convinced, but I also disagree with those who count her completely out.  Party leaders, whatever their ideological positions, would have to be nuts or completely cut off from reality to allow her to walk away with the nomination — but of course there's a serious debate on whether that's the case (the latter, not the former). And as I've said Palin is an excellent test.  Meanwhile, most people who wanted to be president would hesitate to wring every dollar out of their celebrity, but I think we all know that Palin isn't most people. 

One thing on which I am certain: the Boston Herald's fantasies notwithstanding, there's no way that any GOP nominee would voluntarily put Sarah Palin on the bottom half of the ticket.

Does Jonathan know how shameless Romney is? He'd do anything for the White House.

Let's see what a gloom-monger might predict if Iraq were to descend into another bout of sectarian chaos. I'd offer these warning signs:

1. An attempt by the loser in the election to recount some of the votes to keep a Shiite dominated party in power at the expense of a largely secular one. Check. 

2. Subsequent power-vacuum that leads to a widening sense of illegitimacy. Check.

3. Continued withdrawal of US troops. Check.

4. Signs that the largely Shiite police and military are alienating Sunnis in this climate. Check. 

On the other hand, it appears that al Qaeda in Iraq has been decapitated.

The British class fixation did not end in the 1990s. Like Iraqi sectarianism, it is baked deep in the pie. So we get this from the Sun:

The son of a rich banker, [Clegg] had a posh upbringing and an expensive private education. He went to elite Westminster school and Cambridge University. Friends say he is attracted to a Euro superstate because he is only a quarter English, with a Dutch mother, a half-Russian father and a Spanish wife.

A toff and a Euro-weeny! And then there's the acronym: MPSIA. It means "minor public school, I'm afraid". And public means private. The Guardian's Sholto Byrnes puts the boot in to Cameron:

The metropolitan Westminster School, where Clegg went, is just not as grand as Cameron's alma mater, Eton – which, as Dominic Lawson pointed out on Sunday, has truly become a four letter word. At Oxford, Cameron was a member of the aristocratic, moneyed Bullingdon Club, and his college, Brasenose, was founded in 1509. One imagines that tail coats were, in general, less in evidence at Clegg's Cambridge college, Robinson (founded 1977); nor that many of his fellow undergraduates were as familiar as Cameron no doubt was with "the sound of English county families baying for broken glass", as Evelyn Waugh put it.

Mandelson – New Labour's slimy, gay blend of Bob Shrum and Sidney Blumenthal – has already described Cameron as looking down his "rather long toffee nose" at regional England. This is the same man who upon being presented in his own constituency with a dish of mushy peas, passed on the "guacamole." And of course, the veracity of this priceless anecdote is as hotly disputed as the virtues of a nice, steaming steak and kidney pie.

(Photo: The Bullingdon Club members around the time I was at Oxford. Cameron is third from the left, looking like a member of Spandau Ballet. Boris Johnson is seated fourth from right. The Bullingdon was the rawest expression of class privilege and misbehavior at Oxford. No one not already ensconced in class privilege was a member.)

"The economic types can go ahead and debate whether that’s in fact the case [that Obama cut taxes for 98% of working Americans]. Regardless, what the left will never understand is that we don’t care if our personal taxes went down. And this flaw in their thinking is what it frequently is when they furrow their brows disapprovingly and peer down upon us… They think we think like they do. They think we’re all selfish narcissists just like they are. MEMO TO BILL AND BARACK: The Tea Party movement isn’t about “us,” it’s about something more important than us; it’s about this place we call America. And no bribe in the form of any kind of personal tax cut or government handout will buy us off when it comes to protecting this country," – John Nolte of Breitbart's Big Government blog.

Take it away, Lawrence Welk:

Mark Halperin takes an actual non-truthy stand on something.

A day after the Suddeutsche Zeitung Der Spiegel ran a story that Father Gerhard Gruber had been pressured by the church to take the fall for Ratzinger's official decision to transfer a child-rapist priest rather than report him to the police and defrock him, the priest said the report was untrue:

Gruber said he had telephoned a friend, and the contents of the conversation, "well-meaning but unfortunate" had circulated.

He now says the pressure he was under was merely time constraints. Make of this what you will.

An Ibex pulling a Sully.

Ian Leslie compares Clegg and Obama:

[Clegg] has characteristics that play well on TV: energy and likeability, a certain classlessness, and an ability to speak human. But  – and here's the key – he's also quite bland. He doesn't have a Scottish accent or ginger hair or a military bearing. There's nothing memorable about him. So while he's spent the last three years putting together a reasonably credible policy platform, the public have ignored him (I swear there would have been quite a few voters watching last week's debate surprised to discover that Cameron and Clegg were two different people). It's as if he's been lying in camouflage, invisible to the voters, only to spring an ambush four weeks before election day.

Different political systems reward different strategies. If you want to be an agent of change in America, it's better to stand out from the beginning, as Obama did by virtue of his skin colour, his name, and his charisma – then prove you've got substance over the long haul of a primary campaign. But if you want to do the same thing in Britain, be bland, and blend into the background – then seize your moment at the last minute.

Vile stuff – and surely more than just an exercize in free speech:

“We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”  Theo van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker who was murdered by an Islamic extremist in 2004 after making a short documentary on violence against women in some Islamic societies. The posting on Revolutionmuslim.com features a graphic photograph of Van Gogh with his throat cut and a dagger in his chest… Al Amrikee said the purpose of including the al-Awlaki sermon in his posting was to remind Muslims that insulting the prophet is a severe offense for which the punishment in Islam is death.

They have balls those guys. They don’t even need to stick them near a microwave for that.