Greetings From Minneapolis! I have arrived; the convention may now proceed. Unless of course it doesn't.

But if it does (and hopefully that means that Hurricane Gustav's force will have greatly diminished before hitting land), this clip should aired on the Xcel Jumbotron in prime time and referenced by several candidates in their speeches:

Ed Morrissey asks:

This also prompts a question of ethics, which all of us should consider carefully. Should private conversations between politicians get videotaped surreptitiously like this? If so, then perhaps Fowler and many, many others should take better care about having a laugh at the misery of others, even among friends.

Plenty of traditional liberal journalists have turned off the record remarks of politicians and celebrities into major stories. (Which is ultimately part of what earned them their "drive-by media" sobriquet from Rush.) As Roger Ailes noted several years ago:

Jimmy Carter's famous confession that he sometimes had lust in his heart for women other than his wife was uttered to a Playboy magazine journalist as he was leaving Carter's home at the conclusion of the formal interview.

And there are numerous additional examples of such moments, a few of which are described in the above link.

But as is its wont, the Internet amps these sorts of moments not up to 11, but 1100. George Allen's Senatorial re-election in 2006 was sunk by his "Macaca" gaffe, which was part of a coordinated effort by the left to videotape Republican candidates during every possible appearance (and then some), waiting for any sort of gaffe that could be turned into a YouTube clip and exploited by a friendly news organization such as the Washington Post, which ran over 100 stories on Allen's gaffe in the space of about less than three months, in which he apparently mispronounced his campaign staff's nickname of the young mohawk-haired James Webb campaign operative assigned to tape him.

Whatever the explanation, Allen's gaffe, given massive exposure from the Washington Post and other quarters in the MSM ended his senatorial career, which ultimately lost GOP control of the Senate, and sank Allen's presidential ambitions. In its wake, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos gleefully wrote:

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.

All it takes is one "Macaca" incident to transform a race or create one where one didn't exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It's about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

A couple of years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them.

The "tape 'em all, let YouTube sort it out" philosophy began on the left, but its eventual boomerang was merely a matter of when, not if.

Austin Bay interviews Steve Green, Glenn Reynolds, Jennifer Rubin, and--live from Denver International Airport--James Lileks. In a half-hour interview recorded by yours truly earlier today, they look back at the then just recently announced Sarah Palin pick by John McCain, Barack Obama's speech last night, and the gestalt of the Democratic Convention in Denver.

Tune in here to listen!

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine writes:

If even Bill Clinton, the gold standard of "third way" politicians, is trading in classic Democratic Party populism, it really is over for the what used to be called New Democrats.

Which is bad news for everyone, as the Democrats shifting further left in the post-Clinton years shifts the American political center of gravity with them. Read the whole thing.

I'd quote from this story by Dave Barry on the big, big story of the Democratic Convention--the fight against bird porn, and a cameo from Daryl Hannah, but I'd wind up excerpting the whole thing in an effort to lay out the conceptional groundwork of this fast breaking story. Which, like Watergate 35 years ago, required the efforts of another journalist to bring the story to its complete fruition. In this case, Blogosphere favorite James Lileks, who makes a key guest appearance in Barry's article, and also has video of the anti-Bird Porn puritans in action, here.

Of the ongoing catfight between the hosts of MSNBC (with the shrapnel frequently hitting even the guests), Rebecca Dana of the Wall Street Journal writes, "Since the start of the Democratic National Convention, ratings have exploded for the cable news channel MSNBC. So have tensions among the network's top anchors":

In an uncomfortable moment Tuesday night, an exhausted-looking "Hardball" host Chris Matthews shouted at a producer ("I'll wrap in a second!") before a stilted exchange with "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann, in which the two argued about who was talking out of turn. Mr. Olbermann made a flapping-lips hand gesture, and Mr. Matthews took umbrage. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer sat quietly on-screen, waiting to be interviewed.

That incident followed a seven-minute back-and-forth Tuesday afternoon between "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough and network correspondent David Shuster. Mr. Scarborough, a former Republican representative from Florida, accused Mr. Shuster, a registered independent, of taking a "cheap shot" by mentioning his party affiliation. Mr. Scarborough sarcastically added: "I feel so comforted by the fact that you're an independent. I bet everyone at MSNBC has 'independent' on their voting cards."

Since the early days of CNN's "Crossfire," cable news has relied on strong personalities to keep drama high and viewers tuned in throughout the day, when news isn't always exciting enough to keep the audience's attention. Passionate debate can make for great television -- and terrific ratings.

But some found this level of personal bickering hard to watch.

"My reaction to that is: 'Grow up!' They have to just grow up," said Connie Chung, a former MSNBC host and former co-anchor of "CBS Evening News."

Tough to argue with--particularly when it's coming from the woman who gave us this moment of adult, sophisticated cabaret entertainment.

(Which also aired on--but of course!--MSNBC.)

Who knew that John McCain would have YouTube down, indeed?

The McCain Camp has issued a memo listing "Suggested Toga Styles" for those visitors tonight on a pilgrimage to the "Barackopolis."

But really, they're just helpfully trying to prevent the sort of wardrobe malfunction that seems to befall performing celebrities in football stadiums all too often these days.

There is no escape even from the aura of the penumbra of the echo of the Decade From Hell:

"Mackenzie Phillips has been busted at LAX for allegedly possessing heroin and cocaine."

Disco Stu's mood ring sure turned black over that news.

And it's comin' right at you, complete with a phalanx of papier-mache puppets, courtesy of Zombie's all-seeing camera in Denver. This caption in particular is terrific:

And then there was the woman who showed her support for "Separation of Church and State" by wearing a kaffiyeh.

Howard Dean's got to crank up his anti-hypocrisy machine a couple of more notches, I suspect.

Back in the very, very early days of this site's existence, I wrote:

When Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of the British satirical magazine Punch in the early 1960s, Khrushchev had announced he was going to tour England alongside its prime minister. Muggeridge wrote up a list of the silliest tour stops he could think of, and then put the article to bed, ready for publication. When the actual tour list was drawn up, he had to massively rewrite the article. At least half the tour stops in his satirical piece were actually on Khrushchev and the British PM's agenda!

Which is why Muggeridge's Law is: there is no way that a writer of fiction can compete with real life for its pure absurdity.

And even your humble narrator isn't immune. Yesterday, when I was interviewing Roger L. Simon about PJTV, he started talking about bias, and remarked that everyone's biased, which is true enough; it's human nature. "You have a bias, I have a bias, everyone has a bias" I think Roger said. I immediately quipped, "Keith Olbermann doesn't have a bias--he's straight down the middle!", trying to think the most obviously in-the-tank anchor on TV, who in the past, hasn't been afraid to at least tacitly admit it.

Naturally, I had just unwittingly crashed straight into the brick wall of satire known as Muggeridge's Law:

Regardless, [MSNBC President Phil Griffin] said he has faith in his convention anchors -- including Olbermann, a scourge of the right -- for both the final days in Denver and next week in St. Paul, Minn.

"Look, when Keith anchors, he plays it straight down the line," Griffin said. "This is our team. They've served us well. We love 'em, and we're going to be at the Republican convention, and it's going to be great. And I don't have any hesitation."

Straight down the line, straight down the middle. Objectivity all the way, dude!

(Is it just me, or is Griffin starting to sound like Howell Raines railing against the furies immediately after the Jayson Blair scandal exploded in his face? But hey, if this was the gang you had to play Kindergarten Cop with every day, you'd be feeling pretty tense, too.)

Bi-partisan support: John Hinderaker of Power Line and Ann Althouse are both calling this new ad by the McCain campaign "devastating", and it's tough to argue with them:

Glenn Reynolds notes that, "Weirdly, McCain seems to have taken a lead in the rapid-delivery YouTube department. I wouldn't have predicted that." Especially since Obama's arrival as a national player was trumpeted by this YouTube mash-up, produced by one of his supporters. But it looks like McCain's braintrust have found a video producer or two of their won with some pretty nifty YouTube chops in recent days. And the Operation: Chaos-extended Democratic primary season has given them plenty of raw material to build with.

Kathy Shaidle writes, "I'm not a big Sean Hannity fan but... ":

He is spanking stupid old Mike Dukakis right now.

Dukakis came on acting like a tough guy -- I must say, it's the first time I've ever seen somebody try to swagger while sitting in a chair -- and ended up fumbling and mumbling when Hannity asked him to name some of Barack Obama's specific accomplishments.

Dukakis got so agitated his ear piece fell out, and he was reduced to parroting (just as vague) answers that Alan Colmes was shamelessly feeding him.

It's obvious that Dukakis spent all day, maybe all week, practising a tough guy act for this appearance: "Ha, not only would I kick my wife's rapist's ass, I'd do it IN A TANK!"

After less than five minutes, Hannity had him squirming, smirking and choking.

Brutal.

Heh.

Watch the Massachusetts Miracle man right here:

This BBC article, which starts breathlessly, "Hollywood is on the verge of breaking into an entirely new virtual world", really isn't all that surprising; Arthur C. Clarke was writing about "synthetic thespians" over 20 years ago.

Though why not start with musicians first? The MTV/YouTube small-screen format has to be a lot more visually forgiving than a 40-feet movie screen, and an all digital, all synthetic singer seems like a logical progression from today's formula pop stars, as I wrote four years ago for Tech Central Station.

Fox's Shepard Smith seems to have discovered the crisp new Nacho Cheese-colored spray-on tan, which Doritos appears to be test-marketing at the Democratic convention. As James Lileks writes, "the last time I saw someone with that much makeup on he had green eyes and went by the name 'Data.'"

George Will forecasts what to expect--and what not to expect from the Sermon on the Mile High Mount tomorrow:

When Barack Obama feeds rhetorical fishes and loaves to the multitudes in the football stadium Thursday night, he should deliver a message of sufficient particularity that it seems particularly suited to Americans. One more inspirational oration, one general enough to please Berliners or even his fellow "citizens of the world," will confirm Pascal's point that "continuous eloquence wearies." That is so because it is not really eloquent. If it is continuous, it is necessarily formulaic and abstract, vague enough for any time and place, hence truly apposite for none.

If Socrates had engaged in an interminable presidential campaign in a media-drenched age, perhaps he, too, would have come to seem banal. But the fact that Obama lost nine of the final 14 primaries might have something to do with the fact that when he descends from the ether to practicalities, he reprises liberalism's most shopworn nostrums.

Russia, a third-world nation with first-world missiles, is rampant; Iran is developing a missile inventory capable of delivering nuclear weapons the development of which will not be halted by Obama's promised "aggressive personal diplomacy." Yet Obama has vowed to "cut investments in unproven missile defense systems." Steamboats, railroads, airplanes and vaccines were "unproven" until farsighted people made investments. Furthermore, as Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute notes, Democrats will eventually embrace missile defense in Europe because they "will have nowhere else to go short of pre-emptive strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities."

Read the whole thing, which is leaving Kyle Smith in awe.

When we last left Team Obama, they were attempting to get the above video banned from TV. (More on that here.) Now they're attempting to smear NRO journalist Stanley Kurtz for attempting to report the story, thereby bringing maximum attention to it, as Ben Smith of the Politico writes:

Barack Obama's campaign hasn't advertised this a great deal this week, but the campaign's "Action Wire" has been waging large-scale campaigns against critics. That includes tens of thousands of e-mails to television stations running Harold Simmons' Bill Ayers ad, and to their advertisers -- including a list of major automobile and telecommunications companies.

And tonight, the campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station's telephone number and the show's extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he's a conservative, which isn't in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia.

"Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse," says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups.

"It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies," it continues.

Andy McCarthy of NRO describes the results thusly:

The pro-Obama callers on the Milt Rosenberg show are a riot.

In the last few minutes, two called to scald Milt for having Stanley on without having an Obama rep on to give the counterpoint. Milt explains, repeatedly, that he contacted the Obama campaign (he gave the name of the campaign official his producer spoke with) and the campaign -- the HQ of which is about a quarter mile from the studio where the show airs -- declined to come on. They were offered the opportunity to have someone there with Stanley for the entire two hours, and they said no.

Another pro-Obama woman called and, after accusing Stanley of slander but of course not citing anything he said that was slanderous, stated, "We want it to stop." Milt asked what she wanted stopped, and she replied, "It's just not what we believe as Americans." Milt tried again, asking what she didn't believe. She responded that it was someone saying bad things about Barack Obama and, again, we just want it to stop.

Very compelling.

Earth to Obama supporters: no one is claiming guilt by association -- though willful association with an admitted terrorist would be worthy of noting in a presidential candidate. Obama and Bill Ayers had a working relationship. Yet, Obama claimed Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and has otherwise minimized the relationship. Aside from the fact that Obama is not telling the truth, which itself is important, the details of the relationship are important. If the press was doing its job, we'd have those details already. Finally, the media's job is being done ... by Stanley. He should be saluted, not smeared. If the Obama campaign has a substantive response, let's hear it. If all they can do is smear a good faith critic, they are strictly bush league ... and it comes as no surprise that their guy thought Bill Ayers was someone worth cultivating.

We're still in the early rounds, but this is playing out remarkably like John Kerry and the Swift Vets all over again. As I wrote right around this time four years ago:

Kerry's massively invented narrative ("swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant"--as Steyn describes him--turned brave defender of soldiers' rights) was built to survive the glancing scrutiny (if you can call it that) of a 1972-era media that consisted of three TV networks with half hour evening news shows, and a few liberal big city newspapers, all of which were staffed with journalists more or less largely sympathetic to Kerry's leftist anti-American beliefs.

But between the Swift Boat Vets and the Blogosphere, there are far too many people examining Kerry's story, and his "reporting for duty" edifice has crumbled.

Is that fair? We'll, we're deciding if we want the man to have the key to the most powerful arsenal ever assembled. If he can't survive the scrutiny of the Blogosphere, who James Lileks recently described as an "obsessive sort with lots of time on their hands", is he someone who should be trusted with this power?

The 1972-style media seems to think so.

And a year later, John O'Neill of the Swift Vets gave an interview in which he said:

TAE: Were you surprised when Senator Kerry focused so much on his Vietnam record at the Democratic Convention in late July? How do you account for this when he clearly knew you were out there?

O'NEILL: I think he thought that he had good control over the mainline media, that they were sympathetic, that they would kill the story. And I think he was very confident that was the case with the New York Times and the three major networks and CNN, and that he could intimidate the portions of the media not already friendly to him. And so he thought the story would never come out. That had been his experience over and over again in Massachusetts.

TAE: Everything changed in early August, after your first ad.

O'NEILL: All of a sudden, Kerry and the media were faced with an ad that was actually showing. There was a time when they controlled the entire world of communications. That day is over.

Change the name from Kerry to Obama and the state from Chicago to Illinois, and O'Neill's quote is remarkably timely.

Back in 2004, Kerry's brain trust could at least some ignorance in the difference between old media and new--when RatherGate broke for instance, Mary Mapes of the very Kerry-friendly and very old media CBS later claimed, "Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line."

Four years later, what's the Obama camp's excuse? And as John Hinderaker notes:

Obama's suggestion that it is illegal for a 501(c)(4) entity to fund issue ads that are negative toward him appears ludicrous. Here's the real question, though: if Obama is elected President, will he appoint an Attorney General who will carry out politically-motivated prosecutions like the one he is now demanding? I suppose we can't know for sure, but why wouldn't he? If he demands criminal prosecution of free speech that opposes his political interests when he's a candidate, why wouldn't he order it as President?

Revel in the joy and optimism--the hope and change, you might say--that comes from the audacity of litigation.

Update: Don't miss Mickey Kaus's thoughts on this story as well.

In 2004, Lewis Lapham got caught phoning it in, writing up the GOP convention for Harpers magazine before the convention actually took place. But Jonathan Last goes Lapham one better--why not intentionally write the most hyperbolic prose possible about the Democratic convention--and then see who's deep enough in the tank to actually top it?!

...And you're Ed: Interview Michelle Malkin about her run-in with a crazed 9/11 "truther" for this week's edition of PJM Political--and then talk to Roger L. Simon about PJTV--Pajamas' new online TV service. Both on this week's edition of PJM Political.

(Note: No Bird Porn or High Fructose Corn Syrup was harmed in the making of this podcast.)

With a "high-ranking" though otherwise anonymous MSNBC journalist telling the Politico Website that "The situation at our channel is about to blow up", MSNBC President Phil Griffin responds:

"MSNBC does not have an ideology," Griffin said. "We hire smart people who are passionate about their love of politics and love of news."

But Griffen was happy to talk about his network's ideology last fall to the New York Times:

Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.

"It happened naturally," Phil Griffin, a senior vice president of NBC News who is the executive in charge of MSNBC, said Friday, referring specifically to the channel's passion and point of view from 7 to 10 p.m.

Of course, the savvier TV networks aren't as schizophrenic when it comes to admitting their biases.

Update: "If they're this unhinged this week, what will they be like next week in Minneapolis?"

Gerard Vanderleun has a photo of a mock Air Force One that, sadly, won't be in use after Obama's Sermon on the Mile High Mount tomorrow:

We've already had the leaked photos of the Greek Temple / faux White House backdrop, but it seems to me that this little touch -- if they are actually stupid enough to use it -- will be enough to cause high-velocity bipartisan projectile vomiting from coast-to-coast. It also might be [ice-on-cake / straw-on-cameltoe / bridge-too-far] element of the Obama Potemkin Presidency that insures he never gets on board Air Force One -- without an invitation from a merciful McCain.

Nonsense--Obama can hop on this Air Force One any time he wants...

Jay Ambrose asks, "What if Obama was president instead of Bush":

More and more it looks as if we've won the war in Iraq, thereby giving the United States a crucial victory in the struggle against Islamic radicalism, and it is clear we wouldn't have if the most important war protester in Denver this week had had his way.

That protester is not one of the street shouters waving a banner and thinking he has thereby made a profound, world-changing statement, but Barack Obama, who rode his opposition to the war to primary and caucus wins and finally to his moment of selection as the Democrats' presidential nominee.

His position on the unpopular war was not the only thing leading to his triumphal hour at the Democratic National Convention, but the position undoubtedly was the sine qua non of his candidacy, and he did not stop with saying the war was wrong.

Early on, he proposed a U.S. troop withdrawal divorced from conditions on the ground, and he opposed the troop surge, saying at one point it wouldn't work and insisting it would put more American lives in danger.

In fact, the surge in combination with new battleground tactics and other factors vastly reduced U.S. and Iraqi casualties and has helped get us to a remarkable point. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been all but destroyed.

Aided by a population sickened of endless killings of Iraqis doing nothing but going about their daily lives, the Iraqi armed forces have grown in strength and have established order in increasingly large swathes of the country.

A confident Iraqi government has been negotiating with the United States about when we will go home. And we've already reduced the number of combat troops to pre-surge levels with more troop reductions planned for the fall.

Put Obama's timetable in place and take away the surge he did not want, and we could now be facing a deteriorating situation with deep, dark tragedies lying in wait: A quick return to a dictatorial, vicious, anti-American regime, genocide, an al Qaeda resurgence and the increased likelihood of terrorist strikes within the United States.

Found via Glenn Reynolds. A corollary to Ambrose's story, which would make an equally good column, is how the key moments of the last four years, from the GWOT, to Katrina, to the economy would have been reported by the legacy media if all of the events were the same, but Obama or someone else from his party had presided over them. Something tells me the collective tone of Katie & co. would have been just a hair less apocalyptic.

(See also: media coverage of American events under Clinton, Bill.)

"Practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started"--Peter Robinson, quoting FDR crony Rex Tugwell, in the latest edition of his Uncommon Knowledge video series. This week with Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man.

Greg Pollowitz writes, "One thing that's becoming clear is that MSNBC's bias toward Obama is reaching a stage where it is clouding the judgment of the pundits."

Meanwhile, Stephen Spruiell asks:

Is it just a coincidence that as MSNBC is becoming increasingly more like the official network of the Democratic Party, it is increasingly engaging in that party's penchant for embarrassingly public in-fighting and back-biting?

Probably not--which is why Allah has your "daily 'Olbermann antagonizes another colleague' clip."

Two and a half years ago, I asked, "Will Video Kill The Blogosphere Star?" Now we know: the two parties are about to have a pretty bigtime merger, in beautiful downtown El Segundo.

All hail Caesar Obama!

Update: There's always been definite gnostic feel to Obama; to combine memes from Glenn Reynolds and Nigel Tufnel (and really, who doesn't?) I blame...Da Druids. Meanwhile, Orrin Judd asks a reasonable follow-up question.

(Via Michelle Malkin, who has much more on the Temple on the Platte.)

Say, that new John McCain ad in the above video with a 3:00 AM cameo from Hillary looks awfully familiar--almost as though it was created months ago...

Update: Welcome Instapundit, National Review Online and Riehl World News readers--please look around; there's lots here you may enjoy, both on the blog, and our video page.

Don't tell MADD (I don't need the spam), but I made the Drunk Report with this post. I have no idea what the Drunk Report is except that it's like the Drudge Report, but with an additional 80 proof, an extra half-once of vermouth, and only a mild hangover the next morning.

I'll get back to you on that last item.

Wow, I was only kidding when I wrote that last headline, but Ed Morrissey writes, "Recreate 68? They're on their way."

He has a link to the live video feed of the Denver Post of the crowds in the street for those who want to see if the proverbial revolution really will be televised. On the other hand, as Ed notes, "So far, the protesters have managed to recreate '68 in at least one way ... reminding the nation to vote Republican."

Well that would ensure the most authentic recreation...

Update: The esteemed Zombie is in the midst of the scrum, fighting off the odd blast of pepper spray.

And look! It's a giant paper-mache puppet! Oh, sorry, that's Ward Churchill with his stylin' shades and Che beret--since paper-mache is literally French for "chewed-up paper", it's easy to get the two confused.

Jennifer Rubin writes, "The conservative blogosphere is agog: what was Barack Obama thinking?"

He took a story largely confined to the internet, (only briefly raised in the primary) about Obama's connection to former terrorist Bill Ayers, put it in his own ad, and then filed a claim trying to force the third-party 527 ad that first brought up the Obama-Ayers connection off the air. In the next 24 hours thousands if not millions of voters who never heard of or didn't understand the extent of the Obama-Ayers relationship are going to get a full education.

That Justice Department complaint is a stunt reeking of abject panic. Really, isn't this just unlimited free publicity for the McCain accusations? In the Right blogosphere there is a mix of amazement and delight. And in case you thought the McCain camp wasn't thrilled by this turn of events, read what Steve Schmidt has to say about it.

It is very hard to figure out the reasoning behind the Obama effort. Perhaps there is a deadly poll or maybe they think they can so skew the coverage as to insulate himself. But for now, it is just plain baffling.

Short of digging up Leonard Bernstein, at this point, there's really only one option left for Obama: start flaying about, yelling, "Make! Them! Stop!"--which is what another presidential candidate was doing right around this time four years ago. As James Lileks wrote back then:

John Kerry wants to be president because he is John Kerry, and John Kerry is supposed to be president. Hence his campaign's flummoxed and tone-deaf response to the swift boat vets. Ban the books, sue the stations, retreat, attack. Underneath it all you can sense the confusion. How dare they attack Kerry? He's supposed to be president. It's almost treason in advance. . . . Inconsistencies are irrelevant, because he's consistently John Kerry. And he's supposed to be president.

And as Tom Maguire writes, "Coming soon--'That's not the Bill Ayers I knew.'"

Obama better make sure he's driving one up-armored bus before he throws Ayers under it.

Barron's: "It's Almost as if Obama Wants to Repeat the Mistakes of Herbert Hoover."

They're not the first to notice--Orrin Judd sounded three (Bronx) cheers for Obama/Smoot '08! last month, and Amity Shlaes made the connection in March.

Speaking of Shlaes, the author of the brilliant The Forgotten Man is featured on this week's edition of Peter Robinson's "Uncommon Knowledge" video series at NRO--don't miss it.

Iowahawk files a satiric dispatch from Denver:

With new polls showing Barack Obama's once-commanding lead over John McCain all but evaporated, the Obama campaign announced today it has begun deploying its vast volunteer army of downtown hipster douchebags to help reconnect the presumptive Democratic candidate with middle-American voters.

"Unlike Iraq, this is one surge that is actually going to work," said Obama campaign manager David Axlerod.

Sources within the campaign say the new strategy was prompted by recent national poll trends indicating McCain pulling even with, and in some instances even overtaking, Obama. More troubling for the campaign were internal tracking polls that show the candidate losing significant ground in key Midwestern, Southern and Western battleground states. As the numbers dropped, some within the campaign were left in stunned disbelief.

"It really didn't make sense," said Carly Voorhees, an East Village experimental performance poet, Cooper Union graduate student and member of Obama's 600-expert foreign policy team. "We knew in theory there were a handful of stump-toothed biblebillies and neocon dead-enders out there, but by all rights we should have had at least a 60%-75% lead. Even after Barack threw that awesome victory rave in Germany, the numbers kept deteriorating."

"At first we were stumped," she added. "Then it dawned on us -- McSame's subliminal attack ads were stoking the deep-rooted, latent racism of white middle America. We needed to warn these uneducated simpletons that McSame was exploiting their superstitions and genetic bigotry. The big question was -- how?"

Read on gentle reader, read on...

Sonny Bunch asks, "Am I the only one who read this story about the kid arrested for 'protesting capitalism' in Denver and thought of this South Park clip?"

No--great bloggers searching for quick and easy gen-X pop culture references metaphor alike!

Don't even think about eating a peach inside the Democratic convention:

Today the security check-in tent has expanded to Ringling dimensions. Same rules: remove everything metallic and electrical. You cannot even think of the concept of steel or even the lesser, more malleable metals, or you will set off the detectors; they're calibrated to beep if you've listened to Iron Maiden in the last 24 hours. All electronic devices must be turned on - but of course by the time you get to your place before the Inquisitors, everything has shut itself off. You hold up the line as you struggle with your STUPID CAMERA, which has a balky button; it will turn on only when pressed for a second, but if you press it too long it turns itself off immediately. Behind you, professional camerapersons fume: rube. I made it through without alarms - or so I thought."Got another Apple," said the screener. I actually wondered if they were talking about the make of computer, and were all Mac fans themselves, but no. The secondary screener team plowed through my bags and came up with . . . an apple. "Can't bring these in," said Officer Apple-taker. I asked why, instantly regretting it: Don't cause a scene, idiot, just move along and accept the loss of an apple as one of those things that happens, unless you really want to wear the plastic bracelets and she said "it could be thrown."Yes, it could be thrown; it could also be eaten. That was the plan, long ago."I had to take a peach and a pear too," she added. Somehow that made it better. A simple, soft, gentle peach was now considered a weapon? Arrr. No roughage, no peace! No roughage, no peace!

On the other hand, it's not like next week's GOP convention will be any less strict in what its organizers permit being taken in or out of the convention hall in Minneapolis. Of course, at least there, poo and other contraband won't be carried by the hosting party's allies.

Nancy Pelosi's natural gas is flowing freely:

For those who thought this was just another election, Nancy Pelosi says to wake up: the planet is at stake in the choice between Barack Obama and John McCain.

"We've got a planet to save. Nothing less is at stake other than civilization as we know it today," the California Democrat and speaker of the House told reporters Saturday afternoon in assessing the election and the nominating convention taking place here over the week.

She said Mr. Obama's new running mate, Sen Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a good choice because he melds Washington know-how with an outsider's view. She pointed to his daily commute by train from his home in Delaware to Washington as evidence he is still a man of the people. [Fair enough: the people are paying for it--Ed]

"Joe Biden is the all-American boy," she said in a luncheon for reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

"The All-American boy?" That's a pretty slanderous attack on Joe coming from the current leader of the party of transnationalism.

Betsy Newmark writes:

Remember when the Democrats used to be critical of anything that Republicans did that gave off the appearance of impropriety. We heard this phrase over and over during the Reagan and first Bush's administrations as a justification for all sorts of hearings into possible malfeasance. It didn't matter if someone had actually done something wrong, just if it seemed fishy to the American people.

Now the Obama campaign has decided that the connection between Joe Biden and his son's job working for the a credit card company and his vote for the bankruptcy bill, a bill that Obama opposed, is not a concern.

As Betsy notes, "that whiff of impropriety that Democrats were always so troubled about now doesn't seem to smell so bad when something seems fishy about Democratic connections"--such as these.

Pajamas has a terrific round-up of photos of the protesters in Denver, including this amusing shot. It's a banner featuring a hagiographic image of Saddam Hussein and written underneath, the caption "'Good Vs. Evil': Gross Simplification".

Well, except when you're a Newsweek columnist on PBS discussing Bob Dole and Spiro Agnew, of course. Why equivocate?!

As Richard Miniter recently wrote, "In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles", and that hectoring puritanism has seeped into its celebrity culture in a massive scale.

Fortunately, whenever such Hollywood hypocrisy occurs, the opportunity for satire is rife, and Cracked.com riotously pushes back with "The 7 Most Retarded Ways Celebrities Have Tried to Go Green." I can't argue at all with their number one choice; I would have found a way to work this item into the list somewhere as well though.

(Found via Dirty Harry, and definitely one for Orrin Judd's "All Comedy Is Conservative" files.)

Well, I thought he was Don Draper (minus the hitch in Korea); Karl Rove thought he was "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

And now Clark S. Judge, managing director of the White House Writers Group and was former Reagan speechwriter dubs him "Barack Gatsby":

Fitzgerald writes of how James Gatz swims out to a Great Lakes yacht, casts off his past and turns himself into Jay Gatsby, a very different man from a very different place. Barack Obama is such a figure. He didn't swim out to a boat. He went to Chicago and there, it seems, he reinvented himself. Much has been written of how he has cast off parts of his past - the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the one-time Capitol and Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers. In and of itself, walking away from problematic associates is not unusual for politicians. But his handling of Wright and Ayers is part of a larger pattern. Across the entire presentation of his personal history, he has nipped here and tucked there until the man in the camera looks entirely different from the man inside.

If, despite his populist rhetoric, people have - as polls tell us they do - a discordant sense of the elite in Barack Obama, it is because, while he may not own a bunch of houses, that's how he grew up and that's what he is.

But even if we're not sure of Obama's identity, as Ed Morrissey writes, "Identity politics -- it's what's for dinner in Denver", complete with Barack Obama's political mentor being accused "by several witnesses of calling a black Hillary Clinton delegate an 'Uncle Tom'", according to Ed.

If you enjoyed my "Atlas Mugged" article on mass print media and its successor, then you'll definitely want to read this recent piece by Mark Harris on the Wired Website:

For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie's Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable's market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner's extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up.

"People would say, 'Oh, they're nibbling away, they're nibbling away,'" Harbert recalls. "And we would always say, 'Well, they can nibble, but they're never gonna really take us.' And then they took us."

Detroit and the newspaper industry each thought the same thing--despite numerous predictions from futurists of diversification just around the corner in each industry. Why should Jurassic television be any different? And the Wired article doesn't even get into the next wave of video technology, which is slowly beginning to level the playing surface in much the same way as the Blogosphere did to print.

And speaking of Jurassic and futurists, if you missed a recent edition of my Sillicon Graffiti video blog I did on the topic, I explore what Michael Crichton and Alvin Toffler had to say about the media and demassification:

Especially when you're Joe Biden, and you get to ride it every night on the taxpayers' dime. (And at a normal ticket price of at least $125 per trip on the Acela Express from DC to Wilmington, that's a lot of dimes). Not to mention having your son the lobbyist on its board.

Dan Riehl's post on Biden's love of the rails includes this Wikiquote:

Government aid to Amtrak was controversial from the beginning. The formation of Amtrak in 1971 was criticized as a bailout serving corporate rail interests and union railroaders, not the traveling public. Critics assert that Amtrak has proven incapable of operating as a business and that it does not provide valuable transportation services meriting public support,[50] a "mobile money-burning machine."[51] They argue that subsidies should be ended, national rail service terminated, and the Northeast Corridor turned over to private interests.

Gosh, now there's a thought.

(More on Biden's lobbyist son, whom the Washington Post notes is accused, along with Biden's brother, "in two lawsuits of defrauding a former business partner and an investor of millions of dollars in a hedge fund deal that went sour," from Gateway Pundit.)

The Bard of Minneapolis takes to the road--specifically, Denver. Say, I hear there's some sort of political convention going on there right about now!

Too little, too late, Trent Lott concludes that maybe too much pork can ultimately be hazardous to a conservative party's majority:

Lott was known as one of the "Princes of Pork" while he was in Congress for his ability to bring home the bacon to Mississippi and he said that also caused some friction with McCain. . . .

Then Lott made a couple of admissions I found startling.

"But you know what, in my heart I knew he was right," he said of his pork barrel ways. That's no way to do business, we shouldn't be doing all that earmarking -- it got completely out of control.

"It got out of control with Republicans and that's why we are being punished a little bit," he added. "Because we forgot how we got there, what we believed in, the principles that after 30 years put us in the majority, gave us the White House, the congress, the senate, the house. And then we ran out of ideas..."

That's because Trent's ideas all ended in 1948.

It's Billy Beer for a new millennium as Obama beer hits the shelves!

Ace of Spades earlier today:

If you've talked to Hillary supporters, you know that they're the world's most recent and most enthusiastic converts to the Anti-Media Bias Party. It's almost funny how life-long Democrats are now sputtering angrily about media bias, the way we've been fuming for most of our lives. They know damn well the media propped up Obama while working to take down their girl.

Which is why Ed Rendell sounds much more like Brent Bozell in this Politico article:

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was supposed to give "closing remarks" during this afternoon's Shorenstein Center-sponsored panel discussion with all three Sunday show moderators -- NBC's Tom Brokaw, ABC's George Stephanopoulous and CBS's Bob Schieffer -- but instead, he opened up a can of worms about bias in 2008 election coverage

"Ladies and gentleman, the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing," said Rendell, in the ballroom at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. "It was embarrassing."

Rendell, an ardent Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter during the primaries, now backs Obama in the general election. Brokaw and Rendell began debating campaign coverage, including the on-air comments by Lee Cowan, and when MSNBC came up, Rendell went after the cable network.

"MSNBC was the official network of the Obama campaign," Rendell said, who called their coverage "absolutely embarrassing."

Chris Matthews, Rendell said, "loses his impartiality when he talks about the Clintons."

Ed must be the last guy on the planet who can use the words "impartiality" and "Chris Matthews" in the same sentence and still keep a straight face.

As I noted on Friday, I'm not sure if Jennifer Rubin's description of Joe Biden, whom she described as "old school as they come and as familiar as a worn-out shoe", was an intentional reference to Adlai Stevenson--a similarly follicle-challenged Democratic senator who 50 years ago would have thought his IQ even bigger than Joe's--even if he couldn't remember to have a campaign aide pick him up a new pair of Florsheims.

Likely it isn't, if only because it's an unfair comparison to Stevenson. Peter Seller's President Muffley, clearly a Stevensonian parody, was, after all, the nominal adult voice of reason in the midst of the chaos of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. But this description from Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism of the late 1950s, complete with its own Stevenson cameo is a reminder that while Obama was originally packaged as some sort of new and novel politician, while conservatives are thought to be old-fashioned, very little actually changes amongst so-called "progressives" and their political goals:

Kennedy's political fortune also stemmed from the fact that he seemed to be riding the waves of history. Once again, the forces of progressivism had been returned to power after a period of peace and prosperity. And despite the unprecedented wealth and leisure of the postwar years--indeed largely because of them--there was a palpable desire among the ambitious, the upwardly mobile, the intellectuals, and, above all, the activists of the progressive-liberal establishment to get "America moving again." "More than anything else", the conservative publisher Henry Luce wrote in 1960, "the people of America are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose."

* * *

Perhaps the best expression of this bipartisan-elite clamor for "social change" came in a series of essays on "the national purpose" co-published by the New York Times and Life magazine. Adlai Stevenson wrote that Americans needed to transcend the "mystique of privacy" and turn away from the "supermarket temple." Charles F. Darlington, a leading corporate executive and former State Department official, explained that America needed to recapture the collective spirit of national purpose it had enjoyed "during parts of the Administrations of Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts" (you can guess which parts). Above all, a reborn America needed to stop seeing itself as a nation of individuals. Once again, "collective action" was the cure. Darlington's call for a "decreased emphasis on private enterprise" amounted to a revival of the corporatism and war socialism of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations.

"We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do--don't go into corporate America."

Glenn Reynolds writes:

Anti-war protests in Denver, featuring Cindy Sheehan. Though at this late date, what war are they protesting, exactly? Iraq's in the wrap-up phase (even Obama says the Surge worked and, well, "mission accomplished"), even the lefties haven't been raising much complaint about Afghanistan, and nobody's talking about invading Iran or anything. If you want a real invasion over oil to protest, you could march against the Russian invasion of Georgia, but that's not happening. What's next -- protests against Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba?

No blood for Mojitos, maaan!

(Mmmm...Mojito....)

A new video from team McCain is aimed squarely at the "Party Unity My A**" vote:

Hillary's response to the video? You don't have to fall in love with Obama, you just have to fall in line. Though it might make for good watching on the iPhones of anyone attending the candlelit vigil(!) for Hillary tomorrow in Denver.

This is going to be fun:

Little Green Footballs and Pajamas Media are joining forces to send the undead creature known only as Zombie to the Convention, for the kind of exclusive, slightly bent coverage only an undead creature can provide.

We have a full schedule of newsworthy stuff laid out, but you'll just have to keep checking LGF because the Recreate 68 moonbats may act up and change our plans. We'll be staying in touch with Agent Z minute by minute during the circus, through the magic of teh innernut.

Zombie's reports will begin tomorrow, the opening day of the Convention. The reports will appear simultaneously at LGF and PJ Media; here at LGF they'll show up as front page articles just like the ones I post.

We're looking forward to this week; stay tuned to LGF and PJ for the latest.

Of course, plenty of zombies are already in Denver...

Sixty years ago, a Mr. E. Blair wrote:

In the walls of [Winston's] cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Just as Orwell's Ministry of Information was more concerned with destroying its namesake product instead of archiving it, today's news media seems much more obsessed with keeping big stories out the news than shining a light on them. (See also: Edwards, John; Ayers, William.) Similarly, Wikipedia occasionally can seem to function as a modern-day memory hole, to borrow from this Hot Air headline.

Over at Newsbusters, they've spotted two examples of Joe Biden-inspired Wikipedia weirdness: first, Biden's 1988 presidential campaign Wikipedia page is worked over, and now an inconvenient year for Biden is quietly moved to where Biden's endorsement of McCain for Kerry's veep in 2004 is less obviously visible.

Related: "Liberal Writer Saw Biden as a Disaster Last Year."

One for the "I'll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who tell me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis" files:

Here's another photo of the V'Ger set from Star Trek the main stage of the Democratic convention in Denver. For a party that won't allow additional energy production, that wants to ban light bulbs, and whose house organ did a TV broadcast last year in the dark to promote the eeeeevils of global warming, they sure do love their megawatt Hollywood sets. But then, this is all just a warm-up for the ultimate in carbon consumption for entertainment purposes when the party moves to Mile High Stadium for the Obama-coronation. And--of course!--look's who'll be burning all that carbon, electricity and fossil fuel alongside him!

It's too bad the MSM networks are all in the tank, and thus won't be asking any inconvenient questions--it would have been fun to watch the convention's Director of Greening turn red when she's asked what's she's signed off on.

"Before a crowd of thousands gathered in front of the Old State Capitol, Mr. Obama said Mr. Biden was 'what many others pretend to be -- a statesman with sound judgment who doesn't have to hide behind bluster to keep America strong.'"

He doesn't?! As Orrin Judd asks, "Has the Unicorn Rider ever even met the man?"

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt, not surprisingly, has lots of fun at the expense of Obama's veep. I won't give away the television character that Hugh compares Biden, except to say that as nutty as the character was, the actor who played him is a pretty level-headed guy in real life.

Robert Stacy McCain flashes back to Hunter S. Thompson, McGovern-Eagleton, and the rest of the bad old days of 1972. Flashforward to 2008; Tommy Chong, who certainly knows a thing or two about both the '70s and bad flashbacks, is not a happy man:

"Check out the people you're voting for.... "For instance, Joseph Biden comes off as a liberal Democrat, but he's the one who authored the bill that put me in jail. He wrote the law against shipping drug paraphernalia through the mail - which could be anything from a pipe to a clip or cigarette papers."

Wow--"Liberal" Democrats turn out to be rigid puritans--that never happens these days!

And speaking of the neo-puritanical Biden, he's no great fan of the Second Amendment, needless to say.

Update: One of Charles Johnson's readers also has a pretty amazing '70s flashback.

Hot Air has the Metaphor Of The Day: "Biden got the call from Obama during a root canal"!

All hail President Biden!

News you can use from Tim Blair:

If, on May 14, 1979*, you'd asked yourself, "How long must I wait until a cartoon cat uses the phrase 'terrified asexual forcemeat?'", the answer is 10,693 days.

* I think all of us were asking this question in 1979. Precise date selected at random.

And while such brilliant phrasing isn't a part of "one of the best opening paragraphs ever written", it'll do until the next one comes along.

Update: More meaty, beaty, big & bouncy fun from the cartoon kingdom:

Dreams of My Fund Raising: "Now, we know what the text message sign-up was really about. Not about being all-inclusive and galvanizing the hip kids with cool technology. It's a mega-fund-raising call list, as commenter Gwillie points out."

The fact that it was sent at 3:00 AM was purely a coincidence, right Hillary voters? Because hey, it's always 3:00 AM somewhere...

Update: Thus begins "The Republican Blogger Full Employment Act of 2008"--but then, that's the one of the better bills the Senate always seems to renew each year...

Obama finally makes it official that it is indeed Biden, and instead of pointing out the obvious story here--because that would hurt their candidate--AP simply notes:

Barack Obama named Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential running mate early Saturday, balancing his ticket with a seasoned congressional veteran well-versed in foreign policy and defense issues.

Obama announced the pick on his Web site with a photo of the two men and an appeal for donations. A text message went out shortly afterward that said, "Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee."

The real story here is that everyone knew hours ahead of time, via the Weekly Standard, hoary old CNN and AP itself, the Blogosphere and Drudge. Instead of hype such as this, reminiscent of the McLuhanesque purple technoprose so common in the late 1990s (he said, having written tens of thousands of words of just that sort of prose himself back then) when the Web was bright and shiny and new:

It's beautiful.

In one fell swoop, by choosing to disclose his vice-presidential pick directly to voters through text messaging rather than revealing his pick through choice leaks to the press, the Obama camp has given us a momentary reprieve from having to watch smirk-faced pundits gloat about "inside scoops" and "my sources tell me." No "scoops" for the Villagers, followed by anti-climactic press conferences to the people as an afterthought. No "special access" to them, no matter how much they clamor. Technology has allowed the Obama camp to keep all, reporter and regular citizen alike, on the edge of their seats.

For today, the talking heads are absolutely powerless and impotent, staring stupidly at the screen, searching for words to make themselves relevant. For once, they finally feel what we have known all along --that they have absolutely nothing to offer outside of what is selectively hand fed to them.

With all this baseless VP speculation, with their special status and access stripped away, the "insiders" are exactly where we are, inside the cone of silence huddled together in unawareness, exuding palpable excitement, and waiting for what will now be truly breaking news for all but a select few in Obama's circle. Welcome, Villagers, to the land of the regular. I know it's unfamiliar territory, but enjoy your stay. I know I certainly will.

I'll bet. If there were any Obamamaniacs relying solely upon their text messages to find out who the Messiah's veep would be, they were the last to know--and as Robert Stacy McCain noted:

Imagine the reactions of those poor saps getting their text messages: "WTF? Dude. Joe Biden?"

Bob Owens puts it this way:

It's got to be disappointing when you discover that the candidate you helped elect into office lied to you. It must be worse to find out he's lying to you, when he hasn't even nailed down the nomination yet.

The anti-climactic feel of it all, a combination of a perfectly routine choice by a guy who was supposed to bring fresh bold unconventional outside the box thinking to presidential politics, coupled with more than a little techno-overreach by team Obama with the text gaffe is the real story.

Which is why it's apparently not worth reporting by AP.

It's official, according to AP, who's reporting, "Obama picks Biden for veep":

Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware is Barack Obama's pick as vice presidential running mate, The Associated Press has learned.

Biden, 65, is a veteran of more than three decades in the Senate, and one of his party's leading experts on foreign policy, an area in which polls indicate Obama needs help in his race against Republican rival John McCain.

The official who spoke did so on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to pre-empt a text-message announcement the Obama campaign promised for Saturday morning.

A recollection from Clarence Thomas' autobiography sheds some light on the duplicity of Biden the political hack. Meanwhile, Patrick Rufini has YouTube clips of Biden the gaffe machine: "Joe Biden vs. Joe Biden's Mouth", and Biden's non-gaffes could also come back to haunt him, as Jim Geraghty reminds us of those "'Just Words' That Joe Biden Would Like To Forget."

More confirmation from CNN: "Sen. Barack Obama has picked Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, multiple Democratic sources tell CNN"; Hot Air adds, "so much for texting".

My immediate take? It's such an offbeat choice that I'm reminded of this classic Seinfeld episode.

Exurban League's immediate take? Brutal.

Update: I was going to Google around for one my favorite descriptions of Biden's rhetorical excess from Jonah Goldberg, but fortunately, Jonah linked to it himself:

Biden has a not unrare condition in which the gear box that normally regulates the speed of your mouth has been ground down to a nub and so his mouth can rev at great speeds heedless of where his brain intends to steer it. Those flashes from his enormous teeth are really the equivalent of flashing your brights; he's saying "GET OUT OF THE WAY, I CAN'T STOP THIS THING!"

Meanwhile, over at Pajamas, Jennifer Rubin adds:

What a difference a summer makes. Barack Obama began the summer as he began the campaign: the Agent of Change. With the summer drawing to an end, he has chosen a running mate who is as old school as they come and as familiar as a worn-out shoe.

Which instantly calls to mind this image of an earlier generation's liberal senator who heard his own higher calling, and cursed with his own penchant for rhetorical excess which also caused him a fair amount of trouble.

Robert Stacy "The Other" McCain also fires up the Tardis: "Is it still too late for Obama-Eagleton?"

The thing is, Joe is old news. Very old news. And he's got no executive experience. To jerk around the national press for a full week, only to deliver Joe Biden -- this is a disappointment. Imagine the reactions of those poor saps getting their text messages: "WTF? Dude. Joe Biden?"

Earlier today, I heard Hugh Hewitt playing the bellowing trumpet-powered chorus from Jesus Christ, Superstar whenever he mentioned Obama's name. The truest of the true believers, who believe that Obama is Him--and equally infallible--will somehow rationalize the choice. Mysterious ways, indeed.

Fire up the Super Gaffe-O-Matic '76 if the headline on this Weekly Standard post is correct: "It's Biden."

He's articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy--that's a storybook, man.

Jonah Goldberg's recent National Review essay on Barack Obama's transnationalism was titled, "Hear Me, Earthlings!", and, nevermind its fluorescent pastel color scheme, I as look at the photos of the stage set of the Democrats' convention in Denver, I have to wonder...so what time does V'Ger make himself visible?

Or as Ace puts it, "Obama's Stage Stresses Democratic Planks of Unity, Hope, and Avante-Garde Lighting Concepts."

All welcome Obama-Free Tibet '08!

Even the liberal Snopes Website admits that the Bush #41 supermarket scanner story, as it was reported by the dinosaur media is bogus, and yet, nearly 20 years later, as Newsbusters notes, "CNN's Yellin Perpetuates Discredited Bush Scanner Story."

Jeff Goldstein quotes a wide swatch of David Harsanyi's great article in the Denver Post on MADD and adds:

After the Orioles won the World Series in 1983, Storm Davis, a then-20-year-old starting pitcher for the Birds, who played an integral role in Baltimore's success, could not partake in the post series champagne and beer celebration.

Mother Against Drunk Driving would likely counter such a seemingly arbitrary and incongruous segregation among teammates by noting that the ritual of celebrating with alcohol "glorifies" drinking, and so should itself be eliminated.

- And at that point, it should become clear that MADD is no longer worried about drunk driving per se, but is rather become a neoprohibitionist organization trafficking in emotional arguments to convince cowardly politicians to force change upon the culture -- "change" that has the effect of taking away individual freedom and responsibility, along with the role of parents in teaching young adults how to handle certain freedoms, in exchange for a government run mandate, complete with police powers of the state or municipality, that presumes to usurp those responsibilities by a kind of 3/5 rule on adulthood.

Exchanging white hoods for big buttons and a lot of emotional appeals merely suggests a change in rhetorical strategy from those who seek to build society to match their own personal hobby horses.

Nothing classically liberal about that -- not to mention that turning water into wine these days would likely result in 100 hours of forced community service work, an orange vest covering your flowing frock, your staff replaced by one of those pointy sticks used to pick up coffee cups and Almond Joy wrappers...

Or as James Lileks described the rapidly growing neo-puritanism yesterday, "Smoking, drinking, bacon and sex: I remember when only one of those was a sin."

You know him, you love him, you can't live without him: everybody's famous Winter Soldier in training, Scott Thomas Beauchamp is back!

Update: "Also, Bigfoot is real." I want to believe!

Words you rarely like to hear from a presidential candidate: "Beijing looks like a pretty good option."

In a devastating comparison, Maggie's Farm notes that Obama's gaffes have gotten so bad, he's beginning to make Bob Dylan sound sensible by comparison.

"I don't know about the rest of you, but I increasingly find Obama to be like a late night infomercial host - slightly charming, slightly unctuous, factually meaningless. Ready for the Presidency? Don't be silly."

--Roger L. Simon, November 18th, 2007

"Obama Tests Waters With Late-Night Informercial"

--TV News, August 12th, 2008

A Mr. Allan Stewart Konigsberg once quipped:

I have never in my life had difficulty with the cops. I had difficulty with the cops, that's not...no actually I didn't have difficulty with the cops. I was once sitting home in my house, and a lot of cars pulled up around the house. They shined in searchlights, and I heard a voice over the loudspeaker say "We have your house surrounded. This is the New York public library" They wanted their books back, y'know, and the little librarian was lobbing grenades over the house.

--From Woody Allen - Standup Comic: 1964-1968.

Flash-forward forty years: "Wisconsin woman, 20, arrested for two overdue library volumes."

While her mug shot does bear somewhat of a certain vague aesthetic similarity to fellow Wisconsinite Miss A. Hall, the above guilty party is not from Chippewa Falls though, sadly enough.

Life among the new puritans: "Smoking, drinking, bacon and sex: I remember when only one of those was a sin."

Headline courtesy of Peggy Noonan, video courtesy of Cuffy:

Update: Power Line squares the circle.

As Orrin Judd writes, "As tough is this ad is, consider how much information they have to provide you before they tie the whole message together. It takes twenty seconds longer than the voter's attention span...That said, it's like crack for us wonks."

And the left is reeling from the overdose; witness Michael Crowley of The New Republic's meltdown:

You thought Corsi was swift boating? This is swift boating. The 9/11 link is completely and utterly revolting.

Except that it's true on multiple levels: true in the actual definition of "Swift Boating", as opposed to the pejorative that the media want to think it is, and true in that Obama has to be comfortable on some level with domestic terrorism simply to be buds with Ayers, whose Radical Chic salad days not coincidentally occurred near-simultaneously with John Kerry's Winter Soldier phase. And as Allahpundit notes:

All of this punctuated, of course, but a reminder of how decidedly un-despicable the left would an ad along these lines targeting a conservative who was palsy walsy with an abortion bomber.

Of course, the timing is interesting: the Swift Vets waited until after the convention in 2004, and performed political jujitsu by using Kerry's "Reporting For Duty" speech against him; McCain is launching his pincer movement days before the convention--even before Obama has nominated his veep, which has got to be driving The One to bitter distraction--and hopefully, his colleagues in the Obamedia will all overreact as badly as Michael Crowley did above, thus writing McCain's next ad.

Preseason's officially over. As someone who's name rhymes with the GOP candidate once said, welcome to the party, pal.

Update: A correction--as Newsday notes, the above video wasn't from John McCain's campaign but the American Issues Project:

A conservative nonprofit group with a past link to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign wants to spend $2.8 million on an ad questioning Democrat Barack Obama's relationship to a founder of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground.

The ad, which is expected to begin airing Thursday in Michigan and Friday in Ohio, focuses on William Ayers, whose Weatherman organization took credit for a series of bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.

American Issues Project, the sponsor of the ad, is a nonprofit 501(c)4 organization. One of its board members, Ed Failor Jr., was a paid consultant for McCain's campaign in Iowa last year. The campaign paid his firm $50,000 until July 2007. American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston said Failor has no connection to the McCain campaign now.

The ad signals the emergence of the type of tough advertising by independent organizations that operate outside the financial limits of campaign finance law. It is reminiscent of the Swift Boat ads aired against John Kerry four years ago questioning his military service and are widely blamed by Democrats for contributing to his defeat.

Organizers sought to air the ad on Fox News Channel, but a Fox spokesman said the network declined to run it. He would not say why.

All is proceeding according to plan.

He may be Maverick, but Senator McCain is p.o.ing exactly the right people to endear himself to conservatives a week and a half before the Republican Convention.

As a man of the Great Indoors, air conditioning has been my life-long friend, one whose reputation I will fight long and hard to protect. But it's curious the partisan rancor it brings out in others: back in 1999, Jonah Goldberg quipped that it's responsible for Big Government:

In the 18th and 19th centuries a congressman wouldn't be caught dead in Washington during July. Well, actually, they might be caught dead, because they wore all those clothes and were so fat that they might have died while trying to get out. The British Embassy, for example, moved the entire kit and caboodle to Maine every summer.

The idea is: Ban air conditioning in Washington and you would cut the "productivity" of the government by more than a third (say from late May to late September) and return the United States to the limited government the Founders intended. D.C. is still full of members of this school of thought.

In Salon, on the other side of the political spectrum, Edward (no relation) McClelland writes, "I blame A/C for the decline of the labor movement and for decimating the Midwest's population. Mostly, I blame it for the election of George W. Bush."

And speaking of propeller-driven machines, Mayor Bloomberg spins back from the ledge, slowly:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is backing off his suggestion to put windmills on city bridges and rooftops after newspapers mocked the idea with photo illustrations of turbines on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.

"There are aesthetic considerations," Bloomberg said. "No. 2, I have absolutely no idea whether that makes any sense from a scientific, from a practical point of view."

Imagine the howls of derision from the media if a Republican--or at least one who wasn't temporarily one in name only solely for electoral expediency said that.

Ed Morrissey ponders, "How many times can the DNC mention that Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is a Jew?" in a single article?

I guess Barack Obama was right after all. This election will see dirty smears based on identity politics. He just got the party wrong. This didn't come from a blogger or an e-mail kook -- this comes from the DNC itself. In 660 words, they manage to use a derivative of the word Jew five times in attacking Cantor. They never explain why this forms such a strong theme in their opposition of Cantor, but apparently they believe that Democrats won't need an explanation to oppose Jews.

When will Barack Obama attack this real racism from his own party with the same amount of vigor that he falsely accused Republicans of engaging in it?

Addendum: Defenders of the DNC could say, "Well, hey, all of these are just quotes from newspapers like The Hill and the Picayune" -- which would be true. The DNC, however, just managed to pick five quotes that contain five references to Cantor and/or Abramoff's religion? Let's imagine the response that would erupt on the Left if the RNC did the same thing to Obama. Even Bill Clinton's single reference to Jesse Jackson's win in South Carolina got him branded as a race-card player -- and that didn't involve tying Obama to a criminal on the basis of his skin color.

Heck, we don't have to imagine this at all. Remember all the cries of "racism" when the subject of Jeremiah Wright finally aired?

The silence from the MSM on this, will of course, be deafening. On the other hand, just wait 'til Vice President Lieberman takes office...

John Nolte (also known by his nom de blog, Dirty Harry), writes that "Hollywood is a town run almost entirely by liberal ideologues. But this is also an industry built on the personal relationship, and here's where things get sticky for the openly conservative":

But this is also an industry built on the personal relationship, and here's where things get sticky for the openly conservative.

Unless it's to inspire their annual cinematic treatise to all things them -- the annual film decrying the 1950s blacklist which forced a few screenwriters to use a pseudonym -- present-day liberal Hollywood doesn't much care for the word "blacklist," especially when it's them being accused of doing the blacklisting. Their defense is to hide behind the literal and claim there is no actual blacklist or organized conspiracy to keep openly conservative filmmakers from getting work.

Fine.

In 2004, before anyone had even seen The Passion of the Christ, before Mel Gibson would drunkenly reveal his darker side, leftists poured out of the entertainment, academic, and religious worlds to unleash an unholy hell on the film and its maker. Too late to stop the film (it had secured distribution), the goal was therefore two-fold: to hurt the movie financially (which obviously failed), but also to launch a pre-emptive strike against any filmmaker thinking about following Gibson's lead and scampering off the liberal Hollywood plantation. The message was clear: Stray and you will be personally destroyed. And it worked. The Passion may be the only film to make over a half-billion dollars and not create a me-too phenomenon. A more tolerant industry, or at least one driven by financial considerations, would've quickly greenlit a serious-minded sequel based on the Acts of the Apostles.

Reasonable people would call this a form of "blacklisting," but liberal Hollywood isn't reasonable and rather than have an honest discussion on the matter they instead wrap us 'round the axle of specificity when it comes to the word "blacklist. " So let's use another word: Passioning.

"Passioning" is what happens when the leftist Hollywood establishment, using whatever power available, demean, dismiss, diminish, and defame those they consider an ideological apostate. In 2004 it was Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ; today it's director David Zucker and An American Carol.

Read the rest, and don't miss the full version of my interview with Andrew Breitbart on the same topic (including a discussion of An American Carol) over at PJM Political.

It's also worth revisiting the Anchoress' thoughts from late 2005 on the damage to pop culture post-9/11, as well.

While Jake Tapper of ABC has done a remarkable job for an MSM journalist at keeping all of the candidates' feet to the fire, "the fine ABC News folks who monitor Tapper's comments", as Bob Owens writes, sound like they're playing the same Chicago rules that the media's favorite candidate abides by as well.

(For my XM interview this week with Bob, click here.)

James Lileks, whom I interviewed about AMC's Mad Men series last month for Pajamas' XM show, has some thoughts about the show in yesterday's Bleat:

I thought "Mad Men" would end up more highly regarded than "The Sopranos," and it wasn't just the late night and the well, wow factor the last episode left me with. It's the same kind of show - episodic, layered, one big arc sheltering a dozen small plots - and it also deals with a Big Subject, but there are crucial differences. That means a long "Mad Men" essay follows, so if you don't care, well, farewell! See you at buzz.mn. (And Twitter.)

Nearly everyone in "Mad Men" is a likeable character in some ways despite their flaws, and nearly everyone in "Sopranos" was mostly unlikable but redeemed for the moment by plot and dialogue. I suppose that's why the latter was lauded; there's something perverse and vicariously appealing about caring for bad guys. Aren't we naughty. But even the not-so-bad people in the Sopranos were unappealing, really; the wives were all shrews content to float along on murder money, the kids were empty shells, and the mobsters - while always fun to watch and listen to - were cruel men without qualities, only tics. Did anyone care if Christopher fell off the wagon? Anyone care about anyone, except whether they would be the Whacker or the Whackee this season? When you think about it, the grand tale of modern mobsters yearning after a bygone time when they had the nabe in their hands is a little like post-Communist block captains lamenting the end of the Soviet Union. Cry yourself a river. Put on the Sinatra and deal with it.

The show gets smaller as we get away from it, and in a way you start to feel a bit abashed for having gotten sucked in. "Mad Men" inhabits a far more interesting world, has people making an honest living, dealing with art in a quintessentially American way - through commerce - and takes place at the same time as the Soprano's good old Good Old Days - except these guys aren't stealing or hurting or killing. They don't have any good old days; these are the good days.

Well, at least until the end of this season, which is set in 1963. This was the penultimate first season episode. So it stands to reason that the crew of the good ship Sterling-Cooper are slowly drifting into one heckuva Boomer-era iceberg somewhere near the conclusion of this season's story arc.

If "inexperienced" is code for racism, and if Ralph Lauren's Waspy-duds are racist, (which must make this a photo of the 21st century KKK in their bedsheets) then surely the headline of the article that RedState links to is as well.

The writers of Avenue Q didn't know the half of it: by the time November rolls around everything will be code for racism--if it isn't yet already.

Related: "Roasting Obama."

Having read this article on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's loony return-of-the primitive proposal to put wind turbines on top of apparently everything in Manhattan, I was about to post the usual bloggerific snark, though Rush and GlobalWarming.org have you well served in that department.

But when I looked up Bloomberg's Wikipedia page, I came across this truly bizarre passage:

Bloomberg has on numerous occasions been accused of sexually harassing men under his employment, which he has denied.[24][25] T. Dan Winger sued Mr. Bloomberg for sexual harassment, alleging that he had made explicit comments about his body and encouraged him to spend time alone with him. The lawsuit was withdrawn in 1999.[26] In 1997, a former Bloomberg L.P. employee who became pregnant while employed filed a lawsuit accusing Bloomberg of saying "Kill it!" and "great, No. 16," a reference to the number of pregnant women in the company.[24] The lawsuit was settled the same year for an undisclosed amount of money.

Somebody clearly has gone in and hacked the genders of those in that passage. "T. Dan Winger" is in all likelihood "T. Diane Winger" with a quick, err snip. I took a screen cap to record the weirdness, which will probably be reversed in the not too distant future.

Just another day at the faith-based encyclopedia.

Well sure--minus the gubernatorial-level executive experience and military service.

Dick Morris writes:

If Obama lost -- after Hillary made a fuss at the convention -- they would blame her for all eternity (just like Democrats blame Ted Kennedy for Carter's defeat). But, without having any leverage or a decent hand to play, the Clintons bluffed Obama into amazing concessions.

Hillary will get to play a film extolling her virtues produced by Harry Bloodworth Thomason. Bill will speak on Wednesday night. Hillary's name will be placed into nomination. She will get to have nominating and seconding speeches on her behalf. And, on Thursday night, the last night of the convention, the roll call will show how narrowly Obama prevailed.

So Obama gave away Tuesday night, Wednesday night and part of Thursday night to the Clintons. It will really be their convention. A stronger candidate would've called their bluff and confined the Clintons to one night on which both Hillary and Bill spoke (he would have outshone her). He would have blocked a roll call by allowing a voice vote to nominate by acclimation. He would have stood up to the Clintons and recaptured his own convention.

If Obama can't stand up to the Clintons, after they have been defeated, how can he measure up to a resurgent Putin who has just achieved a military victory?

Which makes quite a sharp contrast to this look at California State Controller John Chiang, whose 15 minutes of Democratic fame have arrived after becoming a thorn in the side of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger--not to mention every other California taxpayer:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suffered a setback Wednesday when a superior court judge temporarily put on hold his plan to cut state worker salaries down to minimum wage. The governor also said he would not be speaking at the Republican National Convention unless a budget agreement could be reached in California

At the same time, a new star has emerged in the Democratic Party in the form of State Controller John Chiang, who refused to put Schwarzenegger's executive order into effect.

Chiang also now finds himself in the national spotlight because he has been chosen to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

The decision to pick Chiang was not a coincidence, NBC Bay Area's Mike Luery reported.

The implied message according to party officials is that Democrats are not afraid to stand up to Schwarzenegger, in part because they believe the public will not side with the Governor's order.

Arnold's no Putin, but still, maybe the Democrats could consider the Torricelli Option with Chiang to combat growing Obama remorse...

Victor Davis Hanson (who was kind enough to step into the virtual studios of PJM Political this week) writes, "Watch the Convention. Obama will, of course, still be nominated, but Hillary will play Medea, Lady Macbeth, and Joan of Arc all in one--and to the hilt."

And of course, there's Hillary own personality.

Hillary in Quadrophenia? As environmentally friendly as they are, I doubt she would look very dignified on a Vespa.

Jim Geraghty writes, "Somebody Wake the Chicago Media":

How is it that the Chicago Tribune has not reported on Stanley Kurtz's fight with the University of Illinois at Chicago over access to documents relating to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a small foundation, founded and inspired by Bill Ayers, for which Obama served as board chairman?

Nothing in the Sun-Times, either...

UPDATE: A reader informs me the Tribune has run a brief AP item on the controversy, but no reporting by its own staff on this yet.

I think they're waiting for the National Enquirer to do more legwork on the story...

Meanwhile, this could be fun: "McCain has brought up Ayers before but I don't think he's run any ads about him. Look for that to change."

The latest edition of PJM Political is now online!

Found via Orrin Judd, Lloyd Billingsley, who previously wrote "Hollywood's Missing Movies", which featured a plot summary of Total Eclipse, the greatest film Hollywood will never make, has a review of the new hagio-documentary, Trumbo:

Capitalism is evil and America is a horrible fascist place, the argument goes, except for my lucrative studio contract, except for my fat bank account, except for my mansion, my swimming pool, my ranch, and my luxury cars. That's why there were jokes about Robert Rich, one of Trumbo's pseudonyms. Trumbo, who died in 1976, tells those stories here, along with his one-man show of accredited victimhood, in which he gets some help. Former Nation editor Victor Navasky does a lot of the explaining, and his book Naming Names, a defense of the screen Stalinists, is conveniently displayed beside him.

Here is the familiar footage of the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on Communism in Hollywood, which foolishly focused on film content. The screen Stalinists were eager to testify but the strategy of defying the committee came straight from the CPUSA bosses. Trumbo is billed as an independent thinker and contrarian, but that didn't extend to Party bosses. When they laid down the law, they were obeyed. As John Huston later discovered, the strategy was all about protecting John Howard Lawson, the Party's straw boss in the studio talent guilds, and like Trumbo, an unpleasant fellow to those of other affiliations, even on the left.

Some studio people were friendly to the committee because the Party, in its heyday, wielded plenty of power in the studios and had made their lives miserable, doing all they could to quash their projects and ruin their careers. Trumbo provides not a hint of that background, nor why the committee came to Hollywood in the first place. It was the result of an investigation of Gerhard Eisler, a Comintern agent whose brother Hanns wrote scores for Hollywood movies. The Comintern isn't even mentioned a single time.

Footage from films such as Papillon and Spartacus shows how much Trumbo imposed the heroes-versus-informers template. He also has a brief role in Papillon as a prison commandant, which is appropriate. The Hollywood Communists maintained silence as Stalin kangaroo courted their fellow writers and artists into the gulag, or just killed them off. Nothing about that in Trumbo, nothing that would threaten his status as the icon of what, in Hollywood, passes for the Greatest Generation.

Trumbo will likely win an Oscar for best documentary, even though it's as much a fantasy as Tropic Thunder. Trumbo's back story and the tale of CPUSA overtures in Hollywood are much more dramatic and action packed, but so far no takers in the dream factories.

I know at least one Blogger who gave it a shot, however:

Saddleback: The Recap: Featuring James Lileks, Victor Davis Hanson and Jennifer Rubin. Plus much more; later today on PJM Political!

Unintentional or intentional error? You make the call, sports fans!

(Incidentally, just to follow up on John Hinderaker's post, the word in question is still contained within the page that Power Line links to, as of the time of this posting.)

Sally Quinn of the Washington Post writes:

This was not a debate. There was not a winner or a loser. The one sure winner was Rick Warren, who overnight changed the face of evangelicals in this country from the cartoon caricature of rigid, right-wing fundamentalists to one of open-minded, intelligent, concerned citizens.

Cartoon caricatures? Wherever would one go to read such stereotypes?

(H/T: 5'F)

Ed Morrissey has a photo of the pass to Barack Obama's acceptance speech at Invesco Field with its now infamous upside-down flag motif. I think it's a likely gaffe, not an intentional slur (perhaps a Kinsley-esque gaffe?), but it does immediately recall two other blasts from the Democratic past: the cover of John Kerry's The New Soldier cri de coeur from 1971, as Ed notes, and according to a passage in Steve Hayward's The Age of Reagan, the staffers of the following year's campaign by George McGovern.

Barack Obama once positioned himself as someone who had moved beyond the failed punitive liberalism that began in the mid-to-late1960s. But from Bittergate to this recent gaffe, his campaign seems mired in his party's reactionary politics, which date back to the days after JFK's death; now the longest running hangover in history.

Related: On the other hand, "Credentials? We don't need no stinkin' credentials"!

Err, the other Joe that is. Kathryn Jean Lopez has your "Most Bizarre Sentence of the Day", from Howard Fineman:

Biden has largely escaped any hint of scandal, personal or political, in a long career, even though he was forced to withdraw from the Democratic race in 1988 amid charges of plagiarism.

As someone once wrote, "A political party is dying before our eyes--and I don't mean the Democrats..."

Glenn Reynolds asks:

IS IT JUST ME, or has Technorati become almost useless lately? Seems like half the time it doesn't work, and the other half the time it's days behind. What gives?

I found it to be that way for quite a while, to be honest. I sort of assume if one of their servers crashes, some sort of backup kicks in with old posts, but this seems to be happening at an accelerating rate in recent weeks.

Hopefully it will be back to 100 percent by the end of the summer, as this fall will no doubt be a peak period of usage, for obvious reasons.

Dick Heller gets his DC gun permit.

Traditionally in sports, you don't exactly devote a whole lot of effort in the preseason, lest you risk injury and give away your game plan to other teams early. As I mentioned yesterday, the "Bush cheated!" rumors in 2004 came in October. The "Bush is a racist" card from 2000 that was played in ads that blamed the death of dragging victim James Byrd on then-governor of Texas Bush also came in October, as referenced by the date of this op-ed from the time by Brent Bozell.

Both cards have already been played by Obama this year against John McCain (though virtually nothing would top the smear by the teams playing in 2000), and the conventions haven't even started. Which seems to be either a rookie error, or they're sitting on the mother of all doomsday October surprises.

As far as the McCain cheated! rumor, it seems like a pretty silly one to have Andrea Mitchell float for Obama as (a) the Bush cheated! rumor didn't exactly gain much traction in 2004 and (b) it allows the McCain camp to remind the media of this:

Exit quotation from Team McCain's bruising letter to NBC about how deep in the tank they are for Obama: "John McCain actually requested that he and Barack Obama do the forum together on stage at the same time, making these kinds of after-the-fact complaints moot."

Indeed.^TM

AP reports, "Dam breaks near Grand Canyon; hundreds evacuate."

Deborah Howell, the Washington Post's ombudsman ombudswoman ombudsperson writes:

Democrat Barack Obama has had about a 3 to 1 advantage over Republican John McCain in Post Page 1 stories since Obama became his party's presumptive nominee June 4. Obama has generated a lot of news by being the first African American nominee, and he is less well known than McCain -- and therefore there's more to report on. But the disparity is so wide that it doesn't look good.

And if 2000 and 2004 are any indication--and they are--it's not like the media will do anything about it, of course.

(H/T: IP)

Hi, I'm Barack Obama. You may remember me from such public service videos as "Pirates of the South Side: Dead Man's Vote" and "It's Raining Weathermen". But today, I'm here to talk you about...

(*Neither could Ross Perot, for that matter.)

Via Tim Blair, "An important community warning, featuring one of the best opening paragraphs ever written":

A Mount Gambier woman has warned the community against cleaning lawnmowers in bedrooms while smoking.

I know I won't ever do that again!

Link: sevenload.com

F. Scott Fitzgerald once thought that there were no second acts in American life--but then, he also thought that a half-gallon of Beefeater's was a convenient single-serving size. The Libertarian Party? Hey, good enough for Mike Gravel, good enough for Hillary Clinton!

Remember one of the loonier conspiracy theories that the left floated in October of 2004--that Bush cheated during the debates against John Kerry? Here we go again!

I blame those Katherine Harris-type election officials, myself.

Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on mixed marriages. "It's not the type of mix you might think", she writes. "This is a case of a woman who's a diehard Obama supporter married to a McCain guy. This sort of split isn't unusual for them; they nearly always disagree on politics." Read the whole thing, including this addendum:

I'll add that I think the death knell for a politically mixed marriage is when one partner or the other--or perhaps both--begins to consider that those on the other side are not just mistaken but are in fact evil.

Which probably happens more often than one might initially imagine, given Krauthammer's Law.

Kyle Smith notes that tonight is Chris Noth's last appearance as Detective Mike Logan on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. While fellow original L&O vet Dann Florek soldiers on as Capt. Cragen in L&O: SVU, as I wrote back in 2002, the franchise has never been the same since Michael Moriarty bailed out on the original L&O, long, long ago.

Orrin Judd links to this typically disingenuous passage in the New York Times:

Regime change in Iraq in addition to Afghanistan, he argued, would compel other sponsors of terrorism to mend their ways, "accomplishing by example what we would otherwise have to pursue through force of arms."

Finally, as American troops massed in the Persian Gulf in early 2003, Mr. McCain grew impatient, his aides say, concerned that the White House was failing to act as the hot desert summer neared. Waiting, he warned in a speech in Washington, risked squandering the public and international support aroused by Sept. 11. "Does anyone really believe that the world's will to contain Saddam won't eventually collapse as utterly as it did in the 1990s?" Mr. McCain asked.

In retrospect, some of Mr. McCain's critics now accuse him of looking for a pretext to justify the war. "McCain was hell-bent for leather: 'Saddam Hussein is a bad guy, we have got to teach him, let's send a message to the other people in the Middle East,' " said Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts.

As Orrin writes, "Which raises the obvious question, which parts of this does Mr. Kerry think are wrong: that Saddam was evil; that he should have been removed; and/or that other evil regimes ought to get the message that we can and will remove them too?"

I'd be curious as to the answers most of the Timespeople would give to those questions, as well.

What is it with Democratic presidential candidates and hyperbole?

• Al Gore inventing the Internet and cleaning up Love Canal.


• John Kerry reliving Apocalypse Now.


• Hillary's non-existent Tuzla sniper fire.

And now this, from tonight's debate/interview/conversation/forum/thing:

Obama said the most gut-wrenching decision of his life was to vote against the Iraq War. McCain said it was when he declined an offer to leave a prison camp in Vietnam.

As Dan Riehl writes, "Obama didn't vote against the Iraq War. He wasn't even in the Senate! Am I missing something here? Did he somehow qualify this to make it true? Or was it simply made up?"

True--but he made a very personal decision--even if it didn't count for the record. And it's seared--seared--into his memory!

(Via Hyscience.)

I gave NBC a lot of grief last fall for their global warming stunt of turning a handful of overhead lights off in their studio as some sort of sophomoric global warming cheerleading when covering a Cowboys/Eagles NFL game, which itself burned megawatts of power from the stadium lights, the video electronics, and the satellite hookups. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel spent by those driving to the game, the network equipment trucks, the corporate charter flights, etc.

But NBC made up for it big time with this:

WTHR, the NBC affiliate for Indianapolis, reported from Beijing and described the NBC set used for the network's two highest rated news broadcasts, "NBC Nightly News" and "Today," as air conditioned - even though it is outdoors.

"The set is outside, but air conditioning vents make the weather bearable," Anne Marie Tiernon wrote for WTHR Eyewitness News on August 14.

Thanks, fellas. Everyone has that brief embarrassing fling with the teenage nostalgie de la boue Rousseauvian primitiveness of environmentalism, but it's good to have you back with the rest of us.

Rich Lowry writes:

In the first fifteen minutes, McCain had established a moral seriousness stemming from his conduct in Vietnam as a POW and his long-time as a national leader that Obama can't match. Throughout the rest of the night, he brought up Iraq, al Qaeda, and the Georgia crisis, when Obama was more inward-looking. McCain sounded like a potential commander-in-chief, Obama more like a potential friend.

It's Obama on your shoulder!

"That's above my pay grade."

(Watch over the next few weeks to see if that quote resonates--and ricochets badly for Barry.)

Update: Mark Hemingway concurs: "That spectacularly inept metaphor is going to haunt Obama throughout the rest of the campaign."

The Onion: "Study: Watching Under Four Hours Of TV Impairs Ability To Mock Pop Culture."

Already a best-seller in Canada, something tells me that these could really sell like hotcakes in the US come November, particularly if the newest Obama logo were emblazoned upon them.

As Barack Obama reels in response to John McCain's charges that he's a lightweight more obsessed with image than substance, his campaign has come up with the perfect rejoinder. Gateway Pundit spots Team Obama courting top fashion designers to create his own clothes line.

And why not? For complete stylistic fabulosity, he's already got the logo ready to go!

(Via Founding Bloggers; no word yet on whether the new Obamatogs are Manolo-approved.)

Ahh, good times, good times! John Kerry is reporting for duty! And Tim Blair is reporting for fisking!

Related: Jim Geraghty:

It would help Obama's campaign if they, while trying to refute Corsi, did not refer to Bob Beckel as a Republican strategist.

Twice.

Oy.

Jonah Goldberg spots a brewing "Nightmare On Dem Street":

For months now people have been saying to me, "Do you really think they're gone?" "Is it finally over?" "Is the coast clear?"

The questions have been in response to Barack Obama's supposedly yeoman service in putting an end to the Clintons in public life.

My response to those who believe our long national nightmare is over has always been: "Have you seen no monster movies?"

Freddy Krueger always comes back. Jason re-emerges from the pond one more time. Dracula had so many comebacks; nobody was surprised to see him hanging with Abbott and Costello.

Of course the Clintons will be back.

Further thoughts from Jonah at Bloggingheads.TV, and for a flashback to Hillary's campaign, tune in to the "The Top Ten Hillary Moments Of 2008" edition of Silicon Graffiti from this past May:

Yet another boomer-era childhood memory tainted by politics:

If you thought Blues Brothers 2000 soiled the memory of one of the best films ever made, then you may not want to watch the video below. Fox is reporting that Dick Durbin and Rahm Emanuel will be performing as the Blues Brothers at the convention.

No word yet if Durbin will be dusting off his jackboots for his appearance.

Hugh Hewitt explores the latest Obama pushback (because this man won't be Swift Boated! says in-the-tank-Time): "Ayers and Dohrn Are Members Of The Establishment."

Much more from Tom Maguire. You could make a pretty good case that 1960s-era radical chic is the new establishment. (see also: the Clintons, John Kerry, wide swatches of academia and judges, etc.) But that's really putting the bohemian into the bourgeois, to borrow David Brooks' theme.

Update: "My advice to the Obama people: 'proceed with extreme caution.' They don't want to get into a discussion of character and background. They are opening a door that they will not be able to close."

At Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet Of Fury writes that when Canadian author Howard Rotberg was accused of being a racist by a Canadian book chain's p.r. firm(!), he sued:

Rotberg believes that his suit is a much-needed challenge to the current neo-McCarthyesque climate, in which "racist" has replaced "commie" as the charge, judgment, and death sentence of choice. Like "commie," the word "racist" is so overused that its meaning is becoming lost; look at one judge's recent assertion that "devil's food cake" is "racist." And, like "commie," the word has become a source of amusement. (The blockbuster, Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q features an upbeat song entitled "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist.") With each passing day, Peter Brimelow's definition -- "A racist is a conservative winning an argument with a liberal" -- seems more apt than ever.

And yet, the word still has the power to make even the powerful tremble. Witness the "first black president" himself, Bill Clinton, feeling obliged to insist to ABC News that he's not a racist.

Rather than tremble in the face of accusations of "racism," Rotberg is fighting back.

Read the whole thing. And speaking of neo-McCarthyesque, it's worth flashing back to James Lileks' 2003 take on how the M-word has had its own meaning inverted for a new century.

Veteran new media videographer Andrew Marcus and Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft have teamed up in order to form a more perfect blog titled Founding Bloggers. (Note proto-very early analog-era citizen journalists displayed on masthead.)

They'll be going on the road to both conventions, so stop by daily!

Forget The Clone Wars--this is the best Star Wars (and Matrix) homage this summer:

(Via the Anchoress.)

It's Answered Prayers for some budding young Sith Lord! Kyle Smith writes that George Lucas may have stepped into the latest scandal for those aficionados of the industry of the world's most puritanical company town who:

A. Whose blood pressure blows sky-high if anybody looks at them cross-eyed.

B. Have far too much time on their hands, and:

C. Are bummed because they missed the chance to flip out over Tropic Thunder's use of the newest worst most eviltastic word discovered to still be in the English language.

It's....Capote The Hutt!

(Think he's kidding? Two words: Muggeridge's Law.)

But then, this is all just preseason stuff. The Complainy-American (to borrow a Tim Blair-ism) will really be out in full dudgeon this fall over this.

Update: Kyle's take on the film itself? "A Big Pile of Dukoo." Reading his review, I can't help but think of Marcia Lucas' thoughts on her ex-husband's franchise in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:

"After Star Wars, he insisted, 'I'm never going to direct another establishment-type movie again.' I used to say, 'For someone who wants to be an experimental filmmaker, why are you spending this fortune on a facility to make Hollywood movies? We edited THX in our attic, we edited American Graffiti over Francis' garage, I just don't get it, George.' The Lucasfilm empire--the computer division, ILM, the licensing and lawyers--seemed to me to be this inverted triangle sitting on a pea, which was the Star Wars trilogy. But he wasn't going to make any more Star Wars, and the pea was going to dry up and crumble, and then he was going to be left with this huge facility with its enormous overhead. And why did he want to do that if he wasn't going to make movies? I still don't get it."

That pea has dried up, and no amount of water in all the vaporators on Tatooine is going to bring it back to life.

Now that the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter story is out in the overnews, even liberal sports networks are picking up on it. And making Rielle Hunter's backstory sound weirder by the minute:

On Sunday, as I was sitting in my summer cabin in Vermont, completely absorbed in a New York Times story about John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter, I began reading a paragraph whose message shot through me like a sudden bolt of electrical current. The story centered on Ms. Hunter's refusal to take a DNA test to determine the paternity of her 5-month-old daughter, but that was not what startled me. It was this: "Ms. Hunter was born in Fort Lauderdale. Fla., in 1964 as Lisa Druck and moved to New York City in her 20s, becoming part of a Manhattan social scene that included the writer Jay McInerney ..."

Here, I jumped up and blurted loudly to my wife, Judy: "Good God! John Edwards was having sex with the daughter of the guy who taught Tommy Burns how to kill horses by electrocuting them!"

Read the whole thing.

Hot Air has video of impeachment-crazed leftwing whackos attempting to shout down Nancy Pelosi.

Her response?

"I have complete comfort with the frustration. I'm from the streets," she said.

But these days, there's just no place for a Street Fightin' Nan.

John Podhoretz argues for a hot cup of Joementum in Commentary; meanwhile Yuval Levin notes how topsy-turvy, how out-of-kilter, how utterly Koyaanisqatsi politics has become in the last eight years:

As the Obama team trots out Lincoln Chafee, Rita Hauser, and other "stalwarts" to try to suggest that even Republicans are turning to Obama, it's worth giving another thought to a very prominent fact that's so obvious we don't really think about it much: The Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate from 2000 is just about McCain's most vocal and prominent backer. Strange times.

Indeed.^TM

Assuming, as many rumors strongly indicate, that Lieberman, at a minimum, plays the role of Zell Miller at the Republican Convention, he'll be dead to Harry Reid.

Veep or Senatorial Siberia, the next several years will be provide quite a contrast for Lieberman.

As Power Line noted a week ago, as sexy as the John Edwards story is, the far greater news story is the Russian invasion of Georgia. And the confluence of the stories, and the media malpractice that both stories in their own way demonstrate, provides us with quite an incite into the MSM's collective mindset.

Regarding the latter story, Rush Limbaugh notes, It's a Sorry Day for Our Media:

Ladies and gentlemen, permit me a brief moment for a personal message to Campbell Brown, Suzanne Malveaux, and Ed Henry of CNN. Of course, Suzanne Malveaux asks the president of Georgia, "Have you reached out to the Russians, have you tried dialogue?" And then Ed Henry and Campbell Brown made the ludicrous assertion that we can't do anything because we did something arguably worse by going into Iraq than what Russia is doing in Georgia. So specifically to you, Campbell Brown and Ed Henry, you are journalists. You are people who chronicle the passing of events. You witness these events, and you cover them. As such, your memory ought to be reliable. Iraq was not a sovereign nation. Iraq lost its sovereignty because Iraq invaded a sovereign country called Kuwait. In the ensuing war to kick Iraq out of Kuwait, Iraq lost. They then begged us to stop slaughtering their supposedly invincible million man army as it was retreating to Baghdad, which we did.

As terms of the ceasefire, Campbell Brown and Ed Henry, we resume the right to resume kicking their asses at any point if they did not live up to the terms of the surrender agreement. Shockingly, Saddam Hussein did not live up to those terms and continued in wanton violation of 15 Security Council resolutions. You covered all of this, Campbell Brown and Ed Henry, you covered it all. For you to compare Saddam Hussein to the president of Georgia, a democratic and elected president amongst a free people, if you want to start making comparisons, Putin is closer to Saddam Hussein than Saakashvili. These are our best and brightest trained journalists, ladies and gentlemen, covering the stories and then forgetting that they were even there. I doubt that they forgot. They're just pushing the agenda anyway. They willingly sacrifice their credibility, all in the pursuit of an agenda.

As I wrote back in 2004, when I reviewed Orrin Judd's Redefining Sovereignty for TCS Daily:

The essays that Judd chose for this section illustrate his opinion that America itself has redefined sovereignty so that the right to maintain the governance of a nation now depends on a regime's ability to maintain basic civil rights, and a conform to liberal democratic norms.

Judd notes that the isolationist (or non-interventionist) Right has been quite hostile to this development, "which does of course involve us in the internal affairs of states from Syria to Burma to Somalia to Haiti." However, Judd's selections demonstrate that this is consistent with America's past. Americans after all settled the continent all the way to the Pacific, fought a Civil War at home, and abroad fought Imperialism, Nazism, and Communism successively, all the while requiring other peoples to adopt our own foundational principles.

The media seem to believe their own B.S.: Saddam's winning every election with a 99.96 percent plurality is not a sign of democracy--just ask the Andrew Sullivan of 2003.

As John Hinderaker writes, "Give This Woman A Purple Heart". As a journalist, she's definitely the anti-Katie Couric, delivering a story under intense pressure--not the least of which is the bullet, apparently from a Russian sniper, which grazed her left arm.

Rachel Lucas quotes an incredible passage in a San Francisco Chronicle article on an Oakland family that is, shall we say, rather financially overextended:

Joann's parents, Johnnie Gardner, 87, and Estelle, 88, bought the two-bedroom in the Sobrante Park neighborhood in 1954 for $11,500. His salary as an electrician at the Oakland naval shipyard allowed them to make the payments.

But in recent years, Joann and her brother refinanced it several times for increasingly larger amounts.

The final refinance at the end of 2006 left the family owing $454,000. The monthly payments of $3,362 exceeded the household income of $3,144.

What happened to the money from all the refinances?

Gardner can't quite say. Some went to paying off credit cards; some was eaten up in huge loan fees. What is clear is that the family has not made a mortgage payment since December 2006.

The interviewee "can't quite say", and the reporter dare not press her, because if she does, the sob story she's attempting to write would likely dissolve instantaneously. Just another dispatch from the age of outrageous credulity.

Thirty years ago, Pete Townshend attempted to define rock and roll to an interviewer:

"If it screams for truth rather than help, if it commits itself with a courage it can't be sure it really has, if it stands up and admits something is wrong but doesn't insist on blood, then it's rock 'n' roll. We shed our own blood. We don't need to shed anyone else's."

Too bad rap never got the message.

Reuters reports, "Polo Ralph Lauren to launch shopping by cell phone."

I wrote several articles for various electronics magazines about online retailers attempting to sell via cell back around 1999; if it didn't take off then, I'm not sure why it will today, though perhaps the iPhone-style platform is more conducive to shopping than the cell phones of the past. But hey, good luck, Ralph!

Which actually isn't saying all that much these days: take a look at Redacted's IMDB page. If you assume $9.00 a ticket, with its absolutely pathetic $65,087 domestic gross, that means Redacted was seen by about 7,232 people during its initial run in theaters. (As John Nolte likes to write, "Anyone care to debate how Hollywood's money driven?")

In contrast, my recent "2004: An MSM Odyssey" video was viewed by 8,507 people according to Brightcove, its Webhost.

...And I can safely guarantee that my budget was just a smidgen lower than Redacted's five million dollars.

Thomas Frank feverishly lets it all hang out:

The most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from the control room--of an "end of history" in which taxes and onerous regulation will never be allowed to threaten the fortunes private individuals make for themselves. This is the longing behind the former White House aide Karl Rove's talk of "permanent majority" and, 20 years previously, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's declaration to the Republican convention that it's "the job of all revolutions to make permanent their gains".

When I first moved to contemplate this peculiar utopian vision, I was struck by its apparent futility. What I did not understand was that beating liberal ideas was not the goal. The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but by erasing it. Building a majority coalition has always been a part of the programme, and conservatives have enjoyed remarkable success at it for more than 30 years. But winning elections was not a bid for permanence by itself. It was only a means.

The end was capturing the state, and using it to destroy liberalism as a practical alternative. The pattern was set by Margaret Thatcher, who used state power of the heaviest-handed sort to implant permanently the anti-state ideology.

"Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul," she said, echoing Stalin. In the 34 years before she became prime minister, Britain rode a see-saw of nationalisation, privatisation and renationalisation; Thatcher set out to end the game for good. Her plan for privatising council housing was designed not only to enthrone the market, but to encourage an ownership mentality and "change the soul" of an entire class of voters. When she sold off nationally owned industries, she took steps to ensure that workers received shares at below-market rates, leading hopefully to the same soul transformation. Her brutal suppression of the miners' strike in 1984 showed what now awaited those who resisted the new order. As a Business Week reporter summarised it in 1987: "She sees her mission as nothing less than eradicating Labour Party socialism as a political alternative."

That's the stuff! Every time I think that the right is just bumbling around in the dark and rapidly losing ground to the left, something like this from the other side truly warms my heart. As one of Charles Johnson's rotating metatags says, "please more print and distribute and get blessing!"

As I wrote yesterday, it's obvious that the chief role of the legacy media is keeping news out of circulation, rather than generating it. Matthew Sheffield concurs:

In far too many newsrooms, the question is no longer about serving the public's right to know but protecting the public from things it wants to know. No wonder they're looking elsewhere.

And just to follow-up on my quote on Tuesday from Umberto Eco about the age of outrageous credulity, the legacy media's role as gatekeeper is combined with their utter naivete when faced with a candidate whom they admire, as John Weidner writes:

Everybody who retained any objectivity could see that [John Edwards] was a phony, and were not surprised by this. When a guy talks populism and green-ism while building the biggest mansion in the county, there's a 99% chance that he's a sham. When a guy spends minutes in front of a mirror fluffing his hairdo, there's a 99% chance that he will not resist the sexual temptations available to a celebrity.

And when you make millions as a trial lawyer, it means you are skilled at convincing people of things that just ain't so.

Most importantly, what you are comes out in your life. If you are real, then a presidential campaign will bring lots of stories to the surface, from people who were impressed with the candidate's actions long before they could be helpful in any campaign. If Edwards really cared about that poor little girl supposedly shivering because she could not afford a coat, he would have been spending time working with groups who help the poor. And doing so long ago, before it might gain him any advantage. (And if Shapiro were a real journalist he would have taken note that cheap coats are available at any thrift store, and that people just give old coats away by the ton. The story was always bogus.)

Hey, Sam Kinison figured out that last part over 20 years ago.

Update: Dean Barnett adds:

So is it shocking that such a fellow would cheat on his mortally ill wife while recklessly jeopardizing his political agenda (not that he ever gave a fig about that agenda)? Of course not. The more pressing question is how he was able to get away with such a stunt. Okay, he personally charmed Walter Shapiro so Shapiro gets a pass based on his apparent congenital gullibility. But what of the rest of the putatively objective media that didn't get to bask in Edwards' golden glow over "raw" dinners? Why were only Mickey Kaus and the National Enquirer curious about this fellow who so energetically sought to be the world's most powerful man?

Related thoughts from Mark Hemingway.

Fred Thompson writes, "Dangerous Times In Georgia Demand Serious Leadership":

It has been instructive for the country to see the candidates' reaction to the equivalent of Hillary Clinton's 3 a.m. phone call. While he was vacationing in Hawaii, Barack Obama's advisors scrambled into action and initially came up with the expected liberal bromides which equated the actions of Russia and Georgia and only ratcheted up the rhetoric when they began to actually understand what was happening.

It wasn't that difficult for John McCain. For him Georgia was another little-known part of the world, whose leaders and history he is familiar with. And long before this Georgian crisis, he's had the correct read on Russia, just as he's had the right read on what we needed to do in Iraq.

This crisis half a world away confirms what I've been saying for a while: This election cycle, the traffic in the world is very heavy ...and dangerous; it's no time to give a kid with barely a learner's permit the keys to the car.

McCain's own thoughts can be found here.

Jules Crittenden returns, if only temporarily, from his summer hiatus to remind us that he's not the only writer in his household---his wife has a new book out: "Think CSI on a soul-searching journey in which the protagonist is doing everything she can to look the other way."

If you've ever said to yourself--and really, who amongst us hasn't?--I wonder what happens behind the scenes when they shoot a Triumph the Insult Dog video segment, Daniel Frank, AKA "Captain Spaulding", writes:

Watch sausage being made as camcorders pick up Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at Comicon here and here.

Meanwhile, found via Kathy Shaidle, the Cake Wrecks blog documents, with copious photographic evidence, pretty much just what its title suggests.

Early on in Barry Levinson's 1997 movie, Wag The Dog, there's a scene (mostly improvised, according to the audio commentary from Levinson on the DVD) of the team of writers, musicians and hucksters that Dustin Hoffman, playing a Robert Evans-inspired Hollywood producer assembles to fake America's war with Albania. As the team get to know each other, and understand that they'll be faking politics and history instead of selling Coca-Cola, they eventually explain why none of them bother to vote. (Denis Leary's "Fad King" character gets off the best line--explaining that the last time he voted was for the baseball Hall of Fame: "I voted for Boog Powell on first base, he didn't get it, and it just depressed me. It's futile.")

This video of Rielle Hunter begins pretty much where that scene ends--and with this quote, immediately goes into science fiction territory that even Levinson and David Mamet wouldn't dare to mine:

"Meeting John Edwards was interesting, because in person, when I met him, he was very real and authentic, from my perception."

But then, sometimes perception is not Rielle.

Great moments in MSM leads:

While the amount of sodium cyanide found in a Denver hotel room was enough to kill hundreds of people, the FBI says they do not believe there is any link to terrorism.

I feel safer already, don't you? Though Charles Johnson spots one possible link.

The MSM spends much of their working days making sure that any negative news involving their favorite Democratic candidates is kept carefully wraps, but Jack Shafer of Slate suggests that the legacy media goes one step further, and boycotts the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions:

With just one exception over the last three decades, the two major parties have known the identity of their likely presidential candidate weeks or even months before gaveling their national political conventions open. For that reason, one way to improve coverage of the four-day, quadrennial conventions of Republicans and Democrats would be for the TV networks to assign sportscasters like Bob Costas, Joe Morgan, and John Madden instead of political journalists to report on the gatherings. They know how to make a game with a foregone conclusion seem entertaining.

That last suggestion brings to mind a quote from Tom Wolfe back in 1980:

Just try to think of the last major scoop, to use that old term, that was broken on television. I'm sure there have been some. But what story during Watergate? During Watergate there were new stories coming out every day. None were on television, except when television simply broadcast the hearings. The can do a set event. And that's what television is actually best at. In fact, it'd be a service to the country if television news operations were shut down totally and they only broadcast hearings, press conferences and hockey games. That would be television news. At least the public would not have the false impression that it's getting news coverage.

Rather than the MSM trucking in so much video gear to the convention halls that their collective carbon footprint is almost as big as Al Gore's, Shafer suggests dumping the whole thing to C-Span:

A still better way to improve convention coverage would be to withdraw all reporters and force the curious to rely on a C-SPAN feed: Unless a brokered convention threatens to break out, these political gatherings tend to produce very little real news. Yet the networks, the newspapers, the magazines, and the Web sites continue to insist on sending battalions of reporters to sift for itsy specks of information.

I made the same suggestion four and a half years ago, but safe to say it's never going to happen: convention coverage is the one thing that the legacy media of television gets right, because it's fixed and static, like a sports broadcast; and for new media, it's a chance to see and be seen.

"CNN's John Roberts Pushes Obama's 'Similarities' to Eisenhower, Reagan", which is awfully ironic, considering that both presidents were looked down upon by the left during their terms in office--and that's putting it mildly.

Eisenhower, the man who masterminded the D-Day Invasion, was considered a mental lightweight by most establishment liberals. (Recall also Woody's anti-Ike joke at a fictional Adlai Stevenson rally in an Annie Hall flashback.) And of course, Reagan was absolutely despised by the MSM, as Noemie Emery perceptively recalled last year.

But then, this is all part of the full-service effort that CNN's John Roberts has been putting in this year in aid of the Obama campaign; recall his infamous "Wright-Free Zone" moment back in April.

One Al Gore clubhouse inside of another, as Ted Kaczynski's cabin is on display now at the News mausoleum in Washington, DC.

As Jaime Sneider of the Weekly Standard writes:

So I guess the question is does the "hands on" experience of the Newseum allow visitors to handle the contents of Kaczynski's cabin? Do recall among his only possessions was an underlined copy of Al Gore's Earth in the Balance.

For our Silicon Graffiti segment on the Newseum, click here.

(Headline explanation here.)

The latest edition of PJM Political is online. The newest show features Steve Green, Roger Simon and myself discussing the MSM running interference for John Edwards, Amanda Carpenter on the Washington Post's own journalistic gaffes, and James Lileks and Austin Bay on Russia's invasion of Georgia.

Tune in each week!

Brian Fitzpatrick writes that America has a "New Newspaper of Record: the National Enquirer."

The old one seems more obsessed these days with keeping the news away from the public than actually reporting it. Which is increasingly reflected in its bottom line.

Which is why the legacy media keeps rockin'!, on both coasts.

"Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue."--in this case, "cultured rat neurons."

Wait'll Dr. Richard Daystrom and Dr. Eldon Tyrell hear about this!

Not surprisingly, I couldn't let the scandal involving John Edwards and Rielle Hunter go without doing a quick Silicon Graffiti on it. The video builds on--and brings up to date--an essay I contributed to the New Partisan in 2005, tying in today's media-created hucksters, with Orson Welles' last completed movie, F For Fake which had just come out on DVD back then. The new SG also quotes (in slightly truncated form), one of my favorite passages from an essay by Umberto Eco:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it--he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Fortunately, the customers seem to be much less credulous these days than those who supply the product.

"McCain Wins Russian/Georgian Conflict 3:00 A.M. Moment", according to Red State. But then, this wasn't too hard to predict back in March:

Because it's always 3:00 A.M., somewhere.

"Nothing would have more impact on the economy and the price of oil than his election as president," former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young (no relation to this Andrew Young) said. "There would be a boost of 1,000 points on the stock market the first week after he's elected. This would be better than a chicken in every pot."

Thus ushering in a decade of blazing 1.5 percent annual growth!

By the way, note this line from Young:

More importantly, Young strongly believes that the economic future for the United States is inextricably connected to the rest of the world.

"It's technically impossible to be self-sufficient," Young said. "In order to maintain our leadership in a global economy we have to work with the rest of the world. With the transfer of technology, we either lead the world or we get trampled by it."

Obama agrees of course--depending upon which day you ask him.

"Barack Obama is located nowhere near the end of the aisle--he's way far out on the left. He makes Bernie Sanders look like Curtis LeMay. So I think this time around, at least, it's much more easier to come out as a conservative or a moderate or at least pragmatic because otherwise the guy you'd have to vote for has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. And some people aren't for that right now. He's a 47-year-old nice enough guy who is reflexively liberal and wants to get Chatty Cathy with bad guys."

--Dennis Miller

The Charlotte Observer has a flashback to this Edwards repeat:

Shrum, then a Kerry advisor, said in a 2007 book that Kerry had qualms. Edwards, he wrote, told Kerry he was going to confide something he'd never told a soul: that after his son Wade had died, "he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service...

"Kerry was stunned, not moved," Shrum wrote. "As he told me later, Edwards had recounted the exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before--and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else."

And that's the Plane Truth.

(Video found via Tammy Bruce.)

Ann Althouse links to a late December edition of Bloggingheads.tv featuring Mickey Kaus discussing this strange story circling John Edwards, much to the chagrin of an extremely skeptical Robert Wright.

As Ann notes, "the only thing interesting to me about the story at this point is how Mickey Kaus will act when he gets back on Bloggingheads."

For a more recent Kausian take on the story in its late undernews stage, tune into my interview with Mickey on PJM Political from July 30th.

Is the Obama hand signal really the apocalyptic Sign of Wences?

20 years after Saturday Night Live said goodbye to everyone's favorite Atari Democrat, and from the man who brought you this classic moment:

If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.

Comes the breathless question...Just what if Michael Dukakis had won!

Which begs for a follow-up: What if George Bush had won in 1992?

Special "Gay Ex-Governor Owes Wife No Alimony" edition!

(Via Warner Todd Huston.)

Like Power Line, Roger Kimball also reminds us that the big story yesterday wasn't the John Edwards affair (though what it says about the media has some key repercussions, far beyond Edwards himself), but the Soviets Russians invading Georgia:

The whole drama as the eerie sense of history repeating itself. The London Times today carries an article about "The Revolt in Georgia"--not the one unfolding before our eyes, but the revolt against Soviet occupation in September 1924. The Soviets had initially recognized Georgia's independence in the wake of the First World War, but occupied the country in 1921 and brutally put down the revolt that erupted three years later. At the time, the president of Georgia made an appeal to the League of Nations. The Times reports that although "sympathetic reference" to Georgia was made in the assembly, "it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid and the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to to make an impression upon Soviet Russia."

That was in 1924. What sort of impression do you suppose the "moral influence" of the successor institution to the League of Nations, the U.N., is likely to have on the uncivilized successor to the U.S.S.R.?

Similarly, Russia's invasion should generate precisely the same intense non-reaction that Germany's mobilization had on English intellectuals in the 1930s.

News from 2004 reaches Tim Rutten!

Old Media Dethroned
Edwards' admission signals the end of the era in which traditional media set the limits of acceptable political journalism.

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it -- reporting that turns out to be largely correct -- and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion.

The whole story of the 2004 election was that the gatekeepers were dethroned--the Swift Vets made their case against John Kerry by doing an end-around old media by running their commercials on the Internet, and Dan Rather's case against George W. Bush was demolished in a tidal wave of distributed information sharing, first via Free Republic, which was joined shortly thereafter in the Blogosphere. Both stories demonstrated precisely how Old Media's role as a gatekeeper was dethroned:

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds reminded us--well, the left, to be precise--of Eason Jordan's admission that he was willing to allow CNN to lie for Saddam Hussein, in order to able to put "LIVE FROM BAGHDAD" on the CNN Chyron. Jordan finally came clean on this propaganda coup for Baathist Iraq in mid-2003 after Saddam fled US soldiers in an op-ed titled, "The News We Kept To Our Selves." Evidently, the L.A. Times thought they kept the news of 2004 to themselves as well.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes that as schadenfreudlistically delicious as the John Edwards story breaking into the MSM is, the real story of the day is Russia rolling tanks into Georgia. Click over to Power Line for very early reports, and a remarkably ominous photo.

Update: More at England's Telegraph, which has an initial report of over 1300 civilians reported to be killed, and video. And some thoughts from Anne Applebaum.

Blue Crab Boulevard has an interesting take on the nannies of L.A.:

Steve Chapman notes the new trend of what he calls paternalism.

In Los Angeles, driving out certain businesses is not a potential side effect--it's a conscious policy. The city council recently prohibited the opening of fast-food outlets in the poor, 32-square-mile area known as South Los Angeles. If you're a global corporation selling inexpensive meals to go, Los Angeles has a message for you: Invest anywhere but here. Apparently a vacant lot is better than a Burger King.

Councilwoman Jan Perry believes the measure will assure the locals "greater food options." The Los Angeles Times reports she "said the initiative would give the city time to craft measures to lure sit-down restaurants serving healthier food to a part of the city that desperately wants more of them."

Of course, it could do that without punishing outlets that don't need luring. But if vegetarian and seafood restaurants didn't see the area as profitable before, this law won't change their calculations. It takes an Orwellian mindset to imagine that shutting out McDonald's and KFC will expand, not diminish, the range of dining options in South Los Angeles.

All it will accomplish, as several fast-food workers told the city council, is to deprive residents of jobs in the forbidden outlets. Does anyone think unemployment will improve their diet? Or that a community with fewer jobs will be a more inviting place for preferred restaurants?

As I said, Chapman calls it paternalism. I think it is authoritarianism, pushed hardest by the left these days. The same folks who howl the loudest about the "government in your bedroom" have no problem whatsoever with the government in your refrigerator or in your food choices.

It's the soft fascism of low expectations.

Ace has a great round-up on the media's stonewalling of the John Edwards story:

OPERATION PROTECT ELIZABETH

Never leave a fellow liberal soldier behind, and never stop fighting until the battle is won. The campaign continues.

"All the News That Doesn't Harm Elizabeth Edwards"

I really can't f***ing believe the media is now deciding whether to report big stories of national scope based on whether someone they like might be distressed by their reportage.

Of course I can believe it; I have to believe it. It's what they're doing, obviously.

I guess the New York Times didn't like Cindy McCain all that much when it reported on McCain's non-affair with his non-paramour.

Should media organizations be required to disclose which people they "like" and wish to "protect," and which people they "don't like" and "don't wish to protect," so that we might know beforehand where their biases may lie?

Seems like a bona fide conflict of interest, more so than many others. If the media is in the tank for Elizabeth Edwards, we need to know that, in order to properly evaluate their coverage of her husband.

But the classic showstopper is this moment from MSNBC's David Shuster, in which he feigns shock at the John Edwards' staffers are covering for his boss, and actually has the chutzpah to admit that he followed their advice on not covering the story:

More from Ace:

The media has two jobs here, which I've been seeing all day.

Job One: Reassure the public you knew all about this and are hardly surprised, because you don't want them to think you're so out of the f***ing loop this snuck up on you. So everyone's in "Oh, of course I knew, it was all so obvious!" in-the-know cool-kid mode.

Job Two: The trickier one-- attempt to explain how it can be you knew all about this but didn't report it, or bother to do the minimum threshold of follow-up. Bear in mind, the National Enquirer is a small outfit. When they assign three or four people to a story, that's a substantial fraction of their entire component of reporters and photographers.

It's nothing for a network news organization to assign three or four people to a story -- they've got hundreds of unpaid interns chomping at the bit to do something besides edit and fetch coffee, for God's sakes. So even if they didn't want to send a reporter, they could have sent a dozen recent graduates out there to get the story... which they would have gotten. This was not exactly a Phillip Marlowe murder mystery here.

Note that Job One and Job Two are basically impossible to square in any satisfactory manner. But they're quite righteous and smugly self-complimentary about both.

In this video, David Shuster lets everyone know he knew allllll about this way before the Iowa primary, but failed to report on it -- or, apparently, follow up at all-- because "credible sources" within John Edwards' camp assured him the story was garbage and that he'd be embarrassed to report it.

"You're only as good as your 'sources' are," Shuster says. Well, Dave, your sources are apparently shit, buddy, and you're so f***ing credulous, stupid, or in the tank you deem them "very credible." So I guess you're not that good, eh?

Unable to let it stand there -- with David Shuster looking pretty bad -- he goes on to say how goshdarn angry he is about being lied to by his very credible people/crochet club buddies.

It's their fault, you know.

Which is odd.

Edwards' people were just doing their job. They did their job well.

It was Shuster who failed to do his job.

Why are they to blame? They never held themselves out as disinterested parties or objective observers. They're supposed to be invested in their client's/friend's future.

Shuster was temporarily suspended by MSNBC, seemingly on orders of Hillary Clinton's campaign, after his "pimped out" remark; nobody should be surprised that he, or MSNBC as a whole, spiked a story based on another Democrats' threat.

What's in your Water? Rainbows, man! But what's in your video? Apparently several unnecessary apostrophes, and spelling errors prodominatly on display in the titles at the beginning of the video--always a sure sign that crack research scientists are hard at work!

The media demands photos of John Edwards' alleged love child--and the Exurban League delivers!

Nikke Finke notes that the man who brought you the man who brought you Saturday Night Live, longtime Hollywood powerhouse Bernie Brillstein has passed away at age 77. Brillstein managed Lorne Michaels, the creator and longtime executive producer of Saturday Night Live, along with John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Jim Henson, and numerous other people who brought you the 1970s and '80s.

There's a passage in Finke's obit that could be taken the wrong way though:

In 1970, Brillstein left Management 3 and moved to Los Angeles, where he decided to go it alone. He built up a list of top comedy writers, including The Bob Newhart Show's Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses and comedy writers Lorne Michaels and Alan Zweibel, and he packaged them all into new TV shows for the networks. By 1975, Brillstein was one of the hottest personal managers and TV packagers in the entertainment business. In that year alone, he sold both The Muppet Show, brainchild of puppeteer Jim Henson, and Saturday Night Live, created by Lorne Michaels. The story behind SNL is now legendary, but it bears repeating: when Michaels and Brillstein came to pitch the idea of SNL to NBC, the network executives simply stared at the men. "They said, 'Who are these Jews from California?' They absolutely hated us," Brillstein remarked.

It's a great line, and it's true that the staid management of NBC had vastly mixed feelings about Lorne Michaels until his show became a ratings hit and cultural phenomenon. (The latter happening before the former.) But it's worth noting that, just glancing at the photo section in Doug Hill and Jeff Wingrad's Saturday Night, NBC's management at the time consisted of men such as Herb Schlosser, Dave Tebet, Mike Weinblatt, and Aaron Cohen. If such a quote actually was uttered at the meeting, I doubt there was any antisemitism behind it.

The undernews finally floats over the top, as ABC News reports, "Edwards Admits to Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate" Lionel Hutz a liar? Say it ain't so, Homer!

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extra-marital affair with a novice film-maker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today.

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 42-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

So is this enough to get his speaking slot at the Denver convention reinstated, or will he still be considered toxic in a couple of weeks?

Note this element in the ABC story:

A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child.

According to friends of Hunter, Edwards met her at a New York city bar in 2006. His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience.

Edwards said the affair began during the campaign after she was hired. Hunter traveled with Edwards around the country and to Africa.

Edwards said his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family became aware of the affair in 2006.

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

When the National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards, his campaign staff and Hunter vociferously denounced the report.

"The story is false, it's completely untrue, it's ridiculous," Edwards told reporters then.

He repeated his denials just two weeks ago.

Edwards today admitted the National Enquirer was correct when it reported he had visited Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month.

At this point, the spin that currently puts the story in the best possible light for Edwards is that, as Allah writes, "Rielle Hunter is his lover--but the kid is not his son. Er, daughter." And as the ABC article notes, "A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child."

This sounds more like behavior more at home with a rock group on tour passing a favored groupie from musician to musician than (presumed) adults trying to position their man to run for the most powerful office in the land.

Mickey Kaus will--very safe to say--have more on this story; for our interview last week with Mickey on XM Satellite Radio, click here.

Its multifaceted meanings are a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma--with a touch of Goatse...

And voila! A meme is born:

In a column for the Politico yesterday, Reason editor Michael Moynihan wrote the left had turned into a "a virtual Bletchley Park of racial cryptographers teasing out the sinister motives and subtexts of McCain's campaign advertising."

It was a funny line, but it to dismiss it as just hyperbole would be a big mistake. Responding to McCain's "The One" ad, a Democratic consulting group put out a frightfully lengthy memo deconstructing it. This excerpt will give you the general thrust of it:

This is the use of religion at its very worst in politics because it is an attempt to subtly and perhaps even subconsciously play on some of the deepest fears of millions of evangelical Americans. From the title of the ad (that immediately reminds anyone familiar with the Left Behind series of the name of the false church set up by the anti-Christ) to the quotes (with no respect to context) and images that the McCain camp chose to use, which basically allude to every symbol of the anti-Christ possibole [sic] short of flashing 666 on the screen, this ad is an attempt to stir up already circulating falsehoods about Obama and add more fuel to the fire.

That's right, after the racist charges didn't stick and then their ridiculous Nazi accusations were ignored, there was only one other place they could go. Obama's defenders are now accusing McCain of using his campaign ads to call Obama the anti-Christ. Marvel for a second at the absurdity of that. I have no idea what charge the liberal Bletchley Park could make to further discredit themselves, but where there's a will, there's a way.

Here's an all-too-rare sign of racial sanity on the left, fortunately.

Update: Here's a new project for the codebreakers to sink their mad deciphering skills into.

"I'll say this much for the Obamas: No one has more interesting political conversations with second-graders than they do...the Obama camp is uniquely well positioned to engage seven-year-olds on foreign policy."

Dean Barnett explores a topic I've written a fair chunk about as well over the years, the post-objective news world:

By only moderating the conventional news presentation models slightly, Fox became tremendously attractive to right wing viewers. It's little wonder that it took so long for someone to try the same thing on the left. Of course, getting to the left of the other networks required more extreme behavior, but that's a challenge Olbermann has more than met. In doing so, his show has become a major success story, especially among those desirable young viewers.

Fox's and Olbermann's success will provide encouragement for other news organizations. The New York Times today published a remarkably obtuse editorial that merits some attention. Writing about the Hamdan trial in an essay risibly titled "Guilty as Ordered," the editors observed:

Now that was a real nail-biter. The court designed by the White House and its Congressional enablers to guarantee convictions of high-profile detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--using evidence obtained by torture and secret evidence as desired--has held its first trial. It produced ... a guilty verdict.

The military commission of six senior officers (whose names have not been made public) found Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who worked as one of Osama bin Laden's drivers until 2001, guilty of one count of providing material support for terrorism.

The rules of justice on Guantanamo are so stacked against defendants that the only surprise was that Mr. Hamdan was actually acquitted on the more serious count of conspiring (it was unclear with whom) to kill Americans during the invasion of Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001.

The charge on which Mr. Hamdan was convicted seemed logical since he did work as Mr. bin Laden's driver.

Naturally, the Times rushed this editorial into print before Hamdan was sentenced to a mere 5 1/2 years in jail. The editorial also acknowledges that he was found not guilty of the more serious charge, and was indeed guilty of the charge that he was convicted of. And yet the editors ludicrously wrote, "Guilty as ordered."

This is fever swamp stuff. What's more, it's intellectually lazy/supremely idiotic fever swamp stuff. Take it from someone who reads the Daily Kos--something so intellectually incoherent and factually sloppy would never make it on to the Kos front page. And yet there it was, the lead editorial for America's paper of record this morning.

I have difficulty in believing that the Times editors have all been simultaneously beaten with a stupid stick. Instead, it's more likely that the Times, whether consciously or unconsciously, is trying to follow the new news paradigm of looking for an audience among partisans.

Of course it is.

Oh, I hope we're not too messianic, or a trifle too satanic, the sequel:

The McCain campaign is unquestionably targeting the 44 million+ Americans who have read the Left Behind series. The makers of the ad chose all of Obama's quotes very carefully and filled it with image after image equating Senator Obama to the anti-Christ, and especially to Nicolae Carpathia, the anti-Christ in the popular end times novels....

The anti-Christ, in the Left Behind series, Nicolae Carpathia set up a religion called THE ONE World Religion. Carpathia started his career as a young charismatic junior Senator. He made his rise, with Satan's support, by spreading a message of unity, hope, and peace, in an anomic world in the wake of the rapture....

The text and voice over are exact copies of previews for Christian Specific end-times movies.

You know, sometimes the Leaning Tower of Pisa is merely the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

"By the way can you imagine that if Joe Biden is selected as VP he might actually be the less gaffe-prone of the two?"

--Jennifer Rubin, "It's Not a Gaffe, It's a Theme"

Special big city jailed mayoral edition.

(Big--but rapidly shrinking--city, incidentally.)

Kyle Smith on the New York Jets' acquisition of Brett Favre: "We Can't Beat Patriots, So We Might As Well Sell Shirts."

Isn't that Paul Anka's shtick?

Texas Monthly performs some heavy duty airbrushing on LBJ's record.

Amanda Shea King has some thoughts on my recent Silicon Graffiti video: "Ed Driscoll And The Media's Schetoma."

Special antisemitic edition.

In a 2004 Weekly Standard essay, James Piereson coined the phrase "punitive liberalism" to describe the post-JFK left:

From the time of John Kennedy's assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter's election in 1976, the Democratic party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism.

Given this bill of indictment, the Punitive Liberals held that Americans had no right at all to feel pride in their country's history or optimism about its future. Those who expressed such pride were written off as ignorant patriots who could not face up to the sins of the past; and those who looked ahead to a brighter future were dismissed as naive "Pollyannas" who did not understand that the brief American century was now over. The Punitive Liberals felt that the purpose of national policy was to punish the nation for its crimes rather than to build a stronger America and a brighter future for all.

Such a mindset is at work in just about every university course, which sees American history as little more than several hundred years of racial bloodshed. So when a leftwing presidential candidate remarks:

"America is.., uh, is no longer, uh.. what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don't want that future for my children."

It begs the obvious question: when does he think the glory days were? As Ed Morrissey notes:

Everyone feels that we can improve ourselves, but we don't usually cast it in terms of the country no longer being what it once was. Coming from the Obamas, that doesn't even make sense. They have talked about how difficult it was to break through barriers, not without some justification, to reach this point in their lives and American history.

Doesn't that speak to the point that we continue to grow and to learn? And if not, which "good old days" did Obama mean? The 1980s? I doubt it, [I think that's a safe bet--Ed] and if he means the Clinton era, then why did he run against Hillary in the first place?

Once again, Obama got off the teleprompter and put his foot directly in his mouth. He's not selling Hope, he's selling Despair, and himself as the snake oil that will cure us of all our ills.

In The Crack-Up, a topic he was expert on, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote:

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Something tells me that Obama has as many opposed ideas on a single subject as can be imagined.

And then some.

Update: Red State: "Barack Obama shoots Irony in the head, then takes a chainsaw to its limbs." Heh, indeed.^TM

John Nolte: "Hitchcock's Notorious Returns To DVD October 14th."

In England's Times Online, Alice Thomson writes:

Julie Burchill can't stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don't want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.

Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the "nutbag ecologists" are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans.

So the salad days are over; it's the end of the greens. Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence.

But the problem for the green lobby isn't that it has been overrun by "toffs": it's the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone.

In addition to the deliberate misery that green policies cause (seen most obviously every time you fill up your car), the seeds of its destruction are sewn by the same people who espouse its beliefs. Environmentalism is a substitute religion, but a religion nonetheless, and the left, historically, works to undermine religious faith, quickly pointing out any sign of hypocrisy. Al Gore will tell an audience...

"This is not a political issue," Gore told a crowd of approximately 2,500 paying attendees. "It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue."

...Before floating away on the Goretanic. If that was Jerry Falwell using similar rhetoric but living such a lavish lifestyle, the hoots of derision from the chattering classes would be palpable.

Or, look at this way: everybody admires Mother Teresa's sacrifices, because nobody wants to actually live that way himself.

Update: Related thoughts from Robert Bidinotto.

For longtime fans of the NFL, there's a curious symmetry to this story--Joe Namath played his entire career for the New York Jets, except for that last year, where he just looked entirely out of place in an L.A. Rams uniform. With the exception of his very early days as an unknown Atlanta Falcon QB, Brett Favre played the vast majority his NFL career with the Green Bay Packers. And that Jets uniform he's going to wear for the last year or two of his career will no doubt look just as strange.

But this seems to be the least painful solution to what had deteriorated into a remarkably dysfunctional situation between a player and a team each thought to be amongst the classiest in the league until recent weeks.

Update: As seen in the Circuit City ad rotating in the sidebar, EA might want to update the artwork on Madden '09:

Your one stop shopping for "The Ultimate List of Barack Obama Flip-Flops."

As Groucho Marx once said, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well, I have others." And that was decades before postmodernism turned reality into a Play-Doh Fun Factory, and made a fixed worldview anathema.

(See also: Clinton, Bill.)

Suspicious white powder edition.

"Political humor is no longer welcome in Academia as administrators choke the life out of parody."

Gee, now there's a shock.

(Via Maggie's Farm, where it's safe to say that satire survives unscathed.)

Ten minutes of video, 55-minutes of satellite radio, 30-minutes of podcasting, and all for the price of your broadband connection; just another week here at Ed Driscoll.com.

Seriously--be sure to check out the latter two items: Steve Green energetically ties together the disparate elements of this week's PJM Political, and Austin Bay interviews General David Petraeus, who phoned in from Baghdad.

(For any podcasting boffins in the audience, here's some gear talk: because of the poor phone connection, Gen. Petraeus initially sounded more like a call from here until I applied a massive amount of Izotope's RX audio restoration plug-in, followed by compressing the daylights out of the recording with their Ozone mastering plug-in.)

Michelle Malkin: "Name Al Gore's hugetastic boat!"

It must be list day in the Blogosphere--at Pajamas HQ, Victor Davis Hanson has a list of "Obama's Ten Commandments". And enjoying VDH's post is no doubt a sure sign--one of 25!--that you might be a racist.

And speaking of lists, Byron York wonders if a recent David Letterman Top Ten list that referenced John Edwards may have gone AWOL--or never aired in the first place.

"As Fred Thompson noted: Barack Obama ran in the Dem primaries as George McGovern, but without the experience or war record."

Gateway Pundit: "Pro-American Protesters Give Bush a HUGE Korea Welcome!!"

Gateway Pundit notes a curious, most unexpected development though:

This didn't seem to make any headlines back home today for some reason.

Tough to overcome all of the static from the wall-to-wall John Edwards coverage in the MSM, I guess.

I wish everyone would get their stories straight--are McCain's ads trying to tell me that Obama is Hitler, or that Obama is the Anti-Christ?

Work it out and get back to me, fellas--thanks.

There's a hint of disappointment lurking in the subtext of John McCain's recent videos highlighting just how in the tank the MSM are for Obama; as Michelle Malkin quipped, "Hell hath no fury like a Maverick spurned". And while McCain may have initially counted on the media's support, he really should know better. While the media loved Maverick in the 2000 primaries--at least compared to that Bush guy--and for iconoclastic quotes afterwards, when presidential elections start in earnest, the MSM knows which party they're backing--and they're not afraid to let you know as well.

The latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, v-cast, Internet TV show, or whatever the kids are calling these things this week begins with this moment at the conclusion of the 2000 election and goes all the way to 2004's grizzly aftermath, and beyond. With a few surprises along the way...

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti can be found by tuning in here.)