Candidate Jimmy Carter said yes on the campaign trail, but history remembers his actual presidential administration with much more of a gimlet eye. And President Obama is having more than a few Carteresque moments of his own.

Found via Steve Green's weekly roundup of Blogs at PJTV.com, Barbara Curtis writes:

On Tuesday, as press secretary Gibbs fielded questions from the press regarding Daschle's dropping out as HHS secretary, Obama and Michelle "escaped" to read a book to second graders at a DC public school:

[Click for video]

There's certainly the irony that his own girls are going to the most elite school in DC while the Obamas grandstand among the common kids in a public school.

But ponder the significance of a man who spent only several months in the Senate and then campaigned for almost two years to get to the White House, who now spends two weeks flubbing administratively while entertaining lavishly, then together with his wife acts like it's such a terrible burden they have to "cut loose" and "break out."

And just imagine if Bush had done something similarly shallow in the midst of constantly crying "Crisis!" to the citizens of this country.

"Who is this guy? Where is the Barack Obama who charmed the country and challenged it to greatness?" is New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin's cri de coeur.

Over at his American Spectator blog, Robert Stacy McCain responds:

Campaigning is tough, but governing is infinitely harder. Remember when first Hillary Clinton, and then Republicans, tried to point out that Obama had no executive experience, had never really shown leadership in his legislative jobs, et cetera? Now his deficiencies are hurting him every day. The White House has many advantages, but it's not a very good place to hide.

Orrin Judd looks into distance and observes: "Somewhere, a killer rabbit licks its chops."

Glenn Reynolds links to a post on the Flying Debris blog on the apparently systematic harassment of a group of anonymous Chicago-based blogs:

The bloggers at the fantastic Chicago blog Uptown Update and the now defunct blog What the Helen have been subpoenaed by a developer of the notorious Wilson Yard project in the Uptown neighborhood. Additionally two Uptown community groups have recently been subpoenaed, the Uptown Neighborhood Council and the Buena Park Neighbors.

Glenn adds, "Expose Chicago politicians and their cronies, and they'll try to expose you, I guess."

See also: Plumber, Joe The.

Peter Robinson writes, "Every so often a president finds himself standing completely exposed--naked, so to speak--before the political class." Reasonable people (if such a group can be found to debate President Bush's record) can disagree, but Robinson believes that President Bush was first caught with brass exposed in October 2005, when he nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:

As she began making courtesy calls on members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, word began leaking from the offices of astonished senators that her purchase on even the most basic constitutional case law proved tenuous.

In contrast, Robinson believes that President Obama's fallibility is being exposed much sooner in his administration's tenure:

Permit House Democrats to draft his stimulus legislation? What could Obama have been thinking? Only one answer fits: Obama wasn't thinking.

After the Harriet Miers debacle, Bush quickly recovered the support of Washington Republicans. He nominated Samuel Alito in Miers' place and then returned to his other duties as chief executive. That was that. Nobody ever had Bush figured for a brilliant mind anyway.

In recovering from the stimulus debacle, Obama is unlikely to prove quite so lucky. A brilliant mind is exactly what Obama's supporters in Washington thought he had. Brilliance defined Obama. Brilliance is what Obama was all about. Now we know that he has already made some dumb mistakes.

The glee among Republicans right now is only to be expected. The long faces among Obama's startled supporters in Washington are a lot more telling.

In 2007 and 2008, Obama was given virtually no vetting by a media deep in the midst of a "slobbering love affair," to borrow from the title of Bernard Goldberg's latest book. (Incidentally, Bernie will be a guest on this week's PJM Political show tomorrow on Sirius-XM satellite radio.) He (Obama, not Goldberg) encouraged voters to view him a cipher that they could project onto any and all hopes they wanted. He frequently engaged in messianic rhetoric while campaigning, and seemed to encourage similar responses from his more rabid fans--certainly, he did nothing to tamp down such responses.

Even when he won the election, and the media's comparisons to Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and other presidents venerated over decades or more of history continued, Obama consciously played into them, jetting back to Chicago and taking the train, a la Lincoln, to his inauguration.

What could go wrong once it became time for the least experienced executive in the nation's history to actually govern?

"Company who sold 'Retarded Babies for Palin' t-shirts goes out of business--The owner claims he can't take the hate mail anymore."

Back in July you'll recall that John McCain's campaign ran a YouTube video that dubbed Barack Obama "the biggest celebrity in the world" and compared the candidate (still in the middle of his first term in the Senate) to Paris Hilton.

You know you're over the target when you start receiving Good Morning America, and they and the rest of the enraptured legacy media were collectively infuriated by this ad:

Co-host Diane Sawyer hyperbolically derided the spot as a "political nuclear attack" and asserted that the campaign is taking "a strange new turn."

GMA news anchor Chris Cuomo seemed equally flummoxed. He opened the show by asserting, "Some odd campaign news today. There's a round of new campaign commercials that really have us scratching our heads here." A bewildered Sawyer agreed: "What sort of committee meeting do you have where you say, 'Let's use Britney!' 'Let's use Paris!' Yes, that'll be a blow!"

And for a time it was. In mid-September, when McCain was still leading in some polls, Rich Lowry wrote:

The enduring scandal of the McCain campaign is that it wants to win. The press had hoped for a harmless, nostalgic loser like Bob Dole in 1996. In a column excoriating Republicans for historically launching successful attacks against Democratic presidential candidates in August, Time columnist Joe Klein excepted Bob Dole -- not mentioning that Dole had been eviscerated by Clinton negative ads before August ever arrived.

The press turned on McCain with a vengeance as soon as he mocked Barack Obama as a celebrity. Its mood grew still more foul when the McCain campaign took offense at Obama's "lipstick on a pig" jab. "The media are getting mad," according to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz. "Stop the madness," urged Time's Mark Halperin, exhorting his fellow journalists to fight back against the McCain campaign's manufactured outrage.

One of the reasons why the "Celebrity" ad so angered the MSM was that it spoke to the heart of Obama's appeal--it's not ideas and policy oriented, it's "largely aesthetic and personality-based", as Peter Wehner writes in an excellent article at Commentary. Read the whole thing, but the main thesis is here:

Obama's appeal, while widespread, is largely aesthetic and personality-based. This explains why a somewhat unsettling cult of personality has arisen around Obama. His appeal is not rooted in ideas or political philosophy or governing achievements; indeed, it is not grounded in any acts of governance. Yet some people already speak of him as a Lincolnian and Messiah-like figure.

But precisely because this appeal is largely aesthetic rather than substantive, because it is not grounded in things deep or permanent, its durability is limited. Reality will intrude. A million watt smile, fashionable sunglasses, and a nice jump shot are fine - I wish I possessed each of them - but one can confidently assume that Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Hassan Nasrallah, and Hugo Chavez are immune to their charms. Inflation, deflation, and unemployment will not be determined by the eloquence of Obama's rhetoric, the dinners he attends, or the columnists and reporters he seduces.

My point is really a rather simple one: Obama will be judged by the outcome of events. The other things are fine -- but in the end, they are far less important, and in some cases they are evanescent. People magazine and the Style section of the Washington Post are fun, but they are not serious.

Right now Barack Obama, having been President for all of three days, appears to be sitting on top of the world. He is a bright, talented, and able man. But the world is an untidy and unpredictable place. Pakistan may convulse. Iran may well go nuclear on Obama's watch; if so, Saudi Arabia and Egypt might soon follow, and the most unstable region in the world would be home to several nuclear powers.

Hard decisions need to be made, often based on incomplete information and rapidly changing events. Inter-agency clashes will occur. People and agencies thought to be competent will prove to be unreliable. Intelligence agencies will not be able to tell the President all that he wishes. A massive federal bureaucracy, an emboldened Congress, and other nations will begin to assert themselves. The law of economics will not be suspended. Entitlement programs remain unreformed and therefore unsustainable. Wasteful programs will refuse to die. The deficit is exploding. People's expectations are soaring, and soon enough they will insist on results.

Barack Obama may or may not succeed as president; but whether he does or not, the things people are taken up with now will not be determinative. And if things get worse rather than better, if Obama appears overmatched by events, then what are viewed as strengths now will be seen as weaknesses later. The day's vanity will become the night's remorse.

Barack Obama is President of the United States, not a crown prince on a white horse. Fairy tales are fine; but fairy tales are childish things.

Which is my Michael Novak is speculating on "The Coming Fall"--when it will occur, and what might cause it.

By getting Jim Geraghty to post "The right man won in 2008:"

Mac is back--back to his moral preening about how bipartisan he is, back to his reflexive demonization of his own party, back to his refusal to recognize any legitimate concerns raised by those who disagree with him. If we're going to have Democratic agenda enacted, better it be by a Democrat than a Republican obsessed with avoiding the "partisan" label in the White House.

Read the whole thing.

Mrs. George Stephanopoulos on the reaction of herself and her husband to Obama's inauguration.

As its former Ombudsman Daniel Okrent wrote in 2004, "Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?"

"Of course it is."

Related: Has Caroline Kennedy gotten Pinch-ed? Don Surber thinks so!

(H/T: Radio Pundit.)

Victor Davis Hanson has "An Uneasy Feeling"--and who can blame him?

I distilled from the press coverage and the crowds and the punditry yesterday that for all too many suddenly a vote for Obama redeems America. Now, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in their lives they are apparently proud of the United States. (Had we not had the financial meltdown in mid-September, and had Obama stayed three points back in the polls, would millions have stayed soured on America and now in sullen silence licked their wounds?).

So I am surprised that suddenly the election of a single individual means that we are united, patriotic, proud of America? Suddenly Okinawa or Antietam, or all those who died at the Argonne, are ours to claim again? (This reminds of elementary school, when our third-grade split up into two sides, as the teacher quizzed us on geography-and the losers of the contest cried and said unfair and how they didn't like school or Mrs. Wilson, and then when they won the next day, how suddenly third grade became glorious, and Mrs. Wilson and her games were once again wonderful).

But America was always ours, the public, and the nation transcends the proposition of whether Obama gets elected or not--given that the United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. So I think it would be wise to cool it on the "I am now proud of America" rhetoric. If getting your way means suddenly the dead at Iwo or those who were blown up in B-17s over Germany are at last your own and matter, then we are in deep trouble.

Don't miss VDH's "More Modest Proposals in the Age of Obama" aimed at The One's more beatific supporters. Such as Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, whom you can hear at 3:54 in the latest Hollywood Obaworshiping video stating, "I pledge to be a servant to our president and all mankind."

All of which is summed by this observation by Dan Blatt of Gay Patriot (via one of his commenters) on the yin and yang of the last eight years:

Obama worship is the flip side of Bush hatred. They love the one without knowing what he stands for and loath the other while mispresenting his record.

Exactly.

(H/T: IP)

The Media Research Center is your one stop shop for Obama worshiping media clips. Savor the bias!

(No really--I'm just thrilled that even more legacy journalists are on the record regarding where they stand.)

Update: "Are They Writing for Tiger Beat or the New York Times?" Who can tell the two apart these days?

AP's ubiquitous Nedra Pickler writes, "Biden shushes wife after secretary of state slip":

The wife of Vice President-elect Joe Biden let it slip to Oprah Winfrey Monday that her husband had a pick of two jobs in the Obama administration.

Jill Biden said President-elect Barack Obama gave Biden the choice of being secretary of state or vice president. The vice president-elect tried to hush his wife as soon as the words came out of her mouth, with a loud "shhh!" that sent the audience into laughter.

The Bidens made a surprise appearance on Winfrey's show, recorded at the Kennedy Center for broadcast later Monday on the eve of the inauguration.

The vice president-elect said he only accepted Obama's offer to be his running mate after talking it over with "Jilly," his pet name for his wife. Mrs. Biden said she told him vice president would be better for the family.

Fortunately for the sake of the entire planet's survival, Mrs. Biden wisely chose the job where her husband could the least amount of international harm:

Andrew Breitbart writes, "it's understandable that Republicans are green with envy and scratching their heads wondering why the Internet works for Democrats but doesn't work for them. The simple answer:"

There is no technology that can help overcome the left's current online dominance.

There is no wizard in Silicon Valley who can make things better.

There is no Joe Trippi who can take an obscure Republican and push him to victory using online tools past, present and future.

Facebook won't do it. Twitter won't do it. Countering Soros and MoveOn .org won't do it. And mimicking Kos and Arianna won't do it.

Sorry, Republicans, there is no magic Internet button.

The Democratic Party resonates on the Internet because it resonates in pop culture. The Democratic Party resonates in pop culture because it has been committed to dominating it for over a generation.

Read the whole thing--and for my interview with Andrew discussing the left and pop culture, and "Big Hollywood", his new online salon, click here.

A fine selection of "Words To Rest In 2009."

As Jonah Goldberg writes in the L.A. Times, on the campaign trail, Barack Obama was every candidate you wanted him to be. But that's about to change once he actually takes office and begins to govern:

Presidential inaugurations are in many ways the high-water marks of any presidency because they're so full of hope. All things seem possible. The rivalries and backbiting haven't set in yet, at least not publicly. Even the inevitable disappointments over Cabinet picks and White House staffing are tempered by the wide-eyed dreams of an ambitious agenda. Everyone -- or at least everyone who backed the guy -- has that "we can make this the best yearbook ever!" feeling.

Then comes the letdown. No, I don't mean Barack Obama will be a failed president. But even the most successful presidents bitterly disappoint some people, usually some of their biggest supporters. Indeed, they can only disappoint supporters because disappointment first requires confidence and hope. Those who voted against Obama can either have their low expectations fulfilled or be pleasantly surprised.

Many conservatives, for example, had hoped that George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was simply a marketing slogan. They were dismayed to discover he really meant it. In the 1980s, Republican factions were deeply divided in the "let Reagan be Reagan" debates. Everyone heard what they wanted to hear during the campaign and expected the man's presidency to jibe perfectly with their expectations.

Obama's ideological compass is far more difficult to discern than Reagan's or Bush's were. This is why his conservative detractors often called him a cipher. Obama's supporters rolled their eyes despite producing often-contradictory evidence to rebut the charge.

This raises perhaps the most interesting question of the Obama presidency: "What wasn't Barack Obama lying about?"

I don't mean this to be as harsh as it sounds. I'm not talking about what his conservative critics said he was lying about -- say, the true nature of his relationship with William Ayers. I'm talking about issues where his own supporters seem to have just assumed he had his fingers crossed.

Not the least of which is Obama's infamous statement on bankrupting the coal industry, uttered a year ago in the midst of an hour long conversation the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle and then unnearthed by a blogger in the last weekend of the election; the closest anyone remotely associated with the feckless McCain campaign came to delivering an October surprise. After The One's latest flip-flop on this issue, Ed Morrissey wonders if the freshness dating has expired on that statement--but concludes, don't be too sure.

Selwyn Duke looks at the state of manufactured consent at the dawn of the Obama administration:

A common defense of error today is to say, with due indignation, "I have a right to my opinion!" Legally this is true, given that our First Amendment is extant. But as G.K. Chesterton once said, "Having the right to do something is not at all the same as being right in doing it." There is no moral right to an immoral opinion -- nor to one bred of emotionalism unconstrained by reason -- nor to a deceitful one.

More than ever, Americans are realizing that this isn't a sentiment to which the mainstream media subscribes. In fact, with how it shamelessly carried water for Barack Obama during the election, 2008 has been dubbed "the year journalism died" (Sean Hannity is fond of this label). Yet, while such pronouncements make for compelling commentary, nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that journalism is alive and well -- outside the mainstream media. As for the latter's journalism, by the third millennium it was not only dead, not only laid to rest, but fossilized and buried under the stratum containing the hula hoop and pet rock. And it would take a Jurassic Park-like effort to reconstitute its DNA and resurrect the ancient beast. Thus, a more accurate statement about 2008 is: It was the year that many more illusions about the validity of mainstream journalism died. Let us now take a look at a media that has made malpractice an art.

Read the whole thing.

Surprisingly harsh words from Obama's friends at AP to The One:

Unemployment is up. The stock market is down. Let's party.

The price tag for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration gala is expected to break records, with some estimates reaching as high as $150 million. Despite the bleak economy, however, Democrats who called on President George W. Bush to be frugal four years ago are issuing no such demands now that an inaugural weekend of rock concerts and star-studded parties has begun.

Obama's inaugural committee has raised more than $41 million to cover events ranging from a Philadelphia-to-Washington train ride to a megastar concert with Beyonce, U2 and Bruce Springsteen to 10 official inaugural balls. Add to that the massive costs of security and transportation - costs absorbed by U.S. taxpayers - and the historic inauguration will produce an equally historic bill.

In 2005, Reps. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and Jim McDermott, D-Wash., asked Bush to show a little less pomp and be a little more circumspect at his party.

"President Roosevelt held his 1945 inaugural at the White House, making a short speech and serving guests cold chicken salad and plain pound cake," the two lawmakers wrote in a letter. "During World War I, President Wilson did not have any parties at his 1917 inaugural, saying that such festivities would be undignified."

The thinking was that, with the nation at war, excessive celebration was inappropriate. Four years later, the nation is still at war. Unemployment has risen sharply. And Obama pressed Congress to release the second half of a $700 billion bailout package in hopes of rescuing a faltering banking industry.

Obama's inauguration committee says it is mindful of the times and is not worried people will see the four days of festivities as excessive.

Merely a disaster area, as Mark Steyn notes.

Via the Liberal Fascism blog, some thoughts from Byron York and Jay Nordlinger on all-enveloping corporate Obama worship. And much more from Debbie Schlussel, who calls into yesterday's B-Cast on Breitbart.tv to discuss Obama taking central command of the internecine battles in the cola wars--and getting his own trading cards as a result:

Related thoughts from Hot Air's Allahpundit.

Update: "Everybody remembers those pro-Bush celebrity videos sponsored by major corporations, right? Right?"

"Prepare now for the coming post-stimulus hyperinflation with these million-dollar bills featuring Barack Obama's picture! Why wait until the government gets around to issuing them in 2011, when they'll buy a single measly gallon of gas?"

I must say, hopefully our real million dollar notes will look as sharp as these Weimar Republic bills--which, with their Bauhaus designed at least looked cool, even if they were essentially worthless due to hyper-inflation.

In the Philadelphia Inquirer (which somehow spontaneously failed to combust when his manuscript arrived at their doorstep), Rick Santorum posits that John McCain "may be Obama's secret weapon."

Hey, his lame campaign in the last six weeks of the election helped his competitor to win--why stop now?

Jules Crittenden writes, "Anxious not to be stuck with the blame for another Katrina, Bush puts the federal disaster response into motion ahead of time, mobilizing FEMA bucks."

Jules has photographic evidence of the multiple survival mechanisms being put into place for those enduring the disaster region. He also links to an article which states that incoming volunteers are well aware of the grim conditions they'll be facing:

Beginning this weekend, millions of people are expected to swarm into the Nation's Capital - many with the highest expectations of seeing history unfold around them.Most seem aware of the challenges they face, transportation difficulties at best, millions of charged up people in the same place, enduring the elements for long hours, and all with no access to indoor plumbing.

Not to mention all of the anti-war protesters. In other words, a repeat of Woodstock, except with Geritol the drug of choice instead of LSD, and many fewer cool bands.

Related: Not that the Washington establishment isn't itself quite a hallucinatory experience.

Joe The Veep discovers Ed the videomaker. May Barack help us all.

"A source of mine called to say that Obama's reached out to some newspaper publishers about giving papers a tax break in the stimulus package."

Man, from P.J. O'Rourke's fingers to the Connecticut papers' mouths, to Obama's ears. If this story actually is true, it's yet another example of reality invariably trumping fiction.

Tabitha Hale writes that "2008 was the year of identity politics"--on both sides of the aisle--along with some thoughts on how to get past them.

Guy Benson looks at Obama's tightly-controlled press coverage so far:

As I watched President Bush's final tango with reporters this morning, I was reminded of how Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin described President-elect Obama's press conferences thus far:

"As ferociously as we march like villagers with torches against Blagojevich, we have been, in the true spirit of the Bizarro universe, the polar opposite with the president-elect. Deferential, eager to please, prepared to keep a careful distance.

The Obama news conferences tell that story, making one yearn for the return of the always-irritating Sam Donaldson to awaken the slumbering press to the notion that decorum isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The press corps, most of us, don't even bother raising our hands any more to ask questions because Obama always has before him a list of correspondents who've been advised they will be called upon that day."

How long will the Obama-friendly press corps, no matter how "deferential" and "eager to please," tolerate such tight management?

I give 'em four years, myself. Eight years tops.

Fortunately, The One was careful to under-promise during the campaign in the event of just such a contingency.

It's easy to understand why Sarah Palin drove the drive-by media insane--since she stood in the way of The One, and she established a successful career while concurrently being an apostate to whatever mishmash of ideas is commonly defined as liberalism these days, she simply needed to be destroyed, just as Joe the Plumber would similarly also need to be taken out.

It's not personal, Sonny, it's strictly business.

But Robert Stacy McCain has quite an interesting theory about why Sarah Palin had a similar effect on several prominent conservative pundits:

Somewhere between Bush's historic triumph in November 2004 (when he became the first president since 1988 to be elected by a popular-vote majority) and November 2006, the wheels fell off the Permanent Republican Majority. Suddenly, as if awakened from fairy-tale slumbers, conservative intellectuals began to regret that George W. Bush was not one of them.

Think about it. Peggy Noonan, Christopher Buckley, David Frum -- what is the thread that connects them? All worked as speechwriters: Noonan for Reagan, Buckley for Bush 41, Frum for Bush 43. While these Republican wordsmiths had all praised Dubya's machismo magnificence when he was contrasted with such pompous rivals as Al Gore and John Kerry, the bloom fell off that rose after 2006.

That born-again, down-to-earth, drawling Texas thing -- somehow, it had once made Bush seem like Gary Cooper in High Noon. But as the disasters mounted and the poll numbers headed southward, that Gary Cooper glow faded and these conservative intellectuals turned on their TVs to behold, with unspeakable horror, President Jethro Bodine.

Thus their reaction to Sarah Palin. While the Republican Party grassroots looked at Palin and saw an American Margaret Thatcher (except much sexier), the conservative intellectuals looked at her and saw . . . Vice President Ellie Mae Clampett.

Shootin' her some vittles! Takin' care of young 'uns. Let's go a-swimmin' in the ce-ment pond!

You see? The fear and loathing of Sarah Palin among (some) conservative intellectuals is a subconscious reaction to their belated recognition of Bush's weaknesses. The liberals who bashed Bush as being "in a bubble" and "out of touch" had a point. Since 1999, Bush really has been encased in a hermetic capsule of expert advisers. And this capsule was purposely constructed with the eager assent of the conservative intellectuals because, deep down, they never really believed he had it.

By "it," I mean what Ronald Reagan had, that finely-honed political sense, that keen instinct for the right word, the right stance -- the "vision thing," as Bush 41 once said.

Reagan had that, had it in his very marrow, in every molecule of his being. As much as the Noonans, Frums, Buckleys and David Brookses of the GOP wanted to believe that Dubya had that Reaganesque quality, he never did. He was . . . just another Bush.

Having watched firsthand Palin absolutely knock the crowd out inside the Minneapolis convention hall in August, she's certainly charismatic and has that magic X-factor that allows a speaker to connect simultaneously with both an arena full of thousands of people and the individual viewer watching in his den on a 32-inch TV. (And the echoes of her performance made McCain seem all the more stiff the next night.)

She certainly could have been a fine vice president if McCain hadn't "suspended his campaign", permanently, in retrospect, in late September. But does that make Palin the next Gipper? (Or an American Thatcher?) Unless you've got the legacy media firmly in your pocket--and no Republican, certainly no conservative, ever will--the final step between being one of 50 governors and being handed keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is a very, very tall one. I'd like to see something along these lines in preparation if Palin wants the job. But definitely read the rest of Robert's post, here.

The TV channel with one finger poised on the delete key suddenly has an epiphany, Steve Green writes:

Via Charlie Martin on Twitter comes this admission from CNN's Campbell Brown (video at link): "Obama's lofty ideas lack specifics."

Dude, hope and change. How much more specific does the President-elect need to get? I mean, those were good enough for CNN during the campaign.

CNN declared itself and their candidate an idea-free zone during the election; why start now?

Meanwhile, CNN is trashing the newest citizen journalist heading towards Israel. As a viewer, frankly, I'm not at all sure what Joe the Plumber can tell me about the Middle East. But I do know that hasn't lied to me yet about the Middle East, and that already puts him ahead of at least one TV network.

With a revival of the Fairness Doctrine making ripples in the news, we at Silicon Graffiti HQ know that it's important to diversify our video blogging. Last year, we explored the Top Ten Gaffes from Hillary Clinton. So in the name of Fairness, we're listing the chief gaffes of the winners of the 2008 presidential election as well.

Thrill to President-Elect Barack Obama in defense of high gas prices (when those prices were nearing their peak) and spreading the wealth--to all 57 states! And of course...The Top Ten Gaffes of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., demonstrating the continuing viability of Seinfeldian Opposite Theory in action.

Believe me, it wasn't easy culling the list down to ten, especially when this late entrant came in over the transom this weekend. But even if you've drunk deep the Oba-Kool-Aid, hopefully you'll enjoy what's here.

(Bumped to top. Incidentally, for many more videos, start here and keep scrolling.)

Jennifer Rubin writes that the Bill Richardson debacle "is the Obama team's first significant misstep (well, aside from directing a series of conversations with the known-to-be under-investigation Blago and not imploring fellow Democrats in Illinois to pass a bill for a special Senate election)":

With the advent of this incident and of Blago-gate, it is fair to ask whether the Chicago crowd isn't too relaxed about the appearance of corruption. Have they gotten so used to the the stench of impropriety and the possibility of federal investigation that the alarm bells no longer sound? The Obama players are from Chicago, but they're not in Chicago any longer.

The confluence of these two pay-to-play scandals isn't being missed. Andrew Malcolm writes:

Unspoken by both Obama and Richardson today was the political reality that the Democrat-controlled Senate, which would have to confirm Democrat Richardson for the new Democratic president, is already in a mortifying fight with Illinois' Democrat Gov. Rod Blagojevich over a similar federal "pay-to-play" probe of his operations, including the alleged auction of his nomination to fill Obama's now vacant U.S. Senate seat with another Democrat.

There will be future incidents testing whether the Obama team has learned its lesson about insufficient scrutiny. Embattled Rep. Charlie Rangel springs to mind. We'll know progress has been made when we see the White House pressuring Congress for his removal from the Ways and Means Chair, and not scrambling to keep up with the latest investigation.

For now, the Obama transition crew has at least learned the second lesson of corruption scandals: throw the miscreants overboard fast. The first, of course, is don't associate with them to begin with.

Good luck with that.

Related: Illinois: the "shining cesspool on a hill."

Noemie Emery charts the strange twists and turns of Clan Kennedy:

From Joe Sr. on down to his sons and their children, the Kennedys have been many things to most men. Morally, they have been profiles in courage and cowardice: They fled Luftwaffe bombs in Blitz-ridden London, and in wartime sought out the most dangerous missions; they have saved shipmates from drowning in dangerous waters, and left a woman to drown in a scandalous accident; they have given the last full measure of devotion in war and its aftermath; and in peace and in new generations, they have sometimes asked for much more than their due. In politics, they have been far right, far left, and dead center; they have been male chauvinists and quivering slaves to the feminist movement; they have been isolationists, interventionists, and democratic crusaders; they have been Churchillian and Chamberlainesque. Joe was an isolationist and a right-winger; Ted an isolationist and a left-winger; Jack and Bobby were centrists and interventionists, though in contrasting ways. The rational Jack was a centrist on just about everything, while the visceral Bobby was a melange of both left and right instincts; a friend in his time to Cesar Chavez and Senator Joseph McCarthy; a man who attacked Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society from the left, right, and center, and in his last years sounded like Ronald Reagan and a student protester on alternating days.

The ironic fact is that while Joe bought Jack his seat in the House in his first election (with help from Jack's maternal grandfather, a one-time mayor of Boston), the Kennedy brand was built on the talents of Jack and of Bobby, whose centrist convictions the latter-day Kennedys have gone to some pains to repudiate. Jack, it is known now, governed slightly to the right of Richard M. Nixon, while his heirs have been to the left of McGovern, who (along with his running-mate, a Kennedy in-law) lost 49 states to Nixon in 1972.

This has created between the legacy and those who claim to uphold it a disconnect, which voters sense and act on even if the legatees seem to deny its existence. At the start of the Cold War, John Kennedy urged rearmament, and ran to the right of his Republican rivals, while Ted Kennedy strenuously fought against all the arms systems with which the Cold War was finally won. Bobby Kennedy was famous for his loathing of Fidel Castro, a left-wing Latin American dictator who used his country as a base for America's enemies, while Bobby's sons suck up to Hugo Chávez, the Castro-lite left-wing Venezuelan dictator, who makes common cause with America's enemies, including Iran.

A number of Bobby's children, in particular, have seemed to go in for left-wing fringe causes, backed by the kind of boutique liberals Bobby once thought of as "sick." This is the reason the attempts of the younger Kennedys to tap into the emotional charge of the legacy have fallen with such a dull thud: the reason that despite lavish send-offs, no Kennedy of the third generation has achieved lift-off beyond local office; the reason that Ted Kennedy, adored in his state and by the base of his party, has always been a hard sell outside them, and was humiliated by the despised Jimmy Carter--and by his own party members--in the 1980 campaign.

The Kennedys, however, seem oblivious to these contradictions, a fact shown in Caroline's choice of her cousin Kerry to serve as spokesman and surrogate, even though Kerry's public service credentials are even weaker than Caroline's, and her main claim to public attention was as a tabloid heroine in a spectacular divorce in 2003 from Andrew Cuomo, Caroline's rival in dynasticism. Caroline meanwhile is trying to run on the legacy of her father and Bobby, while embracing a post-60s Teddy-type platform strikingly out of step with that of her father and late uncle.

Would Jack, who threatened pre-emptive war over missiles in Cuba, have really opposed a war with Iraq after Saddam defied U.N. resolutions? Would Bobby, who made his chops busting corrupt labor unions, have supported the end of the secret ballot in union elections? What would Jack and Bobby have said to the feminist social agenda, up to and including late-term abortion? And what would Bobby have said of gay marriage?

If Caroline wants to run as a legatee, she should explain which Kennedy legacy she supports, and why she supports it (including the tax cuts put in by her father.) She could start by reading her father's inaugural and seeing if there are any parts she believes in. Would she "bear any burden and pay any price" to ensure the survival of liberty? If she wouldn't, she should tell us why.

You can hear my interview with James Piereson, the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, on JFK's 1960 election in the year-end edition of PJM Political by clicking here; and for a look at Caroline helping to launch the latest in a quadrennial search for a would-be successor to the throne, click here.

2008: The year of wasted questions:

Danny Glover rounds up his choices; here's an excerpt:

3) Burning Down The House: When conservatives create videos that strike a chord with the public, they often become the target for copyright-infringement "takedown notices" at YouTube.

I can certainly relate to that; you can watch the rest of our videos here, including the Hillary 3:00 AM mash-up from March that the McCain Campaign eventually copied.

Danny also links to an interview with the anonymous maker of this awesome video, which was referenced in our recent "In Dodd We Trust?" video.

...That David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy wore his baseball cap with the brim facing backwards:

Who would have thought that twenty years after I, as a teenager, thought it looked cool to put my baseball cap on backwards (was it a Beastie Boys thing? Who remembers...), that youths, and even some adults (saw a guy in his 30s yesterday), would still be doing it (though there seemed to be a break for a time in the late '80s and mid '90s). Folks, the bill is on the front for reason, to shade your face from the sun. And it's soooo unclassy. Can you imagine Cary Grant wearing a backwards baseball cap? Please ladies, boycott the gents who wear the cap backwards, or at least tell them how silly it looks, and end this travesty for good. Perhaps a simple, "you know, David Bernstein had that look twenty years ago," will do.

Too bad this unwitting celebrity fashion victim and his army of media handlers such as this Reuters journalist never got the memo:

The president-elect, looking uber-cool with his White Sox baseball cap on backwards, flipped the shaka to a crowd of about 30 people as he left a gym on a Marine Corps base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he is vacationing.

As Jonah Goldberg noted last week, American society--let alone the rest of the world--is far too balkanized for such a blanket statement. And in such a diverse environment, news agencies such as Reuters need to mindful of such a wide range of readers. In other words, we all know that one man's uber-cool fashion plate is another man's uber-dork. To be frank, it adds little to the national dialogue to call the attack on the basketball courts by the president elect an uber-cool aesthetic experience.

Michelle Malkin has a "Tale of two presidential workout fanatics"; meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has a tale of two politically-connected religious leaders. In both cases, one story has been met by praise (home run!) the other with derision. What ties these pairs of stories together? "Liberal double standards: It's just how they roll", Michelle writes.

If you missed it today on Sirius-XM's POTUS channel, the year-end wrap edition of PJM Political is now online in handy portable podcast form (as frequent contributor James Lileks is wont to say).

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com and myself for the year-end edition of PJM Political as he recaps the key moments of the 2008 presidential election. Plus a look back at the decisive elections of the past with:

• Michael Knox Beran, the author of Forge of Empires: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, 1861-1871 describes "How Lincoln Saved The World."


• Amity Shlaes, the author of the New York Times best-seller The Forgotten Man on the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections.


• James Piereson, the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution on JFK and the election of 1960.


• Craig Shirley, the author of the Reagan's Revolution and the forthcoming Rendezvous With Destiny on the 1976 and 1980 elections and the fall and rise of Ronald Reagan.

Tune in here to listen!

As a candidate, Barack Obama was but one of many of the left in recent years who scolded Americans on their economic largesse--until they seemingly took his advice and drastically curtailed their spending, Mark Steyn writes in his newest column:

"Retail Sales Plummet," read the Christmas headline in The Wall Street Journal. "Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending."

Hey, that's great news, isn't it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Sen. Obama said on the subject? "We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say, 'You just go ahead, we'll be fine.'"

And boy, we took the great man's words to heart. SUV sales have nose-dived, and 72 is no longer your home's thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Sen. Obama's logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume 4 percent of the world's resources. And in these past few months we've made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-elect Barack Obama doesn't seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. He's proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar "stimulus" package or whatever it is now to "stimulate" it back into its bad old ways.

On the other hand, as Tom Blumer writes, "If a recovery begins too soon, a massive 'stimulus' package might not be needed. Democrats consider that a bad thing."--hence even more negative jawboning from the incoming administration.

CNN's John Roberts can be witnessed between 6:50 and 7:30 point in this edition of Silicon Graffiti doing an amazing aerial 180 worthy of both Tony Hawk and Joseph Stalin--and here with the very definition of a Freudian slip. And yet, he seems surprisingly incredulous when one of October's chief hit and run victims of the drive-by media mocks his objectivity.

Update: Kathy Shaidle observes a revolving door revolving at the White House, as the upcoming Obama administration continues to take shape.

More: "That's a great thing about E. J. -- you don't have to read his columns anymore. You just know he's supporting Obama."

Allahpundit has a holiday epiphany: "Christmas miracle: Traffic soars on 'shirtless Obama' Internet searches":

Got an e-mail from Ed 20 minutes ago telling me to check SiteMeter. On one of the most gruesomely awful traffic days of the year, with blog readers tuning out in droves to prepare for the holiday, we're ... way above our daily average. Have a look at the referrals to see why. It's not just us, either. It's Internet-wide, per the AP and The One's current standing at Google Trends.

Hours of searching to find interesting Headlines, hours of toil to compose thoughtful posts -- and all America wants is a Barack Obama beefcake pec-tacular. All right then, I won't stand in the way of love. Drink it in. A man-boobs alert has been issued by the boss and Althouse, but I say let he who is without love handles cast the first stone. And don't underestimate his strength: If German media reports are accurate, he's capable of curling 70 lbs. Judging by that photo, I'd have guessed that was half his body weight.

Clearly, our incoming president is the leader of "the American League of Justice Dispensed Shirtlessly", to borrow a Lileksian riff.

In an update to Allah's post, Ed Morrissey adds:

I'm glad AP decided to post this instead of me. I'm above posting phrases like Obama six-pack, Obama shirtless, and especially Obama topless in a vain effort to get Google traffic. You'll never see that from me. No sir-ee.

Seriously, though ... wouldn't you think that people have better things to do two days before Christmas? Thankfully, no.

Ed was kind enough to link to us on Tuesday morning, shortly before I hopped on a cross-country flight from the relatively mild climate of San Jose into bitter wintry, hail-strewn Philadelphia, the latter city yet another victim of global warming at its worst.

If you missed it yesterday on Sirius-XM's POTUS channel, Saturday's PJM Political is now online; tune in here to listen.

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for his take on President-Elect Obama's cabinet choices, and the Pythonic implications of the "shoe toss" incident that bedeviled President Bush in Iraq.

Plus, from PJTV:

• Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon debates Frost/Nixon with fellow Oscar-nominated screenwriter/producer Lionel Chetwynd.
  
• Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin talk with Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, now looking to helm the Republican National Committee, followed by their conversation with the surprise celebrity from the last month of the presidential election, Joe Wurzelbacher, aka...Joe The Plumber.
  

If you missed any previous episodes of PJM Political, click here and scroll through for hours of audio archives. And tune in to Pajamas Media's PJTV channel for video coverage throughout the week.

James Taranto corrects a moment in the election timeline:

Remember Barack Obama's big race speech back in March, the one that invited comparisons to Lincoln? Neither does anyone else, but it seemed like a big deal at the time. On March 18 The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder did a short item called "Speechwriter of One" (quoting verbatim):

This wasn't a speech by committee... Obama wrote the speech himself, working on it for two days and nights.... and showed it to only a few of his top advisers.

This now appears to have been puffery, at least if the Washington Post has the story right:

One Saturday night in March, Obama called [Jon] Favreau and said he wanted to immediately deliver a speech about race. He dictated his unscripted thoughts to Favreau over the phone for 30 minutes--"It would have been a great speech right then," Favreau said--and then asked him to clean it up and write a draft. Favreau put it together, and Obama spent two nights retooling before delivering the address in Philadelphia the following Tuesday.

"So," Obama told Favreau afterward. "I think that worked."

Favreau is the 27-year-old Obama speechwriter best known for a party photo in which he pretends to grope the right breast of a life-size cardboard cutout depicting New York's junior senator. Harmless frat-boy antics, to be sure, but it does make all the solemn praise Obama got for that race speech all the more hilarious.

(H/T: FTPS)

Time magazine's "Person of the Year 2008" cover story, dated December 17th: President Elect Obama's "arrival on the scene feels like a step into the next century -- his genome is global, his mind is innovative, his world is networked, and his spirit is democratic."

Time magazine, December 18th: "Obama has proven himself repeatedly to be a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot."

"For people who think there's no cultural divide in this country, consider the treatment of two women much in the news in 2008."

Really, "what can one man do to save the world?" (Click over if only for the terrific Photoshop.)

(Via the Binkmeister.)

A rather discordant tone struck by the "relatively young and inexperienced" CEO of the Office of President Elect:

Meanwhile, in other dispatches from the Chicago Way, the 24Ahead.com blog spots a little ongoing Stalinizing of Illinois' archives.

Ed Morrissey posts an amusing clip of Joe Scarborough riffing on the instinctive legacy media.

FrontPage Magazine quotes the speech that Bernard Goldberg (the author of the groundbreaking books on media bias, the first titled, logically enough, Bias and its sequel, Arrogance, gave during David Horowitz's latest Restoration Weekend on November 14th. It was followed by a Q&A, where this excerpt was taken:

Bernie Goldberg: I have long argued, and I continue to argue, despite what some of my conservative friends think, there is no conspiracy. Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, and in my day, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw never came in the morning, went into a room, summoned their top lieutenants, pulled the shades, dimmed the lights, gave the secret handshake and the secret salute, and said, "How are we going to screw those conservatives today?" It never, ever happened that way. And you know what? I wish it did because that is so outrageous. That is so unacceptable that nobody would tolerate it for two seconds.

What happens in reality is worse. What happens is there are so many likeminded people in the newsroom, they not only think alike; it becomes a group-think kind of thing so that they see conservative views as being to the right of center, which they are, and they see liberal views as middle of the road. They don't even know what liberal views are because of this bubble that they live in.

What made it different this time - despite the fact that they wanted Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale to win, it wasn't the same thing as this year because Walter Mondale was just another white guy and so was Michael Dukakis. This was different. They were on a mission. This was very important. Their cause, as I say, was noble, and they were going to do whatever they had to do to make this happen. And unlike in past years where they all denied their bias, you're right. The questioner was right. They acknowledge it. And you know why they acknowledge it in the end? Because they don't give a damn what any of you think. That's why.

Unidentified Audience Participant: What I would like to know is there's such a contradiction here in the fact that the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times are almost spinning out of existence. Why is it that they had such a powerful effect on the election?

Bernie Goldberg: I don't know that they do have a powerful effect on - I don't think the media defeated John McCain. I think the media was as corrupt as the day is long, but I don't think they defeated John McCain.

One of my friends in the room suggested maybe two or three points, but it wasn't enough to throw the election. I think people listen to this stuff.

A poll came out. It was a reputable poll. I think it was by Pew, the Pew Research Center, that said 90 percent of Republicans - the question was simply this - "Who do you think most reporters want to win the election?" and 90 percent of Republicans said they want Obama to win. But this is a statistic that should send chills running up the spine of any journalist with half a brain; 62 percent of Democrats and independents said the same thing. Now, if they don't have Republicans - we've already decided we don't trust them, but if 62 percent of Democrats don't trust them, that's a real problem because all they have, at least in theory, is their credibility. So I think they didn't put a thumb on the scale, but they put their big fat asses on the scale this time, and they wanted him to win, and they made no bones about it. But they didn't beat John McCain.

He's right--McCain did much damage to his own campaign through its infighting and lacking of planning and coordination, and his ham-handed "suspending his campaign" stunt in late September without really knowing what he'd do once he got to Washington to deal with that month's bailout sealed his fate.

And McCain seems thrilled to be able to hang out with David Letterman and count the media as his friends again. The pressure of actually having to lead is off.

Now go over and read Goldberg's actual speech.

And for my two-part interview with Goldberg in 2004 in Tech Central Station, click here and here.)

(H/T: CG)

As one of Tim Blair's readers quipped on Friday:

Obama has besmirched the "Office of the President Elect" more than anyone in American history.

In mid-November, When Obama's transition team fired up Photoshop, printed out their mock "Office of the President-Elect" signs and pasted them to Obama's lectern, the media, weary of covering the real president during the final two months of his administration (except when the Florsheims fly, of course) ate it up. Itchy with anticipation over the transition and already used to giving their candidate maximum media exposure (and plenty of cover), they were thrilled to report on his press conferences as if he already was the president--why bother with the stuffy formality of transferring power in January?

And then we all learned how to pronounce the word "Blagojevich."

With a little bit of political jujitsu in mind, this weekend, the RNC responded with this ad:

Hot Air's Allahpundit asks, "Should the RNC have waited on this? No benefit of the doubt during the interregnum, at least?"

In 2000, there was plenty of doubt, and very little of it beneficial, thrown by the out party at their successors during the transition period.

Having established the precedent, why would they think the urge to attack during what was once a calm and orderly transition would cease?

"The single best thing about the election of Obama, may be that we now have a chance to view the terror threat without the distorting lens of Bush hatred."

Hey, let's give the left some credit for this--they finally found something in government worth cutting.

Jennifer Rubin adds:

How magnanimous of Biden to recommend his own irrelevancy. The funniest part of this article is the willingness of the reporter, with a straight face, to convey the Biden spin that this was "all his idea." Yeah. I'm sure President-elect Obama pleaded with him, "Joe, I need to to coordinate national security. I need you to oversee economic recovery. I need you to be charged with Congressional relations." But, of course, Biden declined. Oh, please.

The good news is that the one Biden's specialty will be labor issues. So, if the least significant person in the administration gets this in his portfolio, maybe "card check" isn't so high on the agenda after all.

If the office of the veep really is shrinking as much as the Politico states, there's a suggestion proffered by NBC as to where those funds could be used...

As Christian Toto writes, while Roger Ebert has always been a man of the left, his BDS seems to be getting the better of him these days. In his otherwise appropriately middling review of the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, Ebert opines:

The message of the 2008 version is that we should have voted for Al Gore. This didn't require Klaatu and Gort. That's what I'm here for.

To which Christian replies:

Really? I thought you were here to help the public decide the best way to spend their hard-earned money at their local theater. Maybe that whole "thumb" thing was just a distraction.

Exactly. But Ebert really lets his 1960s-minted BDS flag fly in his review of Frost/Nixon:

Strange, how a man once so reviled has gained stature in the memory. How we cheered when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency! How dramatic it was when David Frost cornered him on TV and presided over the humiliating confession that he had stonewalled for three years. And yet how much more intelligent, thoughtful and, well, presidential, he now seems, compared to the occupant of the office from 2001 to 2009.

That's not strange, that's what the media does to every Republican president when he leaves office when comparing him to a successor from his same party. Why should Nixon be the exception?

More Ebert:

Nixon was thought to have been destroyed by Watergate and interred by the Frost interviews. But wouldn't you trade him in a second for Bush?

Nahh, I'm not a wage and price controls kind of guy. But that's the great irony of Nixon's presidency, as Tom Wicker of the New York Times wrote in his 1991 biography of Nixon. If the left could have gotten past their hatred of the man, they would found, particularly in his statist warmed over Great Society domestic policies, he really was one of them, to paraphrase Wicker's title--or at least he certainly governed like it.

While Ebert naturally gives the movie four stars, John Nolte provides a bit of much-needed perspective:

Frost/Nixon is a full on respectable, accomplished and intelligent retelling of the now famous series of interviews English television personality David Frost conducted with disgraced former President Nixon in 1977, just a few years after Nixon's resignation. No one can argue a successful stageplay hasn't been transformed into a beautifully shot narrative with two memorable performances by Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost. The film holds your attention and reeks of competence from beginning to end.

All that's missing is a point.

* * *

Frost/Nixon rates as an impressive television movie, but as a feature it lacks a point, any kind of real intellectual curiosity, and, most of all, an ambition to do more than win awards. There's a great Nixon film to be made about this corrupt but fascinating man, but a couple of terrific lead performances won't help anyone remember this one for very long.

Even Ebert circuitously admits that the film is a show about a show about nothing:

[Nixon] admitted what everyone already knew, and that freed him to get on with things, to end his limbo in San Clemente, Calif., to give other interviews, to write books, to be consulted as an elder statesman. Indeed, to show his face in public.

Wait--didn't you start your article by saying that Nixon was "interred by the Frost interviews"? So the interview that interred Nixon freed him to get on with things?

In actuality, the interview was hardly the heavyweight slugfest the movie and its hagiographic critics make it out to be. At National Review, Fred Schwarz goes back to the newspaper reviews of Frosts' interviews with Nixon to see how they played at the time with a media still giddy over their recent victory:

To someone who was around back then, the idea of making a major motion picture about such a notorious fizzle seems bizarre; you might as well write an opera about "The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault." Is this just a case of memory being deceptive? Were the interviews really a landmark of a milestone of a watershed, as the publicists assert? To test this, I looked back at the reception they got in the media of the time.

The show's producers secured lavish advance coverage by giving virtually everyone with a press card some sort of "leak": transcripts, unedited video, production notes, briefing materials, correspondence. The week of the broadcast, Nixon was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, in that long-vanished era when those publications were considered influential. In the days leading up to the broadcast, the Washington Post ran several solid pages of Watergate transcripts and analysis, flashing back to the glory days of 1973.

After the airing of the first interview -- the only one anybody cared about, since it contained all the Watergate material -- there was far less hoopla. The Post's Bob Woodward, Nixon's erstwhile tormentor, called it "a much-touted television interview which shed little new light on the scandal."

Elsewhere in the Post, Haynes Johnson's analysis dripped with disappointment: "[The former president] proceeded, for the next 90 minutes, to give us all the familiar Nixon responses we have all seen for more than a generation. Those advance reports about Nixon being broken -- or shattered -- or even shaken by the withering interrogation of David Frost are in error. Nixon is in control throughout. He offers little that is new, and less that is of substance." Johnson continued: "Last night's program was billed as a dramatic and historic encounter between Nixon and his opponent, the relentless David Frost. It was nothing of the sort. . . . By the very end of the program, Frost looks as though he's swept up by the Nixon responses. . . . The tables have been turned. Frost had met his match."

The New York Times, in a brief, unsigned "Week in Review" item a few days later, echoed the been-there, done-that theme: "The spectacle was a familiar one . . . he portrayed himself, in typically Nixonian terms and gestures, as a victim of circumstance whose errors sprang from good intentions. . . . No important factual information about Watergate emerged from the interview."

* * *

How did this one-day story suddenly become the most important event since the Civil War? Well, if there's anything the media loves more than overhyping an anti-Republican story, it's overhyping its own importance, so when they have a chance to do both at once, it's no surprise that they get a little too excited.

As I wrote here last year, Frost/Nixon is an attempt to use history, assisted by plenty of dramatic license, to retrospectively turn a loss into a win. By all accounts, Frost/Nixon does a fine job of dramatizing the negotiations and preparation that led up to the interviews. And it's hard to imagine Frank Langella, who plays a Brezhnev-looking Nixon, giving a bad performance. Still, the movie's fundamental premise is just plain wrong.

The trailer says: "In 1974 President Nixon resigned to hide the truth. But one man had a few questions." In fact, Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; "the truth" was contained in congressional transcripts, court papers, and Oval Office tapes, and the great bulk of it came out before Frost and Nixon sat down for their "historic" clash. Some questions did remain unanswered: Why would anyone bug the DNC? Why didn't Nixon burn the tapes? Where did the 18-1/2 minute gap come from? But Frost never brought these up.

All that his much-vaunted interviews "revealed" was the unsurprising truth that, even in retirement, Richard Nixon was the same Tricky Dick he had always been.

As Orrin Judd concludes in his review of Wicker's biography:

It is perhaps the perfect punishment that Nixon has no one left to defend him now except for the same liberals who were his lifelong enemies. One imagines Richard Nixon spinning in his grave at the very thought of a NY Times columnist penning a 700 page apologia for his life and works, and one smiles.

And as John Nolte writes:

Since 1976's All The President's Men Nixon's become a genre all his own. Take a look.

My personal favorite is Robert Altman's Secret Honor, starring Philip Baker Hall and a half gallon bottle of Chivas Regal, and its Blagojevichian conclusion. (Language warning, but the video clip's here.)

Nixon was still very much alive when the 1984 film was made; while I don't know his response, I'd like think that deep down inside, he very much enjoyed, even a decade after he left office, still being able to cause that embittered a reaction amongst the left.

(And as for Nixon's interviewer? Much like Dan Rather's banishment to the cable purgatory of HD-Net, Frost has also been exiled to his own video Siberia.)

Having aided in his defeat for the White House, the media are now allowing John McCain to safely inherit the role of inoffensive elder GOP statesman-as-lovable-loser role last worn comfortably in the late 1990s by Bob Dole.

Meanwhile even with McCain's campaign concluded, the incompetence wears on.

In contrast, "The Other McCain" offers a roadmap for GOP recovery, here.

How much are the media in the tank for Obama? Enough so that they'll happily toss inconvenient articles down the memory hole for him.

This morning, Ann Althouse wrote:

Why am I getting the feeling that the mainstream media will do what it can to obliterate the connection between Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama?

It's more than a feeling, to quote those sage philosophers from Boston.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey spots plenty of airbrushing at Obama's Change.gov site.

"Engraved in beautiful Helvetica!" Really, doesn't everyone on your list deserve one of these?





(H/T: John McCormack)

Warner Todd Huston compares and contrasts 2008 and 2001:

Jonathan Alter was an early accuser of new President George W. Bush when he and VP Cheney began to try to warn the country that an economic downturn was well underway as he was taking office. As Bush tried to warn the nation, the media jumped all over him for "talking down the economy." Yet, as we watch the reporting of Obama's current down talking of the economy, the media has said nothing similar to the condemnation reigned upon Bush.

The myth that people like Alter was pushing in 2001 was that Clinton bequeathed a good economy to Bush, but the reality was that the spiral had already begun to fall into negative territory months before Bush took office. Despite that obvious downturn, the media formed a chorus of attacking Bush for being too negative in the face of the American people. On March 26, Alter unleashed his Newsweek piece headlined "Thanks Ever So Much, President Poor-Mouth." Alter called Bush's warnings "risky and unusual," and made the pronouncement that Bush was wrong to do so. "Even if Bush turns out to be right in his predictions of gloom," Alter wrote, "that doesn't mean he was right to make them."

On CNN, Lou Waters needled Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer on January 12, 2001 about the "politicalization " of the economy. "President Clinton, sort of, answered that as well today. He's talking up the economy. There are economists who say you guys are talking down the economy. What's happening here in this transition period, the whole, sort of, politicalization [of the economy]...," Waters said.

On March 19, The New York Times scolded Bush that presidents were supposed to be "cheerleaders for the nation's economy."

Yet, has anyone seen any similar scolding of the new "cheerleader" in chief, Obama? Has anyone seen an Alter sternly scolding Obama for "poor-mouthing" the economy? Has there been any hectoring from CNN over Obama's grave warnings? Where is The New York Times beating up that downcast Obama?

Why would the media complain about Obama, when they're doing a remarkable job of talking down the economy themselves, as Virginia Postrel notes:

If anyone should fear a Depression, it should be journalists, who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers. But instead, they seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship--without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s. (We're all yuppies now.)

Read the whole thing.

Back at the Republican Convention in Minneapolis, Steve Green handed me one of these bumper stickers, which Joe the Plumber sounds like he's in full agreement with:

I'm not going to speak for the Democrats but I mean, the Republicans didn't put out a candidate for us to really vote for. It's the lesser of two evils.

As Ace's co-blogger Drew M. writes, "Ah poor Maverick, no one really liked him. Alas, I'm sure he'll spend the next 4 years getting even with those of us who voted for him."

(H/T: TV)

With the arrest today of Illinois' Gov. Rod "Name That Party" Blagojevich for trying to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat (corruption? In Chicago? I'm shocked!), Exurban League has a photo taken at Obama's upcoming press conference.

Update: While the obvious references are to the Untouchables, Blagojevich sounds far more like Joe Pesci in Scorsese's Casino, with his Tourette's-like four, eight and 12-letter verbal explosions. They've caused quite a run at the asterisk factory at ABC News.

I hadn't planned it this way when I started working on the new video late last week, but the timing of Monday's news of fresh disaster from old media makes the latest Silicon Graffiti remarkably timely.

But first, let's define the title.

From Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Back in early 2007, I started wondering if the accelerating decline of print newspaper readership, media advertising revenues, and the upcoming election year were creating a strange new tone in the media. And near the tail-end of an election year in which the media weren't afraid to let you know who to vote for--and who they were voting for--Michael Malone of ABC and Pajamas Media wrote:

Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .

So here's a look at how the media got there, beginning in sepia toned 1926 when mass media was born with the first radio networks, all the way to the days of the Web, the Blogosphere, and the surprising impact Craigslist has had on classified advertising revenue--and a look at declining newspaper advertising in general.

This accelerating downward spiral has completed unnerved much of old media--to the point where a newspaper in a city once known 160 years ago for its residents' spectacular success at mining for gold completely overlooked the solid gold story dropped into their laps, helping to create a remarkably holographic presidential candidate.

(For 21 or so older Silicon Graffiti videos, click here and keep scrolling. And a special thanks to my friend Jenifer Toksvig for doing such a terrific job of recording the opening narration.)

The Rosetta Stone of humor is here--and the punchlines are endless.

Update: Found via STACLU, here's a bottomless well of bad (and needless to say reverential) Obama art. What would the response be if the ideologies were reversed, and it was a Website full of worshipful Reagan or Dubya art?

And you thought Olbermann and Matthews bit people's heads off at MSNBC:

Robert Stacy McCain responds to my post on frontloading the next GOP presidential candidate's complaints about media bias and writes, "What bothers me is how Ed -- and I think most Republicans -- take hostile media as a given":

This is defeatism, and I don't like it. Go back to Rep. Smith's math: If media bias influenced 4% of voters, that made all the difference.

To my mind, what this says is that if Republicans could get slightly more favorable press coverage -- say, reducing the media's pro-Democrat bias from 70/30 to 60/40 -- this improvement could make the difference between defeat and victory. Ergo, an effective public-relations program doesn't have to be 100% successful in order to make a decisive difference.

Read the whole thing.

CNN's Jonathan Mann runs through the usual litany of acceptable progressive predecessors (but no President RFK, alas) and asks, "Which hero do we want Obama to be?"

The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.

Which is a remarkably tacit way for Mann to damn his fellow media men--after all, if Americans truly are "putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know" that constitutes one epic failure amongst those whose job it is to inform them. But then, the modern function of the news media is to withhold information, not disseminate it. Something CNN has been quite good at in some areas--less so in others.

(Via Newsbusters.)

Related: Magical thinking at MSNBC: "Anchor Frets: Why Hasn't Obama's Election Ended Terrorism?"

Ron Radosh notes that much of the country have confused politics and religion:

If you consider Obama the closest man can get to God, you are probably among those who think that George W. Bush is the closest man can get to being the devil. As Canadian journalist Robert Fulford writes in The National Post, "liberal Americans who see the Republicans as the party of the devil have enjoyed eight years of intense self-righteousness." These are about to end, thankfully.

Actually, (and it's safe to say that Radosh would agree with this), if you literally think either man is the closest one can get to God or the devil, you're insane.

Radosh adds, "As Obama takes over our nation's helm, hopefully more reasoned opinion will prevail on the question of George W. Bush's legacy as President", adding some thoughts on how history will view Bush. That's a topic that's also being explored by David Frum and Victor Davis Hanson this weekend. It's safe to say that history in toto will likely be much kinder to Bush than the cartoon caricature that's been created by the media, academia, and the left (sorry for the redundancy), once the 2004 election year and the media's coverage of Katrina the following year allowed the festering emotions on the left to burst, to borrow Charles Krauthammer's metaphor.

Though as with President Nixon, numerous leftwing historians will have to continue to justify the staggering amount of hatred they've invested in the man for ideological reasons, especially since, as was the case with Nixon, Bush's policies weren't all that different from his immediate predecessor.

If you missed it today on Sirius XM, the latest edition of PJM Political is now online, featuring Roger L. Simon's interview on the changing role of gender in Hollywood with fellow Oscar-nominated screenwriter/producer Lionel Chetwynd. And recorded on the recent National Review cruise, my interview with former Cheers executive producer Rob Long. Plus an excellent discussion on President Elect Barack Obama's impact on black America with PJTV co-host Joe Hicks and John McWhorter, senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute.

Hosted by the best-known bartender since Sam Malone, produced by your friend and humble narrator--click here to listen!

In the Washington Times, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) writes that during the 2008 campaign, "the media crossed a threshold that should be greatly troubling to Americans":

Coverage of the election by many in the media ranged from slanted or biased to actually serving as strong and unabashed advocates for Sen. Barack Obama's campaign.

For example, national news magazines such as Time and Newsweek essentially provided free advertising for Mr. Obama, featuring him on their covers far more frequently - and more favorably - than Sen. John McCain.

Day after day, the New York Times showed its favoritism by allowing Mr. Obama to dominate coverage and control the debate. For example, The Times' opinion editor, a former staff member in the Clinton administration, refused to publish an op-ed by Sen. McCain about the Iraq war just days after publishing an op-ed on the same subject by Sen. Obama.

In general, media coverage of Sen. McCain was 3 times more negative than coverage of Mr. Obama following the conventions, according to the nonpartisan Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Another way to see the media's bias is to follow the money. An analysis by Investor's Business Daily showed journalists contributed 15 times more money to Democrats than Republicans during the 2008 election cycle. And journalists who gave to Mr. Obama outnumbered those who contributed to Mr. McCain by a 20-to-1 margin.

Kevin D. Williamson of NRO's Media Blog responds with two thoughts:

1. It's a solid analysis of the media problems Republicans face.

2. Every time I hear a Republican candidate or office-holder talking about media bias in the fall, I assume that the election is over and the Republican has lost. It's not that the complaints don't have merit--do they ever--it's just that the media-bias talk tends to come up right about the time things are going undeniably south for a campaign. So maybe it's best to front-load the discussion for next time around. Candidates who are talking about media bias in October are losing elections.

And when they're talking about it in late September, they're really toast, as Robert Stacy McCain wrote in his October 3rd pre-postmortem:

I didn't comment on it at the time, but I was shocked when Steve Schmidt lashed out at the New York Times on Sept. 22. Every word Schmidt said about the NYT being in the tank for Obama was true. But you don't do that. Ever. Not in a campaign you have any hope of winning. It is one thing to criticize specific errors by specific reporters, but for a presidential campaign manager to call into question the fundamental integrity of a newspaper that more or less dictates news coverage at the three major broadcast networks? Uh uh. No way. Leave that work to surrogates. Then Wednesday, in an interview with the Associated Press, McCain himself got all hostile with the reporter. That is tantamount to an admission of defeat.

But one of McCain's many weaknesses as a GOP candidate is that he counted on the media's support--or at least was praising the media--and in particular, the New York Times as late as January of 2008 in the Republican debate in Florida. This left him absolutely unable to criticize the media in any form--which is why Schmidt's meltdown in late September sounded so much like whining, even though, as Robert McCain wrote back then, "Every word Schmidt said about the NYT being in the tank for Obama was true."

Hopefully the next GOP candidate will lay sufficient upfront groundwork so that his supporters (and not just the base) will know that the media attacks are coming--and that the GOP isn't competing merely against another party, they're also competing against the bulk of the legacy media, where most voters go to receive whatever scraps of information they'll get to justify their voting decisions.

It wouldn't hurt to remind people of the media's excesses and kneejerk support for Obama in this election, as many will have forgotten it. Laying this groundwork early in the campaign would also allow the candidate to have lots of "See, I told you so" moments when the drive-by media hits start flying. Whoever the next GOP candidate is, he might want to remind his supporters of this moment, as Stephen Spruiell describes in the December 1st "dead tree" edition of NR (subscription required):

McCain's health-care plan also became the subject of a deceptive ad campaign, funded by Obama's historically deep and mostly unscrutinized campaign coffers. The ads claimed that McCain's health-care tax credit would go "straight to the insurance companies, not to you, leaving you on your own to pay McCain's health-insurance tax." A few media sources took the trouble to point out that this was a flat-out lie, and that no one would pay more in taxes under McCain's health-care plan. But at this time most of the media were busy accusing McCain and Palin of fomenting racial hatred every time some bigot unaffiliated with the campaign yelled something offensive at an open event. So much for wanting to talk about "the issues."

The McCain campaign complained mightily about these and other instances of media malpractice, and the public shrugged. In perhaps the most blatant case of overt bias against McCain, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said that each complaint from the McCain campaign made him want to "find the toughest McCain story we've got and put it on the front page, just to show them that they can't get away with it."

Which of course, the Times was doing all year, even if the stories weren't true.

Spruiell concludes:

When the top newspaper editor in the country is openly discussing his strategy to attack the Republican nominee through the news pages and almost no one cares, complaining about bias just isn't going to accomplish much.

The mainstream media have staked their future on Obama; that was evident in the way they conducted themselves during this campaign. Economic and political forces are driving notionally objective news organizations toward overt partisanship. Now is the time to invest in conservative alternatives and work to secure mainstream recognition for conservative voices. The media game has changed, and we have to get better at playing it.

If the next Republican presidential candidate doesn't get that, he's dead politician walking.

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "I think Obama may do more for George Bush's reputation than anyone thinks":

Obama is a masterful politician who never has had any real ideology or persona other than his own diversity story and history, youth, and charisma that together allow him to be whatever is politically expedient at the time.

That is, there is a pattern here: public campaign financing, FISA, NAFTA, drilling, nuclear power, coal, guns, capital punishment, abortion, Iran, Iraq, the surge, etc. all were repackaged as the primary and general elections evolved. A community organizing past that once welcomed in a Wright, Pfleger, Ayers, Khalidi, became inoperative lest he meet a McGovern-like fate.

And rather than assess carefully the Bush policies, it made better sense to lump them altogether under the general rubric that Bush shredded the Constitution and, as a unilateral preemptivist, ruined the American brand over seas (while knowing privately that when Obama himself assumed office he would leave alone the homeland-security measures, Patriot Act, FISA, etc. to ensure the continuance of the 7-year hiatus from a major attack, and follow Bush/Petraeus in getting out of Iraq to preserve the unexpected victory).

Likewise, privately Obama knew the meltdown was not Bush's fault per se but a bipartisan miasma a decade in the making, fueled by Wall Street greed, wrongheaded utopian politics, and corruption at Freddie and Fannie--and thus the Bush response was largely to be followed (and this apparently may even extend to not tampering immediately with the existing tax rates.)

The result of all this?

I think we are slowly (and things of course could change) beginning in retrospect to look back at the outline of one of most profound bait-and-switch campaigns in our political history, predicated on the mass appeal of a magnetic leader rather than any principles per se.

No, there is another...

Mort Kondracke, a man of the moderate center left writes, "How can the Republican Party rebound? The first step would be to quit letting Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham set its agenda."

John Hawkins notes correctly that in terms of the GOP's candidate in 2008, talk radio didn't set the agenda:

Then there's the perfectly ridiculous idea that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham set the agenda of the Republican Party. Really? That's funny, because I remember a guy named Bush in the White House -- who bent over backwards to cooperate with the Democrats, expanded the size of government, ran large deficits, and tried to push the Dubai Port Deal, Harriet Miers, and amnesty for illegal immigrants -- over the loud protests of people like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Ingraham.

I also seem to remember a fellow by the name of McCain -- you know, older gentleman, served in Vietnam, white hair -- who won the nomination even though people like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Ingraham said it would be a disaster. You know who did like him though? The Mort Kondracke and David Brooks wing of the Republican Party that was thrilled that they finally had their champion running as the party's nominee. Then, after eight years of big government Republicanism and John McCain, these same people want to blame the very people who pointed out the political pitfalls the GOP was stepping into almost every step of the way?

Please. Give. Us. A. Break.

McCain and Rush have had a pretty vocal Louella Parsons/Hedda Hopper feud for ages (or a Tom Wolfe/Norman Mailer-style feud for something more macho sounding); when McCain was nominated, my first thought was, "This should be interesting to watch: how does a Republican win the White House when he hates Rush Limbaugh--and the feeling's mutual?"

The answer of course was that he couldn't. And as John writes, it's quite a stretch that believe that Rush is what's wrong with the GOP when he had zero impact on whom the party chose for its nominee.

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, I take a look at anger in American politics. The title derives from the nifty book on the topic by Peter Wood, whom I interviewed near the end of the 2008 election for PJM Political.

Look for:

• The exterminating Olbermann!
  
• Terry Tate, sacking Sarah!
  
• Dehumanizing bumper stickers!
  
• Code Pink has a plan to stick it to the man!
  
• Open Mic Night!
  
• Shocking signs!
  
• The don't taze me bro!
  
• Five Easy Pieces!
  
• America's favorite ex-Weatherman!
  
• And the world's favorite Teutonic terror tyke!
  

The Five Easy Pieces clip, which Wood deconstructs in the above video is a tremendous touchstone of early 1970s anger. I had planned to connect it to this passage from David Frum's 2000 book on the 1970s, How We Got Here, but it would have taken the video above the YouTube-friendly ten minute cut-off mark. Of course, there are so many examples of anger run amok from the 2008 campaign, that this video could have run infinitely longer than that. (There's a reason why Michelle Malkin's 2005 book on the topic ran for 256 pages.)

For previous Silicon Graffiti videos, click here.

More from Ace and Robert Stacy The Other McCain (from whom the above ironic headline derives) on that Mark Halperin quote on the media's epic fail--or deliberately ignoring all of Obama's flaws--we explored earlier today.

This quote from Time magazine's Mark Halperin is making the rounds today:

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

First of all, setting aside the Iraq war reference (which I sincerely doubt was an oblique reference to CNN being in the tank for Saddam), how is it a "failure"? A failure implies mistakes, details overlooked, preparations for a test not completed. This was a quite deliberate choice of the media to pick a side and aid it. And historically speaking, picking a side wasn't even that much of a choice.

Of course, it's not like anyone expects the legacy media to still feign objectivity, which is an affectation left over from the early days of the first radio networks of the 1920s and television networks of the late 1940s and early '50s.

But this year's media's bias against McCain, Palin and the GOP in general is a carry over from the 2004 campaign, as I noted in one of my Silicon Graffiti videos:

Near the tail-end of that campaign, one journalist even wrote an internal memo to his colleagues urging them to drop the pretense of objectivity:

It goes without saying that the stakes are getting very high for the country and the campaigns - and our responsibilities become quite grave

I do not want to set off (sp?) and endless colloquy that none of us have time for today - nor do I want to stifle one. Please respond if you feel you can advance the discussion.

The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.

Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.

We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that.

The journalist who wrote that both sides weren't equally accountable and that the media had a duty to help Senator Kerry?

Mark Halperin, then with ABC News.

Matt Drudge links to this New York Times article and notes, "REPORT: TIME INC. in 'contractual promise' with Angelina Jolie for 'positive coverage'...". The Times piece begins:

When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt negotiated with People and other celebrity magazines this summer for photos of their newborn twins and an interview, the stars were seeking more than the estimated $14 million they received from the deal. They also wanted a hefty slice of journalistic input -- a promise that the winning magazine's coverage would be positive, not merely in that instance but into the future.

According to the deal offered by Ms. Jolie, the winning magazine was obliged to offer coverage that would not reflect negatively on her or her family, according to two people with knowledge of the bidding who were granted anonymity because the talks were confidential. The deal also asked for an "editorial plan" providing a road map of the layout, these people say.

Hey, as Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place." Can't fault Brangelina for asking for the print version of what Chris Matthews has promised Barack.

As highlighted by the latest Time and Newsweek covers, the incoming Obama administration and its media cheerleaders are attempting to dial back expectations a tad. Obama's no longer God (of course, as Mort Sahl once said, if you're going to identify, identify), he's merely the second coming of Abe Lincoln and FDR. Jonah Goldberg writes, "It's a step down from divine redeemer, but you have to start somewhere":

Lincoln was Lincoln because he fought and won the Civil War and freed the slaves. News flash: That ain't what America is like today -- and thank God for it.

I think Lincoln was just about the greatest president in American history, but I sure don't want to need another Lincoln. Six hundred thousand Americans died at the hands of other Americans during Lincoln's presidency. Lincoln unified the country at gunpoint and curtailed civil liberties in a way that makes President Bush look like an ACLU zealot. The partisan success of the GOP in the aftermath of the war Obama thinks so highly of was forged in blood.

Likewise with FDR. Listening to liberals gush over a "new New Deal" and Obama's call for us to emulate the "Greatest Generation," you'd think they want another Great Depression and World War.

Indeed, liberals have long idolized the 1930s as a decade of great unity. It wasn't. The 1930s was a miserable decade of poverty, domestic unrest, labor strife, violations of civil liberties and widespread fear. If liberals really loved peace, prosperity and national cohesion, they'd remember the 1920s or 1950s more fondly. And yet they don't. Why? Because liberals didn't get to impose their schemes and dreams on the country in those decades. Behind all the talk of unity and bipartisanship and shared sacrifice lies an uglier ambition: power. The audacity of hope behind all this Lincoln-FDR-Obama blather is the dream of riding roughshod over the opposition, of having their way, of total victory.

The Chinese curse and cliche "may you live in interesting times" is on point. Liberals (and a few conservatives as well, alas) seem desperate to live in interesting times. Not me.

"You know what I hope? I hope Obama is another Coolidge or Eisenhower", Jonah concludes. "But I'm not holding my breath."

How would we have viewed the last four years if they had been under President Kerry? Found via Betsy Newmark, that's the topic that David W. Rohde of The New Republic explores.

Betsy adds:

He goes on the theorize that the Democrats wouldn't have done as well in the 2006 congressional elections without the spur of the anti-Bush vote. And then the financial collapse would have occurred on a President Kerry's watch. He doesn't mention, but we could add in that Kerry would never have supported General Petraeus's strategic changes in Iraq and so would have presided over a humiliating retreat for the United States in the Middle East. And I would also add in that it's hard to imagine a President Kerry endearing himself to the American people after four years of seeing his lugubrious, yet pompous demeanor for four years.

And of course, Hurricane Katrina, the cudgel that the media used to break the back of the Bush Administration in 2005 and during the midterms of 2006 wouldn't have been deployed by the media against their own man.

So where does the GOP go from here? PJTV explores Conservatism 2.0 later today.

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Traditional journalism as we knew it --the big dailies, the weekly news magazines, the networks, public radio and TV--no longer exists. Death by suicide. RIP--around March, 2008.

As rigor mortis sets in, I doubt the media are concerning themselves much about how ill-informed the average voter is, but if so, they might want to take a look at their story selection this year. Here are two recent but stellar examples of the media living up to the legacy set for it by Edward R. Murrow, et al:

CNN analyzes Obama and Palin's doodles.

Meanwhile, in a story that I'm sure its myriad of readers were undoubtedly pining for, Salon analyzes the incoming first lady's posterior.

Arthur Frampton could not be reached for comment.

As Mark Steyn noted in his "Happy Warrior" column on the back page of the recent edition of National Review, when choosing between an actual combat veteran and a fellow celebrity to play James Bond, for actor Daniel Craig, the choice is an easy one:

Before we close the book on this election season, let me quote one of the most dispiriting asides on the subject. Daniel Craig, the star of the new James Bond movie The Audacity Of Solace - no, wait, A Quantum Of Hope - was being interviewed by Kevin Sessums for Parade (that supplement thingie that's free in all the local newspapers), and as a final question was asked which of the two candidates would make the better 007:

Craig doesn't hesitate. 'Obama would be the better Bond because--if he's true to his word--he'd be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M,' he adds, mentioning Bond's boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. 'There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain.'

Oh, great. John McCain has survived plane crashes, just like Roger Moore in Octopussy. He has escaped death in shipboard infernos, just like Sean Connery in Thunderball. He has endured torture day after day, month after month, without end, just like Pierce Brosnan in the title sequence of Die Another Day. He has done everything 007 has done except get lowered into a shark tank and (as far as we know) bed Britt Ekland and Jill St John.

And yet Daniel Craig gives him the desk job.

On the other hand, Tim Blair notes that that the media's standard for heroism these days is one heck of a lot lower than it used to be.

A frighting schism threatens to fracture the once unified mass media: Time says that Obama is the next FDR, Newsweek says he's the next Lincoln. Kyle Smith calls on our old media overloads to settle their differences, for the good of the nation.

(Of course in reality, The One seems do be aiming his standards just a tad lower, and doing his damnedest to be the next Bill Clinton.)

If you haven't seen it already it, don't miss John Ziegler's new Website, How Obama Got Elected, and this video interview with various Obama voters on election day:

It's a long video, but stick it out until the end, when all of the interviewees reveal where they get their "news"--it's a damning portrait of the legacy media's ability to inform the public, if indeed that's a job that MSM still pays lip service to performing.

More from Newsbusters and Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

James Lileks spots the least-likeliest Washington Times ad ever.

It's a tough job, but--in theory at least--somebody's got to do it; eventually.

Maybe.

So who will be the first comedian to knock The One down a few pegs?

(H/T: 5'F)

Jim Treacher has "A friendly chat with the liberal who lives in my head."

Meanwhile, in an everything old is new again moment, Dan Riehl spots a surprising (or maybe not!) source calling for a minority group to step to the back of the bus.

Time magazine portrays BHO as FDR.

In her latest combination defense and apology for her newspaper cooking the books to help nudge President Elect Obama over the finish line, Deborah Howell, the Washington Post's Ombudswoman writes:

Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world.

To which James Lileks wrote the perfect rejoinder three and half years ago:

The first question in any J-school application ought to be "do you want to change the world?" And anyone who answers yes gets kindly turned away. Your job is to describe the way the world changes. Not pretend you're there to nudge it along towards utopia.

Howell adds:

I'll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don't even want to be quoted by name in a memo.

So what are you doing to change such an obviously poisoned internal culture?

Update: "As for Howell's presumption [that] 'most Post journalists voted for Obama,' that's a safe bet given how 96 percent of the staff at Post-owned Slate reported they planned to back Obama."

Man who invents his own pre-presidential seal invents new government office. As Founding Bloggers ask, "The Office of the President Elect?--who funds that?

Betsy Newmark writes that "Now that John McCain doesn't have to be the face of the Republican Party anymore, the Republicans have decided to take on McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign financing."

As Victor Davis Hanson (whom I finally got to meet in person this past week) noted shortly before the election's conclusion:

For all practical purposes, public financing of the presidential general election is now dead. No Republican will ever agree to it again. No Democrat can ever again dare to defend a system destroyed by Obama. All future worries about the dangers of big money and big politics will fall on deaf ears.

Surely, there will come a time when the Democratic Party, whether for ethical or practical reasons, will sorely regret dismantling the very safeguards that for over three decades it had insisted were critical for the survival of the republic.

Bill Ayers admits that--surprise!--Obama was, in Ayers' own words, "a neighbor and family friend." Charles Johnson writes that "Whatever you think of Ayers, he played this one smart":

He stayed out of the news until Obama was safely elected, because he knew if he admitted the personal friendship, and expressed his real opinions about radicalizing students, reparations, abolishing prisons, etc., his relationship with Obama would--rightfully--become a major issue in the campaign. And he counted on the media not to investigate him.

And with ABC's post-election softball interview with Ayers now online, you don't need a Weatherman to know that the MSM will blow--especially during a presidential election.

"If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give 'tax cuts' to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H.G. Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened."

Of course, Wells himself would have preferred much stronger medicine for America.

"I wonder how many other 'journalists' like Chris Matthews feel it is their job to make an Obama presidency work?"

Pajamas HQ: "Good News: The 2012 Campaign for President Is Underway" Hey, it's never too early to get started.

Meanwhile, via Colorado's man of good cheer and dry Vermouth, Dave Barry spots what this nation really needs:

You know what I miss? I miss 1960. Not the part about my face turning overnight into the world's most productive zit farm. What I miss is the way the grown-ups acted about the Kennedy-Nixon race. Like the McCain-Obama race, that was a big historic deal that aroused strong feelings in the voters. This included my parents and their friends, who were fairly evenly divided, and very passionate. They'd have these major honking arguments at their cocktail parties. But unlike today, when people wear out their upper lips sneering at those who disagree with them, the 1960s grown-ups of my memory, whoever they voted for, continued to respect each other and remain good friends.

What was their secret? Gin. On any given Saturday night they consumed enough martinis to fuel an assault helicopter. But also they were capable of understanding a concept that we seem to have lost, which is that people who disagree with you politically are not necessarily evil or stupid. My parents and their friends took it for granted that most people were fundamentally decent and wanted the best for the country. So they argued by sincerely (if loudly) trying to persuade each other. They did not argue by calling each other names, which is pointless and childish, and which constitutes I would estimate 97 percent of what passes for political debate today.

What I'm saying is: we, as a nation, need to drink more martinis.

I could do with more Martinis--not to mention 1960--myself.

Not exactly a shocker though: Harry Reid is planning to kneecap Joe Lieberman, AP notes:

Although he aligns himself with Senate Democrats, Lieberman angered many Democrats for when he used a prime-time speech at the Republican convention this summer to criticize Barack Obama as an untested candidate beholden to Democratic interest groups. Republican McCain had considered making Lieberman, a longtime friend, his running mate this year before settling on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Bouncing Lieberman from his committee post would require the approval of the Democratic caucus, which is expected to meet this month.

"I want to spend some time in the next few days thinking about what Sen. Reid and I discussed what my options are at this point," Lieberman said. "He promised me that he would do the same and we would continue these conversations."

Republicans have said they would welcome Lieberman to their caucus.

"As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for."

Newsweek's Howard Fineman tells Keith Olbermann yesterday that "Obama's changing everything as he moves":

His victory speech last night in Grant Park which was so memorable on so many levels was also the first speech of his administration three months before it begins. He said, we're at the base of the mountain, not at the mountain top, and exuded a core of sort of sense of sober "let's roll up our sleeves" determination you're seeing reflective in the fact that he got this transition system running two or three months ago, another example of this guy's ability to plan and look ahead, look over the horizon. They've been working for months on this, Keith, just as they worked for months on the campaign itself before anybody noticed.

OLBERMANN: The names that we mentioned here, they are just some of many possibilities that have surfaced for the new administration. It's all over the place. But what will be, is there going to be an overarching theme in the appointments? We discussed this last night, competency, bipartisanship, diversity, newness, where are they going?

FINEMAN: Well, it's going to be all of those. But I think, if you had to pick one, it would be excellence. Barack Obama is a guy who appreciates excellence and focus. He's a guy who appreciates results. As we reported reportedly, doesn't like drama queens, doesn't like egomaniacs, doesn't like leakers -- which eliminates about three-quarters of the people in Washington for sure.

And that's what he's going to focus on. It will be naturally diverse and naturally bipartisan. He's not going to pick people to fit slots because they're Republican, because they're an African-American, because they're Hispanic. He believes that the country has changed enough and developed enough and is diverse enough, as his own election has now shown, that he can pick the best people all across the spectrum and will reflect the whole country. But it's going to be excellence first and experience.

As Fineman wrote four years ago, in "The 'Media Party' Is Over":

A political party is dying before our eyes -- and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

"Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place", Victor Davis Hanson wrote last week--and you can see the transformation in Fineman's hagiographic appraisal yesterday.

(On the other hand, Newsweek's Evan Thomas--he of 2004's 15 points--viewed Tuesday's coronation through somewhat of a more gimlet eye.)

Change Deja vu you can believe in: Caveat Bettor lists "Predicted Similarities between Barack H. Obama and George W. Bush."

Good list--though I'll believe items 8 and 12 when I actually see them occur during the Obama administration.

NBC's Chuck Todd may has been up too late watching war movies on competitor channel TCM before uttering this statement on the Today show:

President Clinton chose a childhood friend to be his chief-of-staff, Mack McLarty. What did that mean? That chief-of-staff never knew how to tell the President no. Never was a sort of behind-the-scenes guy. In Rahm Emanuel Obama knows he's getting Douglas MacArthur, or General Patton. A guy who's a field general, who will keep all of the, keep everything running on time, the trains running on time and will go after Congress.

He'll make the trains run on time? So he's Mussolini, too? Hey, if you say so, Chuck.

But Patton was relieved of command by Ike at the end of WWII when he wanted to push into Russia; MacArthur was unceremoniously dismissed by Truman during the Korean War. Obama has publicly admitted on several occasions as being a rather dovish fellow. And Tim Graham of Newsbusters notes, "Like Obama, Emanuel has no military service on his resume, starting his career in Illinois 'public interest group' politics."

As Tom Wolfe illustrated in Ambush At Fort Bragg this is but the latest example of a journalist using military lingo in his speech, even as his network has routinely been astonishingly negative regarding their chief missions over the last five years.

Update: And if the left have found their MacArthur/Patton/Mussolini, the right "haven't yet found our Omar Bradley."

Umberto Eco wrote a few years ago that "We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity." And as the recently, sadly deceased Michael Crichton noted just this past May, "The truth is, we live in an age of astonishing conformity":

I grew up in the 1950s, supposedly the heyday of conformity, but there was much more freedom of opinion back then. And as a result, you knew that your neighbors might hold different views from you on politics or religion. Today, the notion that men of good will can disagree has disappeared. Can you imagine! Today, if I disagree with you, you conclude there is something wrong with me. This is a childish, parochial view. And of course stupefyingly intolerant. It's truly anti-American. Much of it can be laid at the feet of the environmental movement, which has unfortunately frequently been led by ill-educated and intolerant spokespersons--often with no more than a high-school education, sometimes not even that. Or they are lawyers trained to win at any cost and to say anything about their opponents to win. But you find the same intolerant tone around considerations of defense, taxation, free markets, universal medical care, and so on. There's plenty of zealotry to go around. And it's hardly new in human history.

The media might stand as a corrective, cool and a bit detached, showing by example how to approach information and controversy. Instead, the media has clearly caught the fever of our intolerant times. Formerly, news people would never openly state their allegiance; young reporters understood it was poor form, and a senior person would carry the caution born of the experience that at least some of what one believes in the course of one's life turns out to be wrong. But it's a new era. Now, media reporters are proud to pound the table and declare their advocacy. Since so few of them have any training in science, they don't really know what they are pounding about, when it comes to global warming. They couldn't tell you even in general terms how the global mean temperature is calculated, for example. But it doesn't matter anyway. They just want to declare they believe what "everyone" believes. Who values such a news source?

A rapidly dwindling number, hence the legacy media's well known financial woes. Meanwhile, Andrew Ian Dodge notes that the outcome of the presidential election may help to thin the ranks of another media group whose lockstep conformity is only barely disguised by its veneer of individuality--the liberal comedian.

(Fortunately though, It'll Be All Right on the Night. At least for now.)

Slate has a little fun with CNN's latest technological gimcrack:

Exit question: Did David Bowie's "TVC-15" single from the mid-1970s predict this latest video development?

Update: Welcome InstaReaders! Meanwhile, Hot Air's Allahpundit enharshens CNN's mellow: "Heart-ache: CNN holograms not really holograms."

First Hillary, and now half a year later, Sarah Palin. What is it with Keith Olbermann and female politician assassination metaphors?

Sorry to further invert Bill Moyers' infamous shot at Barry Goldwater, but Jim Geraghty and Ace of Spades describe a huge weakness of John McCain that proved fatal to his electoral viability. Ace writes:

There is no "McCainism" as there was a "Bushism" or "Reaganism." Those men offered fairly clear visions (well, Reagan particularly so). Not McCain. Everything with him is just his personal gut, principle-free, just an instinct, an impulse, which often takes him in wildly contradictory places (but he's always haughty about the moral superiority of his decisions).

For example, he's pro-drilling... but not in ANWR. Um, why? He's forever undercutting himself with unexplained hedges and caveats.

He's pro-business... Kinda. Except when he's making his distaste for anyone working in the private sector "for profit not patriotism" so glaringly evident.

He wants to lower taxes. Sorta. Sometimes. Maybe. In election years.

We must regard Obama as suspect because of his association with the terrorist Bill Ayers... but it's racist to mention his membership in Jeremiah Wright's Church of Hate.

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty has perhaps the definitive example of how McCain's gut led him to the moment that cost him the election: temporarily suspending his campaign--in service of the ultimately unpopular fiscal bailout. As Karl Rove noted a couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, McCain's poll numbers never recovered.

While I'm certainly sympathetic to the message, in light of reports from across the fruited plain, I'm afraid I'd quickly need this T-shirt if I slapped this bumper sticker on my car.

(Via the Anchoress.)

We shared our immediate election thoughts last night on PJM Political, and Ed Morrissey has his own lengthy election postmortem, which concludes:

If the GOP wants to win 60 million votes in future national elections, it has to stand for something other than being Democrat Lite. The Republican Party needs clarity, purpose, and most importantly, an end to the hypocrisy of talking smaller government while porking up their districts. When given only a choice between real Democrats and fake Democrats, Americans will choose the former, which we found out in 2006.

Meanwhile, Dr. Helen adds, "It's the economy, stupid":

I was just watching numerous young Obama fans celebrating on the Fox News channel and read the stats scrolling across the bottom of the page. They stated that over 60% of voters who were worried about the economy voted for Obama. That, for me, summed it up in a nutshell. So many right-leaning types are trying hard to figure out what they did, what the Republicans did, and why they lost. Each election cycle, there's always a theme. For the last two elections, it was Iraq and national security.

Now those issues are in the background and this time around, it's the economic crisis, with a little (or a lot) of help from the media in pushing it to the forefront in people's minds.

Since Good News Is No News, consider this an unintentional thank you from the New York Times to the man who helped pushed the economic issue to the forefront in the media, via his success in Iraq and elsewhere in the War On Terror.

Update: With Steve Green likely recovering from the Mother Of All Hangovers, the election postmortem by Will Collier, his partner in Stoli at Vodkapundit is also well worth your time.

Let the malaise begin! "No Fireworks on Election Day" from the newly minted Nanny Elect--though as Greg Pollowitz notes, "Someone forgot to tell Obama's web design team, which had already incorporated the fireworks into the we-win graphic on his homepage."

Though of course, Obama has bigger weapons cutbacks in mind than M-80s.

AP: "Stocks fall as investors ponder Obama presidency."

Related: Here's another leading indicator: "Party on, dudes!"

On Tuesday night, I hosted a virtual round-table discussion with the PJM Political all-stars: Steve Green, James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, and Jennifer Rubin. Tune in here for their immediate thoughts on the 2008 presidential election and President Elect Obama.

Blogging great Steven Den Beste shares his thoughts on the presidential election--don't miss it.

Allahpundit--with an assist from the late great SoxBlogger himself sums it up:

One of the last things Dean Barnett said to me was that, as best he could tell, Barack Obama is "a good guy and a decent man." I don't think he'd mind me telling you that, especially under the circumstances. It's a testament to his generosity of spirit that even in the heat of a campaign, with every reason to think the worst of his opponent, Dean couldn't help but give him the benefit of the doubt. That's Barnett all over, and that's what made him an indispensable man whom we've been forced, horrendously, to dispense with.

I offer that as comfort to those of you who have no faith in The One but who do have faith in, and abiding affection for, DB. My guess is he'd have handled the news tonight with the same magnanimity that distinguished all of his writing. So in that spirit, congratulations to Barry O on a race superbly run and to our country for not having let the wrong reasons deter it from making the wrong choice. I'll never be a fan, but I swear I'll never take a nutroots posture either in relishing his failures because it helps my party. Like it or not, he's my president. As a great man once said, country first.

Indeed. An interview today with Bill Ayers provides a hidden ray of sunshine and some hope for the future:

In his first interview since he became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader, said today that he had a distant relationship with Barack Obama and that Obama's opponents had turned him into "a cartoon character."

The Black Panthers seen in Philadelphia today also looked like cartoon characters, which is how those who practice the now forty year old sturm und drang of radical chic should look in the 21st century.

Megan McArdle wrote today that:

Whether or not you are for Obama, the candidate, I think you have to admit that there is one pretty exciting thing happening today: we will never again live in an America where a black man can't be elected president.

Spot-on. Barack Obama's victory should once and for all finally break the notion that race is a barrier to any goal in the United States. And those who've built their power from anger and racial divisiveness, like Ayers, the Panthers, and Reverend Wright should now be mocked like the small men they are. It will be up to Obama as president to transcend the figures of his past--and it's up to the rest of us as a nation to finally put them into the rearview mirror.

Good luck over the next four years President Elect Obama--and as this Onion satire suggests (as does your own vice presidential nominee), you're going to need it.

Forget CNN's holograms--this live feed from IowaHawk HQ says it all:

Just on via telephone with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV, and I'll be on (with both pictures and sound!) PJTV at about 10:00 PM Eastern.

"It's taken them awhile, but good to see that MSNBC has now seamlessly integrated its own promotional advertising with that of the Obama campaign."

Well, that should make Chuck Schumer happy!

When in doubt, disenfranchise military voters: "McCain campaign sues over overseas military ballots."

More from McCain HQ, here.

Found via LGF, clearly these are examples of a handful of overzealous fans of Family Guy having some harmless fun. Or maybe a bored academician blowing off steam.

Nothing to worry about here, citizens!

Read More »

(Though some Pepto-Bismol wouldn't hurt to help keep it down.)

Betsy Newmark, after linking to a post by Fred Barnes and noting, "if the results today are what the polls have been indicating, we could be in for far more leftist policies than we had even when Presidents Carter and Clinton had sizable majorities in Congress", adds:

Add in empowered liberal interest groups and bloggers who are expecting to get tangible results for all their efforts to elect Democrats. And then factor in a pliant liberal media that will not act as a loyal opposition as they do when Republicans are in power.

It's all a dismal prospect leaving conservatives with little to hope for except that the liberals will so overreach that there will be a 1994-like backlash against them in 2010.

So while I'm pretty discouraged about the near future, I also am old enough to have lived through Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, the Watergate election of 1974, Reagan's victories in the 1980s, Clinton's success in 1992, the 1994 euphoria, post 9/11 success in 2002, and the depressing results in 2006. I've studied enough history to realize that political results are cyclical. The Democrats are up now, but that will not be permanent and the wheel will turn again. Republicans have been on top and have made their share of bad mistakes. What we have to do is hope that the Democrats don't do too much permanent damage to the country in their time in the catbird seat.

"At least they're consistent."

No! [James Earl Jones voice on] This is CNN [/Vader]:

But instead of the split screen or window TV viewers might typically see during live remote interviews, the Obama spokesperson will be projected as a three-dimensional hologram, making it appear as if he or she is in the Manhattan studio with Blitzer. The network plans to conduct similar holographic interviews with representatives from the McCain campaign in Phoenix.

Mark Hemingway adds, "I can only hope one of the spokesman takes to opportunity to mock this ridiculous gimmick by uttering the phrase, 'Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope!'"

I'll stick with my virtual sets--at least until Adobe CS27 builds holographic technology into After Effects.

Roger Kimball writes:

Over the last couple of months, I've had occasion to say why I prefer McCain to Obama, and what it is about Obama that alarms me. I won't reiterate all that now. Rather, I'd like to say a word about what I hope will happen next. First, I hope that whoever wins wins "cleanly," without the widespread suspicion (or the reality) of voter fraud. I also hope that partisans on the other side-whatever side that happens to be-lose gracefully. Not that I expect them to give up on their principles: on the contrary, I hope that they cling to those principles tenaciously, but that conspicuous among those principles is a commitment to democratic government, which means, inter alia , a commitment to recognizing the legitimacy of democratically elected politicians. If, to take one possible eventuality, Obama wins, I hope Republicans gird up their loins and figure out how to do better next time. I also hope that they forgo the destructive, anti-democratic tactics perfected by groups like moveon.org.

A week or two ago, I quoted from a piece by Andrew McCarthy wherein he noted that "If he wins, Obama will be my president," notwithstanding the many things Obama espouses with which Andy disagrees. Andy separated himself, as I would wish to separate myself, from those who would "rather tear down my country than see a president I opposed succeed." That does not mean I would be happy if-and note the conditional, please-Obama wins. Nor does it mean that I wouldn't begin on November 5th looking around for someone who might be a compelling opponent in 2012. It only means that there is a lot to be said for what the British call the "loyal opposition"-vigorously opposed on the issues, but stalwartly loyal when it comes to the the prosperity and commonweal of this great country.

Indeed™.

In New Hampshire, Connecticut and New Jersey, in addition to Philadelphia.

Like the man said...

Update: Video: "Some Georgians Suspected Of Voting Twice."

Frank Martin writes, "my only prediction for the day, and its a sad one":

I was really hoping against hope that we would see a clear result today.

That hope has now been dashed:

"Denver Election Commission spokesman Alton Dillard says the "days of having your close to final results by 10 p.m. are over." He says officials have tried to make it clear from early on that workers will still be counting ballots into Wednesday, and that still holds true."

So its time to explode a myth. Mail in ballots are not counted until after the election polls have closed. Most elections, the mail in ballots arent even counted and one of the two candidates has to sue the election board to get a count. However, due to the closeness of this election, they will almost certainly have to count them to get a result. Sadly,that will take time. more time than they can get in a single day. This is not limited to Colorado, any state with large amounts of mail in voting will suffer from this phenomenon.

The good news is that this is yet another sign that its a close election. The bad news is that we gotta put up with this crap for a few more days.

Ugh--I hope Frank's wrong about the latter half of his equation.

(H/T: Pajamas' man in Colorado himself.)

Update: More from Jim Geraghty.

Glenn Reynolds notes that "Obama is already preparing his transition, and having his aides read books about FDR in the hope of another 100 days."--but it's worth noting that the cries of a New New Deal came several months before the financial crisis this fall.

In "A Date With Scarcity", his latest op-ed, David Brooks writes:

Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.

Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.

So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.

It certainly is--and I explored several of those pivots in video form, last week.

Update: Shannon Love asks, "If Obama's economic policies work so well, why isn't Detroit a paradise?" and notes, "We may soon be living in a repeat of '70s and looking back at the years 1984-2007 as a golden era."

Radical chic rocks the vote! In Chicago, noted academic Bill Ayers and renowned UFO-ologist Louis Farrakhan are both seen waiting to vote at Shoesmith Elementary School.

And gosh, I'm sure every Philadelphia resident feels infinitely safer when he sees a "Black Panther poll watcher guarding the door to the polling station with a nightstick."

(Wonder who they're voting for?)

Meanwhile, just to remind you that it is indeed Philadelphia:

GOP Election Board members have been tossed out of polling stations in at least half a dozen polling stations in Philadelphia because of their party status. A Pennsylvania judge previously ruled that court-appointed poll watchers could be NOT removed from their boards by an on-site election judge, but that is exactly what is happening, according to sources on the ground.

I'm not sure if W.C. Fields would still rather be in today's Philadelphia, but they've certainly manged to transform voting into a comedic farce.

Oh wait--that's a football cliche. In "Resist these election-time myths", Anne Applebaum pops a number of election day cliches held by those on both sides of the blue light, tectonic plate shift.

Mark Hemingway goes from the inner mind of Joe Biden to...beyond the infinite:

Only Joe Biden could make a gaffe in the act of addressing his gaffes. It's just a matter of time before he gets stuck in a recursive infinite gaffe loop, where every subsequent gaffe is an attempt to undo the previous one. This should put the conventional pundits at a total loss, and eventually CNN will be forced to offer a TV contract to an M.I.T. mathematics and logic professor who has done pioneering work expounding upon Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem as it relates to Eubulides' liar paradox, since he's the only one who comes close to offering a cogent explanation for why Biden is still talking.

You know know what this means, right? If Joe wins tomorrow, it's only a matter of time before some mad Photoshop wiz creates--shudder--The Biden Recursion!

Andrew Breitbart boldly goes where few residents of the Hollywood area dare to go:

I have a dark secret to tell before the election so that it's on the record. It's something that is difficult to say to certain friends, peers, family and, lately, many fellow conservatives.

I still like George W. Bush. A lot.

For starters, I am convinced he is a fundamentally decent man, even though I have read otherwise at the Huffington Post.

President Bush is far smarter, more articulate and less ideological than his plentiful detractors scream, and, ultimately, he will be judged by history - not by vengeful Democrats, hate-filled Hollywood, corrupt foreign governments, an imploding mainstream media or fleeting approval ratings.

George W. Bush is history's president, a man for whom the long-term success or failure of democracy in Iraq will determine his place in history. He may end up a victim of his own tough choices, but the cheerleading for his demise when Iraq's outcome is yet determined has hurt America and possibly set up the next president for the same appalling partisan response.

The fact that the United States has not been attacked since Sept. 11, 2001, far exceeds the most wishful expert predictions of the time. Perhaps facing another al Qaeda-led barrage would have reinforced our need for national unity, caused us to recognize the gravity of the Islamist threat and fortified Mr. Bush's standing at home and abroad.

Yet, thankfully, that never happened. And Mr. Bush has been punished for this obvious success.

More here:

While President Bush has been marshaling a multinational force to take on modernity's enemies in foreign lands, the American left has decided to go to war against not only Republicans but also moderate Democrats.

Bush hatred was a fait accompli.

Back in November 2000, when Al Gore contested Florida and the demonizing of George Bush began full-bore ("President Select," "Bush Chimp," "the illegitimate president"), I told Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, "You watch, the Democratic Party will never grant Bush his humanity, and they will never let up."

And they never did.

The Democratic Party chose to send a clear message that the impeachment of President Clinton incurred by the newly minted Republican-led Congress and the upstart new media - talk radio and the Internet - would be countered by unprecedented partisan fury.

The media will shape "the truth" that Democrats were always behind the initial Afghanistan effort or were poised to grudgingly accept the president whom they previously mocked as "illegitimate."

But those brave liberals who stood by the president were mostly a small minority, and all of them have since been excommunicated for their apostasy.

The biggest failure of the Bush administration has been their inability to clearly communicate a message to rise above the media din, and to court the media in a good will that's clearly not reciprocated.

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote last week, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place." He's right, of course, but the media's transformation didn't happen overnight, and according to some media critics in 2004, there was an effort by the Bush Administration in its first term to attempt to counteract it. If so, it was far, far too fleeting.

The next Republican president, whether he's sworn in this January or in the next decade, will have to understand that new media reality, or face exactly the same demonization that Andrew describes above that every Republican president since 1968 has faced, no matter how he actually governs.

(Via John Nolte.)

In addition to providing sound advice before tomorrow's insanity, Jim Treacher writes, "They've finally given me a good reason to hate Joe the Plumber":

No, not because his first name is Sam. No, not because he owes some taxes he didn't know about until Obama's oppo researchers went after him. No, not because of any of the other stuff they've thrown at him to try to distract from The One's publicly avowed socialist beliefs.

I think I hate him now because he might have become close friends with this SNL cast member:

Don't miss the photo, or Ace's note that apparently canoodling was involved.

Over at his newly minted "Screedblog", James Lileks writes, "Just got this in the mail: McCain, in his last desperate hours, is reaching out to the party's hard core. Just not his party..."

As James writes, "I know what they're going for, but it's the most remarkably odd piece of campaign literature I've seen this year. They look like a divorced couple reconciling at their daughter's wedding. "

I can't imagine another election where a candidate wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College tally so quickly after November 2000 (if only because the last time such an event occurred was the 1888 election). But that's how Bob Krumm sees McCain eking out a victory tomorrow.

Much more so than the isolated incidents that occurred in 2000, watch for widespread Scanners-style cranial explosions amongst the chattering classes on TV if that actually does happen.

What is it with the New York Times and Facebook? A couple of weeks ago, Jodi Kantor uses it to bait school kids into trashing Cindy McCain's parenting skills; over the weekend another Timesperson uses it to through a hissy fit involving the Daily Show:

NewsBusters.org Contributor, the estimable Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center, made an October 30th appearance on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, during which he discussed the many illegal activities of the community organizing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and their long relationship with the media's all-time favorite candidate: Illinois Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Soon thereafter, Mr. Vadum changed his Facebook Profile photograph to one of him hamming it up with his Daily Show interlocutor John Oliver.

This was all too much for New York Times reporter Dan Mitchell. Mitchell sent Mr. Vadum a poison Halloween Facebook email, which is hostile from start to finish and in which he calls Mr. Vadum the aforementioned body part.

The Mitchell email in its entirety, with the one word redacted so as to maintain our G-rating:

Read the rest; more birds flipped here.

Just to follow-up on the Springsteen post below, nowadays, the only time I read about Bruce touring is every four years during a presidential campaign, when he hits the road as a well-paid (at least from the gate receipts) adjunct of the DNC. To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Well, there are a few who come close--and what they say about themselves illustrates the duality of corporate rock perfectly. As Diana West wrote in The Death of the Grown-Up last year:

When U2's Bono promises Grammy night fans "to keep f----ing up the mainstream," as critic Mark Steyn has noted, Bono fails to see--or admit--that he is the mainstream, a bonanza to corporate stockholders and well fit to perform at the official, ribbon-cutting opening of a presidential library in Little Rock.

I recently came across a similar moment in Wikipedia's profile of Billy Joel. (No, I don't know how I ended up there, either, but pop culture ephemera is what Wikipedia does best):

On March 10, 2008, Joel inducted his friend John Mellencamp into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony that took place at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. During his induction speech for Mellencamp, Joel said:

"Don't let this club membership change you, John. Stay ornery, stay mean. We need you to be pissed off, and restless, because no matter what they tell us - we know, this country is going to hell in a handcart. This country's been hijacked. You know it and I know it. People are worried. People are scared, and people are angry. People need to hear a voice like yours that's out there to echo the discontent that's out there in the heartland. They need to hear stories about it. [Audience applauds] They need to hear stories about frustration, alienation and desperation. They need to know that somewhere out there somebody feels the way that they do, in the small towns and in the big cities. They need to hear it. And it doesn't matter if they hear it on a jukebox, in the local gin mill, or in a goddamn truck commercial, because they ain't gonna hear it on the radio anymore. They don't care how they hear it, as long as they hear it good and loud and clear the way you've always been saying it all along. You're right, John, this is still our country and we'll always be victims of powerful people."

But of course: no matter how many TV commercials, supermarket Muzak systems or football stadium loudspeakers play your music, no matter how many millions of albums you've sold or millions you've earned, "You're right, John, this is still our country and we'll always be victims of powerful people."

That's right! Stick it to the man--even if he's yourself!

Back in April, during the Pleistocene primary season, seemingly one million years ago, I wrote:

Sadly, as Slate of all publications once noted, Bruce's second manager, Jon Landau, who went from Rolling Stone critic to rock Svengali, took that Springsteen away from us, transforming Bruce in his formative years from an exciting quirky apolitical musician to just another leftwing product on the showbiz assembly line.

(And speaking of Slate, nice of them to create a fun anti-Obama ad, which will have a little traction even after this week's PA primary has passed.

With Jake Tapper breathlessly writing about The Boss supporting the World's Biggest Celebrity, even as his bicoastal Keystone State gaffes are in the news yet again, who knew how timely it would be at the very end of the campaign:




Related: More on Springsteen and friends in the following post.

This just in from AP: Come Wednesday, on "The morning after: Half of us will be disappointed."

(The kids at Miskatonic University will really be crushed, I'm sure. Cthulhu fhtagn--until 2012!)

Flashing back to Obama's other bicoastal gaffe from April, John McCormack of The Weekly Standard asks, "What is it about San Francisco that makes Barack Obama say things that offend Pennsylvania voters?"

Because it's never too early:

Mark my words, the 2012 primaries will come down to Jeb Bush vs. Please God Not Jeb Bush, and Palin is the obvious PGNJB candidate. If the field gets overcrowded with a bunch of wannabes -- Huckabee, Romney, etc. -- dividing up the PGNJB vote, then we'll get Jeb Bush.

OK, maybe it's slightly too early.

Power Line goes "Inside the mind of an 'Obamacon'"--who all but says, "As a Conservative, I Must Say I Do Quite Like the Cut of this Obama Fellow's Jib."

Related: I'm not at all sure if I want to take her up on her invitation, but Noemie Emery asks us to "Meet the Fastidiocons"--whose model of the perfect conservative Republican, as Emery notes, is apparently Merkin Muffley himself, Adlai Stevenson.

Whoops--sorry, that's, "I want m************ Joe the plumber dead", apparently caught on an open mic during a newsbreak at San Francisco's KGO-AM talk radio station. More Plumber Derangement Syndrome spotted here.

He may be columnist to the world (as Hugh Hewitt describes him each week), but Mark Steyn writes, "I'm not a 'journalist' and have never described myself as one":

And, when I give speeches or appear on TV or radio and the organizers or producers send us the biographical intro in advance, my trusty assistants always insist on the removal of the word "journalist". This used to be purely for truth-in-advertising reasons - I wouldn't want audiences to get the false impression that I'd passed rigorous tests and acquired a diploma signed by Professor Miller. But lately it's been for a more basic reason. I had lunch with Ken Whyte, my publisher at Maclean's, the other day, and mentioned en passant that one consequence of a year's worth of thought-police investigations was that it was no longer possible to avoid the painful truth that, for a profession that congratulates itself incessantly on its courage, bravery, fearlessness, etc (far more than, say, firefighters do) and hands out awards all year long for "speaking truth to power", most journalists are total pussies happy to suck up to state power as long as it's in PC clothing. Professor Miller, a J-school ethics bore boldly campaigning for the right of government bureaucrats to censor writers, would seem to be an almost parodic example of the phenomenon.

As Michael Malone wrote last week--and I'm sympathetic on a host of levels--"A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was 'a writer', because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist":

I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Gov. Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the Big Leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play. The few instances where I think the press has gone too far - such as the Times reporter talking to Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends - can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha Bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side - or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden. If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography. That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: his job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote McCain's lawyer, haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer - when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Senator Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber. Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a Presidential candidate. So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a manner that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide - especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50:50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do, I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .

Not to mention the environment. If the news industry wasn't a collective Victorian Gentleman, then Obama's quotes on coal would be screamed in 48-point Times Roman Type on every newspaper's front page--if only because it's an incredible story, no matter what your thoughts on the environment.

CBS's Scott Conroy writes:

Seizing on a newly released audio tape picked up by the Drudge Report, Sarah Palin took the opportunity here in coal country to accuse Barack Obama of "talking about bankrupting the coal industry."

But it wasn't "newly released." It's been buried in the middle of an hour-long video uploaded by the San Francisco Chronicle that's been hidden in plain sight on the Brightcove video distribution Website since January, until some enterprising blogger stumbled over it.

In the above quote, Michael Malone writes, "Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal? The editors." And he's right. Check out what the editors at the San Francisco Chronicle signed off on: the Chronicle uploaded the video of their interview with Obama to their Website under the narcoleptic headline of "Obama's straight-ahead style"--meaning they couldn't stumble over anything the senator said that they want to highlight in their headline. Which means either the writers at the Chronicle don't know a killer story when they see one--or they're willing to bury such a story if it helps their man get into office. (See also: media and Edwards, John; note dramatic contrast with Plumber, J.T., and Palin, Sarah.)

When the MSM moans about the gallons of red ink it's spilled since 2001, it needs to ask itself if it's prepared to actually report the news, in a fashion that interests readers, or if it exists as a non-profit ideological support system.

Keep rockin'!

Update: It's all about "context", which CNN is all too happy to provide (business as usual, there), rather than promoting a blockbuster story.

Still no word on the videotape that the Times is sitting on (at least until after Tuesday), but Martin Kramer respects the L.A. Times' decision--deliberate or otherwise--to stand by the reporting of one of its long-dead correspondents, who dubbed Rashid Khalidi a PLO spokesman back in the mid-1970s.

In an age where the truth is remarkably fungible, that is worthy of commendation. Check out Kramer's footnote, in which if he ponders if the Times on the opposite coast will have similar respect for the writings of their own long-deceased middle eastern correspondent, who also noted that Khalidi "works for the P.L.O." back in 1978.

In March of 2007, the election campaign essentially began when a consultant for Sen. Obama released this Apple 1984 mashup, which quickly went viral with over five a half million views:

Yesterday, a blogger at Red State brought things full circle:





But then, I'm rather partial to 1984-inspired videos:


And welcome to the readers of "Dirty Harry's" film blog, who have some kind words to say about our latest production.

Update: More fun from Airstrip One, here.

The above headline comes from an interview back in January (you can hear the audio here), in which Obama said:

The problem is not technical, uh, and the problem is not mastery of the legislative intricacies of Washington. The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, "This is really important," and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.

You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know -- Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it -- whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.

Earlier in that same interview, Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that "If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can--it's just that it will bankrupt them.":





Add that to previous utterances from the left on coal:








And of course, Obama's no big fan of cheap gasoline, either:





And the person who popularized "drill baby, drill?" Mama said knock you out.

A Daily Kossite takes Obama's trip to Berlin very much the wrong way.

In repairing our nation's rapidly aging infrastructure, count me as very much one of the "Pro-Pavement People" that Matthew Continetti mentions here, as opposed to "The desire named streetcar."

Reader Patrick Cox sent me a link to this Reuters piece, titled, "WITNESS: Berliners' love affair with America grows cold". Here's a sample:

During the 1990s pro-American sentiment was still high.

They appreciated George Bush's support for reunification in 1990 that overcame British and French reticence. And Bill Clinton got rock star treatment every time he came here.

Even in the wake of September 11 attacks, Berlin's support for the United States was special. More than 200,000 attended a pro-America rally in Berlin on September 14, 2001 to hear German President Johannes Rau say:

"No one knows better than the people here in Berlin what America has done for freedom and democracy in Germany. So, we say to all Americans from Berlin: America does not stand alone."

Germans even dropped their taboo on taking part in foreign military operations and sent forces to help the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan.

So what went wrong?

It was, of course, the dispute over the invasion of Iraq.

Before that, U.S. presidents had always been welcomed in Berlin. However, in May 2002 George W. Bush needed 10,000 German police to shield him from 10,000 anti-war protesters.

In June, Bush spent only a few minutes at Berlin airport on his way in and out of Germany for meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel in an isolated village 100 km to the north.

It was difficult to believe that a U.S. president seemed to be avoiding the city that owed its very survival to America. There was a brief ray of hope a month later when Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech in Berlin -- and 200,000 people showed up.

In case things don't change after November 4, perhaps it's time to try finally to get rid of the American accent.

Which brings Germany full circle: having been liberated by the US after their feverish support of a genocidal mustachioed tyrant, Germany is apparently peeved at the US because we defeated another nation's genocidal mustachioed tyrant. Yet curiously, that nation seems pretty happy not to be under Saddam's yoke.

(Triangulation spotted here; potential for deja vu all over again, here.)

Update: The proprietor of the Bitter Sanity blog spots a little time traveling going on, and emails:

From the article you just commented on:

It was, of course, the dispute over the invasion of Iraq.

Before that, U.S. presidents had always been welcomed in Berlin.
However, in May 2002 George W. Bush needed 10,000 German police to shield him from 10,000 anti-war protesters.

Um... people protesting an invasion that didn't start until ten months later? Prescient, those Germans.

Iraq didn't become an area of major controversy in Europe until winter 2002/2003, if I'm remembering correctly. These people wouldn't have been protesting Iraq - they would have been protesting either the dethroning of the Taliban, or America in general. Probably America in general.

I'm surprised that made it through Reuters' layers and layers of fact checkers.

James Pethokoukis explains "Why Democrats Will Target the Investor Class in 2009":

If Barack Obama is elected president next week, 2009 may well bring a concerted and all-out effort by the Obama administration and a Democratically dominated Congress to turn the generally pro-Republican Investor Class into an endangered class by, among other tactics, raising investment taxes and ending the tax preferences for 401(k)'s, IRAs, and other retirement accounts.

Via Betsy Newmark, who writes, "watch for it. Don't say you weren't warned."

Update: More via the Professor.

Heh, indeed.^TM

Hey, Thomas Jefferson said so and everything--but just in time for the final descent of his campaign, "Obama kicks dissenting reporters off plane."

But then, as Victor Davis Hanson writes, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place"--a trend I've been tracking since early 2004.

(And these guys since the mid-1980s.)

If you want to get up to speed quickly on the background behind the Khalidi-Obama tape that the L.A. Times is sitting on, then I strongly recommend the 10-minute or so interview on PJTV between Roger L. Simon and Ben Shapiro. Click through Roger's post, here.

The L.A. Times is infamous for its 3,500-word hit piece which ran in 2003 on then California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger. It hit the streets in--when else?--October of that year.

Gosh, wonder why the Times is treading so lightly this time around?

(Gateway Pundit suggests the paper maybe interested in safety and protection over and over both mere politics.)

Related: "This Is the Khalidi Obama Embraced".

Amity Shlaes reminds us that yes indeed, FDR's policies prolonged the Depression--or as Mark Steyn wrote at the start of the month:

"Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

For most of the 1970s, Archie and Edith sang, "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again." It took a few decades, but at long last, their wish finally comes true.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson spots one huge budget-busting proposal from Obama, which is troubling not just for its fiscal excess.

As a connoisseur of fine conservative satire, I must say, I do rather like the cut of this "Iowahawk" fellow's jib:

When my late father T. Coddington Van Voorhees VI founded the iconoclastic conservative journal National Topsider in 1948, he famously declared that "Now is the time for all good conservative helmsmen to hoist the mizzen, pour the cocktails, and steer this damned schooner hard starboard." In the 60 years since he first uttered it after one-too-many Cosmopolitans at one of Pamela Harriman's notorious foreign policy black tie balls, father's pithy bon mot has served as a rallying cry for conservatives from Greenwich to Chevy Chase. Today, I say it's time for we conservatives to once again grab the rigging and set sail with the flotilla of the true conservative in this race: Barack Obama.

Trust me, I haven't taken this tack lightly. No Van Voorhees has supported an avowed socialist since great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandpapa Cragmont Van Voorhees lent Peter Minuet $24 and a sack of wampum to swing a subprime mortgage on Manhattan Island. Old dad himself often recounted how, as a lad, he would command the family chauffeur Carleton to drive the Duesenberg down to the Times Square Trans-Lux so he could hiss Roosevelt. But I've taken a good measure of this Obama fellow, and I must say I like the cut of the man's jib.

How can I say this, you ask? One look at this Obama chap is all the answer you need. Suave, tanned, unflappable, Harvard connections; it's obvious that here is a man to the conservative manor born. One imagines him at the helm of the Ship of State, basked in the sunlight diffusing through the seaspray over the bow, like some beautiful rugged Othello from a rapturous Ralph Lauren catalog, calmly issuing instructions to the deck crew in that magnificent mellifluous baritone of his. It's that easy-going, almost effortless grace that has all the A-list conservatives like David Frum and Kathleen Parker whispering Reaganesque in hushed tones. Even Peggy Noonan -- the Grand Dame of Gipperism -- has succumbed to Obama's undeniable conservative charms. Just last month I listened to her wax poetic about the Adonis of Chicago between chukkers at the Newport Club polo tournament final. "Why Peggy, you old dowager," I quipped, "I believe you just had an orgasm."

Do I even need to add the "read the whole thing" encomium here?

Babalu Blog notes, accurately, I think, that "It's a lose-lose proposition for Obama's supporters":

On November 4th, Barack Obama just might win the presidential election. But regardless of whether he wins or loses, the vast majority of his supporters will lose. If McCain wins the election, they will feel the sting of watching the candidate they placed all their hopes in be defeated. But it stands to be much worse for them if their candidate wins.

By placing their hopes and aspirations in the hands of Obama, they have in effect transferred the individual faith they have in themselves to another person. A person who has promised to make their dreams come true for them. No longer will they have to fight, or struggle, or even work to achieve their dreams; Obama promises to do it all for them. But sooner, rather than later, they will realize that Obama can never deliver on this impossible promise. It is then when they will experience a pain much greater than they can imagine; the pain of realizing that you gave up not only your most sacred dreams and hopes to someone else, but that you gave up hope on yourself so that someone else can do it for you.

Which is why, "If I were John McCain's campaign, I would have just bought enough time to run this video after Obama's infomercial..."

Related: "America the Miserable." (Speaking of mirrors and reflections.)

The candidate as Rorschach test: Jennifer Rubin writes that Sarah Palin is every candidate you want her to be--and more.

Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon analyzes Obama's inkblot results.

(Just don't cross the streams.)

A year ago, Editor & Publisher ran a story with the above headline, in reference to climate change. (Article text available here)

Sufficed to say, the industry has taken their house organ's advice deeply to heart on a variety of other topics as well--with less than satisfactory results to their collective net worth.

Something for the optimists and pessimists at Pajamas Media HQ--and if the latter group are proven correct, some thoughts on who will blamed the most and why, and yet may very well be the party's best hope in the near term future--although the latter conventional wisdom doesn't always survive the campaign trail.

Amanda Carpenter catches a sly moment of numerical slight-of-hand as well in the Obamamercial, for those thinking of going John Galt next year.

Biggest celebrity in the world already known for his faux-presidential seal and other self-reverential campaign graphics produces infomercial on mock-White House set. Chris Matthews' take? "It was romance. It was realism."

More human than human is our motto. But like another product of the Tyrell Corporation, does Obama see unicorns when he dreams?

The Weekly Standard's blog looks at "what might have been."

Larry Kudlow talks presidential economics on this week's edition of PJM Political, also featuring James Lileks' warm remembrance of Dean Barnett, and a round-table pre-postmortem of next week's election featuring Steve Green, Lileks, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air and myself.

And you'll never look at Five Easy Pieces the same way again!

The Politico, then and now.

"Shining a light on the Obama fundraising machine"--and its curious list of donors.

Check out this howler in a piece in CQ Politics titled, "What McCain Defectors See in Obama":

The defectors are a mixed lot, but all represent some brand of recognizably conservative thought. Some like Doug Kmiec, Andrew Sullivan, and Ken Adelman are probably conservatives by anyone's definition, while others are cut partly from an older mold. They bear some resemblance to the moderate Republicanism of the Rockefeller era, but the issues of their time are not the same.

Sullivan is as conservative these days as much as John Kerry was "the right man -- and the conservative choice -- for a difficult and perilous time."

(H/T: Orrin Judd, whose link to Powers' essay is titled, "Inherit The Windbags.")

"There's a wealth of information that would help define Obama just waiting -- and waiting -- for the press to discover", Abraham H. Miller writes, in a piece titled Obama's Chicago Secrets":

But maybe CNN and the rest of the electronic media won't send anyone to Chicago because it is blowing its investigative budget flying reporters to Alaska to explore why anyone would fire a public safety director who refused to dismiss a state trooper who tasered a twelve year old boy -- a trooper who was reported to be drunk while on duty, and who allegedly threatened someone's life. Now, there is a story we all can believe in -- "Troopergate."

Obama gets a pass because nothing is more important to the electronic media than getting Obama elected. Obama gets a pass on Bill Ayers because, at some level, most of the people in the media business can identify with what Ayers did. That's why they won't even mention the Weather Underground's planned bombing of the Fort Dix dance. That's why the name "Diana Oughton," the naïve girl who became Ayers' revolutionary partner and lover and who blew herself up in the Manhattan townhouse bomb factory, is never mentioned in any report on Ayers. This despite Diana's story being well known, as a result of award-winning journalist Thomas Power's book, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist.

Let's face reality: If Bill Ayers had been blowing up black churches and belonged to some neo-Nazi organization, do you think his long-time association with someone who might be the next president would be so cavalierly dismissed? Do you think that Dean Stanley Fish of the University of Illinois would consider penning a letter on behalf of some non-repentant neo-Nazi? Imagine if that neo-Nazi had said: "I did not do enough bombings. I did not kill enough blacks."

The left is so wrapped up in its own high-minded sophistry that it is incapable of distinguishing between being self-righteous and being politically obscene. There is no difference between fascism and communism. They are two sides of the same totalitarian currency. They lead to the same excesses. Yet, communism is palatable to the point of being chic, while fascism is appropriately despised.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was as natural an alliance as one between Britain and the United States. The media's failure to see Ayers as indistinguishable from the terrorists who bombed the Birmingham Church is a poignant and terrible commentary on where journalism -- especially electronic journalism - is today.

Bias exists not only in the obvious such as what we are told and how it is told to us, but also in what we are not told.

As the electronic media plows its resources into examining Sarah Palin's wardrobe and repeats Democratic talking points as news, more important subjects for real investigative reporters are ignored. What was Obama's role in Rezko's pay-for-play scheme? What did Rezko expect in return for the $300,000 subsidy for Obama's Hyde Park mansion? What is Rezko now telling the federal prosecutor?

Also, is it merely coincidental that Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn (Mrs. William Ayers) worked at the same law firm as Michelle Obama? How far back does the relationship with William Ayers go and how close is it? And does the relationship stem from both seeing America through similar ideological prisms, one based on hate, and the other -- as Michelle Obama so clearly articulated -- based on shame?

Don't hold your breath for answers.

Don't worry, the media will apologize for not doing what was once thought of as its job.

After their man crosses the finish line next week.

Back in 2005, Howard Dean told the late Tim Russert that "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy."

This seems like an exceptional place to start.

While my Ministry of Truth video on Monday dealt primarily with the ability to pivot history on a 180-degree fulcrum, as an additional feature, it's worth noting that the modern news media's primary role is not to disseminate information, but to withhold it. Sometimes permanently, or simply holding it back until it won't do much damage to a favored patron, at which point it can be released on page D-17 of the late Friday edition of the paper, in a two or three paragraph article in nine-point type next to the local plumber's advertisement and supermarket coupons.

The drawback to this approach of course, is that if there's a hint that the paper is sitting on a story, it can lead to wild--or who knows?--overly mild speculation about its contents.

All of which is why "2008 is not a year on which honest journalists shall look back with undiluted pleasure."

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we visit industrious Outer Party Member Winston Smith hard at work in the Ministry of Truth, and look at how history can be turned on a dime, including:

• The Pivot on the Iraq War.
• Hollywood and the Iraq War.
• All media, all malleable.
• Pivots by Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger during World War II.
• World War II revisionism today.
• One man's new found respect for private property and the Chicago P.D.!
• And a homage to the most Kafkaesque secret agent of 'em all. Be seeing you!

This is the 19th edition of our ongoing Silicon Graffiti videoblog series, which began in January of this year; click here for all of the previous editions.

Jules Crittenden wonders if insane neo-Nazis have mutated into an even weirder hybrid of "AndrogeNazis":

Hey, is it just me or does that neo-Nazi assassination plotter look like maybe he goosesteps with the left jackboot as well as the right? You know, siegheils from both sides of the Nuremberg rally. Like maybe his death train rattles in both directions.

Maybe he's an Ernest Rohm fan.

As Power Line notes, over at the once-respect publication The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan has posted (under the same headline) a YouTube video trashing Sarah Palin titled, "Red, White and MILF." John Hinderaker responds:

I don't think there is any precedent in our history for the shameful manner in which the Left has treated Sarah Palin. Left-winger Andrew Sullivan gleefully posted a particularly disgusting example of the phenomenon today; it's a YouTube video titled "Red, White and MILF." Watch it only if you have a strong stomach. If you don't know what "MILF" means--I'm sure most of our readers don't--Google it.

I can remember when Sullivan was a respected journalist, not a gutter smear merchant and borderline pornographer. His descent exemplifies the Left's decline in recent years to a baboon-like level of discourse. The vileness of much of what passes for political "argument" on the Left has to be seen to be believed. The worst impulses of human nature have been not just unleashed, but rewarded. If you haven't looked at web sites like Democratic Underground, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, you have no idea what the phrase "gutter politics" really means.

Nowhere has the vileness of the Left been more sickening than in its treatment of Governor Palin. It is interesting to contemplate what a semi-pornographic video about Barack Obama, playing on the same sort of prejudices and stereotypes that are so disgustingly on display in Sullivan's video, would look like. Frankly, I can't imagine such a video being made, let alone featured on the web site of the once-proud Atlantic magazine. But on the Left, anything goes--the more slimy and disgusting, the better.

Sadly, that's been true for a number of years now. But from time to time, some have called the left on their actions. Here's a pioneering member of the Blogosphere in 2002 on the dangers of racism, invective and ad hominem attacks emanating from the left:

When a black public person like Harry Belafonte calls another African-American a slave to white masters, you see what I mean. When defenders of feminism call someone who files a sexual harassment lawsuit "trailer-trash," you get the picture. When a gay man can write a column asserting that another man is a "nasty faggot," it's hard to think of how much lower the discourse can get. When liberals denigrate the president as a "boy" or as a "sissy," to quote Maureen Dowd, homophobia doesn't lurk far behind.

I remember a brief interaction I had with one Barbra Streisand long, long ago when the Paula Jones suit had just been filed. I asked Ms. Streisand what she thought of the suit. "Oh, she's just a little kurva," she replied, referring to Jones. That's a yiddish expression for "whore." Charming.

That blogger's name? Andrew Sullivan, oddly enough.

Sarbanes-Oxley? That's strictly for those Joe the Plumber-type suckers in the private sector, writes TigerHawk:

Mark Steyn has more on the hilarious and probably intentional failure of internal controls at the Obama campaign. If it were a public company it would have to disclose a material weakness, and its auditors would wonder whether its "tone from the top" had actually encouraged the practices in question. Fortunately for politicians of all parties, we do not hold government to anything like the same standard of accountability that applies to private businesses with public stockholders.

Reviewing the last weeks of a campaign that seems like it commenced "sometime during your first child's initial year in primary school", Tim Blairadds, "this is just a guess, but it could be that the rules are different for Democrats."

(Video found via Little Green Footballs.)

As Nick Schulz of Tech Central Station spotted in late August of 2004, Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham "wrote about the GOP convention speeches before anyone even stepped to the podium":

But the only "mistake" Lapham made is in revealing for all to see what has long been known by anyone who pays attention to the news: the major media routinely bring to their coverage of significant political events a predetermined storyline -- you might want to call it a "Lapham". Facts that undermine the storyline are ignored or explained away as aberrations to The Truth. For the editor of Harper's and other establishment press figures, it really makes no difference to them what will be said at Madison Square Garden because the Laphams are already set, loaded in the scribblers' word processors and television anchor tele-prompters and ready to go.

Or maybe these days it's best known as Ifillization, but New York magazine also jumps the gun a bit on the results of the election, just as multiple members of Lapham's Blue Media did in 2004.

Scott Johnson of Power Line --part of the "monster" that Mary Mapes, inadvertently helped to create when deliberately cooked the books at CBS in 2004 (back when viewers were still surprised that such things occurred), has some thoughts on her post this week at the Puffington Host. He reaches a conclusion similar to my take from Friday.

As to Big Media in 2008, the Professor and his readers have some thoughts on the state of "Blue Journalism."

"Joe Biden's RAVE Act of 2002 was a terrible blow against dance-generated alternative energy."

A half century ago, Marshall McLuhan noted:

The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie. The form and tone of some press styles may make the very concept of truth irrelevant. The most urgent and reliable facts presented in this way are a travesty of any reality.

And that was during the (surprisingly brief) era in which a mass media feigned objectivity--and might have even believed it themselves. McLuhan's observation is even more true these days, as Roger L. Simon writes.

Update: Rick Moran may have caught CNN in yet another fabrication.

A reporter for Newsweek has no problem admitting to the world that he'd like to take out Rudy Giuliani--in a nonlethal way of course; "just something that put him out of commission for a year or so." But if a journalist asks tough questions of The One's veep nominee, she's immediately put on the defensive for doing her job and not merely being a cheerleader.

Mary Mapes, the woman who brought you RatherGate, wrote yesterday at the Huffington Post:

Americans aren't responding to the old plays -- the fake fears, the faux outrage, the conservatives who yell "Communist" at the news cameras, the pompous right-wing bloggers who once held such sway. I know all too well how scary and effective these old tactics were in 2004. Today, they are toothless. Ha, ha. Nothing makes me happier than seeing once swaggering players like Powerline, Free Republic and Little Green Footballs forced onto the sidelines, left to limply watch this campaign pass by like a parade in which they play no meaningful part. They just don't matter anymore.

Mapes' post is titled, "The Monster is Dying"--so "conservatives who yell 'Communist' at the news cameras" are declasse, but attacking conservatives as a monolithic "monster" on a Weblog is reasoned nuance journalism. Charles Krauthammer, call your office!

But behind each of those "monsters" was at least one person who in one form another said, "I don't know how many people will actually listen, but why shouldn't my voice be heard as well?" (Just as the founder of the Huffington Post presumably said as well at some point.) Much like a certain Ohio tradesman with entrepreneurial dreams who is now called "the now infamous Joe the plumber," on over 500 Webpages. Or as another journalist with the same initials as Mary Mapes wrote today:

So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicting and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

And calling one half of the Blogosphere "toothless" because their presidential candidate isn't an effective purveyor of the same message as they are seems awfully disingenuous to the other side--I don't think the bloggers at, say, the Daily Kos would take kindly at being called, by extension, toothless in 2004 because John Kerry was such a feckless candidate. It also fails to take into consideration that pundits supporting the out-of-party are able to go on the rhetorical offense, something that the right-hand of the Blogosphere will likely have ample opportunity to do so over the next four years.

But if indeed "The Monster is Dying", what a run! In September of 2005, a year after RatherGate broke, Mapes admitted that she had never heard of any of the blogs that she quotes above, even as she was a working TV producer at a corporation which billed itself at the time as "America's Most Watched Network", and hence, presumably, had her pulse on the nation's political scene:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

And accurately so, of course.

But hey, from cat food eating pajama-wearing navel gazers to a journalistic "monster" in the space of seven years after 9/11 is a pretty amazing growth cycle--and something tells me that the starboard side of the Blogosphere isn't going away anytime soon, no matter how much Mary wishes it were so, and no matter what the outcome on November 4th.

Kevin D. Williamson asks readers to "Explain this reasoning to me":

According to the geniuses at the Times, the governor of Alaska is self-evidently and grossly unqualified to be vice president of the United States, but a pop singer is obviously qualified to be lecturing the world about African civil wars and developmental economics.

Here's a little insight into the world of the Times op-ed page from editor Andrew Rosenthal:

Though rockers and pop stars are welcome, another group faces an uphill battle on to the New York Times' editorial page - conservatives. "[US Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice is a particularly bad op-ed writer," Rosenthal said. However, the problem doesn't end there. "The problem with conservative columnists," Rosenthal said, "is that many of them lie in print." And they can't sing.

Liars? That's a bit cheeky from the newspaper that brought us Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair.

Condoleezza Rice got her PhD when she was 26 and speaks fluent Russian. Bono wears snazzy glasses and can see Ireland from his house.

It's more than reasonable to extend Rosenthal's attack on conservative columnists to potential conservative readers of the Times, and to reasonably assume that the Timespeople would prefer those readers avoid their product, just as many of those in Bono's industry would prefer they stay home. Which is one of the reasons why Steve Green projects out the Times' finances and writes, "The NYT in default? It couldn't happen to a nicer paper."

And even as his profession rushes headlong towards a financial cliff, veteran journalist Michael Malone writes that its moral bankruptcy has never been more evident:

Read More »

Forget the Black Panthers, hobnobbing with High Society on Park Avenue, happily dining on "asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi". Bill Ayers is the workingman's unrepentant former domestic terrorist, and as such has earned longest of long shot third party presidential candidate Dave Burge's coveted support.

(Sirhan Sirhan could not be reached for comment.)

For an update on the McCain campaign worker who claimed she was attacked at a Pittsburgh ATM, Hot Air has the details--or the lack thereof in this case. As one Pittsburgh TV station notes:

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Like I said yesterday, who Twitters about going to the bank? And as a reader emailed this morning, "Looking at the photo that has to be the most conscientious knife attack ever made. Uniform cut depths, nothing that needs stitching. Put some antibiotic ointment on it and forget about it"--adding, "It's a hoax. And I surely wish she hadn't done it."

Indeed.^TM

Jonah Goldberg updates a Boomer/Gen-X Saturday morning video chestnut: "The new Schoolhouse Rock cartoon: 'Conjunction: a word that connects a racist attack and Barack Obama'":

This week, an editorial writer for the Kansas City Star denounced John McCain and Sarah Palin for suggesting that Obama is a socialist because he wants to "spread the wealth around." Don't they understand that "socialist" has always been a racist codeword used by bigots like J. Edgar Hoover to demonize black activists like W.E.B. Du Bois?

A couple problems: First, as best I can remember, Marx, Engels, Lenin, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington do not usually get a lot of attention during Black History Month. Second, as writer Michael Moynihan recently noted, Du Bois wasn't merely a socialist, he was a Stalinist! (Du Bois was not entirely unsympathetic to the Nazis, either.) [Paul Robeson was also pretty keen on Uncle Joe--Ed] Besides, when did "socialist" stop being an anti-Semitic codeword for Jew? Maybe when the left started going batty over "neocons."

I'm pretty sure I received the memo replacing the outdated terminology a while back from the liberal Bletchley Park.

Echoing the slogan of the 1930s National Recovery Administration, Mickey Kaus writes that even "Baskin-Robbins is doing its part" to get their man elected.

The NRA (no relation to this NRA) gave corporations that "did their part" a blue eagle logo to display--and woe betide those who didn't cooperate. Presumably, Baskin-Robbins is hoping to be rewarded with the official "Patriot Employer" symbol for their more recent efforts.

From the department of "Be Careful What You Wish For", in my recent "Bonnie & Nixon" video, I incorporated a little of the audio from Bobby Kennedy's March 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, in which he quoted early 20th century progressive William Allen White's call for violence and upheaval by way of higher education:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

As to bring things full circle (and then some), note who's namechecked on the dedication page of a book authored by a noted '60s rioter and rebel turned academician much in the news recently.

In a surprise bombshell study that absolutely no one could foresee, the Politico recently announced--brace yourself!--"Study: McCain coverage mostly negative".

Which is why Boston-based talk radio host Michael Graham writes, "I have a dream for Sen. Barack Obama":

I have a dream that one day, for just 24 hours, he could be Sarah Palin.

OK, maybe that's less of a dream and more a plot point from a bad Lindsay Lohan movie (redundancy alert!).

But imagine the Democratic nominee's day as Barack Palin Obama:

He wake up and reaches for a secret cigarette and a copy of The New York Times [NYT]. Instead of the usual partisan puff pieces ("Obama Health Care Plan Pledges Miraculous Healings For All"), the Times is running exposes about his family.

Does his spouse have extremist political views? Who pays when his kids travel to Washington? And how do we know one of them isn't really his grandkid?

Opening the editorial page Palin-Obama finds column after column filled with personal attacks and insults. Comments about his looks, how much his clothes cost, his speaking style - even suggestions that the radical teachings of his church might be a legitimate topic for discussion.

He clicks on MSNBC and sees the spittle-flecked face of Chris Matthews.

"Obama says he's cutting taxes for 95 percent of taxpayers, but he's not. He's just sending them checks! No cut in their tax rate AT ALL! IT'S A LIE, A LIE! AAARRGGHHHH!

As the MSNBC medical staff fires yet another tranquilizer dart into Matthews' thrashing body, Palin-Obama gets ready to face the day.

At the airport, Palin-Obama is under siege from the traveling press. "Why are you hiding, Sen. Obama? You haven't taken questions from us since last month. Joe Biden hasn't held a press avail since Sept. 7! Afraid he'll make another 'guaranteed crisis' comment? How many more screw-ups before you dump the guy?"

A crowd of thousands gathers to hear him speak. When Palin-Obama mentions the "destructive foreign policy of George W. Bush," someone shouts "murderer!" Another cries, "off with this head!"

By lunchtime, the cable news headline is: "Obama Whips Up Angry Mob, Some Fear Campaign May Inspire Violence."

That afternoon, Palin-Obama sits down with a CNN reporter who spends the first half of the interview asking variations of the question, "How can a half-term senator with zero executive experience and no record of achievement be president? Shouldn't you be ashamed of yourself for even running?"

"Let's talk energy independence," Palin-Obama asks hopefully. The reporter instead demands to know why Obama won't release his medical records, his original birth certificate or the names of about half his contributors.

"You're the most secretive candidate since Nixon," the reporter insists. "And besides, the guy who plays you on 'Saturday Night Live' is way hotter."

The day grinds on. False stories repeatedly corrected by the campaign continue to air. One Palin-Obama supporter - a plumber who asked John McCain a tough question at a campaign stop - had his private medical files hacked into, and found Candy Crowley hiding in his dumpster.

One more campaign stop, more questions about his wife's politics, his children's travel schedule and his clothing budget - and Palin-Obama finally reaches his hotel for a night's rest.

His nightmare of misreporting, mean-spirited negative attacks and blatant media bias is over. For Gov. Sarah Palin, it's going to last at least 12 more days.

You can see ABC's attempt at flooding the zone with negative headlines on display, here. And Tunku Varadarajan of Forbes gives you the A to Z of all the negative coverage here.

Remarkably timely video from the Onion:

On the other hand, the fighting amidst the cold civil war in Australia is also escalating to a new intensity as well.

Update: 10/24/08: It's a hoax; Hot Air has the details--or the lack thereof in this case. As one Pittsburgh TV station notes:

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Like I said below, who Twitters about going to the bank? And as a reader emailed this morning, "Looking at the photo that has to be the most conscientious knife attack ever made. Uniform cut depths, nothing that needs stitching. Put some antibiotic ointment on it and forget about it"--adding, "It's a hoax. And I surely wish she hadn't done it."

Indeed.^TM Story from yesterday follows:

Found via Matt Drudge, WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh reports:

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said.

Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard tells Channel 4 Action News that the victim was robbed at knifepoint on Wednesday night outside of a Citizens Bank near Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m.

Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.

Richard said the woman refused medical treatment after the assault, which happened outside the view of the bank's surveillance cameras.

The robber is described as a dark-skinned black man, 6 feet 4 inches tall, 200 pounds with a medium build, short black hair and brown eyes. The man was wearing dark colored jeans, a black undershirt and black shoes.

In a horribly macabre bit of irony, I read about this story immediately after concluding an interview for next week's PJM Political with Peter Wood, the author of A Bee In The Mouth, a 2007 book focusing on anger in American life, and particularly politics.

(Add this story to the Police Blotter Politics post from yesterday morning, a topic which I discussed a bit further on yesterday's afternoon's edition of PJTV, which subscribers can watch, here.)

Update: Ace cautions that "This could be a hoax. It's has a too-perfectly-awful-to-be-true feel, a Tawana Brawley feel." On the other hand, Ed Morrissey has a photo of the victim--in addition to the letter B scratched into her face, she has a very real looking black eye, to boot.

More: Glenn Reynolds adds, "This is so serious that I predict it will get almost one-tenth as much national coverage as something some guy yelled at a Palin rally once."

Update: Michelle Malkin expresses doubts; explaining why "that McCain volunteer's 'mutilation' story smells awfully weird."'

One item that does seem odd to me is this post on the victim's Twitter page:

atodd: Stubbornly searching for a bank of america to avoid ATM fees.
Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:23:21 +0000

Of course, I could be reading my own concerns into this; my parents were always very discreet when leaving their small business to go to the bank, for fear of getting mugged, so I had that ethos drummed into me through osmosis. On the other hand, just because I wouldn't want the world to know when I was going to the bank, doesn't mean that others aren't blogging up a storm about that aspect of their lives.

Update: This Pittsburgh Tribune Review article mentions in the second paragraph that "Police planned to administer a polygraph test to Ashley Todd, 20, because her statements about the attack conflict with evidence from the Citizens Bank ATM where she claims the incident occurred, police said."

The article concludes by quoting local police Chief Nate Harper, who says. "We are treating this as a credible report", but adds, "The ATM has a security camera, and investigators were trying to watch the video."

Whether or not Todd's story is conclusively proven to be a hoax, note the smug headline on this Smoking Gun report.

Related: Tough to argue with this assessment: "election season is crazy season."

Roger L. Simon looks at two very different, but sadly both fairly mediocre political movies: Oliver Stone's W and David Zucker's An American Carol and describes want sunk both movies: "It's the Quality, Stupid"--or the lack thereof:

I feel badly writing that about An American Carol because its director David Zucker and co-screenwriter Myrna Sokoloff are terrific people and I very much wanted for their movie to work for admittedly political reasons. Almost no "conservative" films are made by the movie industry and when one slips through you root for it fiercely, so I waited until the film mercifully disappeared from the marketplace before making this opinion known. But I think it is important that negative "inside" opinions be known; because if there is one thing that is bad for conservative filmmaking in general, it is to make bad films. Because of the bias, they have to be better than the liberal ones.

Want really sinks both movies is the desire to produce agitprop, to tell an overtly political story. I hope that there are many more conservative movies--both to compete in the marketplace of ideas, and to reduce the near-monopoly that the left currently has on moviemaking. But I'd like to see them evolve to the point where their politics are subordinate to a good story, instead of vice-versa, as An American Carol seemed to me when I watched it in rough cut form at the Republican National Convention in late August. I had hoped that some of the flaws that were evident in this pre-release version would have been reduced in the final tweaking before the film hit the theaters, but it appears that that didn't occur. (You can hear the segment featuring Roger, Glenn Reynolds and myself interviewing those associated with the movie from an early September edition of PJM Political.)

Budding filmmakers on the right could learn much from the lefties of the 1950s, who were forced, because of the Hays office, to bury the more subversive elements of their films. Which worked in their favor--it produced infinitely more enjoyable movies than say, the World War II-era Mission To Moscow, arguably the most extreme example of leftwing agitprop to emerge from the Golden Era of Hollywood. As I wrote last year:

In the 1950s and up until the mid-1960s, it was possible to sneak all sorts of leftwing ideas into films by burying them deep into the subtext of the shooting script. Did you think that The Hustler was merely a film about a down-on-his-luck pool bum brilliantly played by Paul Newman? So did I--until I listened to the audio commentary on the DVD, and discovered that it was a film about the Blacklist. (Hey, if you say so, guys.) Similarly, on one level, it's possible to argue that The Manchurian Candidate is a leftwing fantasy concerning the assassination of Joseph McCarthy, but the film's incredible pacing, plot twists, and eye-popping cinematography help to soft-sell that it's yet another anti-McCarthy movie. And from the same era, while Dr. Strangelove is obviously an anti-military/anti-Cold War film, its Swiftian absurdity and brilliant screenwriting, and pox-on-both-sides message makes it all go down remarkably smooth.

There was less need for this once the G/PG/R/X rating system replaced the Hays Office. (Which had a variety of unforeseen consequences.) But the craftsmanship built up over several decades of moviemaking still showed through in numerous films in the post-Hays, post-Bonnie & Clyde, pre-Star Wars late 1960s and 1970s.

And speaking of the latter, it's a textbook example of a filmmaker employing exactly the methods I describe above to produce what turned out to be a staggeringly commercially successful movie.

As I said, budding conservative filmmakers could learn much from this period.

No--it's worse: Rick Moran explores "The GOP and the 'Dead Parrot' Scenario."

One explanation as to its cause can be found here.

How will the Dead Parrot Scenario translate in 2009? That's the subject of this week's PJM Political, featuring Michael Barone, John Fund, Brian Anderson and James Lileks, and hosted by the VodkaPundit himself, Steve Green.

I've always thought socialism was an oft-used legitimate phrase to describe a wealth-distribution scheme involving high taxes and a command and control economy that placed onerous burdens on entrepreneurs and businesses, but was considered, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, much less bloody than the alternatives further towards the left. But lately, it's apparently become a codeword--but is socialism code for being black or being Muslim?

Let me know the definitive answer and get back to me, fellas.

Update: "Biden advises GOP to focus on economy, not attacks"--and yet when they do, they're smeared by Obama's surrogates, which makes for quite a Mobius loop.

As it did in 2004, the last month of the presidential election increasingly resembles dispatches from the police blotter, rather than a nation of adults carefully weighing whom their commander in chief should be. Here's but a sample of what's going on out there:

• "Overnight, the Republican Party's office on the courthouse square in downtown Murfreesboro was attacked. A large brick with a symbol for anarchy written on it was thrown through a window, taking out the entire glass front."

• "Owner Believes Lexus Vandalized Due To McCain Sticker." (Time to update these T-shirts and bumper stickers.)

• "Video: Code Pink tries to arrest Rove."

• "Angry graffiti messages were spray-painted on the garage of Norm Coleman's St. Paul home overnight and discovered this morning.

  "'u r a criminal resign or else,' was scrawled in black on the side of the yellow garage in the Summit Hill neighborhood."

• Restaurant Offers Free Pizza for [Stolen] McCain Signs.

• "Does Reebok Condone Violence Against Women?"

• "Anti-McCain vandalism hits Maryland: Democrat Displaying GOP Candidate Sign Wakes Up To Find Home, RV, Truck Covered With 'Vote Obama' Graffiti."

• "NEW: Dashcam Video of Palin Protestors: 'With the opportunity of having a national figure in town, civil disobedience is one of the best ways you can get your message across,' she told 11 News." (More video here.)

• "The Hill notes that police departments across the country are preparing for post-election violence."
  

As Peter Wood, the author of last year's A Bee In The Mouth, on anger in America told an interviewer:

For example: "[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people....New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end....Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression."

And clearly we're seeing a lot of those momentary satisfactions of "self-expression", even if the Victorian Gentleman would prefer not to discuss their origins and root causes.

Betsy Newmark stumbles onto Robert Conquest's Third Law of Politics.

(Not to be confused with Malcolm Muggeridge's Law, which is always in operation where Joe is concerned.)

Update: Welcome readers of Charlie Martin's Explorations blog.

But quote swapping to help your guys and hurt their opponents? Hey, that's all in a day's work for the Obamedia.

As Orson Scott Card writes,"Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper. But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie."

Only one?

Update: Related thoughts from John Hinderaker of Power Line.

It will be curious to see how this stunt goes over with, as Ed Morrissey has dubbed them, the Tanning Bed Media:

The best-funded political campaign in American history says news organizations will have to pay--in some cases almost $2,000 each--if they want to cover Barack Obama's election-night celebration in Chicago.

As Ed writes, "Don't expect too much sympathy from us for the Tanning Bed Media. The only reason why Obama's in a position to demand tithes from the worshiping media is because journalists and editors didn't do their jobs in the first place."

Somebody has been watching too much NBC.

Your bumper sticker of the day: "She is not a woman--She is a Republican."

Well, hopefully not this Joe.

As Jennifer Rubin writes, "On the very same day he told us that Colin Powell should have ended all questions about Barack Obama's national security bona fides, Joe Biden comes along to tell us precisely why we should be scared of Obama as commander-in-chief:"

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

Jennifer adds:

Well, golly, if Obama is so untested that we will have a series of international crises -- at the very time we are in a financial meltdown -- which will make the Cuban Missille Crisis look like a walk in the park, shouldn't we vote for the other guy who will keep all the miscreants in their place?

Hey, it's 3:00 am...

Update: I'm not this Ed, either. Although I didn't think he did too bad a job when he was a mayor of a surprisingly bitter and clinging small town in Pennsylvania.

As Mary Katharine Ham writes:

Palin addressed a North Carolina fund-raiser Thursday night saying, "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe...that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

The comment was quickly picked up by media outlets and the Obama campaign, whose spokesman Bill Burton asked in an e-mail to reporters, "What part of the country isn't pro-America?"

Well, there is a small company town in southern California whose chief industry routinely compares one American political party with an ideology that that ended 60 years ago, but not before killing tens of millions of people, while annually explaining away its own deeply entrenched support for an ideology that concurrently also killed tens of millions of people, and is still trudging along in one form or another.

Further answers here.

Kevin D. Williamson spots "An Unbelievable Headline from Slate":

"Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy's health."

Still though, I'm glad to see Winston Smith is finally off IngSoc's vast government payroll and happily writing in the private sector.

Incidentally, back in 2002, Glenn Reynolds suggested one simple method of reducing voter fraud:

The fact is, if you could come up with a new technology as simple and resistant to fraud as the paper ballot, people would be pretty impressed. So why do we use machines?

Perhaps in part for the same reason that some people used to prefer canned vegetables to fresh ones: "it's more modern!"

But since then, as any trip to the supermarket will demonstrate, the left have moved headlong into organic vegetables and away from the more modern canned variety.

Couldn't paper ballots be sold to the left along similar lines? Vote the organic way--vote paper!

Read More »

"Terry Tate, Office Linebacker" made his debut in a Super Bowl ad that aired in late January of 2003, pitching Reebok sneakers. And considering the average career length of a real NFL linebacker, I guess Terry should be glad he still has a job. He's a free agent these days, no longer, to the best of my knowledge, associated with Reebok, but considering his national launch, it seems safe to say that Terry and Reeboks will forever be intertwined.

So I wonder what the sneaker manufacturer thinks of their former pitchman's latest video. Here's Terry, with a little digital editing help, brutally shoving a woman onto an unforgiving concrete floor and yelling oddly Freudian epithets at her, while tacitly endorsing high gasoline prices and the liberal media:

Is this funny? As they say in the NFL--you make the call! On the plus side, at least Terry's shown only trying to permanently injure Palin, not kill her, as The Economist and Keith Olbermann metaphorically called for, when Hillary was running.

So in that sense, it's a definite step forward in an election year in which the surprisingly well entrenched sexism of the liberal overculture was none too thrilled at the idea of female politicians from either party running for national office.

Noel Sheppard writes:

Whether it's an example of the host's bias or incompetence, potentially one of the most amazing aspects of Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama on Sunday's "Meet the Press" was that Tom Brokaw didn't ask the former Secretary of State about the success of the surge in Iraq or the Democrat presidential candidate's opposition to this winning military strategy.

Given Powell's critical position in garnering support for the Iraq War, as well as his involvement in Desert Storm many years ago, it should have been essential to any interview dealing with his endorsement of either candidate how he feels the 2007 increase in troops has worked, and what the Senatorial vote on this strategy by his candidate of choice says about that person's foreign policy acumen.

Despite this logic, a full examination of the transcript and video of this almost 30-minute interview identified absolutely no reference to the surge whatsoever, and no questions posed to the former Secretary of State concerning the wisdom of Sen. Obama's position on it.

There's hope and change and audacity in the air! Why would a unbiased objective hard-hitting journalist spoil the good feelings?

(No? Well, we can always blame it on a lack of research due to NBC's budget cuts.)

Shortly before the election of 2004, Tim Cavanaugh of Reason looked at what he called, "Twilight Of The Liberal Hawks":

What unified the liberal hawks was that their support for the war was based unreservedly on what is popularly understood as the "neocon" vision, the prospect of exporting democracy to the Middle East through force of arms. According to the "forward strategy of freedom," a democratic Iraq with an emancipated citizenry would serve as an example and beacon to the Arab autocracies, empowering liberals in the region while undermining dictatorships; opening up avenues of freedom and self-expression for ordinary citizens in the Muslim world would in turn remove the impetus for terrorism. For liberals whose taste for progressive-minded interventionism had been whetted by the Clinton administration's operations in the Balkans and Haiti (and probably even more so by the counterexample of Clinton's failure to stop the massacre in Rwanda), the invasion of Iraq looked like a natural fit, even if it was advanced through a Defense Department with whom they had little stylistic or political affinity.

Thus, in late 2002 and early 2003, we found such luminaries as Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, Kenneth Pollack, Fareed Zakaria, Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Ignatieff, and many others arguing for the expenditure of American lives and treasure in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

These days, none of those luminaries can summon a kind word for the president who acted in accord with their own arguments.

And with these two endorsements, his successor.

"George this is of what I'm talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from..."

Over at the newly spiffed-up Power Line site, John Hinderaker writes that Sarah Palin apearing on Saturday Night is "a mistake, I'm afraid":

It's not that I lack confidence in Governor Palin; I don't. But I think it's almost always a mistake to visit an enemy's home turf without a clear understanding that you are among enemies.

The Saturday Night Live people are Democrats. That's all there is to it, and they will never give Sarah Palin, or any other Republican, a fair shake. Palin is, of course, more than a match for them in a fair fight. But for a fight to be fair, it must first be acknowledged that it's a fight. That won't happen tonight, and it will be almost a miracle if Palin gains from the exposure.

I'm old enough to remember when President Gerald Ford appeared on Saturday Night Live. That night, he was ridiculed as a klutz, in keeping with the image he had among liberals. It was grotesquely unfair: Ford, an all-America football player at Michigan, was undoubtedly the most athletic President of modern times. But reality won't intrude when your enemy is the editor.

News accounts indicated that the next morning, a shell-shocked Ford summoned his aides and asked who it was who thought it would be a good idea for him to appear on the television show that had been ridiculing him non-stop since he became President. I'm afraid a similar fate awaits Governor Palin.

It wasn't Ford appearing on Saturday Night Live that was the real problem--it was Ron Nessen, Ford's press secretary, who hosted the show. And as I noted shortly after President Ford passed away in 2006, in a very long post quoting from a history of SNL, as one of the writers said out of Nessen's earshot when he agreed to the gig, "The President's watching. Let's make him cringe and squirm."

As John notes, it's guaranteed that similar thoughts were expressed this week as well.

Back in April, Obama discussed Reverend Wright with Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: Did you talk to reverend Wright recently about his decision to make a series of public appearances at this particular point?

OBAMA: You know, I didn't talk to him about that. I had talked to him after all this had happened, partly because I regretted -- I always regret people who are civilians, essentially, being dragged into these political fights.

And I expressed to him -- I said, "Look, we have very strong differences. I do not agree with the comments that you made. On the other hand, I regret that you have drawn so much attention."

Obama talking about his wife, back in July:

And I've said this before: I would never have my campaign engage in a concerted effort to make Cindy McCain an issue, and I would not expect the Democratic National Committee or people who were allied with me to do it. Because essentially, spouses are civilians. They didn't sign up for this. They're supporting their spouse.

I guess once you move beyond the inner circle, the definition of "civilian" becomes slightly hazier.

Clark Hoyt, the New York Times' ombudsman, writes:

Throughout this election season, most of the thousands of messages I have received about Times news coverage have alleged bias -- bias in headlines, photo selections, word choices, what the newspaper chooses to write about and what it ignores, what it puts on Page 1 and what it puts inside. Most of the complaints, but by no means all of them, have come from the right. Nobody acknowledges the possibility that, because of their own biases, they could be reading more, or less, than was intended into an article, a headline or a picture. Many go a step beyond alleging mere bias to accuse The Times of operating from a conscious agenda to help one candidate and destroy the other.

"It's so obvious who the NYT is supporting for the presidency," said Cheryl Page of Jackson, Miss. "How sad that our media can't just report the news, rather than print their opinions in biased ways." There is a proper place for opinion in The Times -- the editorial and Op-Ed pages -- and there is no doubt that most of the newspaper's regular columnists and its editorial policy favor Obama. It would be a shock if The Times did not endorse him.

But the paper's news coverage is another matter. It is supposed to be evenhanded. I think I've seen bias from time to time, and I think The Times made a serious mistake early this year that gave its critics on the right a lot of ammunition: an article that suggested, but failed to prove, a romantic relationship between John McCain and a female lobbyist. (The Op-Ed page, though independent from the newsroom, added to the problem when it ran an article by Obama without first securing a companion piece from McCain. McCain then offered a rebuttal, but when the paper asked for major revisions, he refused and his supporters cried foul.) But I think the news coverage over a long campaign has been better and fairer than critics would admit.

At least the Times' previous ombudsman was willing to come clean four years ago.

(Hoyt's article is titled, "Keeping Their Opinions to Themselves"--not to be confused of course, with "The News We Kept To Ourselves"--different news agency; different messianic figure being propped up.)

Related: And speaking of what a difference four years makes....

Peter Wood's 2007 book, A Bee In The Mouth, explored the growing anger in American politics.

It's on full display, here, and here. Though of course, don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to investigate.

In an earlier post, I linked to Ed Morrissey's discussion of the New York Times' Jodi Kantor attempting to troll Facebook for any muck she can rake on Cindy McCain.

Here's the letter from Kantor, which Ed quotes:

I saw on facebook that you went to Xavier, and if you don't mind, I'd love to ask you some advice about a story. I'm a reporter at the New York Times, writing a profile of Cindy McCain, and we are trying to get a sense of what she is like as a mother. So I'm reaching out to fellow parents at her kids' schools. My understanding is that some of her older kids went to Brophy/Xavier, but I'm trying to figure out what school her 16 year old daughter Bridget attends- and a few people said it was PCDS. Do you know if that's right? Again, we're not really reporting on the kids, just seeking some fellow parents who can talk about what Mrs. McCain is like.

Also, if you know anyone else who I should talk to- basically anyone who has encountered Mrs. McCain and might be able to share impressions- that would be great.

Thanks so much for any help you can give me.

Jodi Kantor
Political correspondent
New York Times

If the following letter is real, an attorney for Cindy McCain is attempting a little pushback:

These allegations and efforts to hurt Cindy have been a matter of public record for sixteen years. Cindy has been quite open and frank about her issues for all these years. Any further attempts to harass and injure her based on the information from Gosinski and Clark will be met with an appropriate response. While she may be in the public eye, she is not public property nor the property of the press to abuse and defame.

It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father. Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them. Thus, there is a terrific lack of balance here.

I suggest to you that none of these subjects on either side are worthy of the energy and resources of The New York Times. They are cruel hit pieces designed to injure people that only the worst rag would investigate and publish. I know you and your colleagues are always preaching about raising the level of civil discourse in our political campaigns. I think taking some your own medicine is in order here.

It's signed, "John M. Dowd [of] Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP". While the letter states that "none of these subjects on either side are worthy of the energy and resources of The New York Times", the mere fact that "Barack Obama's drug dealer" is being introduced into the public discourse by a campaign surrogate itself is pretty remarkable. (But hey, all's fair in a presidential race, right?)

But then, given that the Tanning Bed media have made the business license of someone who merely asks a question of a candidate fair game, and now, the parenting skills of a potential first lady, they shouldn't be surprised if the other side decides to push back.

In the Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman asks, "Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?"

Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember. The presidential campaign was going to be about sex--the sex of the inevitable winning candidate. Then it was going to be about race. We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world. But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex. They are looking at social class. Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middle-class--and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles?

The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won't do. In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely. Obama's longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism. But no longer. The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers's malignity and Obama's connivance. But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do--turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence--they injure not help their cause. Class will always trump politics. Being the first in one's family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status. More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became Sixties royalty not because of the status of the Ayers family in Chicago, but because of their relish for violence. They attempted to kill, and celebrated the killings of others (like Charles Manson's victims and the murder of any number of cops), to set an example for the less privileged. "We've known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. . . . Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way," said the future Mrs. Ayers in 1970. On the other hand, there were the masses of students who merely marched and flashed the peace sign. Socially, they were nowhere. That was the shock of the Kent State massacre--the veteran martyrs of Harvard's University Hall and Columbia's Low Library wondered that such a terrible and authentic event could have taken place at a far-away state school to people of whom we knew nothing.

Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated--but why?

Schulman's piece appears to have written before a certain Ohio tradesman became a household name. But the blowback caused by Joe's walk-on part in the cold civil war reminds us that it is very much a class war--and specifically, the left's attempts to eviscerate the middle and working classes.

Related: Jennifer Rubin writes, "Suddenly, the race card doesn't look as important as the class warfare card."

Dave Burge of Iowahawk has a rare non-satiric post in which he writes:

We've all witnessed a lot of insanity in American politics over the last few years. Up until the last few days, none of it has seriously bothered me; hey, just more grist for the satire mill. But after witnessing the media's blitzkreig on Joe 'the Plumber' Wurzelbacher, I can only muster anger, and no small amount of fear.

Politicians -- Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, et al. -- obviously have to put up with some rude, nasty shit, but it's right there in the jobs description. Joe the Plumber is different. He was a guy tossing a football with his kid in the front yard of his $125,000 house when a politician picked him out as a prop for a 30 second newsbite for the cable news cameras. Joe simply had the temerity to speak truth (or, if you prefer, an uninformed opinion) to power, for which the politico-media axis apparently determined that he must be humiliated, harassed, smashed, destroyed. The viciousness and glee with which they set about the task ought to concern anyone who still cares about citizen participation, and freedom of speech, and all that old crap they taught in Civics class before politics turned into Narrative Deathrace 3000, and Web 2.0 turned into Berlin 1932.0.

Godwin's Law! you say? if the jackboot fits, wear it.

Or as Jim Treacher notes:

The whole "He's not a licensed plumber!" non sequitur is really fantastic. So, if you happen to be standing in front of Obama when he publicly reveals his socialism, what does the media do? Demands to see your papers. That's just delicious, is what that is.

Of course, at Matt Drudge once said:

"Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair".

Or be a plumber. But which job gets your hands dirtier?

(Meanwhile, Jim Lindgren spots a tax issue that doesn't involve Joe the Plumber, but an actual presidential candidate. Which is why the issue will never be raised by the media.)

Over the weekend, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

As always, it gets worse: as Gateway Pundit notes, now the left is re-editing YouTube clips to create snuff porn about plumbers. (Gateway's post is well worth your time, but caution strongly urged before clicking play on the ghastly YouTube clip he's embeded.)

I was a little worried about being hyperbolic in discussing the concept of "a cold civil war" on this week's PJM Political, recorded on Tuesday. Who knew how prescient the show would quickly seem?

That's Betsy Newmark's take on Joe Wurzelbacher, though it's happening in a slightly reverse fashion from George Allen's seminal gaffe in 2006. The establishment liberal media magnified Allen's own mistake a thousandfold. In this case, Obama's Kinsley-esque gaffe that demonstrates his soft socialism is undergoing a far more intense scrutiny than it otherwise would have as a byproduct of the media's declaring war on somebody who was approached by Obama to ask the candidate a question. In any case, it's a reminder that once the Two-Minute Warning sounds, strange things begin to happen:

Meanwhile, in his own video series with fellow-NRO-er Mark Hemingway, Jim Geraghty posits:

I contend we've passed a threshold in the way the media perceives their jobs; they'll never go back to paying any attention to news that is bad for their preferred candidates, and they'll never again worry about accuracy in stories that are critical of the candidates they hate.

Fortunately though, even when the media wiffs a story, the truth occasionally still wins out.

"Let's get just a little smart folks."

While he maybe the 21st century's answer to Amity Shlaes' Forgotten Man of the 1930s, as Robert Stacy McCain writes, "Frankly, I'm not worried about Joe, who can obviously take care of himself. I'll be surprised if he doesn't have a book deal and his own talk radio show by Election Day."

Say, I hear there's going to be an opening over at CNN pretty soon...

Ramesh Ponnuru looks at "The Curse of the Senate:"

One of the reasons sitting senators don't become president is that they get used to talking in an insider shorthand that is incomprehensible to most people. McCain exhibited that trait a few times last night. Obama doesn't seem to have contracted Senate-itis, perhaps because he has hardly been there.

I agree--and that was a question I brought up during yesterday's post-debate podcast over at PJM Political, which if you haven't heard it

Chris Muir reminds us that plumbers often perform a pretty healthy reality check:

Orrin Judd asks, "Why Isn't This John McCain On The Campaign Trail?" Good question. He's infinitely more relaxed and confident than the flinty, tentative John McCain who showed up last night:

I've already linked to Glenn Reynolds' post on Joe Wurzelbacher, but this quote from one his readers is worth highlighting:

The harassment of Joe the plumber is the singular biggest mistake of the Obama campaign. The MSM is making Joe a martyr. Heck, DKos just published Joe's home address. Obama is now not only a Marxist but a Marxist bully - just another Chicago thug. America roots for the underdog and they will not take this action kindly. If Joe were a hero yesterday, wait a few days.

Obi Wan's line in Star Wars when fighting Darth Vader comes to mind - "Strike me down and I will return more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Americans will realize what happened to Joe could easily happen to them. And they will remember this come November.

Well, some will, but whether or not the politics of plumber destruction will be a game changer remains to be seen, of course. But the dynamics of the story do seem vaguely similar to the memorial for Paul Wellstone in late October of 2002. It was initially planned as a bipartisan memorial to an earnest Minnesota politician tragically killed when his private campaign plane crashed. The "memorial" became in the end, a hugely partisan pep rally, demonstrating for millions the most rapacious aspects of the far left in an election year. The back-to-back attacks by the establishment liberal press and their candidates on two conservative-appearing middle Americans, first Sarah Palin, and now Joe Wurzelbacher similarly demonstrate how craven the left can act when they smell blood in the water.

At least American blood. Terrorist blood should never be shed, of course.

Noel Sheppard writes:

Somehow I get the feeling we're going to be hearing much more from Joe...how 'bout you?

Post facto exit question: is Joe the Plumber this election's October surprise? Could he single-handedly change this entire campaign?

Think about it: regular guy wanting to advance himself without the shackles of a socialist tax plan.

Could this be a game-changer?

Not in the slightest.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, the legacy media have done "more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they've done on Barack Obama in two years." The media have internalized Joseph Conrad's famous aphorism from The Heart of Darkness and they're in the process of completely destroying Joe the Plumber, as an object lesson for anyone else who dares Think Different, just as they've already successfully done with Sarah Palin, just as they did 20 years ago with Dan Quayle. Occasionally, an apostate such as Ronald Reagan, Clarance Thomas, Rush Limbaugh or George W. Bush is able to survive such exposure and go on to powerful accomplishments, which is all the more reason why the media must destroy the Other, the Alien, before his message becomes too powerful.

Update: And just like that, a meme is born! Ed Morrissey (with a memetic assist from Jim Treacher) goes inside "The Tanning Bed Media."

You know that proverbial tank that the media are supposed to be in? Snapped Shot has your snapshot of exactly what it looks like.

Steve Green was under the weather Wednesday (hence no drunkblogging). And while I could never replace Steve's sybaritic savoir-faire, I guest-hosted (in addition to the usual production efforts) tonight's PJM Political podcast postmortem of the final 2008 presidential debate. My guests include James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, and Jennifer Rubin.

Our dedicated team of fact checkers is hard at work verifying the accuracy of the following statement from one of the two major candidates running for the White House this year:

"I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls," Obama told me. "If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me, right? Because the way I'm portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?

Fact check: Lie. Obama does not own a Volvo.

Read More »

So is John McCain a Nazi or a Confederate slave owner? I wish the Obama campaign would make up its mind, and simplify its talking points for the media down to one useful all-purpose epithet, rather than the scattershot nailbomb approach of their advisors.

"It's noteworthy that Jackson does not consider himself a Zionist, and believes that Obama is not a Zionist, either. I don't often agree with Jackson, but this time I think he's right."

PUMA power!

That's the headline of the latest piece in the Wall Street Journal by
Gerald Seib. (Whom I shared a panel with for PJTV at the GOP convention.)

Though I would argue that any hopes for "a post-partisan era" were illusory at best--especially considering what an illusion, and a brief one at that, the previous version was.

Jim Geraghty points to a remarkably simple--and proven--way to cut down on voter fraud.

From Shelby Steele:

To be born into a minority group is, among other things, to be born into a collective experience of insecurity. Put differently, it is to be born into a group of nervous people. If you are born black in America, as has been my own fate, then you are born into a particularly intense insecurity. Your people have known almost nothing but insecurity and impotence for centuries -- this as opposed to the majority culture's experience of itself as heroic and world-beating; ingenious in peace, dominant in war.

One thing this means for minorities is that their group identity will often be the enemy of their individuality. In its insecurity, the group is naturally threatened by the impulse in some of its members to think for themselves. Individuals like this seem to put the group at risk. What will we do if the majority culture thinks you speak for us? Your indulgence in individuality jeopardizes the carefully constructed mask we present to the powerful majority. Your individuality collaborates with them. So knock it off. Get in line, or we will shun you to the point of extinction.

Placed into dramatic context, here.

Over the weekend, Michelle Malkin pasted up quite a rogue's gallery of the violent left. John Hawkins provides an equal number of quotes to go along with them.

Just don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to pay much attention.

Gay Patriot has a state by state list of electoral fraud reports, something that will no doubt expand quite a bit between now and November:

You'll note that most sources are local papers and news stations or blogs, few are national media or the leading dailies. That is, while local media and blogs are covering this, the national media is downplaying it or downright ignoring it.

Gee, wonder why?

2008 won't be like 1984--but 2009? Hey, that's a different story:

For my hipster Libertarian friends out there, you need to get this through your thick skulls. Republicans, given the kind of power the Democrats are about to accrue, would maybe take away your right to get a completely totally naked chick to grind on your lap in a publicly licensed bar. The Democrats will do their damnedest to take away your right to speak. There's the First Amendment, and then there's the First Amendment. Be careful what you wish for.

--Steve Green, "Fighting Words."

A few years ago, when Jonah Goldberg pointed out "the generalized ignorance or silence of mainstream liberals about their own intellectual history", he wasn't kidding!

The tagline for George Clooney's 2005 movie, Good Night, And Good Luck is "We will not walk in fear of one another." Judging by the above video (originally found here), that's not a message that many from its core audience deep within the Zabar's Zeitgeist of Manhattan seem to have internalized.

Which is more than a little depressing--if not at all surprising--considering the outpouring of support that Red States demonstrated in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, as "a lot of you remember"--to borrow Sen. Obama's remarkably nonchalant phrasing.

Glenn Reynolds (and no, he's not the subject of the above headline, which I'll get to in just a moment) writes:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

The Angry Left has gotten away with all sorts of beyond-the-pale behavior throughout the Bush Administration. The double standards involved -- particularly on the part of the press -- are what are feeding this anger. (Indeed, as Ann Althouse and John Leo have noted, the reporting on this very issue is dubious). So while asking for McCain supporters to chill a bit, can we also ask the press to start doing its job rather than openly shilling for a Democratic victory? Self-control is for everybody, if it's for anybody. . . .

As I've noted before, in The Right Stuff and in subsequent promotional interviews, Tom Wolfe described the press as "the proper Victorian Gentleman":

I'll never forget working on the [New York] Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy's death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there's nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick's. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president's assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.

And a huge part of that Victorian Gent's daily job is take a rogue's gallery such as this, and make you believe that they're nothing but polite, Ralph Lauren-clad kids just back from playing touch football on the lawn at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.

Just as it was in 1963, the legacy media's primary role in its twilight years as gatekeeper is to keep news out. Unlike back then, it's not because there isn't enough time or space to report it (bandwidth on the Internet being infinite), but to protect their friends, colleagues, political constituency and their ideology as a whole. And to make their opponents, which prior to the Blogosphere constituted a big chunk of their readership--back when the emphasis was on silent majority--look as badly as possible.

(Jim Treacher boils the schism down to just two words.)

Update: More from Treacher: "I'm going to start calling them the Deathbed Media."

As Andrew Malcom writes, John Lewis (D-GA) predictably demagogues John McCain on race:

Lewis took the occasion of McCain himself admonishing his supporters Friday night to cool it in their shouted distaste for the Democratic ticket.

Lewis said: "George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional right."

He said McCain and Palin are "playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all."

McCain's side fired back (note the military term) that Lewis' assault (again) was a character attack "shocking and beyond the pale."

Malcolm adds that "McCain called on Obama to repudiate the attack, which the Democratic presidential nominee's campaign didn't really do later in the day", instead releasing their now standard-issue "Yes, but..." statement:

Later Saturday, Obama's camp shot up a flare to disassociate itself from the worst of Lewis' statement, while not really rebuking the political ally who had turned his back on the Clintons so helpfully at just the right time during the primary season. But it added a qualifier to allow the odor of Lewis' remarks to linger.

"Sen. Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies," said the campaign statement. But wait! There's more:

"John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night."

Bottom line: Just like World War I, artillery back and forth. The trenches didn't move any. But unlike that military stalemate, this election race has a predetermined end. Both sides fed their troops some angry propaganda Saturday to keep them outraged and fired up out there on the front lines.

Most of us watched from the sidelines, shaking our heads and wondering over the persistent absence of serious discussion beyond bumper-sticker sound bites.

And McCain has one less day to change the game's momentum.

The overt cries of racism from the left should have been anticipated by the McCain campaign, as they were a staple of how the Obama campaign also ran out the clock in the primaries against Hillary, Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The common denominator in all this? Ask Bill Clinton who saw all this earlier in the primaries. Team Obama has so prepped the battlefield that it is nearly impossible to raise legitimate questions about Sen. Obama's mysterious past without incurring charges of racism and / or character assassination. The modus operandi is to have Obama high in the clouds talking about hope and change and brotherhood, descending on occasion to lament those who cruelly lie about him, and then ascend again as he unleashes a variety of surrogates who preemptively create a climate in which McCain can say very little without being condemned s illibera [sic] and worse.

Many of us warned about all this in March and April as we saw the Obama Rules box in Hillary. Time is running out for McCain and Palin, and they must act preemptively themselves, honestly warning that they expect to be demonized and have the race card played against them, but that such threats and invective will hardly stop them from asking even more legitimate questions.

Exactly--except that this should have been a preemptive strike from McCain, not a Hail Mary play deep in the fourth quarter. Since hindsight is 20/20, here's a little bit of Monday morning (okay, Sunday afternoon) quarterbacking:

At some point over the summer, ideally during his acceptance speech in Minneapolis, the moment of 100 percent media coverage, which would have allowed him to use the spotlight to bypass the spin of the MSM, McCain should have said something along these lines:

I respect Senator Obama as an opponent, and I also respect the process of democracy in America. The Senator and I have serious disagreements on the most troubling issues of our day. And the American people need to know as much as they can about both of the men running for the most important job in the world. While I have many friends in the media, something tells me that they won't do the most thorough job of explaining Senator Obama's history and the background of his longtime acquaintances. So it's going to be up to us--myself and my supporters, to help make that case.

As I said, I have many friends in the press, and you and I will know if they're covering the election fairly if they report the facts on my esteemed opponent and his history--which, while it isn't as lengthy as mine, contains some rather curious moments--in as much detail as they discuss my history, and the background of Gov. Palin, soon to be the next vice president of the United States.

We'll know very quickly, my friends, about how both the media and my friends across the aisle intend to play this election. If they crudely describe my campaign or myself, or even subtly impugn in some way that it's racist, as happened to my friend on the other side of aisle, the great senator from New York, Hillary Clinton when she ran her gallant fight against Senator Obama, then we'll know what we're in for.

And my friends, if and when such an unfortunate moment happens, I will call out Senator Obama, his fellow Democrats on the other side of aisle, and the media for their role in abetting this.

It's time America move beyond the crude racial demagoguery and bitter divisiveness of the past, and the McCain campaign is committed to seeing that happen. Help me make it a reality, my friends!

And have that clip, and plenty of "see, I told you so" speeches ready for when the inevitable attacks from the media and the left started to occur this fall.

At the start of the month, Robert Stacy McCain (John's more ebullient very distant cousin) rightly called out the campaign for its late September attacks on the media:

I didn't comment on it at the time, but I was shocked when Steve Schmidt lashed out at the New York Times on Sept. 22. Every word Schmidt said about the NYT being in the tank for Obama was true. But you don't do that. Ever. Not in a campaign you have any hope of winning. It is one thing to criticize specific errors by specific reporters, but for a presidential campaign manager to call into question the fundamental integrity of a newspaper that more or less dictates news coverage at the three major broadcast networks? Uh uh. No way. Leave that work to surrogates. Then Wednesday, in an interview with the Associated Press, McCain himself got all hostile with the reporter. That is tantamount to an admission of defeat.

Exactly.

Over the summer, both on my blog and via PJTV at the convention in Minneapolis, I praised the McCain campaign's effective use of YouTube and their outreach to bloggers as examples of a campaign that seems to get the importance of new media. But so far, I've seen very little that leads me to believe that the campaign knows how to handle old media, and the prevent defense they're committed to helping Sen. Obama play.

Again.

Mike Huckabee and blogger Frank Martin each question the timing of the markets' current meltdown.

Oracle's Larry Ellison has the right business mindset for a time like this, and as far as conspiracy theories, for the moment, I agree with one of Frank's commenters, who quotes one of Charles Krauthammer's aphorisms:

Krauthammer's razor (with apologies to Occam): In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.

I agree--but I also reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks at a later date, once everything shakes out, as it inevitably will.

LilacRose links to a post of mine, amongst others writing on the same topic, and wonders if the Cold Civil War that we discussed last year at this time might get a tad warmer come November:

As far as I'm concerned, the differences are irreconcilable. One part of the country wants a socialist, European-style country. The other part wants a country based on free-enterprise and the Constitution. One side has disdain for orthodox Judeo-Christian faiths, whereas the other side embraces or at least tolerates those beliefs. One part believes that if we just let down our defenses, everything would be peace and lovebeads. The other part knows we live in a dangerous world and that defense is essential.

However this election turns out, there will be turmoil. If Obama wins, a large part of the country will feel angry and powerless against the will of the left leaning blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia. (In fact, they already feel that way, I assure you.) They will believe that ACORN created enough false voter registrations to put Obama over the top. If McCain wins, the left will riot and claim, "The Diebold machines were hacked!" The blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia will resent that the will of the "dumb hicks" in flyover country overruled that of their "betters". And we will hear the cries of, "Racism! Racism!" ad nauseam.

I hate to sound all doom-and-gloom, but I see absolutely no solution to this. Or at least no solution in which America stays in the same form it is now. I hope I'm wrong about that. I guess we'll see.

As James Lileks wrote a year ago:

This is what annoys me to no end about the 60s, to cram it all into a tidy convenient decade; the overculture and the underculture ganged up on the great Middle, for different reasons but with equal gusto. The Middle was Crass, in the eyes of the overculture; Phony, in the eyes of the underculture.

Meanwhile, some thoughts on the state of the Cold Civil War near the 49th Parallel, here.

Update: Much more on this topic from Mark Steyn, and from April Gavaza, the "Hyacinth Girl", who, in a newly written post, revisits the topic she originally kicked off a year ago.

Or is it the other way around? In any case, Maggie's Farm has a terrific video piped in via Outer Party member 6079 Smith W. from the Ministry of Truth.

As I've written before here, the past two presidential elections have brought out numerous painful flashbacks from the dreadful late 1960s and early 1970s leftwing culture of radical chic anti-Americanism. But this post at The New Criterion by Michael Weiss is truly Six Degrees of Separation moment:

William Ibershof, the lead prosecutor of the Weathermen in 1972 (and so the Marcia Clark to Bill Ayers' O.J.), has written a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to its article on Obama's association with the domestic terrorist. Ibershof does little beyond add another layer of sediment on top of a story that partisans of the Illinois senator, and evidently two-thirds of voters polled by Fox News, wish to see dead and buried. However, one point he makes merits attention for its historical irony:

I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of "prosecutorial misconduct." It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

So Deep Throat's incompetence enabled Ayers escape jail, become a fixture in the radical groves of academia, and then head up an education program endowed by Richard Nixon's former ambassador to Great Britain.

As Yogi Berra said upon learning of the Jewish mayor of Dublin: Only in America.

Heh, indeed.^TM Weiss's post is titled "Nixonland", a topic we explored a bit in video form a couple of weeks ago.

Despite the progress the nation has made, portions of America still remain remarkably xenophobic and puritanical. When The Other appears, challenging an insular culture's accepted notions and long-held reactionary superstitions, the result is cognitive dissonance in the extreme, bringing out the very worst in our citizens, as this unfortunate sound bite demonstrates all-too-well.

Update: Charles Johnson spots yet another example of puritanical naivete.

Since the role of the MSM is now largely to withhold information damaging to itself and the left (but I repeat myself), occasionally news seeps out from some strange sources--such as Bill Maher's late night HBO show:

As odd as it might seem, for the second week in a row, a panelist on "Real Time" actually divulged information about Democrat involvement in the current financial crisis that most mainstream media outlets continue to hide from the public. With stocks cratering, and a serious economic contraction looming, one has to wonder when America's "serious" media will follow suit and expose the truth behind the current crisis.

After all, in 2006, the word "macaca" and solicitous e-mail messages from a little-known congressman were headline news for weeks, and were largely responsible for the Democrats taking back the Senate and the House. Of course, all this attention came despite the misstatement by then Sen. George Allen (R-Virg.) and the behavior of Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fl.) no way threatening the finances of Americans or our very economy.

There is absolutely no question that if Maxine Waters was a Republican that had blocked GSE reform this decade, and was caught lying on national television about campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie, this would be headline and front-page news for days with full-scale coverage of how she and others in her Party were responsible for the current calamity.

Yet, it seems almost a metaphysical certitude that with about three weeks to go before Election Day, the Obama-loving media are going to keep this matter buried long enough to get their candidate in the White House.

Like I said in my recent video, the Two-Minute Warning has sounded, and the legacy media only need about three more weeks to drag their candidate into the end zone.

From the liberal New Republic magazine:

His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist.

Rev. Wright could not be reached for comment.

Update: Leonard Bernstein continues to rebuff our interview requests as well.

Every election we're told that "this is the most important election ever"--or alternatively, "this is the most important election of our lifetimes." (Which for many Gen-X'ers/Gen-Y'ers is the equivalent, since their sense of history essentially begins there.)

Betsy Newmark believes that the first time the "most important election ever" phrase was first used during the 1864 election, though she argues that it was the previous election which actually qualifies, and it's tough to disagree.

(Though both election years featured particularly pitiful efforts by MTV to "Rock The Vote", since MTV nor rocking existed back then, according to current anthropological research. Kinescopes of Dick Clark's American Bandstand only go back as far as the Reconstruction era.)

In The Denver Post, David Harsanyi writes:

Those Republicans anticipating a fourth-quarter comeback during the debate were instead hit with a wet fish. Did the putative Republican candidate just propose that the U.S. Treasury renegotiate millions of mortgages at a better price?

Was McCain simply unable to articulate a more complex position? It sounded a lot like a comprehensive nationalization of the mortgage industry. It sounded a lot like hundreds of billions of additional tax dollars.

Yep, he meant it. It's called the American Homeownership Resurgence. It will stabilize the economy. And Obama will stop global warming. And McCain will find bin Laden, even if he has to do it with his bare hands. And . . . well, at this pace, we're about two debates away from being promised free lemonade and snicker doodles.

None of these promises have worked. So now the McCain campaign will set its sights on Bill Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko and other members of the Legion of Doom. All of them are legitimate topics for conversation, but with less than a month to go, the conversation reeks of desperation.

In fact, the entire campaign has been one big act of publicity stunts. McCain's shining moment this campaign, as far as I can tell, was a funny ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton.

What McCain's candidacy does tell us is that the Republican Party -- even if it somehow miraculously pulls this one out -- is in need of some creative destruction. Not ideological purity but ideological renewal.

Because being a "maverick" is a political slogan, not a political philosophy.

It's not even a political slogan--merely a bumper sticker.

Christopher Buckley (yes, Bill's son) breathes deep the cult of Obama, endorsing him, and adding:

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves.

Jennifer Rubin asks, "Oh, my--where to begin?"

A first-class temperament does not consort with terrorists or lie about his affiliation with the same. A first-class temperament does not invoke the race card when presented with legitimate criticism. A first-class temperament does not seek to shed his Leftist skin for political expediency. To conclude otherwise is confuse calm with deceit.

And as for the hope that his first-class intellect will lead him away from more extreme ideas, I am not sure what biography Mr. Buckley has been reading. But Obama's is replete with identification with Left-wing causes and their practitioners. What would possibly lead him now to rethink a lifetime of political thought and action? Certainly a smashing political victory and a compliant Democratic Congress will be confirmation, if any was needed, that he has been on the correct ideological track.

On the other hand, considering how closely McCain's fortunes have tracked the S&P 500, it may all be academic, sort of like a course taught by Bill Ayers.

In Forbes, Peter Robinson writes:

This is a story about using American politics to promote the highest of ideals and to realize the worthiest of accomplishments. You may be forgiven your skepticism. But keep reading.

Indeed--it's a terrific profile of War Connerly, who notes:

Politicians have seldom supported him. "When it comes to race," Connerly says, "political correctness is profound. Even conservative Republicans are afraid to take a stand." Organizations from chambers of commerce to unions to the League of Women Voters have fought him, instigating legal challenges that have so far thwarted his efforts to put initiatives on the ballot in Florida and Oklahoma. "In issues involving race," Connerly explains, "the establishment is always at odds with the people." But Connerly has succeeded in putting bans on racial preferences on the ballot in Washington, Michigan, Colorado and Nebraska. The people of Washington enacted a constitutional amendment banning racial preferences in 1997. The people of Michigan did so in 2006. The people of Colorado and Nebraska will make their decision on Nov. 4.

Will the measures in Colorado and Nebraska win? Comfortably, Connerly insists. Whenever bans on racial preferences are permitted to go before the voters, they win.

In a related item, Roger L. Simon explores "Dangerous times ahead: racism in the Blogosphere."

Jonah Goldberg writes, "The simple, relevant fact is that the more detailed and extensive a plan a president proposes, the less likely it is that it will be enacted":

One basic reason for this -- often overlooked by politicians and the journalists who cover them -- is that presidents don't make laws in our system. Congress does. And Congress usually has plans of its own. Bill Clinton promised health-care reform, and his wife had a plan thicker than the New York City Yellow Pages. Congress never even voted on it.

Much like Obama, Bill Clinton barnstormed the country promising a middle-class tax cut. Once he got into the White House, that got filed under "never gonna happen." George H.W. Bush said "read my lips" about his plan to never, ever, ever raise taxes. It turned out that "never" is a term open to many interpretations.

As Jonah concludes:

I'm not saying that candidates shouldn't have platforms. But voters -- and journalists -- should look at them as mission statements, not the political equivalent of instructions that come with a disassembled bicycle.

The real hints for how to choose a candidate, at least in a general election (as opposed to a primary), reside in the realm of judgment, philosophy, track record and temperament. And, using those criteria, the choice shouldn't be hard at all.

It's also worth revisting Jesse Walker's article from this past April in Reason, which listed FDR's campaign promises as a candidate in 1932. As Jesse notes, what FDR proposed is a far cry from the monstrosities of the New Deal which wound up prolonging the Depression for seven agonizing years. (And would ultimately require something even more torturous--World War II--to jump start the American economy.)

Related: "Who Killed 'Reality'? Who But The Media?"

When did the Manolo become the photo editor at the Associated Press?

Or, with a title like "From the Horse's Mouth", speciest at least: John Hawkins presents the quotable Barack Obama.

Rachel Lucas writes that "1984 finally arrived 24 years later."

On the doubleplus side, at least they're not feeling too comfortable in the Ministry of Truth right now.

In a fair world, Harry Reid would be the Piranha Party's first snack (bring plenty of Maalox); but if Dingy Harry does indeed believe that linking Obama to Franklin Raines is racist, then he might want to start by cleaning up the real racists that exist within his party's half of the Senate.

Back in 2005, Howard Dean, another Democratic Senator, told the late Tim Russert that "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy." Dean and Reid certainly have their work cut out for them, eh?

Incidentally, could someone alert CNN that Robert Byrd is a Democrat? One of their Obama cheerleaders journalists seems to have forgotten that recently.

As Jonah Goldberg writes, "The specter of Herbert Hoover is conjured every time there's an economic calamity, large or small":

But you know what? Specters are ghosts. And ghosts aren't real.

The Herbert Hoover of popular imagination was a laissez-faire lickspittle of Adam Smith. But this idea began as Rooseveltian propaganda and endures as the creation myth of modern liberalism.

William Leuchtenburg, possibly the greatest authority on the FDR era, wrote some time ago, "Almost every historian now recognizes that the image of Hoover as a 'do-nothing' president is inaccurate."

After the stock market crash of 1929, Hoover browbeat business leaders to keep wages and prices high. He invested heavily in public works projects. He pushed for an international moratorium on debts. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which later became a home for many of FDR's Brain Trusters. Hoover increased farm subsidies enormously.

Some of Hoover's interventions were good but ineffectual. A few were very, very bad and very effective.

In 1932, Hoover in effect repealed Calvin Coolidge's tax cuts, increasing the rates for the poorest taxpayers by more than 100 percent and hiking the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. Worse, contrary to his own better instincts, Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley trade bill that raised protectionist walls at precisely the moment the world needed trade the most.

Then there's this idea that FDR rode to the rescue, saving the day by untying the American people from the railroad tracks of runaway capitalism. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, now a surrogate for Barack Obama, recently said on NPR: "It's very tempting to always think that the government should just stand back and let the private sector sort these problems out. That's the kind of thinking that made the Depression 'Great.'"

Summers should know better (in fact, I'm sure he does). The Great Depression was not made "Great" by government inaction. Indeed, FDR's New Deal may have been wonderful in some mytho-poetic sense, and maybe some of its reforms can be defended in some broader context, but as an effort to end the Great Depression, the New Deal was a failure. As my colleague Mark Steyn writes, "Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

Which is why the great Amity Shlaes reminds us in her recent column that "The stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression were not the same thing". The late Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal titled a nifty economic history of the 1980s The Seven Fat Years. FDR turned the Depression into seven very, very lean years:

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

Read the rest, here.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt brings it all up to date with the omnious-sounding, "President Barack Hoover."

Mark Sheldon of IlliniPundit writes, "I got a call yesterday from Steven Gray, a reporter for Time magazine who was in town today doing an article on student voter registration":

He left a message on my voice mail asking for ten minutes of my time. I didn't get back to him so he showed up in my office today. He asked for five minutes, no doubt noticing how busy I was and I politely said no. He comes back with..."come on, just five minutes?"

I told him no, because first, I was busy, and two, I really had no idea what he would do with the video he was planning to shoot of me. He gave a little roll of the eyes and so I asked if I could have an unedited copy of the entirety of what he taped of me. He said "No one does that!" That was the end of the conversation.

He seemed like a nice guy and I have no particular reason to doubt his integrity as a reporter. Except for his instant negative reaction to my request.

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, has suggested that everyone bring their own cameras to interviews. I was a little busy to try that stunt, so I went with the next best thing. I wasn't surprised that the reaction was negative, if for no other reason than I expect my response was pretty much out of the blue.

Not doing the interview is probably a good career move. After all, if Time does you right, you get 15 minutes of fame. If they do you wrong, you get a lifetime of infamy on their website.

No hard feelings Mr. Gray. Next time I won't ask for the tape, I'll take Reynolds' advice and bring my own camera.

I guess it's a form of progress that Gray's reply was simply a startled, "No one does that!", because a decade ago, our sensitive legacy media considered taping your own interview "intimidation", as former CBS journalist Bernard Goldberg wrote in Arrogance, his sequel to his first inside the trenches book on media bias:

You know the old saying "They can dish it out but they can't take it"?

In October 1999 the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 was about to air a story on a man named Michael Ellis, the founder and CEO of a company that markets a controversial weight-loss pill. It was the kind of investigation that doesn't always end well for the person on the other end of the camera, the one being interviewed. So, fearing his comments might be taken out of context and that the interview might be edited to make him look bad, before the 20/20 piece aired Ellis took the unedited transcript and video of the entire interview-which he'd recorded on his own-and put it out on the World Wide Web.

This made people at ABC News very angry. In fact, one vice-president told the New York Times, without a hit of irony, that "We don't want other people attempting to get into and shift the journalism process." [Things were much more fun for the legacy media when they had a monopoly--Ed]

Next to be heard was former ABC News Vice President Richard Wald, now teaching young journalists at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Wald called the CEO's strategy, "a not-so-subtle form of intimidation".

Got that? When the media disseminates information about "other people", it's news. When "other people" disseminate information about themselves, it's intimidation.

It didn't take long for the tsunami to reach CBS News, where its president, Andrew Heyward, put out the following in-house memo. I share it with you now, in its entirety.

You can read Heyward's memo at my original blog post on the topic from 2005. Bernie doesn't mention if CBS typed it up on the 1973 edition of Microsoft Word or not, though.

(H/T: IP)

For a sneak preview of today's PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio, check out the podcast of the blogger round-table recorded immediately after Tuesday night's debate, featuring:

• PJM Political host Steve Green--fresh off his usual soiree into debate drunkblogging, plus:

• James Lileks.

• Glenn Reynolds.

• Jennifer Rubin.

• Produced by your humble narrator and multimedia maven.
  

So far today, we've seen Bill Ayers, former Weatherman, Barbara Walters, former attendee at Leonard Bernstein's 1970 "Black Panther Fondue & Twister Party" (to borrow a pithy Iowa-riff) refusing to talk about Ayers, and bloggers making lame Marvin Gaye references--and that's just on this blog alone. And now George Farging McGovern will apparently be appearing, via video, in tonight's debate.

(And that's in addition to the 2004 election's brush with the 1970s, in the form of flashbacks to John Kerry's Winter Soldier days.)

Enough with the 1970s! When does the decade that never ends...end?

Since I spent a semester learning at NYU, it's only fair that I return the favor. Their Department of Psychology is hosting an online academic research study "to learn more about the psychological bases of political attitudes and voting behavior", as their Website puts it.

They've emailed me, along with other bloggers, to ask that their readers take part in their survey, which takes about 15 minutes to complete, once you start here.

At Pajamas HQ, Dr. Helen debunks a lame reply from Salon's advice columnist to someone with a raging case of PDS and mentions University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose studies found:

While conservatives could put themselves in the mindset of liberals, liberals did not return the favor. [Yet more proof of the accuracy of Krauthammer's Law--Ed] In other words, like Hater, some scream, rant, and rave when someone does not agree with them, with no understanding of why people are different. Perhaps a little empathy is in order here for Hater's friends and family.

It would certainly help to reduce the "Attack of the Hatemail", which San Francisco-based columnist Cinnamon Stillwell found herself in the midst of when she publicly praised Palin in print, alliteratively speaking.

As John Dickerson writes in Slate, "The 41st president's run-in with Ponytail Guy left such a mark that it haunted his son throughout his campaigns":

I remember watching a town hall during the 2000 campaign in which George W. Bush consistently refused to call on a man waving from the middle of the crowd like he was trying to flag a rescue plane. Bush pretended not to see him but let on afterwards that he'd seen him and avoided calling on him for fear of creating a moment. In 1996, when Bob Dole was given the chance to attack Clinton's character in a town-hall debate, he demurred, saying the debate should be about the issues.

This year's campaign shows how partisans on both sides go after the journalists who ask questions they don't like. During the Democratic primaries, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, and George Stephanopoulos were all savaged for the questions they asked and how they asked them. Last week, Gwen Ifill was attacked for a book she hasn't written about a subject she isn't addressing. [Say what?--Ed]

"Real" people (by which I mean people who don't do this for a living) who are asking the questions may be harder to rough up. Or maybe not. On Tuesday night, if Son of Ponytail Guy asks a question, he can rest assured that he will receive a thorough going-over in the blogosphere. So I suggest all prospective questioners Google themselves, make sure they're on good terms with their co-workers, and wipe clean their Facebook page. If they don't--or even if they do--they could become the story very quickly.

Indeed--Michelle Malkin suggests that bloggers carefully check the flora and fauna in the bleachers of tonight's town hall debate. Specifically, the wide array of plant life that's likely to be sprouting up amidst the whichy thickets of the audience.

Update: I was just talking about this post at the top of today's edition of PJTV--subscribers can tune in here to watch. (And if you're not a subscriber--what are you waiting for? Click here!)

The question this presidential election year isn't whether or not there will be an October surprise--but how many of them we should expect:

(Previous editions of our Silicon Graffiti video blog, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Michelle Malkin posits why NBC has yanked one of the few Saturday Night Live sketches that's both funny (at times) and actually pokes fun at the left. (Given the overt biases of both SNL and NBC as a whole, that's no doubt a big part of the reason in and of itself that the clip was pulled from NBC's video site.) And Pat Dollard has uploaded his own copy of the video, here.

Somebody doesn't want you to watch it--isn't that reason enough to click over?

It's compare and contrast time! First up, this passage from academia's Ayers apologia:

All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding--- the possibility of change--- depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows should be celebrated and nourished rather than crushed. Teachers have a heavy responsibility, a moral obligation, to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation.

As witnessed by this moment at Brandeis:

Professor Donald Hindley, on the faculty for 48 years, teaches a course on Latin American politics. Last fall, he described how Mexican migrants to the United States used to be discriminatorily called "wetbacks." An anonymous student complained to the administration accusing Mr. Hindley of using prejudicial language. It was the first complaint against him in 48 years.

After an investigation, during which Mr. Hindley was not told the nature of the complaint, Brandeis Provost Marty Krauss informed Mr. Hindley that "The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty." A corollary accusation was that students suffered "significant emotional trauma" when exposed to such a term. An administration monitor was assigned to his class. Threatened with "termination," Mr. Hindley was ordered to take a sensitivity-training class.

Call it "The Tyranny of Nice", to coin a phrase.

Or call it Anarcho-Authoritarianism, to borrow from an Fred Siegel's look at H.L. Mencken from a few years ago in the Weekly Standard, which I flashed back to earlier today, mainly because I was looking for a euphemism for "radical chic" in my post linking to Roger L. Simon's "Running On Empty" reminiscences on Bernadine Dohrn and her apologists in Hollywood:

The Sage of Baltimore needs to be placed in a broader intellectual context. The man who is still selectively celebrated by people like Rodgers, as if he were nothing more or less than an American iconoclast, was one of a number of anti democratic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of them, like D.H. Lawrence, were proto-fascists; others, like H.G. Wells, were apologists for Stalin [Wells was no slouch as a proto-fascist himself, either--Ed]. But they all denounced democracy in the name of vitalism, eugenics, and a caste system run by an elite of superior men.

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

That Ayers and Dohrn were consciously or not exploring concepts that were well over 60 years old at the height of their terrorist activities actually isn't all that surprising. When you're starting from zero, to borrow Tom Wolfe's line, it's easy to forget that you're also running in place--or at least in circles.

Faster than time itself--as Robert Stacy McCain pipes in news from November 5th on how his distant cousin lost.

The theme is very reminiscent of Glenn Reynolds' October 2006 pre-postmortem of the GOP in the midterms. And given the tenor of the month (and yes, admittedly, it's still very early) odds are that it's as prescient as well.

Mickey Kaus spots an example of McCain "losing" the support of journalists whose support he never had in the first place. Mickey adds:

It might seem as if the MSM reaction against McCain's shift to negativism has "driven the final nail into his coffin," as Heilemann suggests. The Feiler Faster Thesis says no--given the speed with which the country now processes information, there's plenty of time for several dramatic twists and turns, including lead changes. Obamaphiles (in the press and elsewhere) are deluding themselves, I think, if they think they can ride the economic crisis and the reaction against negativity to victory in a month. Plus Obama's not that far ahead.

Which isn't to say I disagree with Ace's current grim tone, though.

The news division of NBC and its affiliates were once populated by stand-up men such as John Cameron Swayze, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, and Tim Russert. What ever their biases, these were solid, professional broadcasters, a trend very much carried on to this day by NBC's elder statesman, Tom Brokaw.

What would would they think of this recent comment from a man who fancies himself as their successor?

Update: Olbermann's Palin Derangement Syndrome has--shocker!--spilled over to his Sunday Night Football gig--yet another example of NBC's overt politicization of its flagship sports show.

Kathy Shaidle suggests that the McCain campaign should make Bill Ayers "the hippie O.J.", adding:

It doesn't matter when Obama met up with Ayers, or how many meetings they ever had.

It's about the fact that Ayers went from domestic terrorist to "respected community leader", to the point where Ayers was throwing well attended fundraisers for Obama, and they sat on boards together.

Bill Ayers should never have achieved such respectable positions in the first place.

Bill Ayers should be sitting in jail, not on boards!

But that's how the 1960s Left's reputation-laundering works. Look at Angela Davis, and the convicted felon and torturer who invented (the Marxist inspired "holiday") Kwanzaa and, like Davis, is now a tenured prof.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Ayers was quoted in the New York Times as saying he and his wife only regretted that they hadn't blown up more buildings. People were reminded that Ayers wife praised the Manson family murders.

That story was widely remarked upon for incredibly obvious reasons.

That story alone would make any decent, intelligent person say afterward: "Wow, I better not be seen anywhere near this guy, let alone sit on a board with him or go to his frickin' house. Boy, would THAT ever look bad."

So that means Obama isn't a decent, intelligent person. Period.

He's just another craven, arrogant, Chicago style politician.

The McCain campaign needs to spin this as an anti-hippie, anti-lefty, culture wars story:

Ayers and his wife are dangerous criminals and traitors who got away with it, and are now well off and respected. At least the Rosenbergs got the chair...

Look at how average Americans view O.J. -- make Ayers the hippie O.J.

Ask folks how they'd feel if Charles Mason was a professor now too?

Look:

a guy who has been photographed, as late as 2001, stomping on the American flag is one of Obama's supporters. [Obama served with Ayers on a board during this period, Charles Johnson notes--Ed.]

It doesn't matter if Obama denounces Ayers tomorrow.

It doesn't matter if their connection is/was "tenuous".

Here's what matters:

What does it tell you about Obama and his policies and his worldview that people like Ayers and his ilk are obviously going to vote for the guy?

Do you really want to vote for the same guy that unrepentant, unpunished domestic terrorists vote for?

Yes or no?

Pretty simple, but the McCain camp is blowing it.

Of course--but that doesn't prevent the AP from slagging anyone attacking their candidate and friends.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey notes another former associate of Obama who openly* called for the US invading Israel:

Power's ultimate aim is to send a massive American or Western force into Israel to stop what Power apparently sees as an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. She specifically states that the force has to be "massive", not like a Srebrenica- or Bosnia-sized force. Why would it need to be so large? In order to neutralize the Israeli Defense Force, and protect the forces of Fatah and Hamas.

Had Barack Obama kicked her off of his advisory panel (rumored to number 300) after making remarks like this, it could have assuaged fears about his intentions towards Israel. Instead, he invited Power to advise him after making these remarks. She resigned only after calling Hillary a monster and after insinuating that Obama may not retreat from Iraq in 16 months if the ground situation changed -- which Obama later adopted as his own position after the primaries.

The interview ran in 2002, the period when the left essentially went to ground during the culture war in the immediate wake of 9/11, only to explode in often violent protests and bitter rhetoric in 2003 and 2004, which Charles Krauthammer memorably described as "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release."

Read More »

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Blumer wrote at Pajamas, "Very Different Economic Times in Red vs. Blue States"; certainly the very blue "parentheses states", as Tom Wolfe described them, have been having a tough time making a go of it, as these two headlines on the Drudge Report indicate:

• SCHWARZENEGGER: CALIFORNIA MAY NEED EMERGENCY LOAN...
• New York Deficit Swells...

Or as a recent City Journal article put it, "Houston, New York Has a Problem."

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin asks, "What's The Matter With Harry?"

One of the more curious -- but not unprecedented -- incidents in the last couple of weeks involved Harry Reid. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Just as U.S. credit markets this week were close to the edge of the cliff, threatening capital-starved businesses large and small, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stepped in front of reporters and offhandedly announced:

"One of the individuals in the caucus today talked about a major insurance company. A major insurance company -- one with a name that everyone knows that's on the verge of going bankrupt. That's what this is all about." The next day, share prices fell sharply across the insurance industry. Let us stipulate we do not think it necessary for even U.S. Senators to understand the internal mechanics of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. But if we have learned anything amid the panic over Bear, Lehman, Merrill and adventures in naked short-selling, it is that rumors can obliterate economic value, instantly.

But this wasn't the only such incident:

It calls to mind Senator Chuck Schumer's public suggestion in July that troubled IndyMac Bank "could face collapse." It did, after a deposit run. Senator Schumer said criticizing his action was akin to blaming "the fire on the guy who called 911." The nation's shareholders would sleep better at night if some Members of Congress enrolled in Arsonists Anonymous.

All of this raises the question: are they trying to make things worse in the hopes of furthering their party's election prospects? Similar suspicions were raised when Nancy Pelosi seemed to inflame her partisan opponents and resist any effort to whip her own caucus on the first failed bailout bill vote. Certainly as the financial crisis has intensified their electoral prospects have brightened.

But if we assume that they "meant no harm" we are left with an equally troubling conclusion: they are reckless and ignorant about the ways in which their words and actions may impact a fragile economy. Or to put it differently, their first consideration is invariably "How do we maximize the public's perception that things are rotten?" rather than "What can we do to contain the conflagration?"

While he may lead the self-described "world's greatest deliberative body", anybody who says this...

"Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It's global warming. It's ruining our country, it's ruining our world. We've got to stop using fossil fuel."

...isn't going to get high scores in the thoughtful rhetoric department.

Related Blue State Blues: Roger Kimball plots "Data points from the Windy City".

Steve Green spots a late entrant to a topic I explored in video form back in May:

Update: J.R. Taylor writes, "Thanks for the first Jon Astley reference I've seen in ages..."

Ed Driscoll.com: Internet-based community organizer in an increasingly demassified postmodern world through the collectively remembered flotsam and jetsam of a once unified pop culture!

All right! All right! this is your captain speaking! Do not rush for the lifeboats...women, children, Red Indians, spacemen, and a sort of idealized version of complete Renaissance Men first!

Extreme Mortman explores "Finger Pointing And Photo Cropping."

The Jawa Report (with an assist from James Pethokoukis of US News & World Report) asks the question of the hour: Is John McCain Trying to Win this Election?

On the flip side Bill Hobbs suggests ten ways that McCain can still salvage things.

Charles Krauthammer says that he has a rule about Hail Mary plays--"You get only two per game":

John McCain, unfortunately, has already thrown three. The first was his bet on the surge -- a deep pass to David Petraeus, who miraculously snared it and ran into the end zone.

Then, seeking a game-changer after the Democratic convention, McCain threw blind into the end zone to a waiting Sarah Palin. She caught the ball. Her subsequent fumbles have taken the sheen off of that play, but she nonetheless invaluably solidifies his Republican base.

When the financial crisis hit, McCain went razzle-dazzle again, suspending his campaign and declaring he'd stay away from the first presidential debate until the financial crisis was solved.

He tempted fate one time too many. After climbing up on his high horse, McCain had to climb down. The crisis unresolved, he showed up at the debate regardless, rather abjectly conceding Obama's mocking retort that presidential candidates should be able to do "more than one thing at once." (Although McCain might have pointed out that while he was trying to do two things, Obama was sitting on the sidelines doing one thing only: campaigning.

You can't blame McCain. In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely (for him) framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady, and cool.

Or as Steve Green puts it, staring at the current Electoral College map, "The word McCain fans are looking for is 'daunting.'"

As Roger L. Simon writes, the big loser in tonight's debate was the MSM, not the least of which for this textbook example of bias by omission spotted by Ace of Spades:

Did Gwen Ifill Ask a Single Question About Energy?
Update: No Questions on Abortion or Guns, Either

I thought it was only CNN that kept the news to themselves. But much like Winston Smith's Ministry of Truth, these days, it's the legacy media as a whole that are designed to bottle up information, rather than disseminate it.

Update: "Watch for a whole new, severe strain of Palin Derangement Syndrome to begin tonight."

The cutline on this Pajamas article asks, "Will a sloshed Stephen Green of Vodkapundit commit more gaffes tonight than the candidates?"

Actually, as much as I've seen Steve drink, I've never seen him sloshed. The man knows how to hold his booze remarkably well.

When I first read about Gwen Ifill's enormous conflict of interest between her upcoming book titled, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama and her role as a debate moderator, I was reminded of a passage in James Piereson's book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, on Theodore White, who wrote his first best-selling The Making of the President book after the 1960 election.

As far as the Ifill scandal today, Liz Cox Barrett of the liberal Columbia Journalism Review, (the house organ of "The Media's Ancien Regime", as Hugh Hewitt memorably dubbed the Columbia Journalism School) writes "it stands to reason" that a book titled, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, and due to be published on January 20th, concurrent with the 44th president being sworn in "would sell better if a certain person is inaugurated on that day", and conservative Ed Morrissey agrees:

Yes, it does, as the "Age of Obama" would have no meaning otherwise. Barack Obama has been on the national stage a shorter period of time than John Edwards, who managed to win only one Senate race and no national contests. Obama at least won his party's nomination for President, but has two fewer years than Edwards in office at the national level. What exactly is the "Age of Obama" if Obama loses in November? And how would that impact Ifill's sales?

It's tough to argue with them--but Ifill is far from the first political hagiographer to write a book beginning with the desired electoral outcome and working backwards. See if this passage on Theodore White from James Piereson's book rings a bell:

A Boston native, White attended Harvard, graduating in 1938 as a classmate of Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., though (on White's telling) the two had little direct contact during their college years. Later, in the 1950s, he came to know John F. Kennedy while he (Kennedy) was the junior senator from Massachusetts and White a political reporter for Collier's magazine. During this period, between the mid-1950s and the beginning of Kennedy's campaign for the presidency in 1960, the two met often in Washington, with White gleaning from Kennedy much inside information about the leading personalities in Washington. From these conversations White conceived the idea of writing a book on a presidential election campaign from beginning to end, with an emphasis on the various personalities contesting for the White House.

The challenge for the journalist in executing such a project was to portray the candidates in such a way that the most attractive personality came out on top--though, of course, the writer would have no control over the eventual outcome. As White later acknowledged in his memoirs, he decided to structure the book almost like a novel with its own hero and villain. Given White's friendship with Kennedy, along with his dislike for Richard Nixon, he would (if events worked out the right way) cast the election as a morality play with Kennedy representing the forces of light and Nixon the forces of darkness. When White began the project, his wife wisely noted that "It's probably a good book if Kennedy wins; but if Nixon wins, it's a dog."

White was so in the tank that Jackie Kennedy, through a reccomendation from Bobby, would personally call him to the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport to transcribe the epochal Life magazine article that would forever bind the late JFK's administration and its tragic ending with Camelot.

(Fortunately, the Blogosphere allows voters a chance to actually see the sausage being made, unlike 1960.)

Update: Well, that's a relief: Iowahawk satirically writes, "Ifill Ethics Commission Clears Ifill". But a far greater scandal emerges: why wasn't the vice presidential nominee of his third party candidacy invited to tonight's debate?

More: Another political author, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon weighs in on Ifill's conflict of interest:

Gwen's a friend; of course, she's a liberal. I hold here in high regard and would expect that she will be fair to both sides. My only other comment is that I would never have moderated a televised debate involving Reagan--and never did--because it would have been perceived as a conflict of interest by liberals and conservatives alike even though I think I would have been balanced. But perception is very important.

Of course, the media as a whole lost the perception battle long before the nation got their fill of Ifill Thursday night.

My "Bonnie & Nixon" video this week was inspired by a quote from Rick Perlstein to Reason magazine while he was promoting his new book, Nixonland. Orrin Judd has a lengthy review of Perlstein's book, here.

Back in the summer of 2004, after a rash of leftwing attacks on cars displaying Bush/Cheney bumperstickers, an enterprising T-shirt manufacturer took to selling shirts that said, "A person of tolerance and diversity keyed my car."

One Minneapolis resident really got a full spray of tolerance and diversity on his cars today. Back in 2004, one could make the argument that the left knew that Kerry was tanking and since politics is their religion, they had to vent their frustration in some way, no matter how childish. But with Obama currently ahead in the polls, this sort of fascistic vandalism is more inexcusable than ever.

Ed Morrissey writes, "The schadenfreude quotient of this story makes it irresistible. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd got stranded by the McCain campaign in Pittsburgh after the campaign revoked her credential for the press section of the campaign airplane in August."

And Hell hath no fury like a MoDo spurned:

"It was disappointing because I didn't think John McCain would ever be as dismissive of the First Amendment as Dick Cheney."

Responding to MoDo's exceptional impersonation of a shrieking Helen Thomas, Ed writes:

Does the First Amendment hinge on Maureen Dowd getting a seat on the McCain campaign jet? Did we enter a time of tyranny because she has to find other travel arrangements? Maybe Dowd should start reporting on Obama's Truth Squad in Missouri, where a campaign actually is attempting to intimidate critics into silence through prosecution. Neither Dowd nor her newspaper seem terribly interested in defending the First Amendment where it counts.

Reporters are not owed a spot on the campaign planes. Newspapers don't have a right to that seat. They can cover the campaigns by purchasing flights on their own if they like. Maureen Dowd stopped being a reporter when she started writing opinion columns, which makes her a strange choice for the Times under any circumstances, and her column on Palin and dinosaurs should have disqualified her from the McCain beat anyway, if the Times had any editorial sense at all.

Enjoy flying coach, Maureen. Try reading the First Amendment between stops.

Of course--spurning MoDo enjoys bipartisan support.

Flash! "October remains the month for political surprises."

Traditionally though the October Surprise was spoken of as a singular event:"Hey--remember when that guy in the seriously redorkulated duck-billed platypus hat leaked Dubya's drunk driving arrest shortly before the 2000 election?" Or the 2003 hit on Arnold Schwarzenegger by the L.A. Times, in which the paper, as James Taranto put it, accused Schwarzenegger of behaving on film sets like Gray Davis supporter Bill Clinton?

As I wrote in November of 2004 though, the Internet seemed to have accelerated both the pace of the news cycle and the sheer number of October surprises:

By the time Halloween rolled around, it felt like daily October surprises: NYTrogate last Monday (and Tuesday, and Wednesday and...); Al Jazeera pulling Osama out of a hat on Friday, 60 Minutes' oldie-but-a-goodie body armor story on Sunday, and I think the Times had some sort of other anti-Bush story on Monday. (The bogus early returns Tuesday afternoon was the final October surprise. But that's a whole other post, as this one is going into extra innings.)

And that was on top of RatherGate, a CBS dirty play that fortunately went awry thanks to a bunch of guys in their umm, pajamas.

Back in 2006, in the wake of multiple hits such as the Washington Post-ginned up Macaca scandal and the Mark Foley scandal, Jim Geraghty wrote:

Could there ever be a better time for the reassuring reappearance of the man who has been in Republican circles longer than I've been alive?

Ladies and gentlemen, my longtime sage source and mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi.

Obi gets straight to the point about the Foley scandal, breaking in the final weeks of the campaign.

"At some point, some Republican is going to come out and say, 'Hey. We've seen this show before, every cycle for the past couple of cycles. Starting in September, there's a bombshell every two or three days for the last six weeks of the campaign, from the AP, from the big three networks, from the New York Times and the Post and Bob Woodward, and it's always in one direction. It's always a bombshell of bad news for the Republicans.'"

Obi doesn't list them, but a right-leaning voter can remember - the infamous fake memos used by Dan Rather, the New York Times' brouhaha over the al-Qaqaa weapons depot, the L.A. Times' story slamming Schwarzenegger, the Bush DUI...

Obi wonders if the voting public is getting inoculated; that late-breaking revelations of scandals about Republicans are becoming too transparent to move voters; that they see these stories as a sympathetic media hawking the wares of the Democrats.

This would be a very timely moment for McCain to do something--for example, a YouTube clip or TV commercial highlighting previous late hits, and let his supporters know that, if the pace of 2004 was any indication, near daily hits will be coming (and already have on his veep nominee). Which would then allow him to say, when the bombs start to drop from the Obama campaign and the media (sorry for the repetition), "You see my friends, I told you this would be starting, just as it does every election cycle." And then, when questioned by the media, simply reply, "Hey, you guys do this to Republicans every four years. Such as..." McCain then fires off the list and adds, "Why should this election be any different?"

But he probably won't. In any case, fasten your seat belts--October's going to be one very bumpy ride.

Los Angeles' city seal may no longer have a cross on it, but those God-fearing Christianists at the L.A. Times seem to have developed a sudden new case of religious fever:

The Los Angeles Times seems to have taken a sudden new interest in biblical study. No, they haven't become religious or anything close to that. Instead, they are microanalyzing the Bible for passages that they think they can use to slam Sarah Palin for running for vice-president.

Wow, when Richard Miniter recently wrote, "In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles", he didn't know the half of it!

Whoops--sorry to go all Mahavishnu Orchestra with the above headline. But the latest PJM Political is now online, providing a timely midweek snapshot of a crucial election week: two days after a spectacular Wall Street meltdown and one day before the critical vice presidential debate.

Tune in here to listen!

This past summer, Rick Perlstein, the author of the new biography called Nixonland, looked back on the period leading up to Richard Nixon's 1968 election and told Reason magazine that in his opinion, "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left", adding:

"It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys--you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was."

It certainly was strange, compared with the nation's politics at the start of the 1960s.

In the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we take a look back at the film, its radical chic times, and its champion--Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who would reject traditional culture for "trash cinema." And we'll also look at Bobby Kennedy's Fascist Moment--and even a Bonnie & Clyde-related excerpt the fourth edition of Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan's A Quick And Dirty Guide To War. Which sounds like one meaty, beaty, big and bouncy little video to me.

Tommy guns and fedoras are optional, of course.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Update: Welcome readers of InstaPundit, the Brothers Judd, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog at NRO, and--appropriately enough--the New Nixon Blog. Please look around, there's lots here we think you'll enjoy.

I remember reading a book on Stanley Kubrick that said that the great director wanted a large circular table in the middle of Dr. Strangelove's war room set, so that it would symbolically appear to audiences that the generals and the president were playing a very high stakes game of poker.

Here's a bluff of another sort:

You know where that very important $700-billion figure came from?

Here's a quote from that Forbes story:

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

They made it up to be sufficiently ginormous to frighten everyone into rapid action.

And it worked.

Not yet.

Allah Pundit has the gory details here:

House Republicans weren't willing to swallow a bitter pill today so they'll swallow a more bitter pill later this week. And guess what? They'll still get killed at the polls in November. Bill Kristol thinks McCain's only chance now is to stop campaigning (again) and come back to D.C. to try to drive through a compromise. If he succeeds, it'll prove his leadership and calm the markets. I don't see how he's supposed to pull that off, though, when the entire Democratic leadership will be primed to whine about how he's only making things worse by being there, is ruining delicate negotiations, etc. If Kristol's serious about solving the crisis and willing to sacrifice electoral gain to do so, there's an easy compromise solution: Have McCain and Obama do some sort of joint appearance, maybe a presser, urging support for a bailout. That'll swing public opinion sufficiently to remove the political incentives to voting no and give Pelosi the 10 votes she needs to pass it now. There's no gain for McCain at the polls in doing so, admittedly, but he's the guy who preaches "country first." Here's his chance.

Howard Fineman of the Obama-cheerleading Newsweek writes, "The Obama Administration began at midnight Sunday"--and at the moment, it's tough to argue with him; though hopefully Obama won't prolong the current financial malaise as long as FDR and Carter did theirs.

"They told me if I voted for John Kerry we'd end up with socialism. They were right!"

The Washington Post says, "Congressional Leaders Announce Breakthrough in Bailout Bill Negotiations":

Congressional leaders and the Bush administration last night struck a historic accord to insert the government deeply into the nation's financial markets, agreeing to spend up to $700 billion to relieve Wall Street of troubled assets backed by faltering home mortgages.

Shouldn't that be "more deeply into the nation's financial markets"? Especially since inserting the government deeply into the nation's financial markets caused all the trouble in the first place.

Individuality is fine--as long as we all do it together.

Right Wing News posits that it as unfortunate as Obama forgetting the name of the soldier on his bracelet was, it was the tone of his response that created the takeaway moment of last night's debate:

And from yesterday's debate: "I've got a bracelet too." A lot of conservatives want to give Obama heat for the fact that he couldn't remember the name on his bracelet, but I actually find that forgivable. Obama was in the hot seat and, at moments like that (at least if you're me), names are the first thing to go. The sin wasn't the memory failure, the sin was that he made the statement in the first place.

Let's start with some context: In connection with his belief that there is no peace and honor without victory, John McCain told the moving story of the moment Matthew Stanley's mother gave McCain Matthew's bracelet and asked him to wear it and, more importantly, to honor and give meaning to Matthew's death by making the Iraq War an American defeat, not an American victory.

Obama, had he wanted to, could have scored some substantive points by immediately saying that we don't honor one man's death by creating more dead, or some such argument. That seemed to be where he was heading, but I tuned out because I was so overwhelmed by his actual response: "I've got a bracelet too."

What is this? Kindergarten? Could anything show more clearly what a selfish, self-centered, shallow man Obama is. McCain is talking about real people, and he's talking about how the beliefs he shares with those real people drive him to his understanding that, both for the good of the nation and for the honor of her troops, America must leave Iraq as a strong, viable nation. It breaks faith with both America and her troops to slink away as Obama so wants to do. This is a deep substantive argument. The bracelet wasn't the central point. It was simply a human-interest lead-in to that point.

And what does Obama say? "I've got a bracelet too." What that means, translated, is "I can't think of an original argument, I don't have a deep emotional story, I don't have sound policy justifications for abandoning Iraq now that we're trembling on the verge of actual and complete success but, 'Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah -- I've got a bracelet too.'" The attitude and ignorance behind the statement was appalling.

If this was just one example, it would be bad enough, but we've seen this before. When Hillary, the darling of huge chunks of American women, self-deprecatingly (and rather charmingly) acknowledges that she grates on some people, Obama snaps back with the condescending "You're likable enough." If I'd been Hillary, I would have marched across the stage and bitten him. So, I suspect, would all of her female followers.

And then when Palin comes on the scene, this man of Indonesia, Hawaii and Chicago suddenly discovers his inner Southerner and, when speaking of Republican policies, comes out with an old Southern expression: "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." At that moment, the remaining chunk of American women who aren't Obama acolytes lunged for their TV screens, teeth bared.

The MSM, no doubt recognizing how damaging this statement, is going to downplay "I've got a bracelet too" in the hope that it doesn't enter the pantheon of memorable moments in debate history. It's therefore our responsibility to make sure that this telling moment into Obama's character does not vanish into the abyss.

Elsewhere, Roger L. Simon explores Obama's Kissinger Blunder.

And Newsbusters opens up the Memory Hole: "Media Fail to Correct Obama's Claim of No Al-Qaeda in Iraq Before Invasion."

Update: Related thoughts here.

More: Biden's gaffe slowly begins to permeate the cocoon: the L.A. Times' campaign blogger writes, "Barack Obama: We'll never forget what's-his-name."

Kyle Smith reviews the new leftwing agitpropumentary on Lee Atwater:

Atwater's painful demise seems to delight the largely left-leaning pundits assessing Atwater's legacy, which inspired Karl Rove among others. Howard Fineman of Newsweek, for instance, says, "Life gets even with you in the end," an ugly comment that sounds a lot like the liberal equivalent of calling AIDS God's punishment for gays.

Mewanwhile, Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria begins his latest article with the following opening sentence: "Will someone please put Sarah Palin out of her agony?"

At the start of 2005, shortly before Newsweek started tossing Korans into toilets and American flags into garbage cans, Fineman wrote:

A political party is dying before our eyes -- and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

Might want to look a bit closer in the mirror, fellas.

Greg Pollowitz writes, "In the debate, Senator Obama laid out his four conditions for passing the bailout bill", "Yet 48 hours earlier, he had five conditions:"

Fifth, we both agree that this financial rescue package should move on its own without any earmarks or other measures. We have different views about the need for other action, but this must be a clean bill.

As Greg writes, "Yeah. . .can't have a clean bill now, can we? Not when there are billions for ACORN at stake."

Or as Glenn Reynolds puts it, "You know, it would be easier for me to believe this was a crisis, if the people in charge were acting like it was a crisis, instead of just an opportunity for graft. Then again, to some of these people, everything is just an opportunity for graft."

Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has the change spam we need today:

Dear Sirs,

Please do not be alarmed at the way I am contacting you, and I trust God you will see your way to assisting me.

I am Mr. Henry Paulson, and I currently serve as Secretary of Treasury in a North American country, the US of A. I am due to be receiving the sum of USD700 billion (seven hundred billions), only the money seems to be held up. I got your name from the girl who runs the computer. This is where I need your help.

As soon as you can, God willing, I will need you to give me the number of your American account where I can wire this sum. For your trouble, as part of the settlement, I will give you the sum of exactly nothing.

Please be well, and I trust in God you will assist me honestly and without delay.

Yours, truly,

Mr. Henry Paulson
USA Secretary of Treasure

Via Steve Green, who also spots a New York Times parody (yes, there is a difference, believe it or not) that hits the mark quite well.

Jennifer Rubin thinks she may have spotted it last night.

"And now we can write: Round 1 in the contest to see who's most in the tank for Obama goes to CNN."

Bob Owens writes, "If he can't handle a simple debate without falling apart, how is he going to handle a Presidency?"

And elsewhere, Michelle Malkin spots the telling gesture of the debate.

Update: Jennifer Rubin asks, "Who Won the Debate? More importantly, who does everyone think won?":

How did they hold up on temperament? Obama seemed peeved, and a number of observers - including Juan Williams and Alex Castellanos -- agreed. McCain was occasionally funny and poked at Obama but showed none of the nastiness or ill-temper which his foes identify.

But the "gotcha" may have been from Obama -- who eight times conceded that McCain was "right" on a point. McCain rushed out a video capturing a number of these.

So how did Obama and McCain fair in the opinion wars? The telling difference: Obama's spinners tended to call it a draw while McCain's group was ecstatic. William Krstol on FOX said "no knockout but on the offense throughout." Nina Easton, also on FOX, criticized Obama -- "something bland and policy-speak" about him she thought. Juan Williams conceded that Obama didn't really successfully tie George W. Bush to Obama.

We'll have more as the night goes on. But for once this week the McCain camp is feeling a spring in their step.

Orrin Judd concludes:

Any analysis has to begin from the fact that the media and the Left have built Senator Obama up so much that a guy who's a mediocre debater at best was widely expected by the electorate to dominate. Thus, he's a loser if their performance was roughly equal and a big loser if you think he had a rough night.

Finally, Steve Green has a mild point of contention with Andrew Sullivan.

While change is an ever-accelerating dynamic, some things always remain the same. Whether it's 1960, 1988, 2000, 2004, or this year, the Republican presidential candidate in an election year can invariably count on plenty of CBS from the Tiffany Network.

As the headline on Jim DeMint's blog says, "What Caused The Economic Crisis? Watch This!"

Viral marketing at its finest!

(Especially since I heard about the site via an email from its author, who says that his next project might be "Measles for McCain"--though that could be a bit of a strain...)

"Is Bill Clinton deliberately undermining Obama?"

Update: Almost a decade and a half ago, Clinton said, "I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans." Now more than ever, judging by the title of this post by Pejman Yousefzadeh.

"Dear Editor," Sarah Palin wrote in 2002. "San Francisco judges forbidding our Pledge of Allegiance? They will take the phrase 'under God' away from me when my cold, dead lips can no longer utter those words."

David Levinson Wilk of Politico claims that "Crossword puzzles heavily favor Democrats"--and he should know:

I am partly to blame.

On Jan. 8, 2005, I purposefully and unapologetically became the first person to ever construct a crossword puzzle for The New York Times that featured this five-letter answer:

OBAMA.

Earlier this week, Steve Schmidt, John McCain's senior campaign adviser, lambasted the Times for being "totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate." The GOP, it seems, is finally catching on to a once-hidden truth:

Crossword puzzles heavily favor Democrats.

According to the puzzle database maintained by Cruciverb.com, ever since that game-changing day in 2005, OBAMA has appeared regularly as an answer in New York Times crossword puzzles. With its wonderfully convenient alternating series of commonly used vowels and consonants, OBAMA has been the answer to the clues "Senator who wrote 'Dreams From My Father,'" "Future senator who delivered the 2004 Democratic convention keynote address" and "Presidential candidate born in Hawaii."

But what about MCCAIN? Shockingly, not once has MCCAIN been an answer in a crossword in the New York Times, The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. No MCCAIN, no JOHNMCCAIN, no SENATORMCCAIN, not even his most recent sobriquet, the presidential-sounding JOHNSMCCAINIII.

Gee, now there's a shock.

For most on the left, it's always 1968, the summer of Mobius Loops, and the year of the hippie poseur. Not to mention their only marginally more grown-up appearing peers, such as RFK, who said, "The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow." But Edward Blum writes that to voting rights activists, "It Will Always Be 1965."

Kevin D. Williamson writes, "We've heard much from the media about CDOs, CDSs, and other previously obscure abbreviations. But we should be hearing more about this acronym: ACORN":

Imagine if the housing bubble hadn't burst, but there hadn't been all those dodgy subprime loans made and then securitized. We'd be reading stories about how America is having a wonderful housing boom but the poor and minorities are being left out. There's lots of greed and stupidity in this story, but we shouldn't ignore the fact that a big part of what is wrong comes from bad public policy designed to encourage homeownership, particularly among the poor. Unintended consequences are not to be denied.

But we're not going to hear much about ACORN's role in all this, or, by extension, Senator Obama's.

Or as Robert Stowe England wrote in 1993:

QUIETLY, behind the scenes, the Clinton Administration is preparing for the biggest regulatory crackdown of recent years. Attorney General Janet Reno is linking up with banking regulators and with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to end the supposed epidemic of discrimination against minorities in making home loans. The implications for society at large are ominous.

Paging Cassandra. Miss Cassandra to the red courtesy phone, please.

Update: Robert Bidinotto has a recent post chockablock with links, quotes, and updates titled, "Why the Bubble Burst."

Hey, 57 states, 40 days 'til new president's sworn in, FDR on TV in '29--forget it, they're rolling. (Even if the teleprompter isn't.)

Kathryn Jean Lopez posts an update from Sen. Jim DeMint's office:

We've just been alerted that despite House Democrats relenting on extending bans on offshore drilling and oil shale in the continuing resolution (CR) appropriations bill, Democrat Senate Leader Harry Reid has decided to sneak an extension of the oil shale ban through as Congress fights over the financial bailout. Oil shale in America's West is estimated to hold be between 800 billion and 2 trillion barrels of oil -- that is more than three times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia alone.

Here is the text of Reid's proposed new ban on oil shale, that he is trying to add as an amendment to the CR or move seperately as a "stimulus" package, or we should say an anti-stimulus package if this is included.

Sec 1602 continues ban on oil shale. The language follows:

SEC. 1602. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, including section 152 of division A of H.R. 2638 (110th Congress), the Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2009, the terms and conditions contained in section 433 of division F of Public Law 110-161 shall remain in effect for the 19 fiscal year ending September 30, 2009.

It would be an insult to all Americans if Senate Democrats worked to bailout Wall Street while damaging our future prosperity by banning development of vast energy reserves in oil shale.

Which may help to explain this headline:

Liberal Democrats vow moratorium on offshore drilling to return in '09

Meanwhile, as Glenn Reynolds notes:

AND YOU THOUGHT JOE BIDEN WAS UNFRIENDLY TO COAL: "Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon."

Will he be advising Obama on energy policy?

Certainly in spirit.

The Northeast Corridor is one giant blue state, so presumably they'll be OK with paying high energy prices come the winter.

Newsbusters' Brent Baker writes, "Couric Scolds McCain for Palin's 'Great Depression' Scare -- Which Couric Proposed to Palin."

And meanwhile, Joe Biden's Pangea of gaffes this week continues to pay dividends--as blogger "Right Wing Professor" noted, Katie never batted an eye during Joe Biden's wacky Depression-era-flashback on Monday.

Mark Levin writes, "I hope McCain and his advisors have thought this through beyond today and tomorrow, gimmick or no gimmick":

Ok, let's say the debate is suspended by both camps. Then what? Bush is pushing hard for some kind of massive bailout deal, and will do so in his speech tonight. The conservatives in Congress are resisting all of this - and good for them. McCain says we have to get something done and work together, which means some kind of massive deal that is unlikely to satisfy conservatives. I hope McCain and his advisors have thought this through beyond today and tomorrow, gimmick or no gimmick.

Jonah Goldberg adds, "Mark makes a good point. If McCain does go to Congress and helps rally reluctant Republicans (and they really are reluctant). It will in effect become the McCain bailout, at least as far as conservatives are concerned."

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl has some advice--and who amongst us doesn't, these days?--for McCain:

Let the Left laugh, with Obama saying he wants to continue campaigning and debating, I'd do two things were I McCain.

1) Say you can understand Obama's point of view as he has never been engaged in anything this serious on Capitol Hill, or anywhere else.

and 2) Volunteer to let his VP nominee sit in for him against Obama on Friday.

Yes, I realize the media is still all about Palin - who cares. I'd make the offer.

Maybe Palin would be better off debating this bitter resident of Pennsylvania.

Update: Welcome Riehl World View readers; check out this interesting chess game being played out in the Senate, with Harry Reid being forgainst John McCain returning to the Senate within the space of 24 hours, as Ed Morrissey of Hot Air notes:

[Reid] wanted McCain on the hook so that Reid could blame McCain for the political fallout. When McCain called Reid's bluff -- and that's what appears to have happened here -- Reid did what Reid always does: retreat.

I think Reid fears more than just the idea that McCain will "risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation's economy." What Reid fears is that McCain will return to lead the Republican effort to reach a compromise, and the Senate and House GOP will let him do it. If McCain takes ownership of the bailout effort and manages to get his suggestions on limiting executive compensation and so on as part of the finished product, he will be able to trot McCain-Dodd on the campaign trail as yet another reform he's accomplished by working across the aisle. And in a time of crisis, no less.

And what will Obama be able to say? He gave a couple of speeches and raised cash for himself while McCain went to work for the nation.

If that's what McCain and the Republicans have in mind, this could be the coup of the entire campaign. While Obama went out and sucked up to fundraisers, McCain built the bipartisan compromise that saved the American financial system. If he succeeds, McCain will have trumped Obama on what should have been the Democrats' best issue.

This post started with a quote from Mark Levin hoping that "McCain and his advisors have thought this through beyond today and tomorrow, gimmick or no gimmick." It seems--at least to some extent--that they most certainly have.

Richard Miniter calls McCain's campaign suspension "a shrewd move for the McCain campaign", if not necessarily an example of "country first."--Read the whole thing.

Details at Hot Air; politically, it seems like an interesting move, somewhat reminiscent of this earlier time out. But how will voters--not to mention the junior senator from Illinois--respond?

Update: Well, that was fast:

However a senior Obama campaign official said Obama "intends to debate. The debate is on."

An Obama campaign official said the Democratic presidential candidate called McCain this morning to suggest a joint statement of principles.

McCain called back this afternoon and suggested returning to Washington.

Obama is willing to return to Washington "if it would be helpful." But Obama intends to debate on Friday, an official said.

And thus McCain's next YouTube ad writes itself.

Sky News: "Singer Bette Midler Quits Touring To Help Save The Planet."

Glad to see that at least one celebrity has taken my advice after Al Gore's Live Earth concert last year:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

As Daltry told the The Sun, "I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel". Each concert will require massive transportation efforts involving jet planes and tractor-trailers, hundreds of thousands of watts of electricity to power the lighting and sound gear, and the deforestation required to print at least couple of hundred thousand souvenir programs (and many more no doubt, for sale afterwards). And heck, just think of all of the methane emissions coming from the stadiums' rest rooms, where, no matter how much the audience promises, the Sheryl Crow Rule is incredibly difficult to enforce.

But in the minds of its participants, a cause like Live Earth is worth it. But a generic, everyday, run of the mill concert shouldn't be. So go out with a bang, rock stars--and then, don't be hypocritical puritans; take the sort of pledge that even the Goracle won't.

More news regarding energy and an even bigger celebrity, here.

Last week, Ace had some thoughts on polls:

We haven't lost -- but we are behind.

Four or five twists to go, and we need two or three of those twists to go our way.

BTW, I am not getting into the constant these-polls-are-wrong/oversampled/etc. game. I played that all through 2006 and wound up looking like a chump.

My general take is to buy polls -- especially as regards direction, if not exact numbers -- unless there's some clear problem with them.

The constant complaining that any poll I don't like must be flawed is a mug's game.

I think Ace is right about the polls--but I think we can make an exception for this one.

When an already closed loop is hermetically sealed:

Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase "God damn America." Wright's comments were widely reported and widely discussed beginning with an ABC News report six months ago. Barack Obama even had to give a much-publicized speech because of those words, and others. But the newspaper of record has never seen fit to publish Wright's quote in its news pages. Until today.

If my search of the Nexis database is correct, Wright's quote first appeared in the Times in a column by Bill Kristol on March 17. It was mentioned again in a column by Maureen Dowd on March 23. It appeared in an editorial on April 26. It appeared in a column by the public editor on May 4, and also in an article in the Week in Review section on that same day.

But never in the front section of the paper. Until now. As with the April 26 editorial, today's mention of "God damn America" is in the context of reporting on attack ads targeting Obama. But still, it's there, on page one, for the first time.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama's Wikipedia page being vandalized highlights the excesses of the sclerotic Gray Lady's polar opposite--How's that "anybody can edit it" thing working out for Wikipedia?

The hacking of Obama's Wiki page puts him in interesting company, alongside Sarah Palin, Mike Love, Mike Bloomberg, and former RFK associate, John Seigenthaler, Sr--and no doubt, many more who have entries within The Faith-Based Encyclopedia.

Related: At City Journal, Adam Thierer explores both closed and open information models and writes, "The Internet Isn't Dying--On the contrary, the Web is just catching its second wind."

Jonah Goldberg spots the media playing the race card on Obama:

I have no doubt that the Bradley effect is real. But the Bradley effect does not reflect racism; it captures voters' fear of appearing racist. There's no reason to assume those who lie to pollsters are racists. But for Obama supporters and the media, poll results are some kind of sacred, binding covenant. If voters don't keep their promise, the media have no problem seeing racism at work.

The media's obsession with race in this election is probably fueling the Bradley effect. Repeating over and over that voting against Obama is racist only makes non-racist people embarrassed to admit that they plan to vote for McCain.

Another rich irony is that the only racists who matter in this election are the ones in the Democratic Party. News flash: Republicans aren't voting for the Democratic nominee because they're Republicans. A new AP-Yahoo News poll claims that racial prejudice is a significant factor among the independents and Democrats Obama needs to win, specifically among Hillary Clinton's primary voters. According to the pollsters' statistical modeling, support for Obama may be as much as 6 percentage points lower than it would be if there were no white racism.

I'm skeptical about those findings, as well as the overemphasis on race generally. But to the extent that race is a factor, here's the richest irony of all: Obama's problem is with precisely those voters the Democratic Party claims to fight for, working- and middle-class white folks. Of course, Democrats can't openly complain that their own vital constituency is racist.

I don't know--Nora Ephron's complaint on that topic was pretty darn out in the open during the primaries.

Update: As is this article from Monday's edition of the typically uber-liberal (if I recall the tone of the paper correctly from when I was living in the Delaware Valley until a decade ago) Philadelphia Daily News.

As Kathryn Jean Lopez writes, this election wouldn't be the same without Joe Biden. In addition to the aforementioned Barack-Olian Cluster-Gaffe--which actually snowballed to true classic proportions after Joe's appearance on CBS last night, this was Joe's other moment of greatness from his interview with Katie Couric, transcribed by the Politico's Ben Smith:

Joe Biden's denunciation of his own campaign's ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.

He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed," Biden told Couric. "He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

As Reason's Jesse Walker footnotes it: "And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, 'Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?'"

Actually, you'd probably be wondering what happened to Felix, but still: If Sarah Palin had said this, CBSNBCABCCNNMSNBC would be running it on a never-ending loop today.

Update: "At any rate, it looks like Biden learned his history from Faber College." Hey--knowledge is good.

More: "What's funnier is that Katie Couric didn't catch it."

I think this might be the first presidential campaign gaffe equivalent of a music mash-up, as multiple unforced errors by both a presidential and vice-presidential nominee get chopped down into a fine, fine puree by the patented Obama campaign's Super Gaffe-O-Matic '76 blending machine. First up, via InstaPundit, here's Joe Biden on the 6:30 PM CBS News, complete with video:

Barack Obama's running mate says a campaign ad that mocked Republican presidential candidate John McCain as an out-of-touch, out-of-date computer illiterate was "terrible" and would not have been done had he known about it.

Obama, McCain's Democratic rival, launched the ad earlier this month, part of an aggressive push to slow McCain's rise in the polls after he chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate. It included unflattering footage of Sen. McCain at a hearing in the early '80s, wearing giant glasses and an out-of-style suit, interspersed with shots of a disco ball, a clunky phone, an outdated computer and a Rubik's Cube.

"He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer, can't send an e-mail, still doesn't understand the economy, and favors $200 billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class," the ad says.

Asked about the negative tone of the campaign, and this ad in particular, during an interview broadcast Monday by the "CBS Evening News," Obama's running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, said he disapproved of it.

"I thought that was terrible, by the way," Biden said.

Asked why it was done, he said: "I didn't know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we'd have never done it."

And here's Biden a few hours later:

I was asked about an ad I'd never seen, reacting merely to press reports. As I said right then, I knew there was nothing intentionally personal in the criticism of Senator McCain's views which look backwards not forwards and are out of touch with the new economic challenges we face today. Having now reviewed the ad, it is even more clear to me that given the disgraceful tenor of Senator McCain's ads and their persistent falsehoods, his campaign is in no position to criticize, especially when they continue to distort Barack's votes on an issue as personal as keeping kids safe from sexual predators.

The Obama camp has been thugishly issuing threats on a surprisingly routine basis to metaphorically break the knees of his critics on the right, so presumably, his veep feels equally threatened to stay in line, lest he face a painful Luigi Vercotti-style end to his nomination. (Which "notorious conservative blogger" Glenn Reynolds has been not predicting right from the start!)

Or perhaps the Obama campaign's PR department just threw caution to the wind and got a quick press release out there, safe in the assumption that Biden likely can't remember what the heck comes out of his perpetual motion machine of a mouth from one moment to the next.

Related: Al Qaeda's dreaded Weather Weapon!

Stephen Spruiell reminds us that "While all eyes are diverted to the mess on Wall Street, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are attempting to extend the ban on offshore drilling, which is set to expire October 1."

Roger L. Simon pens an "Open Letter to My Fellow Jews: The Democratic Party is not your religion (or anybody's)."

"We may never know how the Unicorn Rider alienated Jake Tapper so badly, but it sure has amusing results."

Doug Ross has your one-stop Palin Derangement Syndrome Database to keep up with who's said which smear.

Meanwhile, The Jawa Report has a lengthy and detailed post on "Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated 'Grassroots' Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them." Scott Johnson of Power Line describes The Jawa Report's report thusly:

Rusty Shackleford has posted the results of his and his Jawa team's investigation to determine the source of smears directed toward Sarah Palin. The smears include false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views. Shackleford's research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated the rumors, that the rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure and that the firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, Shakleford's evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign.

More from Ace of Spades.

What if it works? Well, Jim Geraghty has one forecast of what the next two years could look like.

On Saturday, Jennifer Rubin wrote:

The McCain camp calls out -- by name -- another reporter (this one from TIME) and goes to far as to quote her snide response when provided with information which contradicts her storyline. Ouch. And the Post's media critic isn't any better-neatly ignoring that the basis of the McCain ad in question was the Post.

And then, yowser, the McCain camp dares the Post to call itself "not credible." I don't know about the campaign against Barack Obama but I could watch this duel for awhile.

Well, here comes Round Two, featuring Smokin' Steve Schmidt, teeing off on the New York Times:

He's right of course (though as Allahpundit notes, "By what Orwellian definition of the term is the guy who co-wrote the McCain-Feingold bill a 'First Amendment absolutist'?"), but for anybody who paid attention to either of these stories from 2004, it's not exactly news, is it?

As yet, as another chapter in the ultimate love affair gone sour unfurls, it will be interesting to watch how the press reports the attacks on its credibility (or lack thereof) from a politician it once feted.

Related: "Hi. I'm NBC and I approved this ad."

One of the running jokes in the 1990s satire Wag The Dog is that "there is no B-3 bomber."

Start worrying, Albania: there is one on the way, apparently.

(Though that could change come January, of course.)

Progress of a sort, from Charlie Rangel: with his latest in a lifetime of ad hominems, at least he's no longer calling a Republican a Nazi.

At Pajamas Media, Katherine Berry notes that "The media gives celebs a pass on ugly rants -- as long as they bash the right people":

The true irony behind the left's united decision to overlook [Sandra] Bernhard's racist ravings is that, by doing so, they've given up their strongest rallying point: something Slate's John Dickerson called "the politics of umbrage" back when Hillary was still in the race.

A reporter will never go wrong at a Clinton or Obama press conference by asking: "Senator, what about the latest outrage?" The question is always apt, because taking umbrage and responding to it has become the chief daily business of the Democratic campaign.

Now, however, Hollywood -- the darling of the left -- is the source of the umbrage, and the resulting silence among the liberals is deafening. The effect is much like Dorothy and crew's stunned silence in The Wizard of Oz when the curtain pulled back to reveal the "wizard" as a gnarly little old man.

Only this time what the curtain has revealed is a far more gruesome sight: the true face of Hollywood, no longer wearing Al Jolson's blackface paint, but just as racist as ever.

Read the whole thing.

Are you inexperienced?

I've been showing my students a video on the history of presidential debates that Chris Matthews and Tom Brokaw did in 2004 before the Bush-Kerry debates. It's a fun retrospective of the memorable moments from all the presidential and vice-presidential debates up to then. I was just listening to Matthews and Quayle rehash the Dan Quayle-Lloyd Bentsen debate. Brokaw pointed out that Brit Hume twice asked Quayle a question about what he'd do if he succeeded to the office. Then Brokaw said that he felt that Quayle hadn't really answered the question the first two times and so he asked it again. And it was that third time that led Quayle to point out that he had had the same number of years in Congress that John F. Kennedy had had by 1960. And then Lloyd Bentsen unleashed his devastating riposte that he "knew John Kennedy and you're no John Kennedy."

Of course, Bentsen didn't really know JFK, but he knew that the pre-Blogosphere mass media would happily cover for him. More from Betsy Newmark:

I was just wondering what the chances are that any reporter this year would, in the presidential debates, would ask Barack Obama three times a question about whether he was prepared after three and a half years in the Senate to be president. After all Quayle had had four years in the House and eight years in the Senate in 1988 and people considered him unprepared to be vice president. Yet, Obama with his unremarkable record in the Senate, half of which he's spent on the road campaigning, is not getting that question over and over. And Charlie Gibson isn't asking Obama if he didn't have a moment of pause wondering if he was really ready to be president before he decided to run.

Funny how standards change back and forth, isn't it?

Indeed.^TM

David Burge recently quipped, "When America's Communities Need Organizing, America's Community Organizers Will Be There to Organize Them." The global village? Eh. As Jennifer Rubin writes, "Solidarity on Standing Up To Iran? Not in the Obama Camp:"

Apparently, the Obama camp and its allies on the left have higher priorities than a showing of bipartisan solidarity on an issue they claim to care about. Whatever drama surrounds the Clintons had ripped through the Jewish community, dashed a showing of bipartisan support, and given Ahmadinejad a moral victory.

But Barack Obama may have been the biggest loser on a number of fronts.

Obama is after all struggling to overcome skepticism in the Jewish community. His past affiliation with Palestinian groups, his flip-flop on an "Undivided Jerusalem," his coterie of advisors who have made troubling comments regarding Israel or America Jews have given pause to some Jews, the vast majority of whom have voted Democratic in presidential elections. The fact that partisan politics by Obama's allies -- and perhaps his own campaign -- submarined an event in defense of both U.S. and Israeli interests will not go unnoticed. Many will ask: "Is bumping Palin off the stage more important than standing up to Ahmadinejad?" It seems so.

On a broader level, Obama's claim to fame is his ability -- how can we forget -- to organize his community. His dismal failure here, indeed his role in wrecking a community protest, doesn't speak well of his ability to bring people together for a common purpose.

Roger L. Simon adds, "There is a Yiddish word for this -- schande."

Stuart Taylor writes, "I no longer trust the major newspapers or television networks to provide consistently accurate and fair reporting and analysis of all the charges and countercharges." Me too--but I arrived at that point four years ago.

Exhibit A: Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. Ed Morrissey writes:

I'm going to start this post by noting that I avidly read Kurtz' media blog, and consider it one of the best continuing analyses of both traditional and new media. I believe that Howard usually tries to approach this task without bias, and mostly succeeds, although he has certainly laid more that a few eggs (and who among us has not?). So when I tell you that Howard is talking out of his hat, I say it with respect and affection.

Why do I say that? His own newspaper has twice reported the relationship between Raines and Obama, and on one of those occasions, Raines was their source:

Read the rest, and then read Cuffy Meigs, who has a video of the "Most Racist Ad EVER ... No, THIS Is ... Wait, THIS One ..."

Finally, Glenn Reynolds asks:

Meanwhile, if Obama is President, will Time regard every criticism of his administration as racist?

No--as long as it's a writer at Time that's making it.

From the Obama's campaign's latest email to his supporters:

More than 600,000 Americans have lost their jobs since January. Home foreclosures are skyrocketing, and home values are plunging. Gas prices are at an all-time high, and we're still spending more than $10 billion every month on a war in Iraq that should never have been waged.

Obama, back in June:

CNBC's John Harwood: So could the (high) oil prices help us?

Barack Obama: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money in their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more rapidly, particularly U.S. automakers...

Or as the president of Fredonia once said, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

(Video of Obama being foregainst high gas prices, here.)

Perception:

Percentage of Americans, according to Gallup, who believe we're in a recession: 38 percent.

Percentage of Americans, according to Gallup, who believe we're in an economic depression: 23 percent.

Reality:

"The second-quarter growth rate for the U.S. economy was revised upward, to 3.3 percent."

Were the preceding two quarters pretty lousy? Yeah, .9 percent in 2008's first quarter and -.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. But the preceding two quarters, the economy grew 4.8 percent each.

Of course, in politics, as with the legacy media (but I repeat myself), perception invariably trumps reality.

Meanwhile, James Pethokoukis lists four ways to make bad news worse. So invariably, watch for these to begin to be implemented. Obama/Smoot '08!

As Rich Lowry writes, "The enduring scandal of the McCain campaign is that it wants to win"; such determination has already ended one love affair:

A crucial turning point in the presidential race came when the McCain campaign ended its candidate's habitual informal interactions with the press. The area of the McCain campaign plane where a couch had been installed so the Arizonian could hold court with journalists was cut off with a dark curtain, marking the end of an era.

Since 2000, John McCain had thrived on his irrepressible chattiness with the press, talking about anything reporters wanted for as long as they would listen. The press loved the access and avoided "gotcha" coverage, letting McCain explain any seeming gaffes. The arrangement worked beautifully for both sides -- until McCain became the Republican presidential nominee.

Suddenly, he wasn't afforded the same old courtesy from reporters, and he had to go about the grim business of driving a daily message. With the end of the running bull sessions, a trial separation began with the press that became a divorce that became a feud.

The enduring scandal of the McCain campaign is that it wants to win. The press had hoped for a harmless, nostalgic loser like Bob Dole in 1996. In a column excoriating Republicans for historically launching successful attacks against Democratic presidential candidates in August, Time columnist Joe Klein excepted Bob Dole -- not mentioning that Dole had been eviscerated by Clinton negative ads before August ever arrived.

The press turned on McCain with a vengeance as soon as he mocked Barack Obama as a celebrity. Its mood grew still more foul when the McCain campaign took offense at Obama's "lipstick on a pig" jab. "The media are getting mad," according to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz. "Stop the madness," urged Time's Mark Halperin, exhorting his fellow journalists to fight back against the McCain campaign's manufactured outrage.

The lipstick controversy indeed represented a silly bit of grievance-mongering. But had the Obama camp's tendentious interpretation of Bill Clinton's "fairy tale" put-down as a racial slight generated similar push-back from the media? Had Obama's ridiculous depiction of Geraldine Ferraro as a quasi-racist? Had Obama's repeated contention -- with no evidence -- that Republicans were attacking him for looking different?

The media have made it gospel that McCain is attacking Obama dishonestly. Of course, campaign advertisements are the last place to look for a dispassionate rendition of the facts. McCain's ads are no different. But they are no worse than Obama's spots.

There's no doubt that McCain came to play, but up against the Chicago Way, is he really prepared to fight to win?

Update: Somewhat like the many cynical, intelligent journalists who get that classic deer in the headlights look when asked to explain the worldview of their fellow staff, Adam Nagourney of the New York Times just can't seem to figure out why on earth John McCain is less chummy with the press these days.

Jay Nordlinger explores "the sheer hatred that Palin has aroused":

"I am almost 60 and come from Massachusetts. In all my years, I have never seen anything like this, and don't want to see it ever again. I have a friend who is both feminist and left-leaning. I asked her why they hate Palin so much. She said, 'Because she's had it all: family, career. And she did it without a man like Bill Clinton helping her. She did it on her own.'"

I have said it before: Hillary Clinton's husband was president of the United States. Sarah Palin's works the night shift in an oil field. Who is the feminist hero? Bien sûr.

I myself have a tale to relate. An episode left me kind of shaken, honestly. Last week, I was talking to a friend of mine -- a very warm and humane woman. We've been friends for years. I had been away, and we hadn't talked politics -- but then, we never do. We never had. She's a liberal, of course -- virtually everyone here in NYC is. And I never, ever bring up politics (with pretty much anyone -- not worth the trouble) (and, of course, I do it professionally).

But she said to me, out of the blue, "What do you think of Sarah Palin?" And while I was drawing breath to answer, she said, "I hate her."

That kind of took my breath away -- because this friend of mine is no hater. But she said it with firm, horrible conviction. She said it with true emotion in her eyes. Frankly, I was too taken aback to reply, other than to say, "Well, my feeling is the exact opposite."

I can see how you might disagree with Governor Palin -- she's a conservative, after all. I can see how you might find her unprepared even for the vice-presidency. But hate? Hate a woman who rose from a modest background to be governor of her state? Who is obviously a warm, civic-minded, talented mother of five?

Hate?

It must be abortion, religion, and culture. If she were pro-choice, went to a mainline church (only on Christmas and Easter), and didn't hunt, she'd be okay. At least less attacked. But then, she wouldn't be herself, would she?

The advertising tagline for George Clooney's 2005 Good Night And Good Luck, one of those exceedingly rare Hollywood movies about McCarthyism, was "We will not walk in fear of one another"--but there are always exceptions.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin notes, "The Associated Press refuses to assist federal investigators trying to find the hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's private e-mail account"; which of course recalls this seminal moment in transnational journalistic ethics--or the lack thereof.

After the 2004 presidential election, the left started billing themselves as "The Reality-Based Community"--as opposed to those faith-based Christianist God worshipers on the other side of the aisle.

And yet, the left isn't above asking a higher power if He'd be willing to invoke a little smiting of his own from time to time...

(Earlier vlogulations found here.)

If you missed it on XM, the latest PJM Political is now online. Stay tuned 'til the end, when host Steve Green and I chart a course towards the Delta Quadrant in the final minutes of the show!

Yesterday, Roger L. Simon asked, "Is Obama the most conservative presidential candidate of our time?" Certainly the most reactionary, and his veep nominee wants to set the Wayback Machine to about 1934. But then, the day after "Markets Crash, Media Hysterical, Democrats Thrilled", Joe's far from the only person on the left who's longing for the days of FDR and breadlines. Or maybe Schumervilles.

"Who knew that back in the late 1990s, the folks at Free Republic were helping collect material for Obama supporters a decade later..."

As I mentioned on PJTV earlier today, as much I love having 500 channels to choose from via my satellite dish and, according to Technorati, 113 million blogs out there, the amount of information and opinion and the unending pace at which it's cranked out, makes it very easy to lose perspective. In a sense, a cable channel like CNBC, as great as it can be, puts an emphasis on the rapid speed of the financial markets, when for most individual investors, they're far better off (NOTE: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. CONSULT YOUR OWN FINANCIAL ADVISOR. INSERT OBLIGATORY SEC WARNINGS HERE. POST NO BILLS. DO NOT EAT PASTE, DO NOT RUN WITH SCISSORS.) essentially buying a few decent mutual funds and hanging onto them for a decade or so, rather than buying, selling, and trading like mad.

The above headline comes from a 1979 Business Week cover story which electroplated then current trends and assumed that they would run indefinitely into the future. At the time of its writing, the Dow closed at about 975, in the midst of the last days of the Jimmy Carter administration's stagflation, culminating in double digit unemployment, interest rates, and inflation, as the above ad from that era highlights.

When I was preparing for PJTV today, I came across this PBS article, which quoted from its coverage of "Black Monday", the stock market correction of October 1987. At the time, the Dow was at 2,200, and the dropped 500 points. Note the end-of-the-world tone from 20 years ago, as PBS attempted to attack the economic policies of Ronald Reagan, and perhaps in its collective subconscious, longed for the days of Jimmy Carter--if their writers even remembered the gloom of that period at all. (Of course, a decade later, President Clinton was following the basic concepts of Reaganomics--and essentially bragging about it ("We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?", presumably much to PBS's chagrin.)

How long will today's economic woes last? Well, check out this CNN article quoting from Alan Greenspan, who goes from stating that Wall Street is in the midst of "a once-in-a-century type of financial crisis"--but then adds:

"Indeed, it will continue to be a corrosive force until the price of homes in the United States stabilizes," Greenspan said. He predicted that would not happen until early 2009, and said the odds of U.S. recession have gone up in recent months.

So despite the doom and destruction tone of the MSM (but then, when is it otherwise, when the GOP is in the White House, particularly during an election year?), I wouldn't start heading for the ledge just yet.

Update: Well, here's one way to liven up an otherwise gloomy day of financial reporting!

Elsewhere: "See me after class."

Found via Hugh Hewitt, John H. Taylor Spots Salon's Gary Kamiya allowing his Palin Derangement Syndome to lead him into an astonishing bit of hyperbole [After the Jill Greenberg meltdown, why is that astonishing?--Ed Good point]:

If Palin catapults McCain to victory, it will be revealed to be the most powerful and enduring force in American politics. And that fact will raise serious questions about the viability of American democracy itself...

As opposed to a tyro Senator who has yet to complete his first term in office and unlike Palin has zero executive experience? (Oh wait, other than running his campaign. Harold Stassen and Lyndon Larouche, eat your hearts out!)

Riehl World View quotes the AP:

John McCain leads Barack Obama by 23 points among rural voters and by 13 points with voters age 65 and over, according to an AP-GfK Poll of likely voters.

And as Dan Riehl notes, "And that's mostly before the 'he doesn't use a computer' ad has really started to play."

Given that senior citizens historically tend to vote in wider numbers than the MTV "Rock The Vote" crowd, this seems like a pretty enormous audience for Obama to alienate.

As Noel Sheppard writes, "Lib Photographer Admits Making McCain Look Sinister for Mag Cover", quoting from the photographer in question, Jill Greenberg:

I am a pretty hard core Democrat. Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me.

No--as long as it's understood that the magazine is taking sides in this election. But then, who isn't these days?

Update: Bumped to top, to include this post from Gateway Pundit, who has a link to Greenberg's homepage, which currently has a rotating series of vile Photoshopped and crudely captioned images of McCain. Now that's dispassionate freelance photojournalism in action!

But more than that, it's also worth flashing back to this April post from Jim Geraghty regarding the far left's meltdown over Hillary Clinton, and this article from last year by Noemie Emery on what was said by the left about President Reagan near the end of his second term. Both of which help to place the burgeoning McCain Derangement Syndrome displayed by self-professed "hard-core Dems" such as Greenberg into sharp perspective, and illustrate that there was nothing out of the ordinary about George W. Bush's presidency to set the left off over the last eight years. He was simply yet another in an endless series of political enemies of the far left who needed to be destroyed. That's valuable governing knowledge for the next Republican (heck, maybe even moderate Democrat) in the White House, whether he's sworn into office this January, or four or eight years hence.

More: Gerard Vanderluen has additional Photoshopped images of McCain that Greenberg has run on her site, along with a press release from Atlantic editor James Bennet:

"We stand by the respectful image of John McCain that we used on our cover, and we expect to be judged by it. We were not aware of the manipulated and dishonest images Jill Greenberg had taken until this past Friday.

When we contract with photographers for portraits, we don't vet them for their politics--instead, we assess their professional track records. Based on the portraits she had done of politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and her work for publications like Time, Wired, and Portfolio, we expected Jill Greenberg, like the other photographers we work with, to behave professionally.

Jill Greenberg has obviously not done that. She has, in fact, disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain."

As Gerard writes, "It has been my experience that if you have to get PR to push out statements on a Sunday, you know you are in trouble. Developing..."

The Anchoress compares and contrasts the questions that Charlie Gibson asked Sarah Palin last week, versus the softballs he pitched to Barack Obama in June. And Newsbusters goes four years back into the memory hole, and reviews Gibson's equally softball Q&A with John Edwards.

Boston Globe: Don't trust the Boston Globe! (At least when it comes to reporting on John McCain.)

Brian Maloney, the "Radio Equalizer", catches former Air America hostess Randi Rhodes calling Sarah Palin a child molester:

She's the woman who shows up at the kid's birthday party and starts opining about everything from politics to lawn care. This is the woman that knows it all. Will shout you down, will get revenge on you. That's who she is.

She's friends with all the teenage boys. You have to say no when your kids say, 'can we sleep over at the Palin's? No! NO!'

(Click over to Brian's site for audio of Rhodes.)

At least she's back to demonizing Republicans. Back in early April, when we last mentioned Rhodes, she was caught on videotape calling Democrats Geraldine Ferraro "David Duke in drag", and Hillary Clinton, "A big f***ing whore, too." As Jim Geraghty wrote at the time:

In and of itself, it's shocking, but it's otherworldly when we think about what Hillary Clinton has meant to liberals for most of the past sixteen years.

Maybe Bill Richardson owes James Carville money, because that would help explain the bitter jihad the former Clinton strategist seems to be on, so relentlessly decrying the New Mexico Governor as "Judas" that Richardson stopped doing media appearances. It didn't take much for Obama-backing General McPeak to declare Bill Clinton the equivalent of Joe McCarthy. And if you've read any Hillary vs. Obama thread on a liberal blog lately, you know that there have been friendlier back-and-forth exchanges in snakepits.

There's something vaguely reassuring about all this, from the view of sitting on the right. It reveals to conservatives that the nastiness exhibited in our earlier disagreements with these folks was never personal; these people are clearly nasty to anyone who disagrees with them. Geraldine Ferraro's long service to the Democratic party means nothing to many Obama backers; she's a racist, "David Duke in drag," as Rhodes put it. I'm sure Senator Patrick Leahy thought his decades of work on the left side of the aisle had bought him some street cred from feminists, but no, he was called sexist when he called on Hillary to leave the race.

Hillary gets called a "monster" by Obama's surrogates; Hillary's surrogates wonder out loud if Obama ever sold drugs. Today Clinton surrogate Ed Rendell speculates that Americans know only half the story of Barack Obama. Day in, day out, in this race it continues.

And while the far left's media mavens continue to wallow in madness, their more moderate establishment liberal counterparts are victims of narcissism, as Roger L. Simon writes.

Jake Tapper (the anti-Charlie Gibson at ABC) explores "The Isotoner campaign":

Like any number of Democratic candidates before him -- Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is once again declaring that he is going to take off the gloves and fight back against attacks from the Republican Party.

This is what you're going to hear from his campaign today, anyway, which is unveiling two new TV ads, including this attack ad against Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

But just so you know -- this is, by my count, the 4th time Obama's campaign has officially or unofficially made such a declaration that Obama will "take off the gloves" and fight back.

That's a lot of pairs of gloves.

The Isotoner campaign, one might say.

Curiously though, once Obama took off the Isotoners, what voters actually received were a glimpse of John McCain's hands, as Ed Morrissey writes:

Earlier today, Barack Obama's campaign released an ad attacking John McCain for not knowing how to send an e-mail. Their crack research team apparently never heard of Google or Lexis-Nexis, but Jonah Goldberg does. He discovers why McCain doesn't use a keyboard -- his torturers made sure he couldn't. The Boston Globe reported it eight years ago:

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain's encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He's an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can't raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

After Vietnam, McCain had Ann Lawrence, a physical therapist, help him regain flexibility in his leg, which had been frozen in an extended position by a shattered knee. It was the only way he could hope to resume his career as a Navy flier, but Lawrence said the treatment, taken twice a week for six months, was excruciatingly painful.

"He endured it, he wouldn't settle for less," said Lawrence, who rejoiced with McCain when he passed the Navy physical. "I have never seen such toughness and resolve."

Making fun of a war hero's severe injuries -- smooth move, Team O. Talk about computer illiteracy! Doesn't anyone on the Obama campaign know what they're doing? Didn't it ever occur to them that a man who can't raise his arms above his head might have a physical barrier to using a computer?

If this is what happens when they takes the gloves off, maybe they should just keep them on in the future.

While McCain is obviously computer literate on some level, telling the New York Times last year that he reads "Drudge, obviously, everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics, sometimes", Glenn Reynolds suggests that his campaign might want to better familiarize themselves with another technology--the video camera:

If I were a candidate, I think I'd bring my own camera to interviews, shoot the whole thing and post the unedited raw video on the Web.

The technology for this is easy - I've got a little Sony HD video camera that records on a chip and fits in a coat pocket or purse - and putting video on the Web is a snap, too.

Of course, the knowledge that this will happen is likely to be enough to keep people honest - but if anything is edited unfairly, the full video will tell the tale. No need to wait for Groundskeeper Willie to appear.

TV journalists won't be happy with this, of course, but it's hard to see a principled basis for objecting.

In the past, the tools for broadcast newsgathering were expensive and specialized, and much of the media's power came from the fact that no one else had them. Those times are long gone, and candidates, and journalists, are going to have to adapt.

Of course, there are risks for candidates, too. A gaffe-prone candidate, or one who's just bad at speaking extemporaneously, might want to present only edited videos to the public - especially if he or she can count on the news media to be generally sympathetic.

But that just makes the whole exercise more valuable to the public, as whether a candidate is willing to make the raw video available would provide a useful data point on whether the candidate is confident - and whether the press corps is in the tank.

I predict, however, that we'll see this strategy adopted soon, quite possibly in this election cycle. The news-media monopoly continues to decay, and technology continues to march on.

Back in 2005, I quoted a passage from Bernard Goldberg's second book on media bias, Arrogance, from the chapter titled "File It Under 'H'"--for hypocrisy:

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Having watched several clips of Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin, I have to say I agree with Jay Nordlinger's take on Gibson's body language:

In his loud sighings and overall body language, he reminded me quite a lot of Al Gore, in the first 2000 debate.

Remember that debate? Governor Bush did poorly, but Gore's behavior was so boorish, people tended to focus on that (and a Saturday Night Live parody absolutely slew Gore).

Palin did much better than that (and Bush rose to the occasion -- more than rose -- in the second and third debates). (Same thing happened in '04, oddly enough.) And she'll get nothing but better, I predict.

P.S. Gibson's behavior was so "out there" -- drawing attention to itself -- I think Palin should have remarked on it, in the course of her answers. What do I mean by "out there"? Well, I mean intrusive, in a way. Blatant.

Often, a good interviewer is seamless in his performance -- he almost absents himself from the proceedings, so that the questions and answers take over. But it was like Gibson was the co-star -- if not the lead star -- of the whole show.

He was as much adversary -- debate opponent -- as questioner. And that's not my idea of how these shebangs should go. (Whether the interviewee is an R or a D.)

As Jay wrote in an earlier post:

Remember this about Gibson, too: A lot of pressure was on him. Why? Because he had the first interview, with this much-hated figure. He was standing in for the whole MSM -- and they were depending on him. He just had to be somewhat hostile, he had to trip her up, if only a little. Otherwise, his colleagues would have said he had blown his opportunity -- their opportunity -- and gone all soft.

In the eyes of the arrogant MSM, he was "vetting" for all.

So -- walk a yard or two in his moccasins . . .

Moccasins? At the risk of venturing into the Manolo's territory, those looked like extra clunky double-soled Florsheim battleship-grade wingtips Gibson was tapping whenever he was bored with Palin, the perfect metaphor for a dinosaur media in general.

Beyond Gibson's effete condescension, the 65,327 jump cuts in the video were obvious and glaring. And in these days of unlimited bandwidth, there's no excuse for that. I can certainly understand cutting a lengthy interview down to fit in with the rest of the material on the half hour nightly news. (Itself a relic from the Jurassic era of Eisenhower and Arthur Godfrey.) But then put the whole thing online with a few or no edits.

And in addition to ABC's edits, Gibson relied on a truncated AP quote to attack the Alaskan governor on her prayers for America's troops. And then to compound the problem, ABC puts the word 'God' in unnecessary scare quotes on the video page highlighting the exchange. Stay classy, ABC!

Update: Neo-Neocon also has some thoughts on, as she calls Gibson, "the Not-So-Grand Inquisitor":

I was constantly distracted by two things: the shockingly choppy editing, and Gibson's profoundly inquisitorial demeanor.

It wasn't just his game face, and the peering over the eyeglasses (he gave new meaning to the expression "looked down his nose at her"). It was his remarkable condescension: "I got lost in a blizzard of words..." That crack sounded more like one side of a couple's quarrel overheard in a restaurant than the statement of a neutral interviewer.

It didn't help that it was preceded by yet another clunky jump cut, leaving the viewer not knowing where "the blizzard of words" was naturally concluded by Palin or--more likely it seems--truncated by an editor at ABC.

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Make way for An Army of Davids An Army of Sarahs!

(And yes, we do need more Pun Control!)

As Ed Morrissey writes:

Yet another stupid Palin smear arises today, on the front page of the Washington Post, no less. Anne Kornblut writes that Sarah Palin linked 9/11 to Saddam Hussein in telling troops departing to Iraq that they would be fighting the same people who attacked America. Perhaps the Washington Post hasn't yet realized it, but Saddam and his regime have long since been dispatched to history:

Hey, it was in all the papers--even the Post!

Jonah Goldberg writes, "Whether or not Sarah Palin helps John McCain win the election, her greatest work may already be behind her. She's exposed the feminist con job":

On Tuesday, Salon ran one article calling Palin a dominatrix ("a whip-wielding mistress") and another labeling her a sexually repressed fundamentalist no different from the Muslim fanatics and terrorists of Hamas. Make up your minds, folks. Is she a seductress or a sex-a-phobe?

But this any-weapon-near-to-hand approach is an obvious sign of how scared the Palin-o-phobes are.

Gloria Steinem, the grand mufti of feminism, issued a fatwa anathematizing Palin. A National Organization for Women spokeswoman proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, writes of Palin in Newsweek: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

It's funny. The left has been whining about having their patriotism questioned for so long it feels like they started griping in the Mesozoic era. Feminists have argued for decades that womanhood is an existential and metaphysical state of enlightenment. But they have no problem questioning whether women they hate are really women at all.

Since we know from basic science that Palin is a woman -- she's had five kids, for starters -- it's clear that these ideological thugs aren't talking about actual, you know, facts. They're doing what people of totalitarian mind-sets always do: bully heretics, demonize enemies, whip the troops into line.

Hey, somebody should write a book about that!

Of course, Palin has unhinged (hey, somebody should write a book called that!) the rest of the left as well. Roger Ebert's meltdown earlier this week is a classic of the genre:

Palin is a shallow, chirpy person with those vaguely alarming eyeglasses. Now her fans all want a pair. Remember back when women wore glasses that departed their ears in plastic swoops and swirls? My theory is, anyone who wears glasses that look weird is telling me something I don't want to know.

Remember all that stuff from the left in the late 1990s about tolerance and diversity and multiculturalism and "think different?" Pretty amazing how it all goes out the window when "The Shadow" appears.

(Ebert has apparently since broken out the Liquid Paper to whitewash his gaffe, but thanks to the Blogosphere, that genie's out of the bubble.)

Update: Orrin Judd writes, "Because they are materialists, the Left thinks elitism is an excess of material things, so they don't even realize that it is how divorced from American culture they are that has always hindered them."

Meanwhile, Tiger Hawk writes, "If John McCain is as lucky as he is smart, the lefty pundits and bloggers -- for example -- and their allies in the press will keeping hammering Saracuda all the way to Halloween."

Well, that's what David St. Hubbins tells me, but it won't just be Spinal Tap's drummers who explode come November if the Community Organizer loses. Mark Steyn writes:

The Washington Post's media man, Howard Kurtz, is mad as hell and he's not gonna take it for more than another couple decades or until the management buy-out offer improves:

The media are getting mad.

Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches.

Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated...

Yes, indeed. Howie feels the press is being "manipulated" by the McCain campaign.

Maybe it is. A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved "manipulating" the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin's amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.

But, if you were really savvy, you'd "manipulate" the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can't possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It's a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie's buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match. You'd not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.

John Hinderaker has more on Kurtz' descent into madness, while Roger Kimball calls the last two weeks an "act of auto-immolation" by the media. Alas, while setting their own pants on fire, Howie & co also managed to spill the lighter fluid all over Barack's coronation robes. The other day Boston's "alternative" paper ran a piece lamenting that MSNBC being so obviously in the tank for Obama is, in fact, damaging the Obama campaign. As Orrin Judd says:

Even if it isn't particularly true, the notion that Keith Olbermann defeated Barack Obama needs to become conventional wisdom, just to drive the Left bonkers.

Indeed. When Howie claims he's getting really really mad, I wonder if he realizes he sounds like Elmer Fudd warning Bugs Bunny "You're making me vewy vewy angwy" right after he's shot his own butt off.

Having written one post earlier today on Charles Krauthammer's "Pressure Cooker Theory" on the madness of the leftwing in general after 9/11, and another which linked to Glenn Reynolds' "Spinal Tap Media" meme (all amps cranked to 11 all the time), when Kurtz writes, "The media are getting mad", all I can say is that I'd hate to see them when their anger actually reaches fruition.

After my appearance on PJTV this afternoon, I heard Glenn Reynolds discussing this New York Times story with PJTV host Allen Barton and Maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon:

Ever since he was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges in 1951, Morton Sobell has maintained his innocence.

Until now. In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, who served nearly 19 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy. And he implicated his fellow defendant, Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets vital classified military information and what the American government claimed was the secret to the atomic bomb.

Glenn added, "Before my time, but I believe that all right-thinking people believed the Rosenbergs innocent back then. I wonder what other beliefs, widely shared among right-thinking people today, will turn out to be similarly wrong in 50 years?"

Back in late 2005, when there a news item that Upton Sinclair hid knowledge of Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt in order to do his antediluvian Free Mumia impersonation (as I wrote back then), Jonah Goldberg noted:

So which leftwing martyr/icon is left? Sacco & Vanzetti were guilty. The Rosenbergs: guilty. Hiss: guilty. Margaret Mead: liar. Rigoberta Menchu: liar. Duranty: liar. Kinsey: liar. Upton Sinclair: liar. I.F. Stone isn't looking too hot (lied about America often, loved totalitarians, might have taken KGB money).

Martin Luther King Jr. -- small flaws aside -- is still looking good. But Bobby Kennedy is only a useful leftwing hero if you don't look too closely. Ditto JFK. Jesse Jackson's going to look awful to historians.

Who's left?

Hey, there's always John Kerry and Bill Ayers.

In the latest edition of PJM Political, Steve Green and I discuss tomorrow's seventh anniversary of 9/11.

Today though, Charles Johnson has a far more cheerful anniversary to commemorate (though it will also be underplayed by the MSM): the fourth anniversary of everybody's favorite blinking GIF.

For our video look back at 2004, check out this edition of Silicon Graffiti:

As Cuffy Meigs notes, even though the original ad can still be seen on McCain's Website, CBS Forces YouTube To Yank McCain's "Lipstick":

Instead they piss off CBS, get everyone talking about media bias, network anchor egos, and YouTube censorship, which fuels the rabid curiosity of those who missed it the first time and forces McCain to produce a new Couric-free version of the ad which then extends the life of this poisonous story for another 2-3 news cycles.

Rove you magnificent bastard.

Or maybe SYMB--Schmidt You Magnificent Bastard. In any case, between the Obama-As-Celebrity riffs, the Palin for PUMAs pick, and now this little gem handed to them by their transnational friends at CBS and Google (who owns YouTube), McCain's campaign has done a great job of political jujitsu. Somebody there is quite adept at using the left's mindset against them remarkably well.

Shannen Coffin writes:

It would appear that Carol Fowler was jealous of the attention her husband Don received for his God-is-smiling-on-Democrats-because-of-Hurricane-Gustav comments and wanted to say something equally stupid that would make her famous. She succeeded. Congratulations, Carol. I'm sure your apology will follow shortly hereafter.

And here it comes, right on cue--complete with the to-be-expected "I apologize to anyone who finds my comment offensive" weasel language.

Hey, it's a botched joke!

Decades ago, Orson Welles once called Citizen Kane and its use of "Rosebud" as a framing mechanism an example of "Dollar Book Freud". Bracing for the onslaught of Hurricane Sarah, Deepak Chopra channels some Dollar Book Jung, and nests a seriously clunky PC parenthetical along the way.

But what would Freud and Jung have made of this incredible admission from Smokey Joe Biden?

Back on the mighty XM satellite after a two week hiatus, this week's PJM Political is a chronological look back at the past two weeks, beginning with the debut of Sarahmania, through the GOP convention, and a look at the weeks to come. With a star-studded cast of pundits, bloggers--and even actors!

And speaking of Sarahmania, Fred Thompson called in today to discuss how she's driven the media absolutely bonkers.

You make the call! Nathan Goulding posts photos from both parties' conventions. Near the top of the album is a photo with this caption:

MSNBC's booth right next to Al Jazeera's. Think RNC planners did this intentionally?

That whole media row on the west side of the Xcel Energy City was a wretched hive of old media infamy. While ideologically the networks housed in those booths moved from establishment liberal to very far left, in terms of skybox placement, the lineup ran from right to left as follows:

• CNN, Saddam Hussein's favorite shills.
• CBS, home of Ra^therGate.
• Channel 9 Action News--OK, we'll let them slide.
• And then Al Jazeera and MSNBC.

As I joked to Roger Simon on the day before the convention began and we first saw the lineup in the convention hall (and somewhat presciently in retrospect), if Keith Olbermann gets the boot mid-convention, he can simply walk next door and feel right at home. Hey, good enough for David Frost, good enough for Keith!

While the new McCain ad highlighting yesterday's gaffe from Obama is pretty good, and I commend the speed with which it was crafted and uploaded to YouTube, the late-August video from Team McCain (embedded above) is just devastating. It's crafted with lurid psychedelic colors, filled with ancient 1960s peace symbols, and linking Obama with Boy George, David Bowie, Amy Winehouse, the late drag queen Divine, 1970s Greenwich Village cult singer Klaus Nomi, and other international musicians and celebrities. Really potent raw red meat for conservatives. Though I imagine the left might not be too sanguine with some of th....

...Oh wait, it's not from McCain? It's a pro-Obama message? Who can tell these days?!

Jim Geraghty writes that this ABC headline "Really Belonged in The Onion":

The smears of Sarah Palin continue, as ABC News writes, "Obama Takes on Obama-like Phenomenon."

Compare her to a pig. Call her election "a step back for women." But calling her "an Obama-like phenomenon" is way out of line.

Unlike the transnational Obama, as long as Hurricane Sarah doesn't play well in anti-free speech Canada, Old Europe and amongst other overseas socialists, she's safe.

"Journalists are not going to change their coverage because of what John McCain says. They are going to change their coverage because of what Jon Stewart says."

Obama really grinds the gears of the Super Gaffe-O-Matic '76 with this one:

"You know, you can put lipstick on a pig," Obama said, "but it's still a pig."

But hey, he still hasn't called her sweetie!

Meanwhile, Camile Paglia writes:

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant?

Gosh--I don't know. Let's ask Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork if they know how far this trend goes back...

Tim Blair's aphorism defines, as he puts it, "The ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force."

Hey, remember a month ago when leftwing Hollywood puritans blew a gasket over a movie using the word "retard?"

Nahh, neither can I.

Update: And neither could Christian Toto, who also heard the Tinseltown crickets chirping in response response to the latest outbreak of the R-word.

Roger L. Simon, who knows a thing or two about movies (and critics) is not happy with Ed Koch today:

As many recall, former NY Democratic mayor Ed Koch backed Bush in '04. Now he's endorsing Obama because Palin's "book banning" scares him. Never mind it's been thoroughly debunked. (Hello, Ed, the Harry Potter series was published after Palin supposedly banned it.) And never mind that McCain is far more of a centrist than Bush. We're all entitled to our opinions and I'm entitled to mine: Ed Koch is the world's worst film critic. Yes, the ex-mayor sends out endless movie reviews - which read like a refugee from the AARP lost in your high school paper - in an email barrage to anyone interested or, in my case, disinterested. I am going to exercise my right to never read another one and unsubscribe. [Didn't you block them as spam over a year ago?-ed. Shh....]

Could the Simon/Koch feud take off in much the same way as the Prager/Lileks rumble?

(Nahh, probably not--but both would make for great video fodder for PJTV.)

The International Herald Tribune reports that "For now, the rule is simple: Hug your running mate, kiss your wife":

When Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, came out on stage to congratulate his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, after her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul last week, he gave her a hug, not a handshake. Palin got another hug at a rally here outside Kansas City on Monday.

The same McCain-Palin embrace -- businesslike, to the point -- was on display at a rally over the weekend in Colorado Springs, but this time McCain's wife, Cindy, was on stage. Moving quickly after his clasp of his running mate, John McCain took a short side-step and planted a peck on his wife's cheek.

It has been nearly a quarter century since Walter Mondale almost never touched Geraldine Ferraro in public when they shared the Democratic presidential ticket in 1984, and it is safe to say that times have changed. Back then, Mondale had a strict "hands off" policy and did not even put his palm on Ferraro's back when the two stood side-by-side and waved with uplifted arms.

Anything more, and "people were afraid that it would look like, 'Oh, my God, they're dating,' " Ferraro recalled in a brief telephone interview on Monday, of what now seems like a political Victorian age.

A healthy distance between running mates is usually a good thing. Glad to see that McCain and Palin have learned from the costly mistakes made in 2004.

The Mere Rhetoric blog explores "The 5 Stages Of Liberal Mourning Over Palin." Meanwhile, Radio Free Canada asks, "Are we Witnessing Obama's Campaign Implosion?"

I think it's far too soon to say that for sure, but candidates with bad internal polls do tend to get weird in their latter stages of their campaigns, as Kerry's midnight rally from September of 2004 highlights.