Here’s a thoroughly disgusting ad from Barack Obama. I’m hopelessly torn over whether the xenophobia, the protectionism, the promise of subsidies, or the general gutter identity politics is the most noxious element. Christ.

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Hey kids, subscribe to Commentary and you’ll receive one (1) complimentary, “full-color 39″ x 26″ World Terrorism wall map includes detailed inset maps highlighting countries battling narco-, Maoist, and Islamist terrorism, icons depicting aspects of world terrorism, political and topographical detail as well as definitions and facts, terrorist organization summaries, and sources and web sites recommended for further research [emphasis mine].” Repeat: it’s a wall map. Is it really possible that Commentards use these things as home decorations? At dinner parties, do they follow up a brisket made into an effigy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by inviting their guests to sit around staring at maps of the countries they want other people’s children to invade? The ghost of Maimonides is crying somewhere.

No doubt about it, the Down Jones picking up points is a lot better than the alternative, but a stock market over a having four separate three-digit swings — three of them over 400 points and one over 500 points — over five consecutive trading days is radically unhealthy.

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Submitted without comment below the fold: (more…)

This is from when everyone was freaking out. Apt, no?

Some important context for the post below: Palin was trying to say something in response to a question about the inconvenient truth that the overwhelmingly majority of Alaskan oil and other energy is sold on the international market, not domestically, and will continue to be sold primarily abroad if we start to DRILL, BABY, DRILL!!!1!!1!! in ANWR. The reserves in ANWR, in any event, are a drop in the bucket relative to the global supply of petroleum. Hence DRILL DRILL DRILLING will have an indiscernible effect on global petroleum prices. What we can be sure of, though, BABY, if we DRILL, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, DRILL, is that by signing the DRILL DRILL DRILL DRILL BABY Act of 2009, President McCain will effectively forestall any robust effort to curb the effects of global warming and climate change that even conservative models predict will be catastrophic — this country has limited reserves of political will, and the conventional wisdom on a national DRILL DRILL DRILL initiative will be that the final solution to the energy crisis has been foisted onto the next generation, which will thereby be deprived of even the modest leeway we have today solved.

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McCain sez Palin “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.” In fact, Palin doesn’t even know much about energy production in Alaska. But okay, you might say, even if she’s weirdly making up figures, she might still know some things about energy and petroleum in particular, right? Astonishingly, gobsmackingly, laughably, what-the-fuck-did-she-just say-ly, auf English bitte-ly, wrong.

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Jonathan Rauch’s column on the McCain campaign is a pretty strong early contender for the best column on this election. Excerpt: (more…)

As Atrios says, “The dirty little secret about John McCain is that he really knows nothing about anything.” However, Andrew Sullivan tries to get a bit too much mileage out of this sorry state of affairs when he huffs re: Randy “Georgia on my mind” Scheunemann calling Jose Zapatero the “president” of Spain: “I thought Zapatero was the prime minister, not president. Spain has a monarchy.” Well, Zapatero is the prime minister, but if Andrew had followed the link on Zapatero’s wiki page to the “Prime Minister of Spain” entry, he’d have read: (more…)

Sarah Palin was asked her opinion on the AIG bailout. Here’s what she said: (more…)

Either John McCain — the guy whose 26 years of experience in foreign affairs we can bank on to lead us to victory in the Global War on Whatever — thinks Señor Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, is a Chavista dictator from somwhere in South America, or else he considers Spain an enemy of the United States. ¡Que Estupendo!

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When was the last time anything happened in American politics as entertaining as the PUMA movement? Lady Lynn Forrester de Rothschild, who hates Barack Obama because he is an elitist, goes on TeeVee talking up the McCain-Palin festivus for the rest of us, and winds up, in discussing the regular people Barack Obama is supposed to have unforgivably insulted in Bittergate, referring to them as “rednecks or whoever.” Lady Rothschild would be well advised to heed the cautionary lessons of white people who try a bit too hard to adopt black culture: they can use that word about themselves; you can’t use it. On the off-chance that Lady Rothschild is a real person and not an elaborate stunt, I await the McCain campaign’s unveiling of an endorsement from Marie Antoinette, who, no doubt, will promptly call Senator Obama “uppity.”

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Does Sarah Palin know what the Bush Doctrine is? Of course she doesn’t; her answer to Charlie Gibson’s question about the Bush Doctrine the other night — and not just her first bewildered response, but each successive response as Gibson gave her prompts to focus her mind somewhat nearer the vicinity of the concept in question — was a shallow and barely intelligible hash that only got worse as she went on, drifted farther and farther away from anything resembling a germane response, and ultimately devolved into a scarcely grammatical melange of buzzwords, with (natch) extra emphasis on every repetition of “Islamic extremism.”

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Having something of a morbid fascination with the PUMA movement, whence the “whitey” tape, faked birth certificate, and who knows what other rumors originated — I believe the remaining PUMA redoubts are still furiously at work trying to prove that Barack Obama is ineligible to run for president and has engineered a massive coverup — I’ve been vaguely aware for a few months of the alleged existence of an individual called Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who is indeed one of those Rothschilds, and really, really hates Barack Obama because, she says, he is an elitist who looks down on plain folk, and has an op-ed in the famously proletarian rag the Wall Street Journal explaining why. Just in case Mdme. Lady de Rothschild is a real person and not a character in an elaborate piece of absurdist performance art, Mickey Kaus has found what average blue-collar working-class Americans call le mot juste: “You lost me at ‘de’…Does Lynn Forester de Rothschild actually exist, or did Paul Gigot invent her?” Of course, a Rothschild is sort of like a small-town mayor in a fantasy-land colonial pseudo-state, except that Rothschilds use their own money to fund idiotic vanity projects (and have actual responsibilities).

This will probably be the last occasion on which I offer a defense of Sarah Palin, since her public behavior since becoming the GOP vice-presidential nominee has been every bit as deplorable as her public record as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska, but — that’s just the point, Palin’s public performance and public record are so atrocious that it’s something of an accomplishment for so many people to have leveled so many ludicrous and irrelevant attacks on her. And I don’t just mean anonymous blog commenters or Daily Kos diarists, but people with distinguished, prominent platforms. A couple of cases:

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Doing a little illustrative Gedankenexperiment that proves to all the right people that he must hate the Jews, Matthew Yglesias writes:

Israel and the United States are separate countries. It’s conceivable that Israel would do something to advance its interests that’s bad for the United States. It’s also conceivable that Israel would do something to advance its interests that’s immoral. And of course it’s conceivable that Israel would do something that’s simply a mistake and likely to backfire. The President of the United States needs to make independent judgments about the merits of Israeli policy and respond accordingly.

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While I was working on a piece now out in the latest issue of The American Conservative about the relevance to US policy on the Russia-Georgia conflict of the epochally disastrous mistake of the Asquith-Grey government of Britain of choosing war with Germany officially in order to defend Belgium, I asked myself several times, “Since even the hawkiest of hawks in John McCain’s foreign policy shop understand that war with Russia means a thermonuclear exchange and billions of deaths, isn’t it a bit of a stretch to suggest their aggressive posturing towards Russia really tokens a willingness to fight such a war?” And in moments of doubt, I found myself answering, “perhaps so.” But then events would allay my skepticism. Like the time John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee casually told Charlie Gibson that the policy her running-mate has favored at least since his debonair pal Misha first charmed him and that she has favored since at least last Tuesday of extending membership in NATO to Georgia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet satellites locked in territorial disputes with the Russian Federation might in fact obligate the United States to go to war with Russia.

She’s even more correct than her attempt to recite the definition of “alliance” suggests; Article V of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty on which the NATO alliance is founded obligates member states to regard attacks on any of them as attacks on all them, so if Georgia had been a NATO member at the beginning of August, the Russian invasion would have triggered a de lege state of war between the US and the Russian Federation. Of course, this fact means that NATO and its leading power have to be extremely conservative and judicious in any potential extension of membership in the alliance, and in particular, must not take steps to bring peripheral states involved in territorial conflicts with nuclear superpowers into NATO and thereby endanger billions of lives. And that’s just a minimal conclusion. The insanity of what the Russia hawks have been up to since August 9 warrants some serious reconsideration among those who had been bullish about the idea of the wisdom of extending NATO membership anywhere, if not of the wisdom of retaining the alliance in a post-Soviet world at all. (more…)

Downblog commenter Jaybird asks:

Can we link to more people who write to [Glenn Reynolds'] employer [the University of Tennessee Law School] to have him silenced?

I’m kinda hoping to give him something to blog about how “They said that if Bush were elected, bloggers with unpopular political opinions would be silenced through force” or thereabouts.

Maybe we’d finally have a blogosphere the way we should have one, once all of the bad opinionators are no longer writing on it.

The reference here is to this post from a few weeks ago by a definite non-Instafan, who after some acrimonious email exchanges with Reynolds decided to write to the UT Law dean in an effort to have Reynolds sanctioned somehow, and have his blog removed from UT hosting and perhaps shut down outright. Now, the reason I linked to the post is that it documents Reynolds’ self-description as “quirky leftist” who would be regarded as such were it not for his preference for, inter alia, raining mass-destruction from above on the captive civilian populations of intransigent states, assassinating physicists, embracing a despicable Dolchstoß mythology to demonize domestic political opposition and explain away the manifest failures of a foreign policy of bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb whomever (and then drill, drill, drill!!!?), promoting said policy by doctoring news reports, and wistfully pondering what flowering democracies might have sprung up in the Levant if only it we didn’t lack the political will and moral clarity to resort to Einsatzgruppen tactics in our occupied territories (see previous link) — and all of it expressed in passive, laconic pseudo-aphorisms and quick links that provide him with a patina of deniability by which he can avoid ever owning his evident beliefs or demonstrating minimal courage of his convictions. The fact that Reynolds believes — or at least, is willing to claim to believe — that all this is consistent with his being some sort of idiosyncratic left-libertarian, and that it’s just a teensy matter obscuring his substantive leftism is fairly hilarious and revealing. Let’s just say that Reynolds needs the word “quirky” to do an awful lot of work in order for him to avoid coming off as a total shit to anyone familiar with his sorry record.

However, in linking to that post, I was not — in distinct contrast to Reynolds’ MO — trying to lend any support, tacit or otherwise, to any campaign to have Instapundit Dot Com sanctioned or shut down by the University of Tennessee. On the contrary, I find the effort at best an extraordinary misunderstanding of the affront it is to academic freedom. If it happened to be the case that Reynolds’ blogging work led to a dereliction of his professional duties severe enough to warrant a review of his tenure aegis, that would be a different story; but there is no evidence to back that story at all. Otherwise, Reynolds’ decision to be a total shit and express views that accompany that quality in his non-academic life is his Constitutional, natural, and yes, academic right. And here’s a word of practical warning to anyone on the left who might be inclined to get behind a campaign to shut down Instapundit Dot Com: if the door is open to professional action against tenured professors for political speech, it won’t be right-wing academics who bear the lionshare of the burden thereby created. (more…)

Glenn Reynolds is offering his readers a poll to register their take on lipstick-gate 2008. Ready for your choices, instareaders? Here you go: (a) a deliberate sexist smear; (b) an inadvertent gaffe; (c) I’m voting “present” on this one. Or translated out of Hewitthannity-speak, (a) Obama is evil; (b) Obama is dumb; (c) Obama is a coward — the last an oblique way of demonstrating ignorance of parliamentary procedure in the Illinois legislature and incomprehension of basic arithmetical concepts (one hundred and something “present” votes being a small fraction of tens of thousands of votes cast). If you think the entire thing is a preposterous fraud that insults the intelligence of the American people and McCain-Palin supporters in particular, you’re SOL because Reynolds doesn’t think any possible explanation that paints the McCain/GOP freakout fit in a minimally uncomplimentary shade is worth considering even in order to dismiss it. This, by the way, after Reynolds devoted about 10 times his ordinary per-post thinking expenditure to try to read Barack Obama’s sinister sexist mind. Instapundit Dot Com: All the brainpower and objectivity of Horatio Goldfarb’s campaign blog, plus more links and widgets. As Clark Stooksbury says, “Reynolds often wonders why people consider him to be a partisan Republican. It has gone beyond that–the man has lost his mind.”

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So the Alaska governor kills her own supper, and that distinguishes her from blue state left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? Total mooseshit. Observe:

Below the fold, some real heartland experience: (more…)

If Maverick had delivered his acceptance speech wearing a pickelhaube, it would have been worse. Otherwise, this was as bad as it gets. Consider this an open thread. UPDATE: It’s over, and some McCain-themed country song is playing. Who the hell wrote this travesty? Forget the awful delivery and the neon monochrome backgrounds. I’ve never seen or heard a worse-written acceptance speech at a convention. Aside from political junkies, could there possibly be anyone in America who watched all the way until the end?

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“The vetting process was completely thorough and I’m grateful for the results.” — John McCain, 2 September 2008.

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Since Sarah Palin doesn’t know anything about foreign affairs — except of course, the affairs of the Russian Far East in which she is the world’s foremost expert — she’s going to need to bone up before she debates Joe Biden. Fortunately, as Leon Hadar notes, “Ms. Palin will be prepared by Mr. McCain’s foreign policy staff, led by Randy Scheunemann.”  So forget Sarah Paleo. She is Neo — the One.

I’ve been holding out, trying to give Sarah Palin as much benefit of the doubt as possible in deference to the positive assessment she gets from various Grand New Partisans whose views I respect, but enough’s enough. Michael Tomasky flags Palin’s response to an Eagle Forum question about whether she took exception to the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance:

Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its [sic] good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

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§ The westernmost point in the Americas, Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, USA, sits across the Bering Strait from Cape Dezhnyov, Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, Russian Federation, the easternmost point in Asia — the latter federal district governed by Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich, a former oil executive who in addition to his gubernatorial duties is also Chairman of the Government, Chairman of the Security Council, and Head of the Anti-Terror Committee of the district.

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Andrew, listen. I’ve been reading you almost daily since you started the blog. You’ve persuaded me to change or at least rethink my positions about a few things over the years, which is pretty damned tough to do. You and I are on the same team in this election. I like a lot of what you’ve written about it, even a lot of the stuff that’s caught the most heated criticism. Your cover story on Obama last year — wasn’t 100% on board, but found it pretty compelling on the whole. The McCain-plagiarizing-Solzhenitsyn on the cross-in-the-dirt story you pursued? It sounded suspicious to me, too. Going after Palin and after McCain for picking Palin, especially the way he picked her? We’re in about 75% agreement if not more. In other words, you’re not going to find a much more sympathetic reader. But Jesus, man, what on earth do you suppose this accomplishes (though it would seem to cry out for non-stop sinister conjecture from Mickey Kaus — and for telling the time from stopped clocks — from now until Election Day, wouldn’t it)? Is setting a standard such that all public office-seekers are obligated to respond to ludicrous charges or else suffer under a cloud of suspicion really going to (a) help motivate the aristoi to enter public life, or (b) help make saying “goodbye to all that” to nasty Boomer politics worthwhile in the end?

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Via Deadspin, here’s Sarah Palin screen-testing to be a Sportscenter-style sports announcer. Alarmingly for Team Maverick, she really steps on some obvious inflection points in the script (e.g., commenting on the late unlamented Minnesota North Stars as “the worst team in the NHL, they’ve got the worst record anyway” as if she were reading off prescription drug ingredients), though to be fair, she has had time to improve her teleprompter skills since then.

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There isn’t going to be a Republican convention? So the McCain campaign is voluntarily relinquishing a chance to air a free national week-long attack ad on Barack Obama? Uh, what the hell’s going on?

Many commentators have said that McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin is an expression of McCain’s risk-taking, hip-from-shooting, dice-rolling maverickiness. Some have compared that to Obama’s clear risk-aversion, as demonstrated by the months of careful vetting of the potential running mates by Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder. Some have drawn explicit links from the different veep selections to, respectively, McCain’s fondness for craps, at which he loses tens of thousands of dollars annually, and Obama’s preference for poker, at which he is moderately successful playing a tight, aggressive game. But the comparison between the Palin pick and shooting craps is preposterously generous to McCain; craps is not a game for brave risk-taking mavericks, but for innumerates and maniacs and innumerate maniacs in which you are guaranteed to lose everything you have by playing long enough. By contrast, there is a non-zero probability that the Palin selection will work out in the long run.

So much for the Hippocratic principle of vice-presidential selection. The fundamental strategic dilemma the McCain camp has faced since the campaign began is that making safe conservative moves could probably assure them of a narrow defeat, but very likely couldn’t put them over the top, whereas making loose, risky bets would optimize their chances of victory, but would also dramatically increase the odds of a Democratic blowout. As Nate Silver points out, to (grossly) oversimplify the bet on Palin, the stakes, and the odds: if McCain starts (say) 2 points behind Obama, and (say) putting Palin on the ticket creates a 50/50 shot at a 3+ point bump but also a 50/50 shot at a 10+ point shellacking, while a conventional Romney/Pawlenty/et al. pick is 100% to add more than 0 but fewer than 2 points, then picking Palin strictly dominates all of Team Maverick’s other options. Indeed, it might mark the first occasion in anyone’s recollection on which McCain made the move game theory militates for (granted, it’s unlikely that that’s how he reasoned through the pick). So on its face, the Palin selection was a sharp move.

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I bow to no man in how high an upper bound I assign to John McCain’s ignorance, recklessness, unfitness for the presidency, and deficit in very basic logical and quantitative reasoning skills, or the objectionability of his unified domestic and international “politics” of moral purification by expurgation in flame, or the potential danger represented by his obeisance to the most locally and globally malign faction of the contemporary GOP by a wide margin (not the Falwellians, of course, but these clownish thugs). Nonetheless, even for me, Ezra Klein’s suggestion that McCain put Sarah Palin on the ticket because he thinks he is the Highlander is just a bit much. Can’t it be that McCain reckoned (probably correctly, I think — more momentarily) that she gave him the best odds of winning the election of all the possible picks? GOP activists don’t have a monopoly, it seems, on Ockham-pulverizing disregard for the manifest explanations of their opponents’ moves in favor of peering into the depths of their souls. I mean, come on.

This post is dedicated to John Schwenkler — more on his injection of common sense into the swirling silliness momentarily, too.

I suppose Iowahawk deserves credit for putting in the man-hours it must have taken to put this together, but it succeeds as humor just in case there’s merit to the idea that there’s something exceptional to the extent to which liberal elites look down on the noble savages of flyover country as if from empyrean heights, specifically that there’s something exceptional to the extent to which liberals treat Barack Obama as some sort of demi-divinity, and moreover that Obama himself shares that view to any exceptional degree. And not to put too fine a point on it, not only is the conceit of exceptionalism in any of these cases fairly idiotic, so is, in ascending order, the idea that these propositions hold at all. Besides which, this election’s pidgin-poetry is already covered, is a heck of a lot more compelling than Iowahawk’s adaptation of Homer, and helps give the lie to the ideas underwriting his attempt at satire. To put it briefly, it’s tough to find “The Idiossey” funny without buying into several distinct, and exceptionally stupid anti-Obama sneers. (Which helps to illustrate the failures of conservative — or let’s be accurate, Republican — political satire* in recent years: if you don’t give credence to a series of dumb insults, watching the “comedy” routine doesn’t just fail to provoke laughs, it induces a vicarious mortified reaction.)

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The greatest blog post ever written about Israel, possibly the greatest blog post ever written, can be found here. For those who are curious, Birthright trips are sort of a combo of a timeshare presentation in Asspen, a propaganda reel for Israel reminiscent of Eisenhower-era anti-Soviet PSAs for grammar school students, and JDate. Thanks, bootlegging fortune! (But I’m not going to lie, a sincerely motivated tear or two rolled slowly down my cheek at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv (where the former Prime Minister was assassinated) and again at Rabin’s grave on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem.)

Those who say that Joe Biden is the “Senator from MBNA” are hopelessly out of date. If the charge has ever been true, then he is now the Senator from B of A, with one spirit leading us all to higher standards. Observe:

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Katherine Mangu-Ward has definitive proof that the DNC has been a smashing success.

Reacting to Hillary Clinton’s stemwinder, here’s K-Lo: (more…)

Well, Michelle Obama’s speech tonight was pretty incredible stuff, and ought to put to bed the all the reprehensible nonsense that’s been said about her. But it won’t. And apparently the Obama campaign and the Democratic party decided the thing to do would be to blow 25% of their convention on themeless, formless, pointless soft-focus feel good blah blah blah. I hope those watching the live C-SPAN feed didn’t develop diabetes. Maybe the point was just to set up Mrs. Obama’s speech, and the thinking was that they shouldn’t step on the feel-goodiness of her speech with attacks on John McCain. Maybe the next two days will be devoted to stripping off his hide. But if tonight was a preview of the rest of the proceedings, whatever good will it produces will have all of a weekend to make it into the zeitgeist before Maverick McPOW, Vice President Zell Lieberman, and the rest of Team Honor Goldfarb get America reacquainted with the surrender-loving Weatherman Senator from Kenya. How do Democrats keep forgetting how these things work?

All the speculation, hand-wringing, and brow-furrowing (check out some of the lefty blogs) about Joe Biden as veep overlook the essential reason Biden is far and away the best choice — and not just for Obama’s chances, but for America. Yes, he voted for the war (though he proposed an alternative to the AUMF that if passed, might have prevented it). Yes, he voted for the bankruptcy bill liberals loathe (though I can’t really get worked up about it, except that it looks like a pretty gross giveaway to the worst state on the Acela corridor). Yes, he’s incredibly pompous, is capable of behaving like a jerk, has been around so long he can scarcely remember not being a member of the senate and has little valuable non-senatorial experience; yes, even if he avoids some ridiculous verbal gaffe, it’ll be stunning if he doesn’t have a few interminable self-back-patting soliloquies (though on the flip side, all the foregoing makes him immensely entertaining). Yes, he’s been saying unhelpful things about the Russia-Georgia standoff.

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Richard Posner has a piece at TNR attacking the Heller decision as without “any principles,” which absence “supports the hypothesis that ideology drives decision in cases in which liberal and conservative values collide. If loose construction produces a conservative limitation on government, most conservatives will support it and most liberals will oppose it; and if it produces a liberal limitation on government, most liberals and conservatives will switch sides.” Right on, and get the smelling salts ready. Posner specifically shows in painstaking detail that so-called originalism not only fails to support Scalia’s reasoning, but directly refutes it. (The confusion arises from the fact that Scalia’s “original meaning” analysis gives as the meaning of any constitutional or statutory provision whatever Scalia wants it to mean, its original meaning having no bearing whatsoever.) But look: the 9th Amendment is in the Constitution. Really, it is. Go ahead and check; I’ll wait. It also means something, not nothing. That means that there are (some, not zero) inalienable constitutional rights that are not enumerated. Private gun ownership is a pretty plausible candidate to be one of them.

Apparently, our significant other in the Special Relationship recently flirted with the idea of cutting state compensation to rape victims who were drunk at the time they were assaulted. That prompted brother-of-Christopher to write:

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