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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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.

The past 14 months of my life have been dedicated to a project; to put Peace on the map.  I just safely made it home after 98 days on the road. I rode 11,000 miles on a 125cc scooter. Last year I rode 11,000 miles as well.  By the end of my trip, which started and ended in Washington D.C., I had traversed through 29 states, and created the largest Peace sign in history on the U.S. map.

I wanted to reach thousands of Americans and ask them, simply,  “How do you define Peace?”  In order to approach and develop conversations with a diverse sampling of Americans, I chose to leave politics out of our (more…)

This could be big.

By this time tomorrow most people following the campaign are likely to have read the Daily Kos diary about the story John McCain recounted last night of one of his Vietnamese captors drawing a cross in the dirt of the Hanoi Hilton on Christmas Day — an experience, according to this McCain campaign ad from late last year, Team Maverick believes constitutes an argument for a McCain presidency without further elaboration. Flagging the DKos diary, Andrew Sullivan notes that he has heard McCain tell the cross-in-the-dirt story “countless times.” Problem is, unless prison guards who oversee torture and abuse have a strange and heretofore undocumented habit of drawing crosses in the dirt (in which case, I’ll be the first to apologize and correct), it would appear that McCain blatantly and shamelessly stole the anecdote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Nor does McCain’s evident admiration and familiarity with Solzhenitsyn’s life and works (would that it were slightly more complete) paint him in cherubic hues. Nor, for that matter, does the fact that as a citizen of a historically Orthodox Christian state, a prison guard in Soviet Russia could reasonably expect to be able to connect his own experiences to a prisoner’s by means of Christian iconography; whereas Christians are only 8% of the Vietnamese population today, and with most of them concentrated in the south around Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City (where European missionary activity was centered), there were probably not all that many guards and soldiers in the North Vietnamese army for whom a cross in the dirt would be a useful way of sharing a moment of humanity with an American prisoner. In other words, it looks really, really bad for McCain. (more…)

Staying classy, the McCain campaign launches a new Spanish-language ad trying to drive a wedge between Obama and Latinos by dwelling on the senator’s failure to call out Latin American states or cities during his speech in Berlin. This is the kind of high-risk strategy Team McCain will have to pursue to have a shot at winning, but it seems to me a potentially fatal mistake for them to launch these sorts of ridiculous attacks this early. The evidence is mounting that the mainstream media are not only falling out of love with McCain, but losing all patience with him — including his most preposterously stalwart defenders. And it’s only the beginning of August. The conventions are still weeks away. Unless the Obama campaign is struck by sudden fatal incompetence, the likeliest way for this campaign to play out is surely the scenario David Weigel envisions: “at the rate McCain’s cranking out attack ads and lines about Obama lusting “to lose the war,” the higher the odds he’ll wreck his image. And then Obama can say whatever he wants about McCain without much blowback. I can’t believe McCain doesn’t remember how this works.”

Once and apparently no longer future McCain strategist John Weaver got a load of the maverick’s latest spot — that would be what Atrios aptly calls the “uppity negro who wants to fuck your sister” ad — and he’s had enough: (more…)

Dick Armey just now on MSNBC: “John McCain knows that tax bills originate in the House of Representatives.” So let none say that Senator McCain doesn’t have a goddamned clue what he’s talking about. He’s seen that Schoolhouse Rock video, like, twice.

AOTP readers are more than familiar with a large cross-section of the strong, and arguably decisive objections to voting for Senator Obama. But the problems we libertarians/civil-libertarians/anti-warriors have had with the candidate, especially recently, hardly exhaust the very good reasons to oppose him. Someone for whom opposition to abortion rights and other forms of reproductive freedom is more salient than any other issue would be more or less rationally obligated to support any marginally better (by those lights) alternative. Likewise with gay marriage and other social conservative issues. A sufficiently rich person motivated exclusively or nearly so by short-term self-interest — especially on the assumption that restrictions on liberty don’t really apply to persons of sufficient wealth — would have a clear rationale for supporting Senator McCain, which conclusion could only really be shifted by an antecedent shift in that person’s priors (i.e., getting her to take other factors into consideration besides her marginal tax rate). There’s lots more where those examples came from, and there are people who can make the good case against Obama much more persuasively than I can.

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Back when depraved torture enthusiast, dissembler, and Princeton admissions error (it happens) Michael Goldfarb officially began collecting paychecks directly from the McCain campaign instead of the Substandard, John Schwenkler tried to make the point that McCain’s hiring of Goldfarb reflected poorly on Honest John given a) Goldfarb’s depravity across a spectrum of issues, and b) Goldfarb’s resemblance to the more sociopathic elements of the Bush administration, the latter of which doesn’t aid Team McCain’s efforts to dodge the “McSame” label. For that, John was taken to task by, among others, Reihan Salam and James Joyner, who noted that Goldfarb was hired to head up the campaign’s online communications — a job for which his work experience from Time.com to the Substandard presumably qualified him, and in which role, in any case, he would not be shaping the candidate or the campaign’s beliefs, but rather, expressing whatever beliefs the campaign instructed him to express. Though true, this defense of Goldfarb (or at least his employment) misses the crux of the matter, which is that yes, Goldfarb was not brought on board to drag the campaign down to his level of loathsomeness; contrarily, one only hires Michael Goldfarb as one’s communications point man if one is already thoroughly loathsome. There is no shortage of talented young-ish McCain-backing writers with ample new media experience who could do a fine job in Goldfarb’s position — the (GOP affiliators among) David Brooks’ Dirty Dozen, incl. Reihan and Ross Douthat, come to mind — without, to put it in McCainian terms, utterly destroying the campaign’s claim to honor. They hired Goldfarb because they never had any honor in the first place.

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The fact that John McCain doesn’t know or understand, as noted below, the mechanism by which Social Security is funded, tends to vitiate whatever credit he might derive from his statement that the Social Security system is an “absolute disgrace.” (For example, since he has no rational grounds to support his view, it provides no basis for arriving at further positions of equal justificatory standing.) Nonetheless, he’s right.

Last week, John Schwenkler posted the latest in a series of well-taken criticisms of those of us anti-warriors who plan to vote for Senator Obama. The fundamental conflict here is between John’s claim that “if we all beat the drums nice and loudly on the issues that are close to our hearts and refuse to join into marriages of convenience where too many core principles are violated, there’s the possibility for a real shake-up,” and mine that the best outcome of this election at any possible world within the inner (relevant) sphere of possibility (to borrow a Lewisianism) is an Obama victory. There’s certainly nothing I can say to decisively refute John, and I feel somewhat sheepish trying, since an occasion on which, ahem, Bismarck’s maxim that “politics is the art of the possible” applies is also highly likely to be an occasion on which Orwell’s maxim that politics is “the defense of the indefensible” applies. By the same token, I don’t see how John can decisively refute my position either. The stalemate is something like Schopenhauer’s description of the philosophical sceptic (from memory, not verbatim): a knight guarding a fortress which can never be conquered, but from which he can never sally forth to challenge others. (John’s the one with the morally unblemished position here, so I take it he’s the knight for purposes of this metaphor.)

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As someone who wants John McCain to lose (and lose badly), I’ve been hoping he’ll pick Mitt Romney as his running mate, and fearing that he’ll pick Mark Sanford or Sarah Palin (and indifferent to Tim Pawlenty). Well, the last few weeks have taught us that any divergence from Team McCain’s narrative of abundant maverickiness and heroism is tantamount to slandering the senator’s military record. So I assume this means Sanford’s out. Mittmentum, baby!

Terry “libertarian Democrat” Michael has an op-ed at the Politico making the case for Bob Barr’s potential appeal not only to ex-rEVOLutionaries, but also to a broad cross-section of conservatives disaffected with McCain and the GOP. What’s more, Barr could just possibly rehabilitate (or habilitate?) the Libertarian Party brand back (for the first time?) to respectability. Money quote: (more…)

I wonder if McCain made the little rabbit’s ears gesture to go with this statement:

And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material.

Radley Balko makes a good catch…McCain’s quote is not just scary because the contempt he piles on Habeas Corpus, but because it betrays that McCain’s grasp of what Habeas is is disturbingly fuzzy. Is anybody else getting a flashback from that time he messed up Sunni and Shiite in Jordan and Joe Lieberman had to whisper in his ear?

Reason’s Matt Welch points out that McCain also gave another constitutional right the rabbits ear treatment a while back.

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No, not McCain. His good friend, real-estate developer and fundraiser extraordinaire Don Diamond.

Mr. Diamond is close to most of Arizona’s Congressional delegation and is candid about his expectations as a fund-raiser. “I want my money back, for Christ’s sake. Do you know how many cocktail parties I have to go to?”[...]

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K-Lo collects herself and genuflects to the following on behalf of a grateful nation: “Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Andy McCarthy, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.”

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