That Oktoberfest directly precedes election day in this country is perhaps the one well-placed blessing of the year. It certainly seems as though the McCain boys are all taking part, because rarely does a campaign, even one as desperately beleaguered as this one, go so far off the deep end so quickly. The GOP bought too far into its own bullshit rhetoric over the past eight years, assuming that the public would still come along for the ride. Terror! Fear! Evil Do-ers! They were lurking in every shadow, hiding in corners and subway stops. Scheming behind Fourth Amendment protected phone lines. Loitering just outside the the cold sweat nightmares of innocent Americans. How quickly we forget that insanity, that Manchurian Candidate hysteria. Some six long years go, swarthy vigilantes from parts unknown were going to put anthrax in your cable bill and blow up your local supermarket. And those damn filthy terrorist sympathizing Democrats weren’t going to lift a finger to stop them!

And like the stumble-stepped ravings of some four-AM drunk, the Republicans just go on shouting those same old lines out into the darkness. Barack Obama is a secret muslim. A terrorist. An arab. A Marxist. He is other and different and impossible to understand. He’s whatever the thing you fear right now happens to manifest itself as. But the Republican party has just now realized that most Americans are shaking in fear, not of the invisible enemy, but of the paper monster. To hell with anthrax – if there’s a letter more toxic than a notice of foreclosure, I’ve yet to read it. People care a lot less about terrorism when they suddenly don’t own anything worth blowing up. And it’s a bit hard to care about something called the Weather Underground when you can’t even make the rent on your shitty basement apartment.

But don’t tell that to old man McCain – he’s got his heart set on pulling out a sqeaker through a carpet-bomb campaign of brick-shitting fear, and he will keep hammering away at the cloudy, smoke and sawdust suggestions that despite better than half the country supporting the man, Barack Obama hates America. McCain tried to scare people with claims about inexperience, and that didn’t work. He tried to scare people with tall tales of taxes, and even that GOP staple fell flat. So now he’s going full on fearmonger! Going, as he openly admitted to Jon Stewart several years ago, “to crazytown”.

It used to be that they secluded this stuff. Kept it hidden, away from the prying eyes of the traditional media. If there were competent sociopaths running this cowardly mud drag, we wouldn’t hear about push polls to Jewish towns in Florida saying that Obama supported the PLO until sometime next March. I’ll say one thing for Cheney, he knew how to keep his minions on a tight leash, and he wielded his brand of bowel liquefying hate like a samuri spinning a katana. The McCain folks, in comparison, are blasting away with a twelve gauge in a crowded mall.

They’ve forgotten that the nastiest of this sort of filth needs to be kept inside the base. It needs to be the quiet thrum of that fringe freakshow ten percent that would vote the party line even if they tried to run Zombie Reagan for office. The majority of Americans don’t want to hear that much crazy coming out of a man to whom they might be handing nuclear launch codes. And they’ve grown tired of the implausible deniability of sending your hatchetmen out to spread the lies and then waving them away, innocent faced, the next day in front of the press. The public knows what Swift Boating is, Johnny boy, and they don’t like it.

They’re tired of hearing about how Barack Obama might be Kenyan or how John Kerry looks French. They want to hear about how they’re going to pay their electric bill. How they’re going to send their kids to college. How they’re going to retire before they hit eighty. John McCain’s wonderfully insulated world, while not as cushy and worry free as George W. Bush’s, doesn’t have room for those sorts of plebian concerns. And he knows he can’t win by speaking to them, because all he has are empty platitudes about low taxes and something he daren’t still call trickle-down economics. Because by now the public is tired of being pissed on.

I have to say, this was the single most dangerous Presidential debate in recent memory. I say that because I only got two hours of sleep last night, and I listened to it in the car on the way home. I damn near fell asleep at the wheel. In some small way it amuses me that I made a flow chart for the Biden / Palin debate. If there were ever an event whose energy and spark could best be summed up in a corporate office tool that no one ever reads, it was tonight’s debate.

So let’s get the preliminaries out of the way. The format sucked. I mean, really. It was boring, it was dry, and all it really offered was stump speech snippets and wind-piddling comments back and forth about the gritty details of each candidate’s plans. Details that won’t be remembered by most of the people who listened partially because they were number stew and partially because most of them probably drifted off. About the only thing this debate did for me was crystalize the need for universal health care, because I imagine that half of the people in that audience have since slipped into comas.

Tom Brokaw was, to be blunt, lame. I know he didn’t have a lot to work with, as some of the audience drawn questions were tortured and vague, but his follow ups were equally bad. The format itself left no real room for actual debate, and even when both candidates chaffed under those rules (which they agreed to before hand, admittedly), Brokaw stuck to them, often cutting off or curtailing the more interesting material in the interest of moving on. The one minute follow ups were an equally bad idea, since they were never one minute and rarely acted as follow ups. Though it’s not like he had any real brain teasers in there. This felt a lot more like the Republican primary debates, if not in substance than in pacing and stammer.

As I said, the economics section was a jumble of numbers that even I can’t entirely remember, and I’ve studied both economic plans. Both candidates avoided saying who they would appoint as Secretary of the Treasury, which annoyed me at first. Though in retrospect, that could have actually been a violation of a federal law that prevents candidates form promising cabinet positions to individuals in exchange for their political support. Which means that Brokaw asked a stupid question. Though that loophole also allowed McCain to avoid mentioning former Texas Senator and noted boobie enthusiast Phil Gramm. That was a win for McCain, since blame for the nightmare of default credit swaps, the key deregulatory blunder in this recent financial crisis, can be placed squarely on Gramm’s greedy, lightbulb shaped head. Though really, does anyone believe that a Republican President would ever appoint William Buffett to a cabinet position? Give me a break.

Then came the section of “Obama will raise your taxes!” “But only if you’re really rich!” that had all the intellectual depth of a lolcat caption. McCain didn’t really score any points on the economy, though the only point that Obama scored was in the question about prioritizing the government’s domestic policies. McCain said that America was capable of making everything a top priority, which is both technically impossible and a weasel way of not wanting to put off single-issue voters (if those elusive creatures really do exist). Obama clearly stated that energy would be his top priority, and I agree with that idea. Nothing else can really be accomplished unless America regains its energy independence. Without that, whatever gains we make can simply be siphoned off at the pump. Comparing his goal of total independence in ten years to Kennedy’s promise to reach the moon in a decade was a nice piece of rhetoric, but it could come back to haunt him in 2012 if he wins the election and doesn’t make enough headway on that plan.

To be honest, the only moment that’s going to stick will be John McCain’s point-and-pout calling Barack Obama “That One” in reference to which Senator voted for the 2005 Energy Bill. Some people are going to throw down the Race Gauntlet here. Don’t. Really, just don’t. I honestly don’t think it was meant to be a racially charged comment. It sounded to me like a zinger that just fell on dead ears, like so many of McCain’s other little jokes tonight and just about all of Palin’s jokes on Thursday. He was trying to sound adult and dismissive, and he failed. He managed to do, in that moment, exactly what Biden went to great lengths not to do in his debate with Palin: sound like a smug, condescending old prat.

Then came the foreign policy segment, where McCain really had to make some ground. Unfortunately for both candidates, it was as mushy and meandering as the domestic policy section, and the questions just kept getting stupider. Granted, I was performing a three-lane change at the time, but did Brokaw really ask if Russia was  once again an evil empire? As in “Evil” evil? What the hell kind of question is that? I mean, I know it was a throwback to Saint Ronnie. I get the reference. And believe me when I tell you that I have no love lost for Putin. But what future President is going to stoke the flames by answering a flat yes to that question (sit down, Tom Tancredo, I said “future President” so that term automatically diqualified you)?

Ultimately, I feel like Obama should have come on stronger during the foreign policy section. He should have hit back harder on McCain’s judgment in going to war. He has the fine distinction of having publicly decried giving Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq, and the overwhelming public opinion is that invading Iraq was the wrong move. Don’t get me wrong, he hit that note. But he presented it like a bullet point when it should have been the fist of an angry god. What frustrated me most was that the entire foreign policy segment seemed dominated with hypothetical what-if questions. I suppose that’s what made me think of the Republican primaries, with its infinite doomsday scenarios that allowed the candidates to out-macho each other in their red-blooded, chest thumping Jack Bauer circle jerk.

The argument can be made – and will be made – that a draw in this debate was a loss for McCain. It’s common policical wisdom that the candidate trailing in the polls needs to use the debates to gain ground, while the candidate in the lead need only effect a stalemate. Add to that the fact that Obama out-performed him by a reasonable degree, and it’s a net loss for McCain. The immediate polling from CNN marked Obama as the more informative, stronger and likeable candidate. In short, McCain couldn’t even perform in his preferred debate format – wasn’t he the one pissing and moaning about Obama not debating him in Town Halls all over the country?

Personally? I don’t give a shit one way or another about those arguments. They are meaningless. To be blunt, this debate really didn’t matter all that much. The debate that mattered took place last Thursday. That was the true refferendum on John McCain as a candidate and what sort of judgment he would exercise if given free reign. The crap-tastrophe that is Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will weign more heavily around McCain’s neck than anything he could have said tonight, or anything he could have gotten Obama to say. Frankly, unless he shows up to the third debate with Osama bin Laden’s head on a war pike, I don’t see how he’s going to win this thing come November.

Author’s Note: I somehow got through this enitre post without making a single “My Friends” joke. Don’t you smarmy bastards worry, Johnny Mac’s got it coming.

So, last night – technically this morning, at about 4:30 AM, I finished a rough draft of a chart intended to add a tiny bit of snark to an otherwise embarrassing debate. A comment on how formulaic our political process has become. That the conversation that takes place in our commercials, our campaigns, our debates. . . it has nothing to do with the business of governance or the bettering of our nation. I threw that chart, a slapdash gif file, up onto a few sites I frequent as well as my own, and called it a night.

Then my inbox exploded.

To be honest, I’m a bit blown away. And flattered. And, let’s not mince words here, pleased. This blog has always been a bit of an experiment for me, culling and combining the different subcultures of my life into one living, raging, visceral, flowing document. These were the types of things I was saying, politically, in 2002. Back in a time when I got hate mail on a weekly basis for being either a communist or a terrorist or a fascist – and varying combinations there-of. Now I get far more people telling me that I’m a breath of fresh air, for most common definitions of the word “fresh”. Those of you who dislike my language should feel free to peruse one of the other fifty ho-jillion web sites out there on the internet. I’ll consider less swearing when our leaders start acting less stupid.

I’ll admit to being taken a bit by surprise. Hell, if I’d known I was going viral, I’d have cleaned up the place a bit more! But for my long term readers (you poor, glorious bastards), I promise that nothing around here is going to change. Well, maybe my templates. And probably my update frequency. But certainly not my attitude. For my new readers, you should know that I am not married to every aspect of liberalism. At least not as conventional American politics defines it. And there are times, though admittedly less often than not recently, when I agree with conservatives. What I’m sick to death of is neo-conservativism. And that is what I will attack mercilessly in this space until something even stupider comes along.

And yes, regulars, I’ll still be covering gamer culture. Sony is due to do something incredibly stupid any day now, and I’ll be there!

Now, with that bit of business out of the way, I’m happy to announce that fans of the Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart can now reference it on the go, over morning coffee, on a cold winter day, or even in the comfort of their own pants! Because I have a new CafePress site up where you can get the flow chart on damn near everything.

I’m also rather psyched to note that the original post that garnered all of this attention over at DailyKos has been Dugg nearly 10,000 times. If you like the chart, or just like my site in general, click on over and show the love!

So, I’ve been quiet thus far, but I figure it’s about time I went moose hunting. So let me start off nice and big for ya, in case there’s any doubt as to where I stand. Sarah Palin is a stupid, self important, ignorant bitch who I wouldn’t put in charge of wiping her own ass. And it’s not just that she’s dumb – which she is – it’s that she’s willfully ignorant of the facts and yet absolutely dead-bang certain that she’s right about her opinions. It’s more of this “governing from the gut” bullshit that we’ve been Chimping along with for the past eight years. I don’t know why it’s a taboo to say someone is too dumb to be President. Hell, most people don’t have the kind of mental sharpness necessary. That’s why it’s so important to pick the right person out of an entire country of potential leaders. But Sarah Palin? She’s not even worth considering. She’s fucking dumb, okay?

And since we’re talking about things you can’t talk about, let’s talk about her pregnant teenage daughter! Here’s now this works. Bristol being pregnant, deciding to keep the baby, and having her little shotgun wedding? I don’t give a rat’s ass. It doesn’t affect my life in the slightest. But it damn well is fair political game, and I’ll tell you why. Sarah Palin supports abstinence only education in spite of the fact that it demonstratably doesn’t work. Don’t believe me? Why not ask the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the Society for Adolescent Medicine and the American College Health Association. Go ahead and Wiki it. I’ll wait.

The reason that Bristol’s pregnancy is fair game is that her mother is telling America, in the face of any scientific data on the subject, how best to prevent teenage pregnancy. Yet the method she supports didn’t even work on her own daughter. Does that mean people should be making fun of Bristol? No, actually. I kind of feel bad for the girl. It must be rough having such a stupid, arrogant git for a mother.

And she is arrogant, make no mistake. Hell, it’s arrogant enough for her to assume that she could be the Vice President without even knowing what the job entails. But here’s a more specific story that should snap-freeze the hairs on your neck. When she became mayor of Wasilla, she spent around $50,000 of taxpayer money redecorating her office. Which is pretty obnoxious on its own, but isn’t even the bad part of the story. When she was confronted with the radical idea that The People might not give a shit whether she liked the pattern on the drapes, she responded with the sort of self important authoritarianism that makes Dick Cheney soak his own trousers. “I’m the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can’t.”

To hell with the Vice Presidency, she didn’t even understand the responsibilities and limitations of her job as mayor. Her attitude, at any given moment, is that she’s in charge and she’ll do whatever she damn well pleases until someone forces her to stop. I’m sure she sees that as just some red-tape-cutting common sense. And you know what? If you’re in charge of your local PTA meeting, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Wittle away some of the pointless procedure and get things done. Fine. But the Vice President and, I shudder to even think it, the President of the United States can’t just ignore the Constitution whenever it suits them. No matter what the past eight years suggest.

So before I get to her debate performance, I’d like to do a bit of a run down. A list, if you will, of the things we’ve learned about Sarah Palin from her very limited, groomed, handled private interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric.

• Sarah Palin isn’t sure what the Bush Doctrine is. She couldn’t even take a wild guess. Everyone who heard her ask “In what respect, Charlie?” knew it, no matter what sort of semantics argument you want to get into over what different meanings that phrase has encompassed.
• Sarah Palin doesn’t know that Freddie Mac and Fannie May weren’t being funded by the federal government before their collapse.
• Sarah Palin thinks that the $700 billion bailout has something to do with health care costs.
• Sarah Palin can only name one Supreme Court case – Roe v. Wade. She couldn’t even conjure up Dred Scott, which even Bush was able to do in the second debate with John Kerry. Speaking of Bush, she couldn’t think of Bush v. Gore. Or Brown v. Board of Education. Or Hustler v. Falwell. Or FCC v. Pacifica (Carlin’s seven words). Or, and this is most stunning of all, Exxon v. Baker – concerning the Exxon Valdez. A case which rendered a ruling during her time as Governer of Alaska, and about which she made public statements in protest of the decision.
• Sarah Palin either could not or would not name a single newspaper or magazine that she reads. She couldn’t think of one. Not the New York Times, the Daily News, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune. Not Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Reports. Hell, she couldn’t even think of a local paper in Alaska. Sarah Palin, by the way, has a degree in Journalism. No shit.
• Sarah Palin cannot name a single instance of John McCain favoring regulation of industry, despite being more than willing to lie right into the camera and say that McCain has been championing regulation for twenty-six years.

There’s probably more, but I could be here all night. The point is, she doesn’t know shit about shit. She has opinions – uninformed ones – and she’s sticking to them come hell or high water. I pity the poor bastards that had to prep her for tonight’s debate with Joe Biden. And while I wasn’t taken with her performance, I will give them credit. They made an organized mess out of a disorganized disaster. So there’s that.

The truth is that Palin didn’t answer any questions she didn’t want to tonight, and she said she’d do exactly that at the start of the debate. She had a hand full of index cards and a brain full of buzz words, and it was her job to say them all in front of the camera. Actually, it was her job to say them while looking at Joe Biden for five seconds, then looking at the camera for five seconds, and then looking back at Biden to start over again. It was like she was on a timer. One of the many things she’d probably been coached on after the whole flap about McCain not looking Obama in the eyes.

I choose to leave you (at 4:30 in the morning) with the following flow chart. Doubtless, it will grow prettier and more robust over time.

Listen, Democratic Party. . . we need to talk. Really. Just sit down for a moment. Just listen.

Have you guys ever noticed that whenever you are up for reelection, it’s the same old rhetoric being used against you? You know the stuff I’m talking about. Democrats are weak. They are spineless. They won’t keep America safe. And even though you guys actually do a pretty good job in terms of managing government agencies, that narrative get gobbled up by the public. It kicks your ass every two to four years. And you can never figure out why.

Here’s why. Currently on the docket in Congress is a $700 billion giveaway to the most irresponsible, greedy, ignorant short sighted buch of assholes to ever dip their fingers into the public purse since the last time we had to bail out the banking industry due to their own excessive cockery. The public hates the bailout. It’s a George W. Bush project, so they already don’t trust it. Members of Congress are receiving thousands of phone calls, letters and emails per day telling them all the same thing. That this bailout is a steaming load of horse shit. It’s actually more unpopular than Bush himself. Hell, it’s more unpopular than freakin’ Dick Cheney.

And you assholes voted for it. Knowing it was an awful plan. Knowing it wasn’t going to fix the core issue. Knowing it was going to reward the very people who got us into this mess. Knowing that the law was unconstitutional. You asked for tiny little changes to the most inconsequential portions of the bill, and then you voted for it. And it was only thanks to grandstanding Republicans that this travesty of a bill got shot down.

And now you’re sitting on Capitol Hill with your knickers in a twist because you think, despite all evidence to the contrary, that you absolutely need to get this legislation passed. You’ve been shown some cock-eyed numbers about one theorhetical economic future and you’ve wet yourselves like the little pansies you are. Never mind the fact that the administration screaming doom from the rooftops is the same one that lied their way into an illegal war using the exact same application of the Shock Doctrine. Lied their way into a gutted Bill of Rights using the same technique. Tried to lie their way into privatizing Social Security (which, if they had succeeded, would have turned this major disaster into an out and out clusterfuck).

So what do you do? Do you tell the President that you control both houses of Congress, and you will not have the terms of this bill dictated to you by the very administrators who failed to predict or prevent this crisis? Do you dare him to veto an actual piece of legislation that would save these institutions from ruin without just handing them free money for fucking up? Do you remind the Republican minority that they are, in fact, a minority, and that their options are to fall in line or be marginalized?

Nope. Apparently, you go crawling back to the petulant GOP minority and offer to include new language for tax breaks and deregulation into the current bill if twelve of them will just pretty please sign it into law. You pussy out. You negotiate a compromise between a Republican President and a Republican Congress because, well. . . shit. I was willing to give you half a pass when the country was in the depths of Terror Panic and disagreeing with the President made you a terrorist. But now? With the entire country rejecting this law? You’ve shown no bloody leadership of any kind. You haven’t even made the half-assed attempt to propose your own plan. Nancy Pelosi can make as snarky a speech as she wants. But unless she backs that speech up with a better plan, it’s just empty partisan bullshit.

But it’s not bad enough that you haven’t shown any initiative on this issue. Instead, your solution to this problem is to add a tax cut to a bill that is going to drain the government of $700,000,000,000.00. The national debt is going to break the ten trillion mark on this bailout, and you want to add a tax cut to the legislation just to sweet-talk a handful of Republicans into passing a law so heinously wrong headed that, if you were doing your fucking jobs, would have been voted down into oblivion in the same breath that it was first proposed.

So the next time you all get painted like spineless little shits in an election year? Maybe it’s because you are.

As predicted, the Repbulican minority on Congress has ow offered up their own solution to our current financial crisis, and as predicted it varies greatly from the Bush Bailout plan. The first part of the plan is to abolish the capital gains tax, which would do exactly nothing to mitigate this financial downward spiral, but would allow the fantastically rich to pay even fewer taxes. The bullshit theory here is that destitute financial institutions would be able to re-coop more of their lost assests selling what little they have left without a capital gains tax. Of course, their alternative is bankruptcy, so they would have sold those assets anyway if they need to.

Step two is to privatize Freddie Mac and Fannie May and then – you’re going to love this – deregulate their crediting practices a bit more. No longer would such companies have to reveal the actual value of their assets. The third broken leg on this stool of fail is to repeal a law that expired in the year 2000.

So, in short, their solution for a financial crisis brough on by rampant deregulation, dishonesty and greed is to push those policies to an entirely new level. Neither of these plans is even remotely acceptable. This is the same old bag full of ideological bullshit that the GOP has been harping on for as long as I’ve been following politics. If only the rich didn’t have to pay taxes on the money they earn, we’d all be millionaires. And the government should keep its nose out of the private sector’s business – you know, unless they need some free money to help bury their mistakes.

Talk about a win / win for Republicans in Congress. They get to puff up their chests and make a big show of disagreeing with Ol’ Ninteen Percent himself,  and then they get to put forward a plan that’s actually worse for America and does jack-all nothing to correct the problem at hand. Touche, GOP. Tou-fucking-che.

So, I’m still working on my Palin-festo, which I suppose I’d better finish before she sinks completely into cultural irrelevancy at the hands of Joe Biden. But I figured that any time the government wants to take $700 billion of our money and give it to a bunch of fucking crooks, it’s worth a brief review.

The current bill, proposed by Bush, is unacceptable on so many levels I can scarcely wrap my head around it. Amongst other things, it gives the Secretary of the Treasury complete and unlimited authority to act, excluding him from oversight by any governmental body. According to the language of the bill, neither this nor future Presidents, and not even the Supreme Court, would have the authority to curtail or regulate his activities.

I couldn’t figure it out. I mean, that sort of language would make the bill completely unconstitutional, not to mention incredibly dangerous. Especially when you consider the secrecy and strong-arm balls-blazing rush job they’re doing trying to get it passed. Usually, even the people who write Bush’s language for him aren’t so obvious or blatant. This thing stinks to high holy hell every bit as badly as FISA, and almost as badly as the Patriot Act.

I was still sitting back, utterly stunned by this realization, when I saw a new poll putting George Bush’s approval rating at an amazing 19%. He’s in the bloody teens now – higher than he should be as far as I’m concerned. But that means that even the 14% of the country that would hump a corpse if it had an (R) after it’s name is sick to death of this man. About a moment later I remembered what month it was.

This bill is a Harriet Miers. It’s designed to flop. I mean, sure, if it squeaks by the Good Ol’ Boy network won’t exactly mind. But that’s not it’s purpose. There are a lot of Republican Senate seats in play this November, and of course the entire House is up for grabs every year. Most of those incumbent Republicans are desperate to distract their voters from their party and from their previous years of Bush loyalty.

So here comes Bush with another over the top, I’m The Decider power grab for the Republican machine to suddenly stand up to. And it’s just close enough to the election that it should still be fresh in everyone’s mind when they go to vote. Suddenly every Republican is a maverick (assuming that they get permission from John McCain to use the word in public). Every one of them stands up to that no good Bush because they opposed this one single piece of legislation. And yes, it’s already happening.

Now, am I suggesting that they somehow orchestrated this crisis so they could play rogue for the cameras? No, of course not. What I’m saying is that just like 9/11, just like the crashing stock market in late 2001 and 2002, just like the threat of terrorism and the rhetoric of extremism, an unfortunate and ugly circumstance is being deftly manipulated for political gain. It’s just another application of The Shock Doctrine. If they pass their crazy bill, they win. If they oppose their crazy bill, they win. Same shit, different day.

So, Obama went on his whirlwind world tour and made it all the way back home, as noted CNN concern troll Candy Crowley suggested, without making any major mistakes. I heard her say it in a snippet on television, and later heard it replayed on either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report (hey, it was 1 AM, I can’t remember which). And both times, I had the same reaction. Is that what eight years of George Bush as our national figurehead has done? Is the bar so low that going to another country and not making an ass out of yourself our official standard for success?

I mean, sure, he didn’t try to give an unrequested back rub to any German Chancellors. So I guess Obama deserves points for that. I just think it’s stunningly sad that our expectations for our President (or in this case, our President-To-Be) are that amazingly low. Managing to go to another country and not embarrass us as a nation is not an accomplishment. It’s not even the minimum requirement. It’s far less than what should be expected.

The concensus was that Obama, who is at least perceived as not being stong on foreign policy, would stammer and fall flat on his face. But since Obama not only failed to produce facepalmingly bad sound bites, but actually seemed to handle himself very well (and with no prompting from aides or advisors), what’s going to be the new spin? Well, obviously, Barack Obama did too well. Yeah. For reals. That’s what they’re saying.

I mean, after all – why was he so cozy with those Old Europeans anyway? Why does he like them more than he likes Americans? He isn’t running for President of European Union, damn it. Where was his flag lapel pin? And remember kiddies, when Barack Obama calls himself a citizen of the world, it’s unpatriotic! But when Ronald Reagan did it, it was Great Communication.

Now, my regular readers know that Obama wasn’t my first choice. In fact, he wasn’t even my second. And while he is counter-punching a bit better than I thought he would, he’s still not taking command of this framing aggressively enough. When an elected official of this government visits a foreign nation, and he is greeted by cheers and waving American flags of the not-on-fire variety, that’s a good thing. He wasn’t being celebrated abroad for hating America. He was being welcomed because he represented what other countries like about America. Not to invoke ol’ Saint Ronnie again, but there was a time not so long ago that American was the Shining City Upon A Hill. Why is that suddenly a bad thing?

Because in a larger sense, we are all citizens of the world. And I don’t just mean that in some Model U.N., naive, hand holding, listening to too much Bono sort of way. I mean that we as a nation have a lot of problems that we just can’t solve ourselves, no matter how much Crawford Cowboy we throw into our stride. We’re not going to get out from under O.P.E.C. on our own. We’re not going to finally catch Osama bin Fucking Laden without working with the international community. And while I do believe that America should look out for its own interests first, I believe there is an amazing gradient of potential worldly outcomes. I think it just might be possible to take care of our own without being complete douchenozzles to everyone else. Call me crazy. Call me a dreamer!

Call me too successful.

Wesley Clark: [McCain] hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?”

Bob Scheiffer: Can I just interrupt you? I have to say, Barack Obama hasn’t had any of these experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.

Wesley Clark: I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.

And that’s the conversation that took place. I wanted to start out with it because so far, I haven’t read the full exchange anywhere else (I had to go find video of it just to get Clark’s opening lines). The specific wording that everyone is so upset about came from Bob Scheiffer – a newsman that I genuinely respect. And the context in which Scheiffer used it was perfectly relevant. The discussion was centered around whether either candidate has been in positions of executive authority before and understands the consequences of war. Scheiffer pointed out that McCain had experienced those consequences first hand.

Clark did the right thing by rebutting this argument. Because military experience is not a pre-requisite for serving as Commander in Chief. In fact, our government was specifically set up with that concept in mind. Does that mean I disparage McCain’s military record? Certianly not. I may not agree with having gone to war in Veitnam, but McCain’s service as an officer is another matter entirely and by any account, he served honorably. And I thoroughly respect the tenacity and inner strength that sustained him through his imprisonment.

But it’s not a free pass to the White House, either. The office of the President is more important than personal feelings, more important than who thinks they’ve proven their loyalty or patriotism. It’s more important than any one man – even the man running for that office. It is more important than his sacrifices, more important than his desires, and more important than his pride. There are many things about John McCain that I still respect – but none of them automatically make him the better candidate. His war record is not a complete list of qualifications for the Presidency. Period.

The gutteral implication of Clark’s statement, though, is that he was mocking John McCain for having been shot down in combat. There are some people who probably only heard the Clark line and thought he was insulting McCain. There are plenty of people who heard the whole exchange and knew they could cherry pick this into a media non-issue of infinite coverage and point-scoring controversy. We’re a week or so out of the primary and already the doubletalk is in full swing.

One of the things I couldn’t quite get my head around during that primary was the infatuation that people had with Barack Obama in the first place. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like him as a candidate. I think he’ll be an effective President. But as the campaign dragged on, his supporters began defending him with Ron-Paulesque zeal. I mean, I like the guy’s message, but he’s still a politician. The Barack Obama that I saw campaigning never entirely meshed with the Barack Obama that I knew from several years before, a man cut from the cloth of Rahm Emanuel rather than Howard Dean.

Still, the John Edwards I supported in 2008 was a much different, much more progressive, and much more aggressive man than the one that ran in 2004, so I was open to the idea that Obama had also broadened his view of both his politics and his party. Though while I felt it, almost as a tangible vibration from John Edwards, I never got that vibe from Barack Obama. Still, I’m sure there was some primary-based bias still swirling in my brain (my guy lost, their guy won). And in the past few weeks, I’d been coming around to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Yes We Can wasn’t as market tested as I originally felt.

That’s about when Obama told the netroots to blow it out their collective asses, specifically holding up the right’s favorite icon of left-wing interwebz godless liberalism, MoveOn.org (a group that endorsed him in Februrary) and doing his best to casually distance himself from them. He went to even greater lengths to distance himself from the Wesley Clark comment – a comment that is blatantly taken out of context and being used as a political wedge.

It’s a drummed up controversey, a bullshit right wing talking point with no substance and no real legs other than the feigned outrage of hackneyed political pundits. I mentined Rovian tricks just a little while ago, and this is a very commonplace one. You wait for someone unrelated to your opponent to say something that you can construe (usually out of context) as being unacceptable or indefensible. And then you demand that your opponent disown that person. It’s a win/win, because your opponent either gets to look like a backstabbing jerk, or you get to thrash him for a statement he didn’t even make in the first place.

Obama, the bold visionary who “doesn’t do cowering” is already lurching to the center. I said during the primary that Obama doesn’t know how to counter-punch. And it sure didn’t take long for him to prove it. I also said that as soon Hillary officially conceded, the media’s love affair with Bracak Obama would come to a swift and sudden end. Judging from the way this non-moment was whirlwinded into an outrage, I’d say I was right on the money there as well. Obama gained nothing by throwing Clark under the bus – and in fact, he tossed aside a very viable campaigning ally and potential cabinet member. McCain supporters aren’t going to be disuaded by this move, nor are they going to be impressed with his hideous co-opting of Bush’s “faith based initiatives” language. All he did was make himself less appealing to his otherwise tireless supporters.

Am I giving up on Obama? Not yet. I’ll see how he plays this out, and how he manages the next wave of Rovian bullshit they throw his way. But as a general rule, Barack, if you want your political base to grow and flourish, you should try watering it rather than pissing on it.

Okay. The primary is over. I can return to my regularly scheduled political vitriol without choking on it and keeling over. Am I happy with the primary results? Meh. I knew I’d be unhappy the moment Edwards lost his footing, and that hasn’t changed. Do I think Obama would make a better President? Yes. Do I think Hillary would have an easier time of winning? Yes again. So not a huge shift in that department.

The tap dancing piss water of media concern over the past few days (and likely well into the next few weeks) are going to be Vice Presidential candidates. Now, in theory, there should only be one qualifying metric for choosing your VP. “If I were to die, would I trust this person to run the country?” That should be the one and only question worth asking. Sadly, I’d say that question isn’t even on the table for most people, because that’s not the electoral function that a VP serves anymore. The Veep “balances” the ticket – it provides for the candidate the qualities that said candidate is otherwise lacking.

Kerry picked Edwards because he had a southern accent, he was easy to listen to, and he had a lot of charisma. Al Gore picked Joe Lieberman because he hadn’t yet made the worst mistake in his life, and he was about due. George Bush picked Dick Cheney because that’s what Dick Cheney told him to do, god damn it. And so it goes.

If Hillary had won, her choice would have been easy. She would have scooped up Wesley Clark, a former four-star General, a former Presidential candidate, a long-standing critic of the Iraq War, and one of the first major political figures to firmly endorse Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And Wes is a damn smart guy, too. I don’t think his 2004 campaign had what it would have taken to go the distance, but the guy is razor sharp and just a genuinely good human being.

The early rumors are that Obama is also looking for some military experience to counterweight his candidacy, though I don’t think Clark is likely to join him on the ticket. I’m not sure who that leaves in terms of public figures, but it need not be a known individual. Though on the flip side, Obama is already going to have enough trouble because of his general unfamiliarity with the public (the last 10 months aside). His other alternative is to select an already established political figure from the 2008 primary. I’ve heard both Bill Richardson and Mike Gravel, though I wouldn’t bank on either. Hillary as a choice is “obvious” but I don’t think it’s likely. And Obama is right not to pick her. As much as I’d like to see the Clinton Counterpunch make a comeback, it would make the whole primary seem like the dog-and-pony show that it truly was. And that might actually distance voters from the process.

As for McCain? Egads, who does he even go with? I mean, the archetype is clear. He needs to go get himself a religious conservative running mate and fast. He’s already going to be a damn hard sell to that strong Christian voting block, so you can expect him to form an uneasy alliance with a serious holy roller before his party has their convention. It would be a bad move for him to pick one of the primary losers as well, though the only one that really fits the bill in the first place would be Mike Huckabee. I’ve heard spatterings of both Joe Lieberman and Jeb Bush – and really, I would pay money to see either of those campaigns. No, his Veep will be someone most of the country has never heard of, but regular 700 Club viewers know on a first name basis.

As for the runup to November? Well, I hope you like race bating, because there’s going to be a steady stream of it coming from independent groups that John McCain and the GOP are really, really, really super duper not even a tiny bit related to or associated with. Honest. For reals. The swift boating of Barak Obama will be ugly and tense. It will also be unrelenting from August to late October. It wouldn’t even surprise me to hear the phrase “race riots” before the year is out.

It will be, to say the least, interesting to see how Obama runs his campaing now that he’s in an actual race as opposed to the good natured slapfight that he was in with Hillary. It’s my fear that he will lack the aggression and even the ruthlessness necessary to win, preferring instead to place his faith entirely in the same public that nearly voted George W. Bush into office two elections in a row. I don’t trust that. Honestly, I can’t trust that, not at this juncture. What Obama needs to do, and what the rest of his party needs to do, is to Learn To Rove.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating spreading rumors about illegitimate inter-racial children or spiking terror alerts or postering neighborhoods with pamphlets that list the wrong election date. Those are all flavor tactics. Those are the methodology and not the target. The core mechanic of Rovian politics is actually blissfully simple. You attack your opponent where he is strongest. You don’t look for weak spots or faults – most people already know what they don’t like about a candidate. Instead, you figure out what your opponent really has going for him and you take that away from him.

It works for so many reasons. First off, your opponent never sees it coming. In 2004, a draft dodger attacked a medal-winning Vietnam veteran for being anti-military for fuck’s sake! In both of Bush’s elections, his opponents were mocked for being too intellectual, for being too smart. They went after Edwards because he has a history of fighting against corperate interests. And way, way back, in the 2000 primary, they spread rumors that John McCain was unfit to be President because he’d been broken by his captors when he was a P.O.W.

The second benefit is that you take way your opponent’s stable base. You rob him of the issue that he knows he can rely on. And in doing so, you rob him of his credentials. You make him look like a liar for campaigning on genuine values because you have publically called those values into question. You force him to play defense and force him to look weak. You force him to fall back onto qualities that are not as appealing, not as strong. It’s a devestating tactic that would be suicide on an actual battlefield, but when your only cost is words instead of lives, it can and does work.

They will go after Obama for being black. Yes, you and I both know they will. But they will go after him for being a relatively new to politics as well, even though that seems like a strength because it plays well into his change memes. They will attack him for being optimistic, because how is some bright-eyed beatnick going to protect America from “the al-Queda”? Most importantly, they will directly confront and attack his “change” rhetoric, on the basic assumption that they can make it sound either head-in-the-clouds absurd or scary – as a rule, most people resist change when they are actually confronted with it. They will attack him anywhere he seems strong, and honestly, so far I’ve never seen Obama properly set up and execute a counterpunch.

McCain, though. He’s an easy target for the Rovian method. In a lot of ways, he’s set himself up to be. He runs on a platform of being honest and sincere. On being opposed to lobbyist money (which, again, they will simultaneously attack Obama for). On not being beholden to religious extremists. On being able to work with both Democrats and Republicans. On being a long-standing icon in politics and having a vast network of solid connections in both the government and the media. And those are the places that Obama needs to attack him.

Attack his sincerity and his integrity – make it seem as if he reverses his positions. Find any minute lobbyist interaction and play it like a harp from hell. Make constant noise over the fact that McCain’s campaign finance reforms would have bankrupted his own campaign. Force him to two-step. Show the footage of him at Falwell’s university, and replay every last snippet of newsreal of him standing side by side with George W. Bush – another aspect that up until a few years ago was considered one of his strengths. Attack him for being just another political insider, for being up to his eyebrows in greasy handshakes and political favors.

Hit him where he is strong, and you leave him nothing to fall back on. His stance on Iraq is vastly unpopular, his economic policy is more of the Neoconservative bullshit that has wrecked our country’s finances, and ever since the end of that 2000 primary, he’s had the lifeless spark of a dead toad. Make him fortify at his weak points, and he loses. It needs doing. And I don’t think Obama has the strength or the stomach to do it. I just can’t see the man with bruises on his knuckles.

I still hope I’m wrong.