The Last Word

Give Andrew Sullivan credit for allowing Patrick Appel to speak his mind on the Palin issue.  The Dish has always set the gold standard for airing dissent from across the political spectrum, and I hope more people favor Sullivan’s approach to online discussion over, say, RedState’s.
As to the merits of the issue, I think Appel’s [...]

So What?

Andrew Sullivan’s latest on Trig Palin’s maternity is uncomfortable reading. After wading through the muck, I’m left wondering why he feels the need to badger the poor woman over the circumstances of her son’s birth. Even if everything he says is true – the pregnancy was staged to protect her daughter; the entire story is [...]

Back to Sarah

According to a new CBS poll, the biggest reason voters switched from McCain to Obama was McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as running-mate. I’m suspicious of polls that suggest a single explanation for a losing campaign, and I think it’s impossible to separate the candidates’ personalities from strategic and electoral considerations, but CBS’s findings confirm [...]

Is this for real?

Canadian prank-callers convince Palin she’s speaking to Nicholas Sarkozy. Mon dieu!

Why Palin Matters

I can’t vouch for the science, but according to this article, McCain has a 22% chance of dying during his first term.

Required Reading

Everyone should check out this excellent Ben Smith post on the road not taken by Republican operatives in 2008. I’ve expressed my frustration with this phenomenon before, but Smith does a fantastic job of explaining why the naked cultural appeals of McCain’s media enablers are so politically ineffective.
It’s also worth noting that it didn’t have [...]

Snobbery

Andrew Sullivan is at it again:
How anti-intellectual is Sarah Palin?
Ramesh Ponnuru asks the question. He refers to Noam Scheiber’s devastating piece on Palin’s Nixonian hatred of educated elites. But Ponnuru wants more evidence. Here’s one way to look at the question: how has Palin brought up her own kids? Her eldest son is a high-school [...]

Double Standards

Getting worked up over the liberal media’s failure to condemn derogatory Sarah Palin street art strikes me as pretty darn silly. Portraying Palin as the devil may be tasteless and obnoxious, but there’s no history of violent animosity between New Yorkers and maverick-y Alaskan reformers (unless you count the recent spate of mildly amusing SNL [...]

No, Sarah Palin is not Howard Dean

Patrick Ruffini at The Next Right:
I’m rooting for Sarah Palin, and in temperament she is nothing like Dean. But she is situated similarly politically, and this is worth exploring further.
Howard Dean emerged when the Demcoratic Party was in full capitulation mode. Dean was the only semi-sorta-mainsteam candidate who said “no” on Iraq. This in-your-face style [...]

That’s odd . . .

I could have sworn that one William Kristol was a member of our “highly educated and sophisticated elite.” Perhaps this is his round-about way of taking responsibility for the Iraq debacle?
Most of the recent mistakes of American public policy, and most of the contemporary delusions of American public life, haven’t come from an ignorant and [...]

“Populism”

It occurs to me that the emergence of a genuinely populist candidate would look radically different from Governor Palin’s stage-managed political entrance. Mike Huckabee, for example, was a populist presidential contender who came out of nowhere to challenge the GOP’s political establishment. The hallmarks of the Huckabee campaign – the shoe-string budget, the lack of [...]

Excruciating

The Redskins game, not Palin’s SNL performance. The latter was merely awkward and uncomfortable.

Best Punditry Ever

Daniel Larison wins the brass ring for this gem:
Were the Republicans to nominate for President one Mr. Camacho (warning: some profanity) and a journalist said something unflattering about his grasp of the finer points of agricultural policy, you can already hear the refrains of ”they also said Reagan was a dunce” and “who expects a candidate to know everything about price supports or [...]

No Cigar

David Brooks is getting at something he can’t quite articulate:
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own [...]

She Speaks To You

Fresh on the heels of my post on Obama’s intellectual appeal, Victor David Hanson writes:
Wisdom can be, but surely is not confined to, or even assured by, degree certification, rhetorical brilliance, or the ability to talk off the cuff about Niehbuhr — or the wit to write Brooks and advise him about his own ethical [...]

The Message

All politics may be tribal, but governance certainly isn’t. At the risk of sounding like David Broder, certain aspects of management – from disaster relief to appointing competent lawyers at the Justice Department – are far removed from our day-to-day ideological battles. This isn’t to say ideology is unimportant; simply that managerial competence and a [...]

Argghhhhhhhh

I’m not sure why this particular ad offends me more than the slew of other really awful character attacks. But it does:

Maybe it’s because Obama is so incontrovertibly right on this issue – we should rely on troops rather than indiscriminate air power whenever possible – that it’s hard to fathom [...]

Make It Stop

I miss the old Andrew Sullivan. The new version is reduced to using Sarah Palin’s own idiocy to justify a bizarre obsession with her son’s maternity.
Of course, his technorati rating is through the roof. Wisdom of the markets and all that jazz . . .
Please. Stop. Now.

Have I Soured On Palin?

In a word: yes.
And this sort of thing isn’t helping. Here, for example, is Palin on the freedom of the press:
“As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, including freedom of the press, we’ve really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with [...]

A Place To Bury Strangers

For me, the low point of the past several days has been watching Sarah Palin repeatedly criticize Obama for calling attention to Afghani civilian casualties. Leaving aside the incredible callousness of this line of attack, one hopes Palin realizes that bombing noncombatants can be pretty counterproductive. This also happens to be one of the best [...]