"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
Eric J. Martin, millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht Something to fill the time this weekend. Not much to say other than I’m currently finishing up Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, and I could not recommend it more (I know people say this all the time but I really mean it). The beginning … Read more
by hilzoy As Steve Benen pointed out over at the Washington Monthly, even the AP has started criticizing McCain’s dishonesty. I want to highlight one quote from their piece that particularly annoyed me: “Dan Schnur, a former McCain aide who now teaches politics at the University of Southern California, said McCain and Obama learned they … Read more
by Eric Martin Another day, another couple of howlers from John McCain. I particularly like the utterly shameless lie about Palin never accepting an earmark as governor. Wow. That one was so bad that even Jake Tapper took notice. Seriously, John McCain has decided to completely sell out. He’s just going to lie over and … Read more
[It is my pleasure to present a guest post from Benjamin Orbach, whose book was reviewed by me on American Footprints – with a follow up interview.] Jerusalem – I was in the U.S. the week that included the VP selections, the DNC convention, and the Sarah Palin media mushroom cloud. Courtesy of Delta, I … Read more
by publius
Via Sullivan, Fallows articulates part of what I was arguing here, although he does it better and more diplomatically. The upshot is that the interview shows that Palin has not followed — and thus probably has no interest in — the foreign policy debates over the past seven years. And I’m not talking about at a wonk level — she’s not even up to “regular newspaper reader” level. And she might be President in 2 months. Excerpts below the fold, but you should read the whole thing.
by hilzoy I recall the moment when I first realized that Hurricane Katrina could be a major disaster: someone, possibly Atrios, had posted the National Hurricane Center’s advisory, and it was flat-out terrifying. I thought of that when I read their most recent advisory for the Galveston area: “NEIGHBORHOODS THAT ARE AFFECTED BY THE STORM … Read more
by publius You all may have heard of a little storm brewing in the Gulf called Hurricane Ike. Well, it’s headed my way. There’s no danger or anything where I am, though I am expecting to be without power — and more crucially, internets — for at least a few days. Hopefully it won’t be … Read more
by hilzoy McClatchy: “Knowles broke new ground while answering a reporter’s question on whether Wasilla forced rape victims to pay for their own forensic tests when Palin was mayor. True, Knowles said. Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla prompted the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill — signed … Read more
by hilzoy From the New York Review of Books the story of a man named Drew Pooters, who served in the Air Force for 14 years, got out, and eventually ended up as a department mananger at a Toys ‘R’ Us: “He liked the job but it didn’t take long before he found that an … Read more
by publius
Well, now we know why they’ve been hiding her. That interview was embarrassing. What I’m about to say I don’t mean in any sort of personal way. But as a selection for Vice President of the United States, she is a complete joke. I’m sorry to be so snarky, but it’s hard to convey the utter absurdity of the whole thing in a respectful tone.
I know Democrats have a million different strategies for countering the Palin phenomenon. Should we avoid talking about inexperience? Should we recognize what a talented politician she is? Well, I’m through walking on eggshells. That interview confirmed what’s become even more clear in the past few days — McCain’s selection was a joke. She (like me) has absolutely no business being a vice-presidential nominee.
Let’s start with the interview, and then I’ll make some more general points about why this is all such a farce (to borrow from Andrew).
by hilzoy I watched the first clip of Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson, and to me, the most striking part was her complete inability to answer the question: “Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?” Here’s what she said: “Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?” “In what respect, Charlie?” “The Bush — well, … Read more
by publius Lying John McCain calls Lying Sarah Palin the nation’s top energy expert. He also noted that she “understands Russia” because Alaska is next to a remote region of that country. Jonathan Martin writes: Asked what specific national security credentials Palin had, McCain cited her experience dealing with energy issues and went so far … Read more
by hilzoy The WSJ: “Workers with professional degrees, such as doctors and lawyers, were the only educational group to see their inflation-adjusted earnings increase over the most recent economic expansion, adding to the concern that the economy has benefited higher-earning Americans at the expense of others. Workers in every other educational group — including Ph.D.s … Read more
by publius A quick thought on this: Government officials in charge of collecting billions of dollars worth of royalties from oil and gas companies accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drug use and illicit sex with employees of the energy firms, federal investigators reported yesterday. What’s so depressingly funny about this … Read more
by hilzoy Like everyone else, I’ve written a lot about Sarah Palin recently. The reason, I think, is pretty obvious: until a little under two weeks ago, most of us knew nothing about her. When Obama nominated Biden, there wasn’t much to write other than a straightforward reaction: most people who read this blog know … Read more
by hilzoy From the NYT, the Interior Department’s Inspector General seems to have found a lot of unusually blatant corruption: “In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in … Read more
by publius Via Ari Berman, ABC News moves the ball a bit on whether Sarah Palin attempted to ban books in the local library. To believe Palin’s version, you must think (1) she was just casually asking a rhetorical question; and (2) the subsequent firing of the librarian had nothing to do with the librarian’s … Read more
by hilzoy It’s bad enough that Barack Obama wants to teach your kids about sex the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching, so that they can protect themselves against pedophiles. But, following up on a comment at the Washington Monthly, I see that the Cub Scouts do too. This is the cover of an eight … Read more
by hilzoy The McCain campaign has a new ad out that says (among other things): “Obama’s one accomplishment? Legislation to teach “comprehensive sex education” to kindergartners. Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family. “ John McCain: wrong on the facts. For starters, the bill is not … Read more
by publius Rod Dreher: Sarah Palin makes perfect sense to me as the kind of person I grew up with. . . . People like me see Palin as a culture warrior, but only because she’s drawn so much incoming fire from her cultural enemies. In truth, I don’t think there’s much of a conscious … Read more
by Eric Martin This should be unremarkable news: Al Qaeda has issued a video marking the September 11 attacks, in which deputy group leader Ayman al-Zawahri accuses Iran of taking part in a Western "Crusader" war against Islam, Al Jazeera television said on Monday. […] In a segment on the video aired by al Jazeera, … Read more
by publius Sarah Palin — for apparently the 23rd time — again flat-out lied about the Bridge to Nowhere today. The press has done a fairly decent job reporting the inaccuracy, but she and the McCain campaign are just rubbing the press’s nose in it at this point. They clearly feel like they have the … Read more
by Eric Martin Matt Yglesias is making sense: Nobody’s paid any attention to this, but as Mark Goldberg points out probably the most significant news of the weekend was the Nuclear Suppliers Group’s decision to give the go-ahead to the US-India nuclear deal. Daryl Kimball and Joseph Cirincione have described the deal as “a non-proliferation … Read more
by publius Gail Collins thinks that earmarks just aren’t that important. Brendan Nyhan agrees, and urges Collins to explain why in better detail. In particular, Nyhan wants her to note that earmarks are only a tiny tiny drop of the overall federal budget. Even if John McCain got rid of every earmark (an impossible task), … Read more
by Eric Martin One of the selling points trotted out to make Sarah Palin appealing to moderates is her supposed environmentalist bona fides (relative to other Republicans at least – an admittedly low bar). However, in addition to her denial of humanity’s contribution to global warming, and reluctance to countenance the polar bear receiving protected-species … Read more
by publius
One personal benefit of the Bush years is that I’ve become increasingly less cynical about politics. I now view political fights as both substantive and vitally important. I also believe (in a reversal since Iraq) that voters will generally act rationally assuming the press informs them what’s going on. Indeed, most of you probably feel this way too — if you didn’t think ideas and arguments actually mattered, why bother reading or commenting?
But Palin’s rise to fame has jarred me a bit. In fact, it’s bringing out my cynical side and reminding me of March 2003.
Looking back, the really scary part of the Iraq War was not the war itself, but how quickly Americans accepted and embraced a top-down war. The public went from never thinking about Iraq in July 2002 to being whipped up in a frenzy by October 2002, with no triggering event like Pearl Harbor in between (yes, 9/11 was in the background, but it wasn’t a direct trigger for war).
It was a pure top-down war — a pure vanguard movement in the Leninist sense. The administration decided on war, and proceeded to sell the public on it largely on the basis of a savvy media campaign. The war was troubling enough, but the public’s willingness to be manipulated — Julius Caesar style — was borderline terrifying. If we could be persuaded to march off to Iraq in that manner, what else could we be persuaded to do if, say, terrorists attacked again?
Love her or hate her, Palin’s rapid ascent has some eerie parallels. And to be clear, these criticisms have nothing to do with Palin individually, or her views or ideology. She may be a dud, or she may be the next Abraham Lincoln. The point is that no one knows.
What’s troubling then is not so much her, but the way in which both the conservative base and apparently a decent chunk of swing voters have embraced her on the basis of essentially nothing but media images and prepared speeches. It’s surface politics gone wild.
by hilzoy
It occurred to me today that voter registration deadlines are going to start coming up soon, and that that being the case, it might be a good idea for someone to post them. And since I am the change I’ve been waiting for, I thought: why not me? After all, some of my readers might inexplicably have failed to register to vote, and others might feel like going out and doing voter registration but not have gotten around to it yet. So, below the fold, I have posted the deadlines for all the states and DC. I put links to the actual calendars; do check them, since while I did try to be careful, I’d hate for some typo of mine to disenfranchise anyone.
The Obama and McCain campaigns can probably set you up to do voter registration. On the Obama site, if you don’t want to do it in your area, click here, then click the state you’re interested in, and you will be able to find its various campaign offices. (Useful for people like me, who live in safe states and within driving distance of swing states.)
[UPDATE: On closer inspection, it’s only really easy to find your local office in some states. All have lots of info on events, etc., but not all have the useful ‘Find your local office’ button on the right, under ‘Take Action’. The ones with the useful button seem to be swing states, as one would expect. END UPDATE.]
by hilzoy Over at the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen notes a Washington Post fact-check that equates these claims: (1) Joe Biden said that “In the Senate, John[McCain] has voted with President Bush 95 percent.” In fact, he voted with Bush 95% of the time in 2007, but his average over the entire Bush presidency is … Read more
by hilzoy As Jay Bookman notes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “According to his spokesman, U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a Southerner born and bred, had no idea on earth that the word “uppity” had racial connotations when he used it to describe Barack and Michelle Obama. No idea at all. Could have knocked him over with … Read more
by hilzoy ABC’s Political Punch reports on Sarah Palin’s speech today: “She said she “championed reform of earmark spending by Congress, and I told the Congress thanks but no thanks on that ‘Bridge to Nowhere’”, she said, ommiting (sic) mention that she’d campaigned for governor supporting the bridge.” I take it most readers of this … Read more
by hilzoy From the WSJ: “The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters. The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it … Read more
by hilzoy Sen. James Inhofe sets a new record for disingenuousness: “Regardless of what polls show, Inhofe said, voters will have to ask themselves a question once they get behind the curtain in the voting booth on Election Day. “Do you really want to have a guy as commander in chief of this country when … Read more
by publius
A couple of quick notes for your weekend enjoyment.
1 – Brien Jackson from Below the Fold was kind enough to contact me a while back about doing an email interview, which you can see here. It extends over several days, so some of my answers were from the convention itself.
2 – Last night, the local establishment I patronized had an old-old-old-school Journey arcade game (that you could play for free!). The premise is that Journey’s musical instruments have all been stolen and scattered to various parts of outer space. Your job is to control the band members (who all have paper cut-out Journey heads, sort of like South Park) and get the instruments back. Naturally, I took pictures (more below the jump).
by hilzoy
I got this email from a friend of mine:
“One thing that struck me last night was the irony of a candidate who relentlessly positions himself as a selfless servant of the nation (“I wasn’t my own man anymore. I was my country’s.”), and then allocates such a large share of his convention speech to talking about himself. I can understand the need for Sarah Palin to dedicate time in her speech to introduce herself to the nation, given that she was an unknown quantity on the political scene at that point (notwithstanding the frenzy of Google searches over the last seven days). But at 72, after a long career in Washington, after a widely-televised campaign, and at the end of a convention in which an entire day had been dedicated to answering the “Who is John McCain?” question, it seems a little unusual for McCain to use his most precious block of national TV airtime to essentially read aloud from his memoirs, saying comparatively little about the country or about his platform.
Here is an admittedly simplistic way of looking at it based on analysis of the full transcript of the speech found on his campaign website. There were a total of 271 sentences in the speech, not including the “thankyouthankyouthankyouallsomuchthankyou” before he started and the “joinmejoinmefightwithmejoinmefightwithme” bit in the final minute or so. Of those 271 sentences, a remarkable 147 (54%) were devoted to telling us about John McCain himself: his past accomplishments (“I fought crooked deals in the Pentagon”), his qualifications for the job (“I know how the world works”), his family and childhood (“When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house…”), his time as a POW (“On an October morning, in the Gulf of Tonkin…”), his patriotism (“My country saved me”), and so on. Another 8 sentences focused on Sarah Palin. This leaves only 116 sentences (43% of the speech) to discuss the topics that one might otherwise expect to constitute the majority of the speech: the state of the nation, his policy positions, future promises, differences between his positions and Obama’s, and so on.
The contrast with Obama’s speech is pretty dramatic if you go back and review the transcript of both speeches. Obama dwells almost exclusively in the realm of the state of the country, the future, what America is all about, key components of the platform, etc — only occasionally sprinkling in comments about himself and his family that help to provide context and credibility. Using a similar analysis of the 226 sentences in the speech, 35 are devoted to Obama himself and/or his family, or about 15% of the speech. More than a third of these came in a single section containing memories about his mother and grandparents (“These are my heroes.”)”
I went back and did the same exercise. I called a couple of cases differently, but ended up with about 50% of McCain’s sentences focussed on himself, but the same 43% on the state of the country, etc. I counted 14% of Obama’s sentences as being about himself; as those included all sentences about his wife and Joe Biden, there was no need to count those separately. The remaining 86% was about the country, his plans, and so forth.
For the record, both my friend and I excluded any claims about McCain and Obama that were about what they were going to do, however vague (e.g., a sentence like McCain’s “We’re going to change that” counts as a claim about the future, not a statement about McCain.) We counted only sentences that were about their present or past. The contrast was pretty striking, even more so when I read the speeches back to back.
A bit more after the fold.
by hilzoy From the NYT: “Senior officials from the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve on Friday informed top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants, that the government was preparing to seize the two companies and place them in a conservatorship, officials and company executives briefed on the discussions said. … Read more