Is Bush a criminal?

McCain, speaking to Bob Scheiffer on Face the Nation yesterday said that Bush is a criminal on the same level as the disgraced Richard Nixon.

Is McCain right?

McCain's confusing image; The Making (and Remaking) of McCain

McCain's series of conflicting and unconvincing images during the 2008 Presidential campaign is not our imagination. There are reasons why the campaign was such a confused mess. Robert Draper describes the campaign to date.

Today Terry Gross interviewed Robert Draper. Here is her podcast of the interview "The many faces of McCain."

Sarah Palin; designated scapegoat for conservative failure

Poor Sarah. The McCain election campaign is collapsing, the election hasn't over yet, and Sarah Palin is already being blamed for it's collapse!

Yep. Palin is already being blamed for McCain's failure to win. Did she really believe that her presence would turn a disaster into a success? Why did she think they selected her?

Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin "going rogue."

A Palin associate, however, said the candidate is simply trying to "bust free" of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged roll-out.

McCain sources say Palin has gone off-message several times, and they privately wonder whether the incidents were deliberate. They cited an instance in which she labeled robocalls -- recorded messages often used to attack a candidate's opponent -- "irritating" even as the campaign defended their use. Also, they pointed to her telling reporters she disagreed with the campaign's decision to pull out of Michigan.

A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

"She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone," said this McCain adviser. "She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.

"Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom."

As Digby points out:

...it does take a real diva to accept a job for which you are completely unqualified and then blame the people who chose you for failing to properly prepare you for the job.

Apparently Sarah Palin was chosen because she was so dumb that she would accept the strange idea that putting her on a losing ticket would convert it to a winning one. That really wasn't in the cards. What her presence has done was keep the fund raising for a failed Presidential campaign going to the end. But the presence of Sarah Palin was never going to make the McCain campaign into one that wins the Presidency.

The presence of Sarah Palin has two effects. First, it jacks up the fund raising for the end of the campaign and makes the McCain campaign appear competitive towards the end of the campaign. Second, it provides both John McCain and the conservative movement with a scapegoat for why McCain has failed to win the Presidency. The conservatives will blame Palin for their loss, while they continue to try to sell the (failed) conservative ideology.

Sarah Palin wasn't chosen for Veep and not given preparation. She was chosen because she was not prepared. She is the designated scapegoat for the conservative movement.

Bad news for McCain camp - real bad news

Martin, Allen and Harris of Politico describe the backstabbing that is going on in the McCain camp as they anticipate a really bad defeat.

With despair rising even among many of John McCain’s own advisers, influential Republicans inside and outside his campaign are engaged in an intense round of blame-casting and rear-covering — much of it virtually conceding that an Election Day rout is likely.

A McCain interview published Thursday in The Washington Times sparked the latest and most nasty round of finger-pointing, with senior GOP hands close to President Bush and top congressional aides denouncing the candidate for what they said was an unfocused message and poorly executed campaign.

McCain told the Times that the administration “let things get completely out of hand” through eight years of bad decisions about Iraq, global warming, and big spending.

The candidate’s strategists in recent days have become increasingly vocal in interviews and conference calls about what they call unfair news media coverage and Barack Obama’s wide financial advantage — both complaints laying down a post-election storyline for why their own efforts proved ineffectual.

These public comments offer a whiff of an increasingly acrid behind-the-scenes GOP meltdown — a blame game played out through not-for-attribution comments to reporters that operatives know will find their way into circulation.

Top Republican officials have let it be known they are distressed about McCain’s organization. Coordination between the McCain campaign and Republican National Committee, always uneven, is now nearly dysfunctional, with little high-level contact and intelligence-sharing between the two.

“There is no communication,” lamented one top Republican. “It drives you crazy.”

At his Northern Virginia headquarters, some McCain aides are already speaking of the campaign in the past tense. Morale, even among some of the heartiest and most loyal staffers, has plummeted. And many past and current McCain advisers are warring with each other over who led the candidate astray.

One well-connected Republican in the private sector was shocked to get calls and resumes in the past few days from what he said were senior McCain aides — a breach of custom for even the worst-off campaigns.

...One well-connected Republican in the private sector was shocked to get calls and resumes in the past few days from what he said were senior McCain aides — a breach of custom for even the worst-off campaigns.

“It’s not an extraordinarily happy place to be right now,” said one senior McCain aide. “I’m not gonna lie. It’s just unfortunate.”

“If you really want to see what ‘going negative’ is in politics, just watch the back-stabbing and blame game that we’re starting to see,” said Mark McKinnon, the ad man who left the campaign after McCain wrapped up the GOP primary. “And there’s one common theme: Everyone who wasn’t part of the campaign could have done better.”

“The cake is baked,” agreed a former McCain strategist. “We’re entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It’s every man for himself now.”

A circular firing squad is among the most familiar political rituals of a campaign when things aren’t going well. But it is rare for campaign aides to be so openly participating in it well before Election Day.

The civil war developing within the McCain campaign has been clear for a while now. a previous post entitled The fracture points of the upcoming Republican civil war describes additional details.

It's not just the McCain election that is being recognized as close to lost. Other recent events demonstrate how badly the Congressional races are going:

• Reagan Appointee and (Recent) McCain Adviser Charles Fried Supports Obama from the New Republic October 24,2008.
• National Republican Senate Committee withdraws support for GOP Senate candidate Bob Schaffer.

This is not a good year to be a Republican.

From MSNBC: McCain, Palin not showing cohesiveness, chemistry

This report from MSNBC is not good for the McCain camp.



[ h/t to TPM. ]

Why is there such an apparent bad feeling between McCain and Palin? Consider this example of Palin's total misunderstanding of what the vice President does.



[ h/t to TPM. ]


Palin is a real drag on McCain's popularity - as she should be. McCain's judgment in choosing Sarah Palin is highly questionable.

McCain's evolution from war hater to aggressive NeoCon who invariably proposes that U.S. military conduct regime change.

McClatchy News has analyzed McCain's history on sending American military to war and found an interesting thing. john McCain has evolved over the years from a reluctant warrior who resisted the quick use of U.S. military force into a hard line NeoCon who strongly supports the use of the U.S. military to enact regime change in nations we don't like.

He [McCain] first gained attention as a freshman congressman in 1983 by breaking with the Reagan administration to oppose an extension of the U.S. troop deployment in Lebanon.

McCain also resisted the use of ground troops to end the 1990-91 Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, arguing that U.S. airpower could drive out Saddam's forces. He opposed invading Iraq — which at that time had chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs — because U.S. troops "couldn't tell a Shiite from a Sunni" and Saddam would be turned "from the bum he is" into a "hero" of the Arab world.

Two years later, McCain sponsored a resolution demanding that the Clinton administration immediately withdraw U.S. forces from Somalia after 18 U.S. troops died in a battle with al Qaida-training fighters depicted in the film "Blackhawk Down."

"The American people did not support the goals of nation building, peacemaking, law and order, and certainly not warlord hunting," McCain said in an Oct. 14, 1993, Senate speech on Somalia.

In the same speech, he decried as "baloney" the notion that a withdrawal would diminish U.S. prestige and insisted that Congress had the constitutional power to pull U.S. forces out of unpopular foreign conflicts if the president wouldn't.

The following year, he demanded that U.S. troops leave Haiti. "In Haiti, there is a military government we don't like," The New York Times quoted him as saying in July 1994. "But there are other governments around the world that aren't democratic that we don't like. Are we supposed to invade those countries, too?"

Yet when it came to Iraq, a far more formidable challenge than Somalia or Haiti, McCain embraced the neoconservative belief that a U.S. occupation would foster peace and democracy throughout the Middle East. He also backed the U.S. military's lead role in Iraqi reconstruction, argued that a withdrawal would weaken U.S. stature and, contradicting his statement on Somalia, asserted that only Bush — not Congress — had the authority to order a pullout. (More here and here.)

But then in the 90's McCain came under the influence of the NeoCons.

McCain's apparently ideological shift began after Haiti. His conversion coincided with his becoming president of the New Citizenship Project, a neoconservative advocacy group that was founded in 1994 by columnist Bill Kristol.

The group initiated the Project for A New American Century, led by Kristol and Robert Kagan, a former State Department official who now advises McCain's campaign.

It was a leading voice of neoconservative security policy and an advocate of using force to topple Saddam's and other anti-U.S. regimes. Its founding members included Vice President Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other key Bush administration officials who pushed the Iraq invasion.

The committee, whose directors included Randy Scheunemann, now McCain's top foreign-policy adviser, was a key advocate for the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which McCain co-sponsored. The act funneled millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, and made "regime change" the U.S. policy. (More here and here.)

Initially an opponent, McCain became a strong supporter of the 1996 U.S.-led intervention in Bosnia, although some conservatives and U.S. military commanders questioned the country's importance to U.S. security. He also backed NATO's 1999 intervention in Kosovo, lambasting the Clinton administration for a restrained bombing campaign against Serbia, and urging NATO to mount a ground invasion, as well.

Air strikes "needed to be, from the beginning, massive, strategic and sustained," McCain said in an April 1999 speech. "No infrastructure targets should have been off limits. And while we all grieve over civilian casualties as well as our own losses, they are unavoidable."

Responding to the 9/11 attacks, McCain called for unleashing the "full fury of American power" against al Qaida and other radical Islamic groups and urged the Bush administration to make civilian casualties a secondary consideration.

"We cannot allow the Taliban safe refuge among the civilian population," McCain wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 26, 2001, of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. "We must destroy them wherever they hide."

His willingness to tolerate civilian casualties has proven to be off the mark.

Thousands of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past seven years are now recognized as a key reason for the Taliban's resurgence, as popular outrage has brought the insurgents fresh support, recruits and propaganda windfalls.

McCain also argued against fighting terrorism with "half measures," even at the cost of destabilizing pro-U.S. regimes in the Middle East. He insisted that using massive force would convince Islamic extremists and ordinary Muslims that resistance was futile.

"We must change permanently the mindset of terrorists and those parts of Islamic populations" who did not believe that the United States was prepared to "wage a relentless, long term, and, at times, ruthless war," he wrote in the October 2001 Wall Street Journal column.

McCain also used the 9/11 attacks to justify the ouster of Saddam. On Oct. 29, 2001, he said on CNN that there was "very clear" evidence that Saddam had played a role in the 9/11 attacks. There was no such evidence. As soon as there's a government of "some kind of minimal viability" in Kabul, "the next step is Iraq," he said.

In January 2003, as U.S. forces were fighting in Afghanistan and massing to invade Iraq, McCain proposed a unilateral U.S. attack on North Korea if other nations failed to join the "aggressive, multilateral isolation of" the isolated Communist regime.

"Spare us the usual lectures about American unilateralism," McCain wrote in Kristol's magazine, the Weekly Standard. "We would prefer the company of North Korea's neighbors, but we would make do without it if we must."

McCain has since shifted his posture, and he now backs negotiations to end North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

He's also shifted his position on Iran's defiance of U.N. demands to suspend its uranium enrichment program, which many experts believe is intended to make nuclear weapons.

After rejecting direct talks with Tehran, he now says that he'd hold them at the secretary of state level. He also advocates tougher international sanctions, including limiting sales of gasoline and other refined petroleum products to Tehran, a step that Bush and the European allies have ruled out as too harsh for ordinary Iranians

McCain also wants to slap financial sanctions on Iran's central bank, which Bush and the European Union have resisted, and he's refused to rule out the use of force.

"There is only one thing worse than a military solution," he said in a December 2006 speech, "and that ... is a nuclear-armed Iran."

McCain really appears to be a person who is most influenced by the last person he spoke to on the subject of the use of military force, and the NeoCons have made sure that they surround him in his campaign staff. It isn't like he made his shift away from war-hater as a result of 9/11. His change occurred much earlier, after the American invasion of Haiti. It's not clear what caused the shift in his attitudes, but whatever it was it has been consistent.

McCain is not a man who should be trusted with the powers of the Presidency to start a war without anyone around to stop him.

Rejected Republican Conservatives react by exposing their Fascist - McCarthyite roots. They provoke a backlash

The Republican Party has come face-to-face with the fact that the American voters are rejecting conservatives and the Bush administration. With slightly over two weeks remaining until the election, the Republicans are resorting to their Fascist - "Joe McCarthy" roots to try to scare voters into electing John McCain and right-wing extremists.

This has always been an undercurrent of Republican campaigns, but in their desperation they are now making the Fascist - McCarthyite campaigning their primary effort to defeat Obama. It is resulting in a massive backlash against the conservatives. A prime example of the Fascist - McCarthyite rhetoric was Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's rant on Matthew's Hardball the other day.



The reaction to Bachmann's extremist rant was swift. Steve Benen explains:

While many have condemned Bachmann's embrace of what can fairly be described as bordering on fascism, many of those offended by Bachmann have also thrown considerable support to Bachmann's opponent, former state transportation chief Elwyn Tinklenberg. The Democrat posted an item to Daily Kos last night, talking about the outpouring of support his campaign has received since Bachmann's shocking comments.

The last few hours have been nothing short of astounding. Since Congresswoman Michele Bachmann appeared on MSNBC's Hardball earlier tonight, there's been a deluge of support unlike anything we have seen. [...]

Our phones haven't stopped ringing. Many have called in to say they're sorry they can only send money and wish they could be here to help.

What kind of help are we talking about here? Tinklenberg raised over $488,000 in just 24 hours. That's pretty impressive.

Bachmann's rant is not an isolated case. The McCain campaign has begun a series of extreme robo-calls targeted at voters in swing states that even the New York Times has taken notice of. While McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds is reported as defending them saying, “These calls are based on hard facts," they have received bipartisan criticism. One notable critic is Maine Senator Susan Collins whose spokesman Kevin Kelley stated "These kind of tactics have no place in Maine politics. Senator Collins urges the McCain campaign to stop these calls immediately." Yet the McCain camp has focused much of its entire campaign on Obama's alleged connection to Bill Ayers because of Ayers' connection with "The Weatherman" four decades ago. Today America is facing an economic crisis that closely resembles the Great Depression, and yet the Republicans and the McCain camp want to focus on Ayers.

The reaction to the incompetence and extreme nastiness displayed by the McCain camp is showing in the "dollar campaign." According to the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama raised more than $150 million in September, a stunning and unprecedented eruption of political giving that has given him a wide spending advantage over rival John McCain.

This money has allowed Obama to spend four times as much as on TV advertising as the McCain camp.

The Republican voter suppression efforts (such as this effort to intimidate newly registered voters in Ohio and this effort by the politicized Department of Justice to investigate the voter's registration efforts of ACORN.) are being widely reported. Again, the conservatives cannot win over the voters, so they are trying to stop them from voting.

The ability of the Obama campaign to raise unprecedented amounts of money is one example of the backlash against the conservatives. Another is this morning's announcement by Colin Powell on Meet the Press that he is going to vote for Barack Obama.

The Presidential campaign based on issues, never seriously engaged by the McCain camp, ended with the worsening of the credit crisis demonstrated by the failures of the major Wall Street investment banks and the Wall Street bailouts several weeks ago. McCain has not seriously addressed either the credit crisis or the no longer deniable Recession. The only Republican conservative campaign in October has been the Fascist - McCarthyite attacks on Obama that exposes the core nature of the Conservative ideology that has dominated American politics since 1980.

The backlash to the failure of the Reagan Revolution is already clear in the Presidential money campaign and the abandonment of support for McCain by prominent Republicans like Colin Powell. Much of this is currently a result of the extremist nature of the McCain campaign, but the current extremist nature of the McCain campaign is a result of the recognized failure of the Reagan Revolution and the conservative ideology.

It's going to be an interesting 16 days until the election. But that's just political froth. For two more weeks we will focus on the election, but after that the real fun is going to start. We are going to have to face the reality that the Reagan Revolution has created.

This is the latest on who "Joe the Plumber" is.

Obviously you are curious as to who the surprise star of last night's Presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain - aren't you? Here, from NY Mag is the latest scoop:

1. Joe owes $1,182.98 in back taxes in Ohio.
2. Joe doesn’t believe in Social Security. "Social Security is a joke. … I don't need another set of parents. … Let me invest my money," he said.
3. Joe is actually called Sam, and is registered to vote as Samuel Wortzelbacher. “We have his named spelled W-O, instead of W-U,” Linda Howe, executive director of the Lucas County Board of Elections, said in a telephone interview. “Handwriting is sometimes hard to read. He has never corrected it in his registration card.”
4. Oh, he maybe is related to Charles Keating. What? No, that cannot be true, because that is insane.
5. But he is definitely not a licensed plumber. “He’s basically playing games with the world,” Thomas Joseph, an official at Local 50 of the plumber’s union, based in Toledo, told the Times.

I hope he enjoys his 15 minutes of fame.

Did McCain back off his hate mongering because of the report of the investigation of Gov. Palin?

Late Friday the Alaskan legislature released the report of the investigation (pdf) of Governor Sara Palin for abusing her power as Governor in violation of Statute 39/52/110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. That report will negatively affect the Presidential campaign of the man who chose her as his running mate, John McCain. In fact, it is probably now clear to even the McCain presidential campaign staff that John McCain can no longer win the presidency.

It is stretching credulity to think that this report was not related to the midday effort by John McCain to step away from the hate-mongering towards Barack Obama which he initiated about midday Friday. Choosing Palin as his running mate with inadequate vetting was only one of many long-shot gambles that McCain has employed to try to make his run for the Presidency into something viable. The McCain "hate-fest" was another. The recent Presidential polls strongly suggest that both those efforts and the rest of McCain's campaign have now failed.

Emptywheel raises some interesting issues that the conjunction of those two events raises. Her first issue is to question the connection between those two event.

Second, Since Palin was not removed immediately as the Vice Presidential candidate and the campaign is clearly trying to spin the conclusion of the report, it appears that she will remain on the ticket. That suggests point three - the "maverick" issue that Palin has contributed to are no longer useful to the campaign. So fourth - how much longer can the RNC continue to fund the clearly losing McCain for President campaign while a number of both Senators and Congresspersons are in close elections and can put the same money to much better use than can the McCain campaign? [Emptywheel links to a good short discussion of this at Crooked Timber.]

It looks like the next shoe to drop may be that the RNC cuts the McCain for President campaign loose financially in order to try to preserve as much of the Republican Party as possible. Currently the Democrats control the Senate with 49 Democrats plus Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman. Of Democrats running for reelection, only Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu appears to be running a tightly competitive race. 24 of the 35 Senate seats (two are Senate races for less-than-six-year terms) up for election this year are held by Republicans. If Mitch McConnell and Saxby Chambliss both lose their Senate races, then it becomes very likely that the Democrats will reach their filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes in the Senate.

Obama already has an almost overwhelming money advantage in the Presidential race. When the RNC cuts off funding of "McCain for President" ads, it is going to be clear even to the MSM that McCain has lost the race for President. That will happen soon. There are only three full weeks remaining until the election.

---

Addendum 9:37 pm
Steve Benen reports that a number of Republican candidates are declining to appear with McCain at campaign events. That's going to work with any effort by the RNC to withdraw financial support for the McCain campaign ads.

The Republican route to ruin

It's pretty clear now that barring some really strange event, Barack Obama is going to win the election for President come November 4th. This year started out as a severely anti-incumbent year, and the recent financial collapse of Wall Street and banks world wide have greatly exaggerated that trend.

The fact that the Republican Party could not field a candidate for President who unified the various factions of the Reagan coalition was easily recognizable early on. There was no Bush-recommended candidate, and every major candidate who could collect enough money to enter the primary peaked out with 40% or fewer of the votes needed to win, so that finally everyone dropped out except the zombie candidate, John McCain, the Non-Republican Republican whose campaign had gone broke in the Summer of 2007 and had to be resurrected. Contrast this with the Democrats who fielded a superb group of candidates which winnowed down to Hillary Clinton and the upstart Barack Obama who were each rolling in money and who fought the primary out over half a year in all 50 states. The final decision of Democrats to choose Obama as the better of the two remaining candidates (by a small factor) was in stark contrast to the Republican choice of John McCain as the only Republican candidate not disqualified by the Primary process.

Throughout the year this was going on the American economic situation continued to get worse, while the economic pundits in the mostly brain-dead and propagandistic media kept trumpeting the "news" that the economy was going to be improving by the end of Summer by the end of 2008 by early 2009 maybe in late 2009. The fact is that no one really knew how bad things were, what was causing the economic problems, or what the future held. It was still possible for individuals trying to sell complicated bank products or elect Republican candidates like Phil Gramm to claim that the economic decline was merely a "mental recession" as late as late Summer 2009. The media was filled with economic "happy talk" even after Bear Stearns investment bank collapsed in March and right up until the other four major Wall Street investment banks disappeared and the largest insurance company in the world, AIG had to be taken over by the U.S. Government in September 2008. Suddenly the media replaced the economic happy talk with gloom and doom to match their ignorance.

The McCain for President campaign then tried to shift the political discussion to how scary Barack Obama's character was, while offering a series of improbable programs that have titles that sound like solutions to the economic problems. Each such program has lasted through about half a week of scrutiny before being relegated to the trash heap and quickly replaced by another faux program.

The outcome of the election is already quite clear. It's just a question of how big Obama is going to win - and considering that the alternative is the aged John McCain with the totally unqualified Sarah Palin as his Vice president, we may all thank God for the likelihood that Obama is going to win the Presidential election.

The Presidential campaign is currently running hot and heavy, and the media is thoroughly invested with trying to sell it as a competition between two equally capable candidates. They have to. Without a solid horse race to sell, the media will suffer a bad loss of advertising revenue. But the media revenue is the main reason they are selling the horse race. Without an unlikely surprise event, the real race for President has been decided.

So what happens after November 4th? At this point we get a sermon [*] from David Frum.

American voters are staggering under the worst financial crisis since at least 1982. Asset values are tumbling, consumer spending is contracting, and a recession is visibly on the way. This crisis follows upon seven years in which middle-class incomes have stagnated and Republican economic management has been badly tarnished. Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is … to put it mildly … severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues.

We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don’t care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.

Republicans used negative campaigning successfully against Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, it’s true. But 1988 and 2004 were both years of economic expansion, pro-incumbent years. 2008 is like 1992, only worse. If we couldn’t beat Clinton in 1992 by pointing to his own personal draft-dodging and his own personal womanizing, how do we expect to defeat Obama in a much more anti-incumbent year by attacking the misconduct of people with whom he once kept company (but doesn’t any more)?

Here’s another thing to keep in mind:

Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.

Normally I don't bother with anything from NRO, including David Frum who occasionally makes sense. But this time he points to the very possible future that the Republican Party is whipping its supporters into an orgy of anger that is not going to die down after the Presidential campaign is over. For a well-known Republican writer like Frum to publish such a warning in the National Review Online [a principle conservative journal] just before the election is a strong indication that he is very concerned that the anger the McCain campaign is building up is a really dangerous trend.

It really is a danger. The Senate Republicans have done everything they could to sabotage any accomplishments by Congress since they lost control of the Senate in January 2007. The major effort by very right-wing House Republicans to kill off the first effort to pass the Paulson Proposal is another example. They reversed themselves only with they found the public was going to blame them for the financial crisis if they continued to act to block action.

It appears that Frum's warning is coming much too late. The anger is already built up. Once the results of the election are known, the conservative Republican anger is not going to be tamped down. The conservatives have already run all the effective Republican moderate leaders out of Congress. There are no remaining "wise old men" to turn to.

The result is going to be that in addition to severe economic crisis facing America in 2009 and two on-going wars, there is going to be an angry conservative Republican Party who would rather blow up the entire American government than work with their opponents to solve America's problems.

I hope I am wrong, but I don't think I am. I see no real hope for good sense and positive efforts to put America first likely to come from the Republican Party in 2009 and 2010. It's going to instead be all anger all the time until the anger burns itself out and the politicians who are fomenting it are mostly removed from office.

Will there be any vestige of the Republican party remaining when that anger is removed from government? Will the brand name survive? That's probably as much a question as what the new structure of banking in the American economy is going to be in the future.

---

[*] "sermon" is Frum's own description of what he wrote.

[ h/t to Laura Rozen at War & Piece. ]

McCain: "My fellow Prisoners..." Can McCAin survive mentally for a four year term?

McCain's mind is going. He doesn't know what words he are using any more.

Listen to this, right after the 20th second.



Can this age 72 guy last four and a half more years? That's mentally if not physically. I really doubt it. And the alternative is - God forbid - Sarah Palin??

Consider also - is John McCain capable of choosing who should become President if he, himself, dies or becomes disabled? McCain is still mentally back in the Hanoi Hilton at times. That's what he means when he says "My fellow Prisoners..."

Observations on the state of the Presidential election

The absence of Bill Ayers last night

Steve Benen reports on the absence of attacks by McCain about Obama's "connection" to Bill Ayers. Apparently the entire shift to character attacks by the McCain camp is being scrapped because the economy is getting worse. Steve speculates that the efforts to use Ayers and Reverend Jeramiah Wright against Obama has polled extremely badly, particularly among independent voters.

How will conservative Republicans react to McCain's loss?

Related to the apparent abandonment of the Ayers/Wright/Resko attack strategy, Kevin Drum speculates on what the Republican reaction is going to be when McCain loses this Presidential election. Conservatives can be expected to blame McCain for losing because he is a RINO - not conservative enough to win. The next election they are going to be urged to "double down" and get really strident and nasty. That will, of course, drive voters away from the Republican Party. The question is how long the Republican Party will act so self-destructively. My bet is that they will look back at the myth of rebuilding conservatism after the Goldwater disaster and keep it going for at least a dozen years - two or perhaps three presidential elections.

How is that related to the McCain camp's apparent abandonment of the Ayers/Wright/Resko attack strategy? When conservatives lose an election they assume that they lost because they were not conservative enough. Being conservative is the same as being nasty enough. So the next time out they "double down" and get twice as nasty. "Tailgunner" Joe McCarthy's behavior was the result of such a redoubling of effort. He lied and destroyed lives, and conservatives applauded him so he did more of it.

Addendum 2:50 pm

Apparently the McCain camp is not abandoning the Ayers/Wright/Resko attack strategy. They are trying to appear to abandon it by the overt campaign, but are actually trying to shove it down into the below the radar attacks that the mainstream media doesn't report on. That way they can have it both ways.

In that under the radar campaign it will join the organized efforts by the McCain camp to encourage the conservative Fascists who respond to the use of Obama's full name ("Barack Hussein Obama") with cries from the audience (through prepared microphones) of "treason" and "terrorist" and the like.

McCain's proposed method of solving complex problems

Steve Benen also points to McCain's strange idea that if there is a problem then McCain will get the leaders of the various sides of the issue together in a room, force them to sit down, and tell them to "stop the bullshit." It's an intellectually lazy way to claim McCain can solve problems by force of will rather than by actually proposing real solutions. I've never seen it work unless the individual who called the meeting also had a set of proposals that would solve the problem and that were acceptable to all sides prepared in advance of the meeting. McCain has never shown any awareness that he could do anything except bluster.

Obama's history of learning

One thing I have noticed watching the Obama campaign over the last year or so is how he has been constantly learning and improving as he goes along. James Wimberly at the Reality-Based Community provides one small example. That suggests to me that with Obama we have someone who can face new situations and quickly learn and adapt to them. Since the current economic problems are frequently described as both unprecedented and getting worse, Obama's ability to learn on the fly seems likely to make him the right man for the job of President during the next four years.

---

Addendum 2:38 pm

The three (irritating) McCainisms

One thing about last night's debate that really irritated me was McCain's repeated phrase My friends. Jerry Feldman counted. McCain said "My friends" 19 times. That's a neurotic tic - and did I mention that it irritated Hell out of me? The other two phrases McCain overused were "My Hero and I Know How To. "My friends" is a neurotic tic which makes McCain sound like an insincere phony. "My Hero" shows that he is a synchophant, and "I Know How to" do whatever it is is the kind of bragging that a kid who really doesn't know how to do whatever it is often resorts to when challenged.

Tonight's debate

Frankly I didn't hear anything new from either candidate. But Tom Brokaw only interrupted Obama. It was totally clear that Brokaw is in the tank for McCain when, at the end of the debate, Brokaw thanked McCain and ignored Obama.

I do think that Brokaw asked a stupid "gotcha" question early on when he asked both candidates who they would appoint as Secretary of the Treasury. No sensible politician is going to answer that question before the election is over and the candidates have been vetted. So the result is that both candidates avoided a direct answer to the question. They both looked evasive as a result. The reason the question is stupid is that the evasive answer is the only possible answer and Brokaw knows that.

McCain's efforts to belittle Obama were fewer than during the first debate, but McCain's dismissive "That one" with a wave at Obama was an effort to belittle Obama but had only the effect of belittling McCain.

I'll be interested to see what the polls say about who won.

McCain wants to destroy the health care system completely.

There was no health insurance for people over age 65 before Medicare. When someone reached age 65, their health insurance was canceled. That's why Medicare was created.

The Republicans have hated Medicare since it was created. As Krugman points out in his column today, this is why Grinch shut down the government shut down government in 1965. Clinton wouldn't go along with Gingrich's effort to gut Medicare.

Well, McCain's health plan goes Gingrich one better. He wants to destroy ALL health insurance for anyone who is ill!

Here's Krugman's description of McCain's health care plan.

Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative.

Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.

As compensation, the McCain plan would give people a tax credit — $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family — that could be used to buy health insurance in the individual market. At the same time, Mr. McCain would deregulate insurance, leaving insurance companies free to deny coverage to those with health problems — and his proposal for a “high-risk pool” for hard cases would provide little help.

So what would happen?

The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan.

But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).

Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.

And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.

In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.

Got that? America has a problem with access to health care for many people who are ill.

Not everyone. If you or a close relative work for a large employer who offers employer-based health care (about 65% of Americans) you have whatever the employer decides to offer. But if you are in a small company or self-employed you might be able to buy health insurance in the individual health insurance market - if you don't have a preexisting condition, and if you don't develop an expensive health condition that causes the insurance to to cancel your policy.

McCain's wants to destroy the employer-based health insurance system and throw everyone into the private insurance market where only the well-paid healthy can afford to buy the policies.

But since many healthy individuals can't afford private policies, McCain is going to offer a tax credit of $5,000 per family or $2,500 per individual. And how will they pay for that? They'll tax your health insurance benefits as income. But that's clearly not enough to cover the (inadequate) tax credits they promise, so they promise to add more money by gutting Medicare and Medicaid.

McCain is obviously demonstrating the logic he learned from his experience during the Vietnam War and applying it to the American health care system problems. As America rolls into the worst economic difficulties it has faced since the Great Depression, McCain offers to fix America's health insurance problems using Vietnam era logic. He plans to "destroy the health care system to save it."

Rove criticizes McCain campaign management

Karl Rove is now criticizing the McCain campaign management a month before the election. Perhaps Karl feels he has to since FOX is paying him as an analyst. Whatever - it is interesting to hear an expert express his opinion.

• Rove can't understand why the McCain camp closed down the Michigan campaign so publicly. It caused a great deal of disruption inside the Michigan Republican Party because of the way it was done.
  
• Rove thinks it strange that McCain camp insiders would speak so publicly about their plans to shift the focus of the McCain campaign from the economy and instead go after Obama for his character traits. It's not something that the press or the Obama camp should be given advance waring of. But if it is done, it should be accompanied by a positive economic message. Obama doesn't publicly explain why they are presenting any given message.
  
• Rove also said that if the election were held right now, Obama would win it with at least 273 electoral votes, primarily because of the economic situation. But the campaign is highly fluid and still has 30 days left to go.

Those are interesting observations.

My own opinion is that the most interesting observation is that the McCain camp is leaking strategic reasons for their behavior. That's a characteristic of an organization which is under a great deal of pressure, appears to be failing to achieve its goals, and as a result it's members are exhibiting poor morale. It's a dead giveaway of poor overall leadership in an organization under stress.

Good leadership may not be able to change the outcome of the effort, but good leaders can keep morale up even as the effort fails. You get high morale in an organization where everyone feels they belong to a team that is working together even though they may not be successful. That isn't happening with the McCain campaign.

Some of the individuals in such an organization feel that they have to justify the fact that they are doing everything thing they personally can to win the election, but that they can see their individual efforts are not enough. They are leaking now because if they wait until the election results are in, no one will believe they say it coming.

The management of the McCain campaign is a reflection of John McCain's personality and his management style. I'd be extremely interested in finding out how McCain has treated ex-Senator Phil Gramm since his unfortunate "This is a mental Recession" comment, especially considering McCain's obvious Contempt for inferiors and his anger issues.

The post-election analysis books are really going to be interesting next year.

An analysis of McCain's body language by threrapists

Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks tell us what McCain's body language at the Obama - McCain debate tells experienced therapists.

Any good therapist learns to read the language of the body, but you don't need an advanced degree to understand John McCain's. His patterns are about as subtle as the flashing lights on a sign that says "Danger Ahead." Since we may end up married to him for four years, we need to pay particularly close attention to two patterns of his: smirking and jaw-clenching.

The McCain Smirk:
The Mouth Of Contempt
You probably noticed how often McCain smirked, particularly when he was being forced to listen to Obama speak. It's his expression of contempt. If he were speaking the truth behind his smirk, he'd be saying something like "I hold you in utter contempt. I am superior to you. My disdain for you is boundless." Any seasoned relationship coach knows a lot about contempt, because it's one of the most destructive patterns in relationships. One of our colleagues in the relationship counseling field, John Gottman, calls contempt one of the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, behaviors that signal doom for a relationship (along with criticism, defensiveness and sulking.) Beware of electing a president who wears the Mouth of Contempt. If McCain is elected president, we'll see a lot of it, because he particularly seems to wear it when someone he disagrees with is speaking.

The McCain Jaw-Clench:
The Painful Art Of Biting Back Anger
Out of politeness one is tempted to look away from McCain's jaws, because his left jaw has a permanent bulge from his bouts with cancer. We encourage you, though, to turn your attention to his right jaw; it's a symphony of clenches that played practically non-stop every time he was forced to listen to Obama in the first debate. Since McCain won't release all his medical records, we don't know the story behind the cancer in his left jaw. However, we know a great deal about what causes his right jaw to clench repeatedly. People clench their jaws when they're angry and can't, won't or don't know how to say it plainly. If his jaw-clench could speak, it would be saying: "I'm mad as hell and trying desperately not to show it." The anger shows in 3-D, though, thanks to the eloquence of Body-Talk. That's a good thing. We need to know when people are trying to conceal their feelings, in our relationships at home and in politics. We need to know what's going on behind the denials and delusions of Mouth-Talk.

Mouth-Talk Vs. Body-Talk
Body-Talk always tells you the truth about what's going on. If your mind thinks you're not scared, but you feel speedy-queasy butterfly sensations in your belly, believe your body. If your mate says he or she isn't mad, but you see him or her clenching those jaws repeatedly, believe the Body-Talk not the Mouth-Talk. Mouth-Talk is useful and often entertaining, but you've probably noticed that we humans can speak a lot of twisted stories, wild justifications and outright lies out of our mouths.

What will be very interesting in future debates is watching how John McCain tries to conceal the Body-Talk that was so obvious in the first debate. He's getting media-coaching around the clock, and will likely try to hide his contempt and anger from us next time. It probably won't work, because the twitches and clenches he'd be trying to hide are caused by trying to hide feelings in the first place. John McCain has been widely reported to have a volcanic temper. A ten-year-old, walking into the room and seeing him on television said, "That guy looks like he's about to blow."

Most people who have not been socialized into ignoring body language will interpret McCain's behavior the same way. McCain's smirk is his expression of contempt and his jaw-clenching is a clear expression of his effort to control his anger. That's the kind of guy I distrust and avoid whenever possible.

The McCain campaign will ramp up the "guilt by association" attacks on Obama

Here it comes. The economy is headed into clear and unambiguous recession four weeks before the Presidential election and McCain's poll numbers are dropping. So the McCain camp is going to try to change the subject off the economy and onto Obama's alleged connection to his fellow-Chicagoan, ex-weatherman Bill Ayers.

Of course, there is no connection between Obama and Ayers other than rarely being in the same room. The McCain camp is going to try to make that into something it is not. There is a much better argument that can be made that McCain is a supporter of North Vietnamese Communism because he spent five and a half years in one of their living facilities.

The guilt bay association attack goes two ways. It is clear that John McCain's close friendship with the ex-Lincoln Savings & Loan chief, Charles Keating led McCain to try to stop the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB.) from going after Keating for his criminal activities that caused the collapse of Lincoln S&L.

From the New York Times:

The sharpest questioning today was from Mr. Heflin, who interrogated Mr. McCain about his late payments to the American Continental Corporation, Mr. Keating's Arizona holding company, for flights he and his family took on the company's corporate aircraft from 1983 to 1986.

Mr. McCain, who of the five Senators was the closest socially to Mr. Keating, would travel with the businessman to his vacation home in the Bahamas, where they swam, snorkeled and went fishing. But he did not repay more than $13,000 to American Continental until 1989, when he said the company notified him that the bill was due. [Snip]

Under questioning by Mr. Bennett, Mr. McCain said it had never occurred to him that it would seem improper for a lawmaker to have such a close personal relationship with a major political supporter with a matter pending before Federal savings and loan regulators. Politics and Friendship

"I don't think being in political office precludes me from having friends," he said.

Compare that history to the one reported by the New York Times between Obama and Ayers:

At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol.

Twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama's first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors. [Snip]

[T]he two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called "somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8."

So here it comes. Obama has associated with someone who was a domestic terrorist 38 years ago when Obama was age 8. But The candidate who is orchestrating the baseless smear is John McCain who took free rides on Keating's jet to his Bahama's getaway and went snorkeling with Charles Keating before trying to stop the FHLB from closing down Keatings already bankrupt Lincoln Saving and Loan.

There's net even any smoke in the Obama - Ayers accusation. There is clearly both smoke and fire in the accusation that McCain was bought by Charles Keating and worked to get him out of his legal problems in exchange for the money and free trips.

That's where McCain's guilt-by-association goes. Directly at the Keating Five scandal.

Rich Lowery must not be getting any

Poor guy. What is the matter with Rich Lowery? Maybe he needs to get out and spend more time at his favorite titty bar.



Really? It that why McCain selected the obviously otherwise incompetent Sarah Palin as his Veep? Because she is the kind of coquette who appeals to the conservatives who don't get out enough?

At last! This week of mostly conservative-instigated stupidity, lies and corruption is over!

About the only thing positive that can be said about this week is that it's over. Between the conservative-caused destruction of the American banking system and its associated theft of unbelievable amounts of money from taxpayers by Congress on the one side and the utter idiocy of having to take the concentrated ignorance, immorality and ambition of Tracy Flick Sarah Palin reading note cards to the American voting public as she avoids answering questions on national politics, this weeks has reached a new low in American history.

Ian Welsh nails the bailout stupidity.

Who cares if the government is massively incentivized to protect the value, even assuming the government cares which is far from clear to me since for this plan to do anything it has to buy at far above market value? They're going to be sold the shittiest parts of the shitpile by far because what would you sell to them if you were the banks? Think about it. This stuff isn't called toxic waste for nothing. MBS's may have something behind them, but much of what's going to be sold are massively internally leveraged instruments like first loss bonds, credit default swaps, and other noxious stuff that hardly even has a name. Much of it won't even be mortgage based, and that which is won't necessarily give clear title to the mortgage proper (you can sell different parts of the mortgage to multiple different MBSs). The 700 billion will probably be gone before Obama even gets in power, so you're not betting on what Obama will do, you're betting on what Paulson and Bush will do. Furthermore Wall Street is already saying 700 billion won't be enough. (So, ok, you might be betting what Obama will do with the next 700 billion or so.) [Snip]

Exactly as written this is a huge giveaway of government money to private interests. That is its purpose. It is meant to bribe banks into lending to each other again. "Sure, it's not profitable to loan at below inflation, but we're making it up to you by buying your shit."

Of course, it is nice to know that our political leaders currently campaigning to become President and Vice President are taking the destruction of the American economy for the next two generations seriously and want to do something about it. That's clearly demonstrated in the seriousness with which last Thursday's "debate" between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin was taken.

Oh, wait. Sarah Palin was there. The "debate" was actually a great "Let's shove Palin up the ass of the American voters and see if they will notice." Aden Renkei of ph33r and loathing caught the zeitgeist very nicely.

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? [Snip]

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.

Click the link to ph33r and loathing, scroll down a bit and look at Renkei's most excellent flowchart that shows how Palin dealt with the debate questions. Or click the Mark Kleiman link Palinflow for the same flowchart.

It's hard to watch the vacuous Palin acting like someone who is significant and then watching the media lap it up and treat her seriously. The media is wasting its resources on her as the American economy is restructured on the fly in ways that will make America a much poorer nation for the next two more more generations.

Consider "The Wink" that Palin threw out at the end of the "debate." That was exactly like the wink that a topless dancer on stage throws at a guy in the audience who she thinks she can induce to give her a tip for taking off her clothes. Palin thought it was "cute." I can see what McCain saw in the aging cutesy beauty queen, but it damned sure had nothing to do with choosing someone to become President if President McCain died in office.

Palin, for all her flaws, is not at fault for the way she has been inflicted on the American public. John McCain did that.

It is a clear demonstration that McCain doesn't have the judgment necessary to be President. Instead of working to resolve the economic disaster that the Reaganite conservatives have bequeathed to America over the last three decades, John McCain has chosen the incompetent Sarah Palin as his Veep to shock and occupy the media and to simultaneously gather the support of the social conservatives. Actually, there is good reason to think that McCain is not yet aware that the bail out bill is about serious economic problems and not just another inside-Washington political exercise. The Palin crap is the direct result of John McCain's desperation to win the Presidency before he dies. Chalk it up to McCain's over-sized ego and lack of good judgment.

Sadly, it has worked. Now all he has to do is to run his lying super-negative campaign for the next five weeks and hope that his roll of the dice will succeed.

Who cares what happens to America as long as the privileged McCain gets elected President at last. The fact that America is spinning down the toilet in front of our eyes doesn't matter as long as John McCain's super-sized ego is satisfied, Right?

The End is Near! Krauthammer makes sense!

One of the things that has made it extremely clear to me over the last few years that the world has changed for the worse is that I have found myself listening to Pat Buchanan and nodding my head in agreement. I had thought that was probably unique to the paleoconservative Buchanan. Apparently not. This time, quite unbelievably, Charles Krauthammer suddenly agrees with me.

Hail Mary vs. Cool Barry

Krauthammer's Hail Mary Rule: You get only two per game. John McCain, unfortunately, has already thrown three. The first was his bet on the surge, a deep pass to David Petraeus who miraculously ran it all the way into the end zone.

Then, seeking a game-changer after the Democratic convention, McCain threw blind into the end zone to a waiting Sarah Palin. She caught the ball. Her subsequent fumbles have taken the sheen off of that play, but she nonetheless invaluably solidifies his Republican base.

When the financial crisis hit, McCain went razzle-dazzle again, suspending his campaign and declaring that he'd stay away from the first presidential debate until the financial crisis was solved.

He tempted fate one time too many. After climbing up on his high horse, McCain had to climb down. The crisis unresolved, he showed up at the debate regardless, rather abjectly conceding Obama's mocking retort that presidential candidates should be able to do "more than one thing at once." (Although McCain might have pointed out that while he was trying to do two things, Obama was sitting on the sidelines doing one thing only: campaigning.)

You can't blame McCain. In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely (for him) framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady and cool.

In the primary campaign, Obama was cool as in hip. Now Obama is cool as in collected. He has the discipline to let slow and steady carry him to victory. He has not at all distinguished himself in this economic crisis -- nor, one might add, in any other during his national career -- but detachment has served him well. He understands that this election, like the election of 1980, demands only one thing of the challenger: Make yourself acceptable. Once Ronald Reagan convinced America that he was not menacing, he won in a landslide. If Obama convinces the electorate that he is not too exotic or green or unprepared, he wins as well.

What's next? Are we going to start getting wisdom from David Duke, Darrell E. Issa (R - CA), or Dick Cheney? Are the ultra-right-wing Kooks somehow getting brain transplants?

The one individual I never expect to see say or write anything I agree with is Bill Kristol. But if Krauthammer begins to make sense, even that certainty may disappear.