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Palin’s speech brought Mark Steyn out of his hidey hole for a Corner post.

I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin – whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin – as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn’t worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.

How’s that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your “devoted husband John Edwards” routine?

I trust even now Maureen Dowd is working on a hilarious new column mocking proposed names for the Governor’s first grandchild. Perhaps Richard Cohen can just take the week off and they can rerun his insightful analysis comparing the Palin nomination to Caligula making his horse a consul. Whereas we sophisticates all know that if McCain were as smart as Obama he’d have nominated a dead horse to be his consul. No wait…

Andy McCarthy Corner post with excerpts from NY Times editorial gushing over Geraldine Ferraro’s pick for VP in 1984. The same NY Times that can’t stop trashing Sarah Palin.

… What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow into statesmen…. Why shouldn’t a little-known woman have the same opportunity to grow?…

Here’s Sarah (excerpts from her speech)

… I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.

We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco. …

… And there is much to like and admire about our opponent.

But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform – not even in the state senate.

This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word “victory” except when he’s talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed … when the roar of the crowd fades away … when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot – what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger … take more of your money … give you more orders from Washington … and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. …

… Our nominee doesn’t run with the Washington herd.

He’s a man who’s there to serve his country, and not just his party.

A leader who’s not looking for a fight, but is not afraid of one either. Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the current do-nothing Senate, not long ago summed up his feelings about our nominee.

He said, quote, “I can’t stand John McCain.” Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps no accolade we hear this week is better proof that we’ve chosen the right man. Clearly what the Majority Leader was driving at is that he can’t stand up to John McCain. That is only one more reason to take the maverick of the Senate and put him in the White House. My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of “personal discovery.” This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn’t just need an organizer.

And though both Senator Obama and Senator Biden have been going on lately about how they are always, quote, “fighting for you,” let us face the matter squarely.

There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you … in places where winning means survival and defeat means death … and that man is John McCain. …

John Fund was there.

Twenty years after Ronald Reagan left office, Republicans who have long missed him may have found a future Margaret Thatcher. If John McCain wins, conservatives may find one of the most enduring accomplishments of his term will have been what he did before it started: helping to fill the Republican Party’s future talent bench with such a fresh and compelling figure.

Sarah Palin is a conviction politician, a naturally compelling speaker and someone who can relate to her audience on very human terms. America has just learned why Mrs. Palin enjoys the highest approval ratings of any governor in America. …

How was the speech received abroad? Daily Telegraph has a sample.

… Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Mrs Palin is coming in for both barrels of Left-wing contempt: misogyny and snobbery. Where Lady Thatcher was dismissed as a “grocer’s daughter” by people who called themselves egalitarian, Mrs Palin is regarded as a small-town nobody by those who claim to represent “ordinary people”.

What the metropolitan sophisticates failed to understand in the 1980s when Thatcher won election after election is even more the case in the US: most (and I do mean most) ordinary people actually believe in the basic decencies, the “small-town values”, of family, marital fidelity, and personal responsibility. They believe in and honour them – even if they do not manage to uphold them.

Middle America – of which Alaska is spiritually, if not geographically, a part – builds its life around those ideals and regards commonplace moral lapses as part of the eternal struggle to be good. …

And the London Sun.

A WEEK ago nobody had ever heard of her.

Today she is the most talked-about woman in the world. And with good reason.

Sarah Palin’s sensational performance at the Republican Party Convention may turn out to be the tipping point of this rollercoaster American election.

Obama fans hoping she would fluff her big night were in for a nasty shock.

This speech has turned the election upside down. It was simply stunning.

Democrats and their Lefty media backers had been sneering that she was a small town nobody, a hick from the Alaskan sticks put into a job way beyond an inexperienced woman.

Believe me, you will not be hearing that again.

Palin turned out to be an electrifying mix of intelligence, passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking.

Full of self-assurance and aggression, she popped Barack’s balloon big-time. …

Now a collection from some of our favorites.

Roger Simon.

Okay, it’s almost three in the morning here in Minneapolis and I am  about as dog tired as I have ever been, but I couldn’t resist putting in my two cents on Sarah Palin’s performance tonight, since I saw it live.  In all my years writing movies, going to drama school, etc., I have almost never seen anything so dramatic.  It was the rebirth of Frank Capra for our times – Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington. …

Ed Morrissey.

Perhaps the media and Democrats would have been better advised to set expectations high for Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech tonight at the Republican convention.  After ridiculing her as a small-town yokel for the better part of three days, Palin would have looked good if she managed to avoid drooling during her speech.  In the event, though, they could have set expectations as high as a Barack Obama acceptance speech, and Palin would still have exceeded them in a tremendous debut on the national stage.

Palin made it clear to the condescending media and her Democratic critics that she is no pushover, no cream puff.  Her nickname, “Sarah Barracuda”, seems a lot more fitting after tonight.  Not only did she defend her small-town upbringing, she attacked Barack Obama on almost every possible front, and for good measure went after Joe Biden and the mainstream media as well. …

Right Coast.

I plan to write something substantive about Gov. Palin’s speech as soon as I stop laughing.  That could be a few days.

I disagree with those who said Giuliani and/or Palin struck a note that was too mocking of the young Obama.  Nope.  The right cure for the grotesque idolatry that has grown up around Obama is to be every bit as mocking as they all were.  He deserves it and the various Obots deserve it too.  The way you beat somebody up is to beat them up.  In the immortal words of Sean Connery, do you feel better now, or worse?  Sorry — I get a little incoherent when I’m laughing my head off. …

Corner Posts.

Contentions’ folks; Wehner, Rubin, and Podhoretz

Power Line.

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Bill Kristol with a short Palin story.

Spengler turns his attention from Russian chess masters to Obama’s losing campaign. On Obama’s speech he has this to say;

… On television, Obama’s spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.

The Democrats were watching the brightest and most articulate presidential candidate they have fielded since John F Kennedy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this was before John McCain, in a maneuver worthy of Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Battle of Midway, turned tables on the Democrats’ strategy with the choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. …

… Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain’s choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain’s selection was a statement of strength. America’s voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.

That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama’s prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.

Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics’ claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.

Why didn’t Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary’s candidacy. “The Democratic front-runner’s wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party’s nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility,” Novak wrote. …

Jennifer Rubin posts in Pajamas Media on Obama’s resumé padding.

Barack Obama has a solution to his lack of accomplishment and experience: pad his resume. If resume fraud were a crime, Obama would be looking at fifteen to life. And it is not just an isolated incident or two. He is a repeat offender.

Obama started early. Even the [1] New York Times acknowledges that in his book [2] Dreams From My Father Obama accomplished little as a “community organizer.” (”It is clear that the benefit of those years to Mr. Obama dwarfs what he accomplished.”) But he did manage to steal credit for asbestos testing and removal in the Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project in Chicago. But he didn’t quite tell the whole story. The Times writes:

What Mr. Obama does not mention in his book is that residents of the nearby Ida B. Wells housing project, and some at Altgeld itself, had already been challenging the housing authority on asbestos. A local newspaper had also taken up the issue. …

David Warren’s Sarah Palin column.

As everyone with access to the mainstream media knows, the Alaskan 17-year-old, Bristol Palin, is pregnant by a high school hockey jock named Levi, and is going to have the baby and marry him.

The august, liberal New York Times carried three big “analyses” on this yesterday, in which their top correspondents had a go at performing journalistic “gotchas” on Sarah Palin, John McCain, and the Republican Party. They don’t need to find any example of wrongdoing or irregularity in Ms. Palin’s past. For their purpose is to reduce her candidacy to a soap opera, so that readers will not be tempted to listen to the woman, or form any judgment of their own about her qualifications to be on a presidential ticket.

One begins to understand why women other than Hillary Clinton are seldom considered for such positions. For the American liberal media grant themselves a free pass on all traditional principles of decency, and every feminist talking point besides, when they are confronted with a woman not in the feminist stereotype. Similarly, should a black man be put forward for an important office, who is not ideologically one of theirs, he will be received, journalistically, as Judge Clarence Thomas was back in 1991 — publicly lynched. …

And David Harsanyi.

… Who knows? Maybe the lynch mob will bury Palin’s candidacy. Maybe Palin will bury herself, proving to be incompetent and unworthy. But how can a candidate be portrayed as a failure by experts who haven’t heard a word from her mouth?

Not only is this dishonest, it betrays a real political anxiety over Palin’s impact.

Do vice presidential candidates have the ability to sway an election or rally a party? Almost never.

But in this presidential election, excitement has become, for the first time, a shared experience.

Jonah Goldberg says Sarah has brought new life to the GOP.

… This is my sixth Republican National Convention, and I’ve never seen anything remotely like the excitement Palin has unleashed. Some compare it to the enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan in 1976 or 1980. Even among the cynics and nervous strategists, there’s a kind of giddiness over John McCain’s tactical daring in selecting the little-known Alaskan.

Readers of National Review Online – a reliable bellwether of conservative sentiment – flooded the site with e-mails over Labor Day weekend. The messages ran roughly 20-1 in almost orgiastic excitement about the pick. On Friday, one reader expressed Christmas-morning delight over the gift of Palin, proclaiming that McCain had just “given us our Red Ryder BB gun.”

Hundreds of NRO readers announced that they were finally donating to McCain after months of holding out. Many had hard feelings toward the senator, who too often defined “maverick” as a willingness, even an eagerness, to annoy conservatives. They weren’t kidding: Between the Palin announcement Friday and Monday morning, the McCain camp raised $10 million. This enthusiasm reflects how, although the party wants Barack Obama to lose, it is just now getting excited about a McCain win. …

John Podhoretz, Jennifer Rubin, and Peter Wehner in Contentions discuss the media feeding frenzy, and Palin’s speech tonight.

I agree with you, John. The feverish quality to the press coverage of Palin, and the degree to which they want to destroy her (and in the process, her family), is astonishing, even for those of us who have watched media tendentiousness over the years. There is, I suspect, something cultural, as well as political, that is driving this. It is as if Sarah Palin–her views, her life-story, her Alaska roots, and perhaps even her decision to have a Down Syndrome child instead of an abortion–are viewed as a threat and/or an affront to many in the media. It is similar to what Clarence Thomas experienced; his life and views were a direct challenge to those who thought they knew how an African-American man ought to think and act.

The McCain campaign is right, in my judgment, to charge that the media is “on a mission to destroy” Palin and right to name names. Members of the press are acting like a “herd of independent minds.” Having never heard of her before, many within the press have deemed Governor Palin to be a failure and a joke. They are now doing everything they can to advance their views. What we are seeing, especially from CNN and the New York Times, is advocacy journalism on stilts.

Thomas Sowell on changes in politics.

One of the few political clichés that makes sense is that “In politics, overnight is a lifetime.”

Less than a year ago, the big question was whether Rudolph Giuliani could beat Hillary Clinton in this year’s presidential election. Less than two months ago, Barack Obama had a huge lead over John McCain in the polls. Less than a week ago, the smart money was saying that Mitt Romney would be McCain’s choice for vice president.

We don’t need Barack Obama to create “change.” Things change in politics, in the economy, and elsewhere in American society, without waiting for a political messiah to lead us into the promised land.

Who would have thought that Obama’s big speech at the Democratic convention would disappoint expectations, while McCain’s speech electrified his audience when he announced his choice of Governor Sarah Palin for his running mate?

Some people were surprised that his choice was a woman. What is more surprising is that she is an articulate Republican. How many of those have you seen?

Despite the incessantly repeated mantra of “change,” Barack Obama’s politics is as old as the New Deal and he is behind the curve when it comes to today’s economy.

Senator Obama’s statement that “our economy is in turmoil” is standard stuff on the left and in the mainstream media, which has been dying to use the word “recession.” …

Guess what John Stossel thinks about government drinking age mandates.

There’s a myth in this country that the drinking age is 21. But that’s only the legal age. The fact that government says you can’t drink before 21 does not mean younger people don’t drink.

More than 100 college presidents understand this, and now they want the minimum drinking age reconsidered.

“The 21-year-old drinking age is not working,” says the Amethyst Initiative, launched by former Middlebury College President John McCardell, president of Choose Responsibility Inc.

The college leaders’ statement charges that a “culture of dangerous, clandestine ‘binge-drinking’ — often conducted off-campus — has developed” and that “By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.”

It makes the obvious point that 18-21-year-olds are “deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.”

States started raising the drinking age to 21 in 1984, after Congress passed a law that stopped federal highway money from going to states that kept the age at 18. Curiously, the law was backed by President Reagan, a self-proclaimed advocate of federalism. Federalism presumes that we’ll get better laws if states are free to compete in making public policy. Federal mandates kill useful experimentation by enacting one-size-fits-all policies. …

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Gerard Baker the American editor of the London Times has a piece that compares Sarah Palin, not to Biden, but to Barack Obama.

Democrats, between sniggers of derision and snorts of disgust, contend that Sarah Palin, John McCain’s vice-presidential pick is ridiculously unqualified to be president.

It’s a reasonable objection on its face except for this small objection: it surely needs to be weighed against the Democrats’ claim that their own candidate for president is self-evidently ready to assume the role of most powerful person on the planet.

At first blush, here’s what we know about the relative experience of the two candidates. Both are in their mid-forties and have held statewide elective office for less than four years. Both have admitted to taking illegal drugs in their youth.

So much for the similarities. How about the differences?

Political experience

Obama: Worked his way to the top by cultivating, pandering to and stroking the most powerful interest groups in the all-pervasive Chicago political machine, ensuring his views were aligned with the power brokers there.

Palin: Worked her way to the top by challenging, attacking and actively undermining the Republican party establishment in her native Alaska. She ran against incumbent Republicans as a candidate willing and able to clean the Augean Stables of her state’s government. …

… Now it’s true there are other crucial differences. Sen Obama has appeared on Meet The Press every other week for the last four years. He has been the subject of hundreds of adoring articles in papers and newsweeklies and TV shows and has written two Emmy-award winning books.

Gov Palin has never appeared on Meet the Press, never been on the cover of Newsweek. She presumably feels that, as a mother of five children married to a snowmobile champion, who also happens to be the first woman and the youngest person ever to be elected governor of her state, she has not really done enough yet to merit an autobiography.

Then again, I’m willing to bet that if she had authored The Grapes of Wrath, sung like Edith Piaf and composed La Traviata , she still wouldn’t have won an Emmy.

Fortunately, it will be up to the American people and not their self-appointed leaders in Hollywood and New York to determine who really has the better experience to be president.

John Fund shorts on Obama’s lack of bounce (maybe he can’t jump either). And, on the MSM treatment of Palin and her family.

… Democrats, who were so anxious to avoid discussing the John Edwards affair even after clear evidence surfaced of his adultery and alleged illicit parenthood, can’t stop talking about Ms. Palin’s family troubles. “The name on the tongues of gleeful Dems, meanwhile: Eagleton,” notes Politico.com. That’s a reference to the 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee Tom Eagleton, who had to withdraw from the ticket after reports he had been hospitalized for depression.

Somehow I think Democrats and their media allies will be laughing a little less after Wednesday night when Sarah Palin gets her own chance to speak to the American people without a media filter. They may find that all the ridicule will strike many Americans as excessive if the Alaska governor delivers a solid good performance.

Ed Morrissey posts; Obama’s answer on experience: But I’m such a great campaigner!

… the main point here is that Obama didn’t really answer the question, and he set up a straw man argument in response to Cooper. Governor Palin is, well, governor, and not currently the mayor of Wasila. As Governor, Palin operates a $9 billion budget, and manages $13 billion in revenue. Furthermore, she runs a government that employs 25,000 people.

Obama blithely pretends that she’s still the mayor of “Wasilly” in order to boost himself. However, running for office isn’t executive experience, for one good reason: Obama isn’t the campaign manager. He has a CEO actually running the campaign, handling the budget, and managing the people while Obama makes the speeches.

If this is Obama’s best response on the experience question, the attacks on Palin’s experience will have to stop, unless the campaign wants Obama to keep embarrassing himself while making it.

Jonathan Adler in Corner post on the “experience of Howard Dean and John Edwards.

Jay Cost tries to look at the Palin pick through non-partisan eyes.

… So, the public gets a pretty sophisticated choice this year. It’s not a choice between change versus more of the same. It’s a choice between degrees of change. I like this. And while I have no idea how Palin will play, I like that McCain believes he has to offer something positive and new to win.

I still think Obama would have been best served by selecting Hillary Clinton as his nominee. However, given the choice not to select Hillary, I think he made a wise move by picking Joe Biden. As I noted above, Biden is a guy who tells it like it is. So, he adds heft without damaging Obama’s core message. The Democrats have a well-balanced ticket. John McCain responded by balancing his ticket well, too.

All things considered, I like these tickets. Together, they give the public a clear choice. Plus, neither offers the public what it certainly does not want, the status quo. People complain all the time about how our two-party system stifles real debate and fails to offer the public a distinct choice. I am optimistic that, when all is said and done, Obama v. McCain will be one that the naysayers won’t point to. When they whine about our “failed politics,” they’ll have to conveniently forget 2008.

Debra Saunders on Palin.

… For weeks, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been the Republican whom conservatives barely dared to hope could become John McCain’s pick as his running mate.

For Republicans angry at Washington’s big-spending bonanza when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress, Palin, like McCain, is an antidote. She is the Alaskan who pulled state support for the infamous Bridge to Nowhere and bucked Alaska’s congressional and state Republican leaders.

For social conservatives, the mother of five has impeccable credentials. She’s a member of Feminists for Life who walked the walk in April when she gave birth to a son, shown by genetic testing to have Down syndrome. “I’m looking at him right now, and I see perfection,” she said of her son, Trig. “Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?”

For conservatives who felt that McCain at times has been too cozy with the Washington left, Palin is a conservative’s conservative – a moose hunter and co-owner of a commercial fishing operation. …

Two NY Times columnists on the Palin pick. Bill Kristol is first.

… I spent an afternoon with Palin a little over a year ago in Juneau, and have followed her career pretty closely ever since. I think she can pull it off. I’m not the only one. The day after the V.P. announcement, I spoke with an old friend, James Muller, chairman of the political science department at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He said that Palin “has been underestimated over and over again. She took on the party and state establishments here in Alaska, and left them reeling. She’s a very good campaigner, a quick study and a fighter.”

Muller called particular attention to her successes in passing an increase to the oil production tax and facilitating the future construction of a huge natural gas pipeline. “At first the oil companies thought she was naïve, and they’d have their way. Instead she faced them down and forced them to compromise on her terms.”

Can she face down the Democrats, Joe Biden and the national media over the next couple of months?

John McCain is betting she can. Perhaps, as he pondered his vice-presidential selection, he recalled the advice of Margaret Thatcher: “In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”

David Brooks.

… When McCain met Sarah Palin last February, he was meeting the rarest of creatures, an American politician who sees the world as he does. Like McCain, Palin does not seem to have an explicit governing philosophy. Her background is socially conservative, but she has not pushed that as governor of Alaska. She seems to find it easier to work with liberal Democrats than the mandarins in her own party.

Instead, she seems to get up in the morning to root out corruption. McCain was meeting a woman who risked her career taking on the corrupt Republican establishment in her own state, who twice defeated the oil companies, who made mortal enemies of the two people McCain has always held up as the carriers of the pork-barrel disease: Young and Stevens.

Many people are conditioned by their life experiences to see this choice of a running mate through the prism of identity politics, but that’s the wrong frame. Sarah Barracuda was picked because she lit up every pattern in McCain’s brain, because she seems so much like himself.

The Palin pick allows McCain to run the way he wants to — not as the old goat running against the fresh upstart, but as the crusader for virtue against the forces of selfishness. It allows him to make cleaning out the Augean stables of Washington the major issue of his campaign.

So my worries about Palin are not (primarily) about her lack of experience. She seems like a marvelous person. She is a dazzling political performer. And she has experienced more of typical American life than either McCain or his opponent. On Monday, an ugly feeding frenzy surrounded her daughter’s pregnancy. But most Americans will understand that this is what happens in real life, that parents and congregations nurture young parents through this sort of thing every day.

My worry about Palin is that she shares McCain’s primary weakness — that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy. …

We get a look inside the thinking of the McCain campaign on Sarah.

In Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain has found a fellow maverick to be his running mate — one who can help bring the right kind of reform to Washington. Ms. Palin, like Mr. McCain, has a strong record of battling the status quo, restoring accountability and effectiveness to government, and working to secure energy independence, root out corruption and curb wasteful spending.

As the chief executive of the nation’s largest state, Ms. Palin oversees some of the country’s largest energy reserves. She came into office at a critical time in Alaska politics, facing a system plagued by corruption. Her response was to immediately begin cleaning it up. The results of her leadership today speak for themselves: Ms. Palin’s approval ratings top 80% — more than 60% higher than that of the Democratic Congress. …

Dilbert’s here.

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Spengler from Asia Times again. This time on Americans who play Monopoly, and Russians who play chess.

On the night of November 22, 2004, then-Russian president – now premier – Vladimir Putin watched the television news in his dacha near Moscow. People who were with Putin that night report his anger and disbelief at the unfolding “Orange” revolution in Ukraine. “They lied to me,” Putin said bitterly of the United States. “I’ll never trust them again.” The Russians still can’t fathom why the West threw over a potential strategic alliance for Ukraine. They underestimate the stupidity of the West.

American hardliners are the first to say that they feel stupid next to Putin. Victor Davis Hanson wrote on August 12 [1] of Moscow’s “sheer diabolic brilliance” in Georgia, while Colonel Ralph Peters, a columnist and television commentator, marveled on August 14 [2], “The Russians are alcohol-sodden barbarians, but now and then they vomit up a genius … the empire of the czars hasn’t produced such a frightening genius since [Joseph] Stalin.” …

… The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them. That is what the informed Russian public believes, judging from last week’s postings on web forums, including this writer’s own.

These perceptions are dangerous because they do not stem from propaganda, but from a difference in existential vantage point. Russia is fighting for its survival, against a catastrophic decline in population and the likelihood of a Muslim majority by mid-century. The Russian Federation’s scarcest resource is people. It cannot ignore the 22 million Russians stranded outside its borders after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, nor, for that matter, small but loyal ethnicities such as the Ossetians. Strategic encirclement, in Russian eyes, prefigures the ethnic disintegration of Russia, which was a political and cultural entity, not an ethnic state, from its first origins.

The Russians know (as every newspaper reader does) that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili is not a model democrat, but a nasty piece of work who deployed riot police against protesters and shut down opposition media when it suited him – in short, a politician in Putin’s mold. America’s interest in Georgia, the Russians believe, has nothing more to do with promoting democracy than its support for the gangsters to whom it handed the Serbian province of Kosovo in February.

Again, the Russians misjudge American stupidity. Former president Ronald Reagan used to say that if there was a pile of manure, it must mean there was a pony around somewhere. His epigones (second-rate imitators) have trouble distinguishing the pony from the manure pile. The ideological reflex for promoting democracy dominates the George W Bush administration to the point that some of its senior people hold their noses and pretend that Kosovo, Ukraine and Georgia are the genuine article.

Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by “war games” is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers’ pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America’s idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a “moderate Muslim” government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent’s king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life …

John Fund says Obama should come clean and provide records that will help us understand his past.

… The Obama campaign didn’t hesitate to criticize Hillary Clinton for not revealing the names of donors to the Clinton Library, or John McCain for releasing only two years of tax returns as opposed to Mr. Obama’s 10 years. Those were proper questions. But so too are requests for information from Mr. Obama, a man whose sudden rise and incompletely reported past makes him among the least-vetted of presidential nominees.

Reporters who decline to press Mr. Obama for more information now, whether it be on William Ayers or the Rezko-Auchi partnership, may be repeating an old mistake. Most reporters failed to dig deep enough into the Nixon White House’s handling of Watergate before the 1972 election. The country was soon consumed with that scandal. Most reporters pooh-poohed questionable Whitewater real-estate dealings of the Clintons before Bill Clinton’s 1992 election. Within months of his inauguration a tangled controversy led to the appointment of a special prosecutor and an endless source of distraction for the Clinton White House. …

Speaking of coming clean, Inside Higher Ed has a piece by a Clemson English prof on Biden’s plagiarisms and the problems for some of his fans.

… But I wish Obama could have located someone with foreign policy experience who did not have Biden’s track record of intellectual dishonesty, because I’d hoped to be motivated to do more this fall than show up and pull a lever for Obama. After this VP choice, however, I feel that’s the most Obama can expect from a constituency he has indicated he takes for granted.

Biden’s dishonesty matters to me in two ways. It suggests something of Biden’s character, indeed, in a realm more relevant to doing his job than was John Edwards’s philandering to his. The other reason is selfish. Now that Barack Obama has deemed a plagiarist worthy of the vice-presidency, it becomes more difficult for me to make the case in the classroom that plagiarism matters. More broadly speaking, Obama’s choice has made it harder for me, and for my colleagues across the United States, to defend the principles that form the foundation of scholarship.

David Broder, dean of the main stream media thinks Palin might help.

… Obama began his campaign for the nomination as the outsider candidate, promising fundamental change in Washington and offering a post-partisan approach to politics. With time, he has come to be seen as a much more conventional Democrat who is now half of a ticket based in Congress, the least admired institution in a widely scorned capital. Millions who saw his acceptance speech heard a standard recital of liberal Democratic programs.

By picking Palin, McCain has strengthened his reputation not as an ideologue, not as a partisan, but as a reformer — ready to shake up Washington as his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, once did. My guess is that cleansing Washington of its poisonous partisanship, its wasteful spending and its incompetence will become McCain’s major theme.

The Democrats‘ great advantage is that they are not responsible for the pain and frustration that many voters have suffered in the Bush years. But if McCain and Palin can shift the focus to the future, they may be able to appeal to the “change” voters who will in the end decide the election.

Broder’s mildly favorable look at McCain’s VP pick is of a piece with his previous column on Obama’s convention speech which Broder found disappointing. It’s here for you to read.

… He is not the first Democrat who has promised a new day. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, in different ways, tried to change Washington, and both wound up frustrated. The status quo forces — the interest groups, many in Congress and parts of the media — all are powerful.

The only time a new president can really change Washington is when he makes it the central message of his campaign, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980.

Reagan’s skill was his rhetoric; hence the label “The Great Communicator.” After the 2004 Obama speech, Democrats thought they had found one of their own. It’s too bad that fellow didn’t make it to Denver.

David Brooks mocks the Denver Dem effort.

My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”

One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.

We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are. …

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It’s Sarah Palin Day today. Watching her Friday, was like watching the next generation come on stage. She looks like she will be a force in national politics for a long time to come.

However, Mrs. Pickerhead says, “Don’t be gloating before the voting.” Guess she’s been hanging around Jesse Jackson.

We’ll start with Palin posts from some of our favorite blogs. Larry Kudlow posted early Friday morning.

If the rumors about Sarah Palin are true, I will be thrilled.

Thru a whole bunch at the Corner and then ending with Mark Steyn.

… Third, real people don’t define “experience” as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. … Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain’t run nothin’ but his mouth. She’s done the stuff he’s merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party’s corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign’s thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night). …

The Weekly Standard’s Blog. This from Noemie Emery on what Sarah does for the race.

1. Steps on the story of Obama’s speech (and convention), and possibly the bounce coming from them, and wipes them off the news cycle. The Sunday news shows will be all-Palin, all of the time.

2. Sends Republicans into their convention on a huge head of steam.

3. Wipes out the image of McCain as the crotchety elder and brings back that of the fly-boy and gambler, which is much more appealing, and the genuine person.

4. Revs up the base AND excites independents, which no one else in the party, or perhaps in the world, could have accomplished.

…

Contentions‘ Peter Wehner.

Governor Palin was, I think, a very shrewd pick. She will energize the GOP base, which was considered almost an impossibility a few months ago. She has a very appealing life story, and a nice, agreeable, easy-to-listen-to speaking style. In her remarks, she made all the right points in all the right ways. This was not a Dan Quayle moment or anything close. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Republicans came away reassured rather than concerned. …

…

There’s now a lot of attention on Governor Sarah Palin and her qualifications (or lack thereof) to be Vice President.

I suppose the first thing to point out is that based on her record, she’s more qualified than Barack Obama–as the former community organizer and state senator from Chicago is running to be President rather than, as is the case with Palin, Vice President. But let’s stick with an apples-to-apples comparison. Governor Palin, it’s said, doesn’t have sufficient experience to be the vice presidential nominee. Compare her record to that of Joe Biden, who has been in the Senate since the early 1970’s.

Let’s do. I would submit as Exhibit A this Wall Street Journal piece by Dan Senor, who served as a senior adviser to the Coalition in Iraq and was based in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. Dan, who is both extremely knowledgeable and a very insightful thinker, reminds us of Biden’s passionate advocacy for a soft partition of Iraq. But because Biden was, in retrospect, so obviously wrong in his analysis and his recommendation, his biggest foreign policy initiative has dropped into a memory hole.

Joseph Biden has experience. But on a range of matters–from Supreme Court appointments to Iraq to much else–he’s shown deeply flawed judgment. His signature plan was a mistake; as Senor points out, it would be nice if he and Senator Obama acknowledged it.

Sarah Palin has nothing to fear in being compared to, and facing off against, Joe Biden.

Jennifer Rubin.

Fred Barnes explains that Sarah Palin’s selection doesn’t just shake up the race, it may shake up the Republican Party. The latter is badly in need of just that, having lost its Congressional majority, a number of governorships and most importantly its ideological direction. Politics is about ideas, but compelling personalities are needed to carry those ideas. So great hopes reside in  the “pro-life, pro-gun, pro-military, pro-Iraq war, pro-spending cuts, pro-tax cuts, pro-drilling for oil everywhere (including ANWR), pro-family, and pro-religion” Palin.

It is ironic that it should be John McCain who, if this is successful, would be credited with finding the path to the GOP’s revival and reinvigoration. McCain certainly is not known as a “Party man.” To the contrary, his role in dividing and infuriating his fellow Republicans nearly cost him the nomination. …

Ed Morrissey says Obama’s convention bounce is gone.

… Once again, the polling numbers show that the Obama speech was a dud.  Most of his bounce came from speeches given by Hillary and Bill Clinton, as they did their best to unify the party behind the nominee.  Obama had an opportunity to play for the center, but instead of sounding presidential and accommodating, he offered the same tired stump speech, the same Bush bashing, and the same vagaries as people heard — even if he did deliver it from a big stage with lots of fireworks.

After squandering a double-digit lead this summer, nothing Obama has done shows that he can make a comeback on his own.  He barely survived the primaries after taking the momentum from Hillary in February, and now he’s lost it to McCain.  The more America sees of Barack Obama, the more they appear to like John McCain, and now the Republicans have the opportunity to seize the momentum for good this week.

Bill Kristol says the Left is scared to death of Sarah.

A spectre is haunting the liberal elites of New York and Washington–the spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism, rising out of the American countryside, free of the taint (fair or unfair) of the Bush administration and the recent Republican Congress, able to invigorate a McCain administration and to govern beyond it.

That spectre has a name–Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska chosen by John McCain on Friday to be his running mate. There she is: a working woman who’s a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who’s broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who’s a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who’s a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who’s a leader.

So what we will see in the next days and weeks–what we have already seen in the hours after her nomination–is an effort by all the powers of the old liberalism, both in the Democratic party and the mainstream media, to exorcise this spectre. They will ridicule her and patronize her. They will distort her words and caricature her biography. They will appeal, sometimes explicitly, to anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice. All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.

That’s why Palin’s spectacular performance in her introduction in Dayton was so important. Her remarks were cogent and compelling. Her presentation of herself was shrewd and savvy. I heard from many who watched Palin–many of them not predisposed to support her–about how moved they were by her remarks, her composure, and her story. She will have a chance to shine again Wednesday night at the Republican convention. …

Sarah Baxter from the London Times on McCain’s VP pick.

When Sarah Palin stepped into the spotlight as John McCain’s running mate in Dayton, Ohio, and promised that women could “shatter that glass ceiling once and for all”, it was an electrifying moment in a presidential election that had already produced its share of upsets and surprises.

History was on the march again the morning after Barack Obama became the first African-American to accept his party’s White House nomination. After the fireworks, the 80,000-strong crowd who had cheered Obama to the skies at the Mile High stadium in Denver woke up with a hangover.

“We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling,” said Camille Paglia, the cultural critic. “That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.”

With her beehive hairdo and retro specs, Palin, 44, has a “naughty librarian vibe”, according to Craig Ferguson, the Scottish comedian who stars on late-night US television. However, the selection of Palin, the governor of Alaska and a mother of five, as the first female Republican vice-presidential nominee is no joke for the Democrats.

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio chat show host, exulted, “We’re the ones with a babe on the ticket” — one, moreover, with a reputation as a tax-cutter and corruption buster in her job as the first woman governor of Alaska.

Palin’s selection on the eve of the Republican convention in St Paul, Minnesota, has set the stage for an epic battle for the votes of women, African-Americans, evangelical Christians and the young. The demographic wars that dominated the contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton are now set to be replicated in the national election.

Will America fall in love with Palin or will she fizzle, like Dan Quayle, the vice-president to George Bush Sr who could not spell “potatoe”? Can she help McCain to defeat Obama, a modern political phenomenon, who drew a record-shattering television audience of nearly 40m — more than the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing — to watch his convention speech?

“Good Lord, we had barely 12 hours of Democrat optimism,” said Paglia. “It was a stunningly timed piece of PR by the Republicans.”

Whether Palin’s selection is more than a political stunt depends on how she handles the electoral pressure cooker. …

Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice called for Palin back in May in the Jewish World Review.

… Because of Palin’s reputation as a maverick, and her initial reduction of state spending (including pork-barrel spending), life-affirming Palin connects with voters and has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate for John McCain.

She would be a decided asset — an independent Republican governor, a woman, a defender of life against the creeping culture of death and a fresh face in national politics, described in “the Almanac of National Politics” as “an avid hunter and fisher with a killer smile who wears designer glasses and heels, and hair like modern sculpture.” …

The August Dream Cruise on Woodward Avenue in the Detroit area puts the lie to Bill Ford’s statement that the “American love affair with the car was over.”  One of Pickerhead’s daughters and all of his grandchildren live four blocks from the action, and he has stood on Woodward a couple of times with two and three hour smiles on his face.  MSN.com has details from this year’s Cruise. Links to lots of pictures.

American muscle, right down to the Cragar mags, is what the Woodward Dream Cruise is about. If you didn’t live American Graffiti, Woodward is your chance to time-warp 16 miles of it.

If fat-fendered cars make your rockin’ world go ‘round, then the Woodward Dream Cruise is your sort of party. The largest one-day automotive event on the planet — take that, Pebble Beach — Woodward is all about real people and real cars driving on a real road.

So what brings an estimated one million people and 40,000 cars to Detroit? Six lanes of urban boulevard, lined for almost the entire 16-mile cruise route with strip malls and burger joints. Once a street-racing haven and always a cruising scene, Woodward Avenue runs straight through the Detroit suburbs and into the heart of American car culture. …

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George Friedman of Stratfor explains the Kosovar background to the Georgian crisis.

The Russo-Georgian war was rooted in broad geopolitical processes. In large part it was simply the result of the cyclical reassertion of Russian power. The Russian empire — czarist and Soviet — expanded to its borders in the 17th and 19th centuries. It collapsed in 1992. The Western powers wanted to make the disintegration permanent. It was inevitable that Russia would, in due course, want to reassert its claims. That it happened in Georgia was simply the result of circumstance.

There is, however, another context within which to view this, the context of Russian perceptions of U.S. and European intentions and of U.S. and European perceptions of Russian capabilities. This context shaped the policies that led to the Russo-Georgian war. And those attitudes can only be understood if we trace the question of Kosovo, because the Russo-Georgian war was forged over the last decade over the Kosovo question.

Yugoslavia broke up into its component republics in the early 1990s. The borders of the republics did not cohere to the distribution of nationalities. Many — Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and so on — found themselves citizens of republics where the majorities were not of their ethnicities and disliked the minorities intensely for historical reasons. Wars were fought between Croatia and Serbia (still calling itself Yugoslavia because Montenegro was part of it), Bosnia and Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia. Other countries in the region became involved as well.

One conflict became particularly brutal. Bosnia had a large area dominated by Serbs. This region wanted to secede from Bosnia and rejoin Serbia. The Bosnians objected and an internal war in Bosnia took place, with the Serbian government involved. This war involved the single greatest bloodletting of the bloody Balkan wars, the mass murder by Serbs of Bosnians.

Here we must pause and define some terms that are very casually thrown around. …

David Warren has an update on the Canadian “Human Rights” Commissions (CHRC).

Perhaps I wrote too soon, last Wednesday, in listing the “human rights” prosecutions against various “politically incorrect” journalists that had been dismissed recently by Canada’s “human rights” kangaroo courts. A new round seems to be on the way.

Fresh from having one set of charges, filed against him by Islamists, dismissed by an Alberta kangaroo court, Ezra Levant has now been served with a fresh set through the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Rob Wells, the new complainant, is the same whose charges against Fr Alphonse de Valk and Catholic Insight were dismissed recently, after costing that small magazine a bundle. Nor was that his first use of the CHRC. Details and documents may be found through Ezra Levant’s website. …

… Dean Steacy, a leading apparatchik of the CHRC, was directly asked in an on-record exchange during one kangaroo court hearing, “What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate one of these complaints?”

He replied: “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.”

Quote this, as it has been frequently quoted, to members of Canada’s political establishment, and you do not get a rise. Like many other “human rights” operators, Mr. Steacy plays on a seedy, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, to obliterate Canada’s own deep tradition of intellectual freedom. …

The humor section starts early because you need to know about The Temple of Obama. First though, Dave Barry reports from the convention floor.

… 7:48 — Through intense effort I manage to surge maybe eight feet, where the path is blocked by a TV network that has set up a platform on the floor so its reporters can report on the convention by talking to each other with their backs to the actual convention. There is huge excitement in the surge as people catch glimpses of both Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer, who are, in this environment, the Beatles. The surgers all stop, whip out cellphones, and take pictures of the backs of the heads of people who are taking pictures of the backs of the heads of people who might actually be getting direct visual shots of Anderson and Wolf. It is a lifetime convention memory.

7:53 — I keep fighting my way forward. As I squeeze past a group of men in suits, I have strong and direct buttular contact, lasting a good seven seconds, with New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. At least it was good for me.

7:58 — I finally reach my destination: the Florida delegates. I was concerned that they might get confused and wind up in, say, New Orleans, but there they were, and as a Floridian I am proud to report that they were wearing pink flamingo sunglasses that expressed the clear message: “Hey, we’re dorks!” …

Here is some background on Obama at the Barackopolis. Power Line has details. They also post on Toga recommendations.

Ed Morrissey is on to the Temple of Obama.

Politico reports that “senior Democratic officials” have had second thoughts about the wisdom of the scope, scale, and setting for tonight’s Barack Obama speech at Invesco Field.  The Greek temple set design appears to have been the last straw, and they now worry about the “rock star” impression that this will leave with American voters who increasingly see Obama as a fad and not a serious candidate.  Democrats failed to foresee this despite nominating their least qualified and experienced candidate in decades, if not in their entire history:

From the elaborate stagecraft to the teeming crowd of 80,000 cheering partisans, the vagaries of the weather to the unpredictable audience reaction, the optics surrounding the stadium event have heightened worries that the Obama campaign is engaging in a high-risk endeavor in an uncontrollable environment. …

Ed also posts on the the revised GDP figures.

So where does all this lead. Weekly Standard posts to Intrade the online gambling site.

Karl Rove writes on the next session of Congress and the opportunities it will provide for McCain.

Democrats and Republicans have scripted their conventions as tightly as possible. But after delegates return home with buttons, badges and banners, the curtain will rise on a more unruly drama: the fall session of Congress. And it could affect the November election more than the conventions.

The House and Senate return to Washington Monday, Sept. 8. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hope it will be a short session, ending on Sept. 26. That will allow members to go home and campaign, not to return until after Election Day. Good luck. …

… Democrats control Congress, so they are accountable. Mr. Reid and Mrs. Pelosi are two of the worst advertisements for Congress imaginable. And Mr. McCain has an impressive record of political reform he can invoke, whereas Mr. Obama, who has yet to complete his first term in the Senate, has no accomplishments to point to that demonstrate that he is an agent of change.

The 110th Congress is an excellent target for Mr. McCain. He ought to take careful aim at it and commence firing.

David Harsanyi says the Dem convention heralds the end of free markets.

Well, it’s no wonder Democrats didn’t want former President Bill Clinton to speak on the economy. Some delegates might have had the temerity to wonder: Hey, why did we experience all that prosperity in the ’90s?

It certainly wasn’t due to populism, or isolationism, or more government dependency, or any of the hard-left economic policies being preached nightly by speakers at the Democratic National Convention.

No, it was capitalism — more of it, not less of it.

Naturally, every political convention features its share of demagoguery. But buried beneath all the idealistic talk in Denver are some ugly details.

Those who had the inner fortitude to remain conscious through speeches by Bob Casey and Mark Warner were surely entertained by the theatrics of populist Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (a man who represents the possibility of America — a place where even a former cast member of “Hee Haw!” can become governor of Montana).

When Schweitzer claims “we must invest” in projects he likes, he means government will take it and invest it for you.

You see, you must. …

Yesterday, Washington Post goes page 1 with story about William Ayers and Obama, and a GOP inspired ad.

… “Why would Barack Obama be friends with somebody who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it?” intones a voice on the ad, which is running in conservative areas of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. “Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama?”

The ad is no video stunt, said Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising. It began running last Thursday, and as of Tuesday, $360,000 had been spent on 264 showings, 52 of them in the Grand Rapids, Mich., media market, just under 40 around Cincinnati, 18 in Norfolk, and half a dozen around Pittsburgh, a corner of Pennsylvania that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton dominated in the spring Democratic primary battle.

“Certainly it connects with base voters,” Tracey said. “If you can’t get excited about voting for McCain, these are the kinds of ads that get them excited about voting against Obama.” …

If you’re like Pickerhead, you need a Mark Steyn fix. Here’s a column from April 27 this year.

Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas, talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.”

Where to begin? For the past 10 years, we all have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the ecowarriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of “climate change.” But let’s take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately 1 degree. That’s the “war”: 1 degree.

If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a 1-degree increase isn’t exactly Pearl Harbor. But Gen. Stengel wants us to engage in pre-emptive war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.

So let’s cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more trees than we did 100 or 200 years ago. My town is over 90 percent forested. Any more trees, and I’d have to hack my way through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St. Albans I found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker “TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH.” Very funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch of Route 7 there’s nothing to see, north, south, east or west, but maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It’s on every measure other than tree cover that Vermont’s kaput. …

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Spengler, a pseudonymous columnist from the Asia Times wants to know where they put Michelle.

… This alleged Michelle Obama bore a striking physical resemblance to the candidate’s wife observed during the campaign, but the differences in attitude and rhetoric were extreme enough to warrant verification. …

… The lady who has often protested against America’s unfairness protested much too little. Gone was the woman who told a television audience last February 18, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.”

Never before has a candidate’s wife delivered a major address to a national convention of either party. The break in precedent stems evidently from the urgent need to remake the image built up by sections of the media of Michelle Obama as a rancorous and resentful woman. But it also may reflect the extraordinary degree of her influence in her husband’s campaign. She is reported to have ruled out Senator Hillary Clinton as a vice presidential candidate, although polls showed that Clinton would strengthen the ticket more than any other choice. …

Maureen Dowd does Hill’s speech.

I’ve been to a lot of conventions, and there’s always something gratifyingly weird that happens.

Dan Quayle acting like a Dancing Hamster. Teresa Heinz Kerry reprising Blanche DuBois. Dick Morris getting nabbed triangulating between a hooker and toes.

But this Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru.

“What is that feeling in the air?” I asked him.

“Submerged hate,” he promptly replied.

There were a lot of bitter Clinton associates, fund-raisers and supporters wandering the halls, spewing vindictiveness, complaining of slights, scheming about Hillary’s roll call and plotting trouble, with some in the Clinton coterie dissing Obama by planning early departures, before the nominee even speaks. …

Michael Barone with interesting stream of convention consciousness.

DENVER—This seems to me the edgiest Democratic National Convention since 1988. Then those running the convention were worried about what Jesse Jackson would do. Now those running the convention are worried, not so much about what Hillary Clinton will do—she will deliver a rousing call for electing Barack Obama—but what some of her followers will do, and about what Bill Clinton will do. The Obama campaign people are adjusting to the fact that Obama enters the convention not well ahead of John McCain, but only barely ahead or even; and that he enters a convention where a sizeable number of Clinton supporters—more than I predicted in early June—are unreconciled to his victory. I’ve already written about how the Obama campaign’s decision to stage the acceptance speech in the Invesco Field outdoor stadium was pushed by the fact that the alternative was to speak in a small hall in which nearly half the delegates were elected to support Clinton.

And they have to deal with the problem of Bill Clinton. The rumor mill is that Clinton was miffed on being assigned to speak on foreign policy; he wanted to speak on his (in his view, very successful) domestic policies which (in his view, I am guessing) he has not seen any Democratic candidate this year, including his wife, pay proper obeisance to. Anyhow, I saw John Podesta, Clinton’s second term chief of staff, out by the fast food stands in the Pepsi Center. He told me that he hadn’t spoken to President Clinton in a week and that he had no doubt Clinton would deliver a ringing endorsement of Obama, as (he said) he had of Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. I asked if he had seen the Bill Clinton speech text. He laughed at my naïveté. “We were still working over the speech text in the car over to the Fleet Center in 2004,” he said, referring to his speech for Kerry in Boston. The point: the Obama campaign, try as it might, cannot completely control Bill Clinton. …

George Will wonders how Obama is going to do all he has promised.

… There never is a shortage of nonsensical political rhetoric, but really: Has there ever been solemn silliness comparable to today’s politicians tarting up their agendas as things designed for, and necessary to, “saving the planet,” and promising edicts to “require” entire industries to reorder themselves?

In 1996, Bob Dole, citing the Clinton campaign’s scabrous fundraising, exclaimed: “Where’s the outrage?” In this year’s campaign, soggy with environmental messianism, deranged self-importance and delusional economics, the question is: Where is the derisive laughter?

WSJ Editors on Big Labor’s success.

Forget for a moment the media fascination with disgruntled Hillary Clinton delegates or Michelle Obama’s makeover. One of the most underreported stories at this week’s Democratic National Convention is that Big Labor is making a big comeback.

Not long ago, the labor movement was in a state of steady, seemingly unstoppable decline. A global economy and the information age made unions less relevant to more workers. The fall of industrial trades cut into existing union ranks, while service workers saw less need to join. Union membership as a share of the American workforce has been falling since the early 1980s, and today stands at 12.1%. In the more dynamic private sector, only 7.5% of workers carry the union label.

The paradox is that even as union numbers have declined, union political clout has increased, especially within the Democratic Party. That’s in evidence in Denver, where no less than 25% of the 4,200 delegates are active or retired union members or belong to households with union members. More significant for the rest of America, labor has won the intellectual battle for control of the Democratic Party and is reasserting its agenda in a way not seen since the 1970s. …

John Stossel continues his thoughts on energy independence.

… To even attempt to achieve energy independence, the government will have to plan the energy sector. Considering how pervasive energy is throughout the economy, this is a recipe for full central planning and a step toward poverty and tyranny. “Why not keep all that $720 billion [we spend to import oil] in the United States of America?” was a sentiment expressed by many. But that reveals a poor understanding of world trade. When we trade dollars to foreigners for oil, they have to do something with those dollars. They don’t stuff them in mattresses. (If they did, it would mean we got free oil.) They buy American products. (U.S. exports are soaring.) Or they invest in businesses here. Or they sell the dollars to someone else who buys American products or invests in the United States.

If we stop buying from abroad, foreigners will have fewer dollars with which to buy American products or to invest. That would hurt us.

Many readers think that energy independence would produce jobs for Americans. But the idea that money spent abroad means fewer jobs here is just plain wrong. If Americans don’t produce energy, they will produce something else. The number of jobs is not fixed. There is always work to do.

If Americans can produce competitive forms of energy — without government subsidies — great! But if others can produce energy more cheaply, we’d be crazy not to buy it and use the savings to make other things to improve our lives.

Charles Murray started it (Pickings – August 13, 2008). Now Walter Williams is asking if college is worth it.

… The U.S. Department of Education statistics show that 76 out of 100 students who graduate in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class do not graduate from college, even if they spend eight and a half years in college. That’s even with colleges having dumbed down classes to accommodate such students. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million students who took the ACT college entrance examinations in 2007 were prepared to do college-level study in math, English and science. Even though a majority of students are grossly under-prepared to do college-level work, each year colleges admit hundreds of thousands of such students.

While colleges have strong financial motives to admit unsuccessful students, for failing students the experience can be devastating. They often leave with their families, or themselves, having piled up thousands of dollars in debt. There is possibly trauma and poor self-esteem for having failed, and perhaps embarrassment for their families. …

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Theodore Dalrymple’s Solzhenitsyn obit is first.

Contrary to popular belief, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died last week at 89, told the world nothing that it did not already know, or could not already have known, about the Soviet Union and the Communist system. Information about their true nature was available from the very first, including photographic evidence of massacre and famine. Bertrand Russell, no apologist of conservatism, spotted Lenin’s appalling inhumanity and its consequences for Russia and humanity as early as 1920. The problem was that this information was not believed; or if believed, it was explained away and rendered innocuous by various mental subterfuges, such as false comparison with others’ misdeeds, historical rationalizations, reference to the supposed grandeur of the social ideals behind the apparent horrors, and so forth. Anything other than admission of the obvious.

Solzhenitsyn’s achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens. Because of his clear-sightedness about Lenin’s true nature, it was no longer permissible for intellectuals who had been pro-Soviet to hide behind the myth that Stalin perverted the noble ideal that Lenin had started to put into practice. Lenin was, if such a thing be possible, more of a monster than Stalin, not so much inhumane as anti-human. …

Couple of shorts from John Fund. One introduces the current William Ayers flap.

… Also unexplained is the sudden sensitivity on Team Obama’s part. It’s already known that Mr. Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, hosted a key fund-raising party during Mr. Obama’s first bid for public office and also served with Mr. Obama on the board of a Chicago-based charity until 2002. Today, the University of Illinois will finally release documents it tried to keep from the public on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the liberal school reform effort founded by Mr. Ayers and chaired by Mr. Obama. Obama campaign aides insist the two men had only a casual relationship. During a Democratic primary debate last April, Mr. Obama said that “the notion that . . . me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense.”

We may know more about the relationship between the two men later this week, after reporters have plowed through the once-suppressed Annenberg Challenge records.

Jonah Goldberg follows the Ayers thoughts.

I am amazed, simply amazed, at the amazement of many liberals that Ayers and Dohrn should matter to anyone. I was one of the first to write about Ayers (for which Alan Colmes denounced me as some kind of McCarthyite, though not in so many words) and I’ve been getting email ever since for my mule-headedness. Apparently the groupthink is so thick that at the Obama campaign they actually think this rightwing or Republican obsession is a weakness. How else to explain the stupidity of their Ayers’ ad? …

Hugh Hewitt posts on the unease the Democrats are exhibiting in Denver.

The Washington Post reports on the great unease at the Democratic Convention:

As the Democrats kicked off a convention designed to unite support behind Obama, interviews with several dozen delegates pointed to an undercurrent of anxiety among many from key swing states who will be charged with leading the push in their communities. They expressed doubts bordering on bewilderment: Why, in a year that had been shaping up as a watershed for Democrats, amid an economic downturn and an unpopular Republican presidency, is the race so tight?

Why, indeed.  The answers:  Jeremiah Wright. Tony Rezko. Michael Pfleger. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

“Above my pay grade.”  “Bitter and clinging to God and their guns.” “Citizen of the world.”  Tire gauges.  “First time I have been proud of my country.”  “Vastly superior infrastructure.”  The Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

And now Slow Joe Biden.

That’s just part of the list.  The Dems are nominating the most radical major party candidate in history, whose thin record is relentlessly hard left, and whose rhetoric of change and hope cannot cover the fact that he has never worked across the aisle, has never sought to reform the deeply corrupt Chicago or Illinois political machines, and that he is hopelessly out of his depth on foreign policy and national security issues. …

David Harsanyi reacts to the Biden pick.

… And there is a noteworthy difference between Biden and Clinton: The loquacious Biden entertained the press corps for a handful of primary debates before dropping out. Hillary convinced 18 million primary voters to support her.

So, then, why not Clinton? If you erode your theme of “change” by choosing a longtime Washington insider, why not pick the one who can unite your party?

Perhaps a clue can be found in the words of Nancy Pelosi, who said Democrats need to “begin anew.” At a convention that features Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy (in order of most annoying), who can argue?

Most observers say Biden is the “safe” pick. Maybe. But there is one thing for certain: Picking Biden over Clinton helps a presidential candidate. And that candidate is not here in Denver.

Ed Morrissey has a bunch of good posts. First on Ayers.

Barack Obama did a double-twist on free speech yesterday in reaction to the ad produced by an outside political group regarding his association with William Ayers.  After his own campaign produced an ad that Factcheck called a “smear” tying Jack Abramoff to John McCain through Ralph Reed, American Issues produced an ad that pointed out Obama’s political ties to the unrepentant former domestic terrorist, William Ayers.  Instead of letting it drop, Obama’s campaign took two really stupid actions: they produced a response ad and then demanded that the Department of Justice investigate American Issues while pressuring television stations to reject the ad: …

And Ed catches Time going gaga over Obama.

One of the pitfalls of reporting from the conventions is that people tend to lose perspective amidst the fervor.  Mainstream journalists supposedly have immunity from this phenomenon, and sometimes chide bloggers for cheerleading rather than retaining a more objective point of view.   Maybe Amy Sullivan’s colleagues should perform an intervention for her and Time magazine, then, because she’s obviously been drinking the Kool-Aid in Denver with this passage:

Given all that buildup, it may come as a surprise that the Democrats who will gather around the gavel in Denver are actually more united than perhaps at any other point in the past 30 years. When Obama accepts the Democratic nomination on Thursday night, he will inherit a party focused on its determination to take back the White House, and that overarching goal should paper over any lingering resentments or policy differences, at least until after Election Day.

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me.  More united than at “any other point in the past 30 years”?  How old is Amy Sullivan — three? …

Slate’s Press Box on Biden’s plagiarism.

Joe Biden’s return as a vice-presidential candidate signals forgiveness—at least from Barack Obama—for having plagiarized a leading British politician during Biden’s campaign for the Democratic Party’s 1988 presidential nomination.

The Biden episode merits revisiting because as acts of plagiarism go, it was spectacular, and because it points to other dicey chapters in his life. To know Biden in full, you must appreciate his parts.

Biden’s puttering campaign for president effectively died on Sept. 13, 1987, when the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd reported that he had pinched major elements of a recent and celebrated speech by Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. That speech, included in this May 1987 Labor Party broadcast, begins at the 7:23 mark.

But Biden didn’t merely borrow words and phrasings from Kinnock, which is a time-honored practice of candidates and their speechwriters and is almost never regarded as plagiarism. He became Kinnock, as David Greenberg writes today, claiming things about himself and his family that were untrue and that he knew to be untrue. …

Thomas Sowell’s random thoughts.

… One of the problems with successfully dealing with threats is that people start believing that there is no threat. That is where we are, seven years after 9/11, so that reminding people of terrorist dangers can be dismissed as “the politics of fear” by Barack Obama, who has a rhetorical answer for everything.

There are countries in Europe that would love to have their unemployment rate fall to the 5.7 percent unemployment rate to which ours has risen. Yet those who seem to want us to imitate European economic and social policies never seem to want to consider the actual consequences of those policies. …

Bernie Marcus, Home Depot’s founder, writes on the Dems new labor laws.

I recently said that America “would become France” if a certain bill now in Congress — which would virtually guarantee that every company becomes unionized — ever became law. Deceptively named the Employee Free Choice Act, this bill would in most cases take away an employee’s right to a secret ballot in a union election and give unions the option to have federal arbitrators set the wages, benefits, hours and all other terms and conditions of employment. …

Borowitz reports Clinton’s Denver speech will be on a 5 second delay.

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Jeff Jacoby signs off on China’s “totalitarian” Olympics.

… A million and a half residents expelled. Free speech strangled. Elderly women jailed. That’s what it means when a police state like China hosts the Olympics. That’s what you get when the IOC and its corporate supersponsors care more about television ratings and market share than about the values of the Olympic movement. That’s what happens when the free world cons itself into believing that China’s Communist rulers, who sustain genocide in Sudan and torture nuns in Tibet, will refrain from doing whatever it takes to turn the Olympics into a vehicle for totalitarian self-glorification.

The cruelty and deceit were on display right from the start, from the digitally faked fireworks to the last-minute yanking of a 7-year-old singer because a Politburo member decided she wasn’t pretty enough. …

Speaking of China, Obama had praises for the country’s infrastructure last week. Ed Morrissey tells us how they made their improvements. They stole from their citizens.

… Beijing at first thought that water demand would increase dramatically during the Games.  Instead of finding ways to increase water supply, they simply stole the water from the poor farmers in Baoding.  The government allowed the reservoirs to fill, tripled the price of water to keep farmers from using much of it, and then built hundreds of miles of pipeline to carry the hoarded water directly to Beijing.

The result?  A housing and land collapse in Baoding in which 31,000 became homeless.  And the most ironic part of the story is that the water wasn’t really needed after all.  When it became apparent that tourists had decided to skip the 2008 Olympics over the Tibet issue, or just because of the Chinese government in general, the need for the water evaporated.  And the infrastructural work that Obama hailed as a model for the rest of the world stopped abruptly, leaving half-build aqueducts and pipelines all over Baoding. …

Here’s the story from China in the London Times.

THOUSANDS of Chinese farmers face ruin because their water has been cut off to guarantee supplies to the Olympics in Beijing, and officials are now trying to cover up a grotesque scandal of blunders, lies and repression.

In the capital, foreign dignitaries have admired millions of flowers in bloom and lush, well-watered greens around its famous sights. But just 90 minutes south by train, peasants are hacking at the dry earth as their crops wilt, their money runs out and the work of generations gives way to despair, debt and, in a few cases, suicide.

In between these two Chinas stands a cordon of roadblocks and hundreds of security agents deployed to make sure that the one never sees the other.

The water scandal is a parable of what can happen when a demanding global event is awarded to a poor agricultural nation run by a dictatorship; and the irony is that none of it has turned out to be necessary.

The blunders began when officials started to worry that Beijing might not have enough water to cope with 500,000 visitors to the Olympics. There was talk of a 30% spike in demand. Their gaze turned to Hebei province, its fields ripe with vegetables, corn and rice, providing a good living for its huge rural population. …

Ed Rendell drops a bomb on the media. John Fund has the story.

… He told the crowd of 300 political luminaries that the media’s coverage of the Democratic primaries had elevated personalities over substance and he complained of sexism in its treatment of Senator Clinton. He called the media’s kid-gloves handling of Barack Obama “absolutely embarrassing,” and suggested that the media had essentially given the presumptive Democratic nominee, whom he now supports, “a free pass.” Journalists, he said, had allowed themselves unprofessionally to be “caught up with emotion and excitement” in the historic nature of the Obama candidacy. He even called MSNBC “the official network of Obama’s campaign.” …

Amir Taheri says the Biden pick indicates a return of Jimmy Carter policy.

… But the third message is that “change” means a return not to the Camelot of President John Kennedy, but to the foreign policies of Jimmy Carter. For Biden, an early supporter of Carter in his quest for the presidency in 1976, shares the former president’s view of the world and the United States’ place in it.

In 2004, I was astonished to hear Biden doing his own bit of America-bashing in front of an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The US, he claimed, had no moral authority to preach democracy in the Middle East. “We don’ have much of a democracy ourselves, ” he said mockingly. “Remember our own presidential election; remember Florida!”

Biden has the experience of more than three decades in the US senate, at least two of them dealing with foreign affairs and defense. But experience is no guarantee of good judgment. And Biden has been wrong on almost every key issue.

* In 1979, he shared Carter’s starry-eyed belief that the fall of the shah in Iran and the advent of the ayatollahs represented progress for human rights. Throughout the hostage crisis, as US diplomats were daily paraded blindfolded in front of television cameras and threatened with execution, he opposed strong action against the terrorist mullahs and preached dialogue. …

Michael Barone wonders why the media won’t question the Obama narrative.

… There is a difference between the two parties, however. The Democrats can usually depend on the mainstream media to accept their narratives uncritically, while the Republicans can expect them to punch holes in their story lines. In 1988, the media didn’t note that Dukakis was less an earthy ethnic than a reformer in the Massachusetts Puritan tradition, but they were eager to point to the senior Bush’s aristocratic eastern background. …

Pastor Rick Warren was the subject of WSJ’s Weekend Interview.

‘Overhyped.” That’s how the Rev. Rick Warren describes the notion that the evangelical vote is “up for grabs” in this election. But what about the significance of the evangelical left, I asked the pastor of Saddleback Church after his forum with the presidential candidates last weekend. “This big,” he says, holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.

Sitting on a small stone patio outside the church’s “green room,” I question him further — has he heard that the Democratic Party is changing its abortion platform? “Window dressing,” he replies. “Too little, too late.” But Rev. Jim Wallis, the self-described progressive evangelical, has been saying that the change is a big victory. “Jim Wallis is a spokesman for the Democratic Party,” Mr. Warren responds dismissively. “His book reads like the party platform.”

If you’ve read any of the hundreds of articles about Mr. Warren that have appeared over the past 10 years, perhaps you think I’ve got the wrong guy. After all, the leader of the fourth-largest church in the U.S. is supposed to be part of a “new breed” of evangelicals, according to the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and dozens of other publications. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof paid him what Mr. Kristof might consider the ultimate compliment earlier this year, referring to Mr. Warren as an “evangelical liberals can love.” …

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Gerard Baker says “Yes we can” might not be magic anymore, and Barack might lose.

… How can it be, you ask? Didn’t we see him just last month speaking to 200,000 adoring Germans in Berlin? Didn’t he get the red carpet treatment in France – France of all places? Doesn’t every British politician want to be seen clutching the hem of his garment?

All true. But as cruel geography and the selfish designs of the American Founding Fathers would have it, Europeans don’t get to choose the US president. Somewhere along the way to the Obama presidency, somebody forgot to ask the American people.

And wouldn’t you know it, they insist on looking this gift thoroughbred in the mouth. Who’d have thought it? You present them with the man who deigns to deliver them from their plight and they want to sit around and ask hard questions about who he is and what he believes and where he might actually take the country. The ingrates! …

Many of our favorites have Biden opinions. Ed Morrissey is first.

… It’s an admission that Obama’s inexperience has finally begun worrying voters, and not just Democratic power brokers.  There really is no other way to see an addition of Biden to the ticket.  Obama can’t be worried about carrying Delaware, after all; it’s as safe a state that Democrats have.  Nor does Biden have a natural national constituency, as his own flop of a presidential campaign proved this cycle.

The Biden choice is an act of desperation borne of a summer-long catastrophe.  There isn’t any other reason for Obama to choose a 35-year veteran of the Senate with as long a history of gaffes and flat-out dishonesty as his second on the campaign for Hope and Change.  In fact, I can’t wait for writers to twist themselves into knots to avoid the cardinal sin of writing, plagiarism, which Biden committed more than once, as Jim Geraghty recounted in 2003: …

Power Line follows.

Few would argue that Joe Biden is among our brightest Senators, but that hasn’t prevented him from obtaining a prominent role on two of the most high-profile Senate Committees – the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. Now that the front-runner in the presidential campaign has tapped Biden to be his running mate, it’s worth taking a few moments to reflect on Biden’s performance on these two committees. We’ll start with the Judiciary Committee.

Biden’s performance there has been disgraceful. He was part of the mob that, during the Bork confirmation process, defeated a highly qualified nominee on no other grounds than disagreement with his views. This step, unprecedented as it was, transformed the rules for judicial confirmation. And it transformed them for the worse, since the long-term effect of the new approach, once the Republicans fully embrace it as they must, will be to create a bias in favor of moderate non-entities, thereby quite possibly depriving the Court of some of its best potential Justices.

Reasonable people can disagree with this assessment, but a reasonable person would be hard-pressed to defend what the Judiciary Committee, under Biden’s leadership, did to Clarence Thomas. Well past the eleventh hour, with Thomas about to sail through to confirmation, Biden decided to hold a “trial” to determine whether, almost a decade earlier, Thomas had committed such outrages as remarking to Anita Hill that dirt on a can of soda looked like pubic hair. Suddenly, it became acceptable to vote against confirming a Supreme Court Justice not just because one disagreed with his views, but also because (according to one witness who had not come forward for years) he had a “potty mouth.”

Over the next dozen or so years, Biden helped extend this new regime to nominees for the U.S. Court of Appeals. Biden’s legacy, then, is a fully politicized system of confirming federal judges – one that will continue to produce ugly spectacles like the Bork and Thomas hearings, undermine respect for the judiciary (a mixed consequence, in my view), and promote mediocrity on the bench. …

Corner Post from Peter Wehner.

I have now watched and read Senator Biden’s speech in Springfield earlier today. From the perspective of the craft of speechwriting, it was quite a thing to behold.

In a speech of just over 16 minutes, Biden used, by my count, the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” 18 times. (Apparently “ladies and gentlemen” is to Biden what “my friends” is to Senator McCain). Biden’s speech was filled with the predictable hackneyed phrases. We were told the American Dream is both “slipping away” and dropping off a cliff. And “the future keeps receding further and further and further away as your reach for your dreams.” Biden feels things with “ever fiber of my being.” Barack Obama possesses “steel in his spine.” And so forth. Biden also made silly claims, such as this being the “last chance to reclaim the America we love, to restore America’s soul.” …

John Podhoretz in Contentions.

… I think the nation should offer profound thanks to Barack Obama for the Biden choice because of the real possibility that there will be unexpected moments of comedy between now and Election Day. For the thing is that Biden doesn’t just have a big mouth. He actually has an identifiable problem. It’s called logorrhea. When he starts speaking, it is nearly impossible for him to figure out how to stop. Almost every blunder he has made in the past decade is due to the free associating that is the ancillary effect of his prolixity.

Surely he has guaranteed the Obama camp that he can keep himself in control. But he’s a man nearing 70, and men nearing 70 do not change. Honestly, this could be fun.

…

… Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, sets the tone for the coming five days: “This looks like the best possible choice.” The Biden choice is the opening of a mainstream-media return to uncritical Obama coverage. …

And Jennifer Rubin.

… John is right that the media is already in overdrive on the Biden-gushing. But does it matter? What we know is that mainstream media fawning has no correlation with real voters’ reactions. They kvelled over the Berlin speech, marveled at the ease with which Barack Obama followed his scripted interludes with heads of state and gasped in reverence at his nuanced answers to Rick Warren. But the public had a different reaction. None of these episodes helped and many, or all, arguably hurt Obama. By now we should know that there are no less reliable predictors of voter reaction than the mainstream pundit class.

Why? Aside from being hopelessly infatuated with The One, they do not represent the views, values or demographic attributes of voters actually in play. MSM  pundits are generally liberal, urban, highly educated, nonreligious, obsessed with rhetoric, and lacking real world experience outside politics/media. In other words, pretty much like Obama. They show no inclination to explore any topic — the Mayor Daley machine, the Bill Ayers connection, Obama’s state senate record — that might throw the Obama narrative off balance. …

Debra Saunders writes on attack dogs, GOP and Dem.

In politics, everyone wants to be seen as a mudslinging virgin – who, like King Lear, is “more sinned against than sinning.” Toward that end, Democrats have crafted the conceit that Republicans are attack dogs, while Democratic candidates are not sufficiently ruthless. After years of calling President Bush every name in the book, the left nonetheless manages to see itself as the victim in the smear game.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama knows how to play to that conceit. In a speech before a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in Florida on Tuesday, Obama went into woe-is-me mode as he responded to Republican candidate John McCain’s criticism of Obama’s opposition to the successful U.S. troop surge in Iraq.

“One of the things that we have to change in this country is the idea that people can’t disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism,” said Obama. “I have never suggested that Sen. McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it, because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America’s national interest. Now, it’s time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same.”

Poor baby. To hear his lament, you’d never guess that Obama repeatedly has argued that McCain picks his positions out of ambition. Obama recently told a group, “The price (McCain) paid for his party’s nomination has been to reverse himself on position after position.” …

The Economist continues on bellwether states. This week it’s Nevada and New Mexico.

… In both states Mr McCain has a powerful weapon that he has mysteriously failed to deploy so far. He is a local man whose home state touches both New Mexico and Nevada. As a result, he can talk confidently about pressing regional issues like water, grazing on federal lands and the travails of American Indians—none of which will be familiar to someone who cut his political teeth in Chicago. Ronald Reagan did this, and ruled the West. Mr McCain needs to start doing the same