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Nick Cohen in The Observer, UK writes on how the liberals in the press paved the way for Sarah Palin’s success.

My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.

For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama’s church.

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor’s office. …

Speaking of ugly and berserk, John Fund says the Dems have sent 30 lawyers to Alaska to dig into Sarah’s past.

Jonah Goldberg says Team Obama is rattled.

Barack Obama, a famous fan of pickup basketball, must recognize his plight: It’s two on one now. John McCain drafted Gov. Sarah Palin, the star point guard from the Wasilla Warriors, to double-team Obama.

(McCain’s team doesn’t care if no one covers Joe Biden, who seems to spend most of his time yelling to the media, “I’m open! I’m open!” But when he gets the ball, all he does is talk about what a great player he is and dribble in place.)

So after the halftime show of the political conventions, to strain the sports metaphor a bit further, it looks as if the change-up in strategy has Team Obama rattled and in danger of choking. Polls — the closest thing we have to a scoreboard — show that McCain, at least temporarily, has taken the lead. The Real Clear Politics average of national polls since Friday shows McCain ahead by a razor-thin (and statistically meaningless) 2.9 percentage points. The USA Today-Gallup poll has McCain leading by a whopping 10 points among likely voters (and four points among registered voters), though that’s almost surely an overstatement.

The McCain-Palin convention bounce also all but closed the ticket’s gender gap. According to Rasmussen, Obama had a 14-point lead among women; now it’s three. According to the latest ABC/Washington Post poll, McCain now has a 12-point lead among white women. …

Roger Simon thinks it’s sweet how McCain got his big bounce just when Olbermann and Matthews got yanked.

I must say it’s amusing that on the day John McCain bounced to a ten-point lead (likely voters) over his unprepared opponent, MSNBC gave the hook to its “nattering nabobs” of bourgeois pseudo-leftism – Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. Somehow parent company NBC got the idea these clowns were not up to moderating a serious political debate.  So much for sideshows.

Meanwhile the mainstream media must be in a state of shock.  Their hero is in serious jeopardy of losing. …

Byron York says painting Palin as an extremist won’t work.

Jonah Goldberg finds Pelosi touting raising five children as preparation for the work in Congress.

… That experience forced me to be disciplined, diplomatic, focused, and successful, and I brought that discipline and focus to the Congress. Also, having a family keeps you focused on the future, which is the biggest inspiration in politics. …

Say What? Ed Morrissey says now Obama thinks tax cuts might not be a good idea.

… Obama has campaigned successfully on economics mostly through populist rhetoric and class warfare.  He has cast the Bush cuts as egregious without explaining the five years of solid growth they produced.  Now that he has to start getting past the slogans and start producing specifics, he seems lost and self-contradictory.  Small wonder that McCain has closed the gap on economic stewardship from 19 points to three in the latest polling.  Voters have begun to realize that Obama is making it up as he goes along.

Nor does Morrissey think the old “cell phone mime” will save Barack.

Barack Obama’s sudden decline in the polls have some of his supporters, and even some of John McCain’s backers, wondering whether the nosedive accurately reflects popular opinion.  Obama’s strength comes with younger voters, they note, and younger voters use cell phones more often as a substitute for land lines — and pollsters don’t call cell phones.  The implication is that Obama may be underrepresented by these polls and is performing stronger than people suspect.

Well, anything is possible, but as John Kerry can tell you, building hopes on massive youth turnout usually sets a candidate up for severe disappointment. …

Want a great example of how the media is biased against Palin. Jim Lindgren of Volokh catches Anderson Cooper with his pants down.

And Samizdata catches a lie from The Economist.

The Corner catches WaPo. Not a lie per se, but a half truth nonetheless.

Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard with some of the background of the Palin pick.

… With the nomination in hand, McCain decided that he wanted his vice-presidential selection to be bold and leaned toward picking Joe Lieberman. But after an extensive look at the practical realities of selecting Lieberman and listening to the arguments for and against taking that dramatic step, McCain realized it wouldn’t work. He turned his sights to three other candidates: Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and Sarah Palin. Romney was always a default candidate, but never a likely pick. Pawlenty had several backers among McCain’s top advisers and, though McCain likes Pawlenty, he saw the pick as too conventional. There was a bold if risky choice remaining: Sarah Palin.

McCain had been impressed by Palin during a 15-minute conversation back in February and spoke to her again on August 24. She did not have a strong advocate among McCain’s top advisers, and more than one cautioned him about the risks of picking someone with such limited experience. And as he had on Iraq, McCain listened to that advice, considered the politically safe choice, and then rejected it in favor of something bolder and riskier.

The early results have been promising, and McCain’s team is confident that she will be a major asset over the next two months.

“You do not get to 80 percent approval by not being a good politician,” said a senior McCain adviser. “I don’t care how red your state is or how blue it is–if it’s Alaska or California–you don’t get to 80 percent without being good.” …

David Harsanyi with a dim view of the Fannie/Freddie bailout.

… Isn’t it ironic that government bars a citizen from risking his own Social Security funds because it’s too chancy, yet it uses your money to bail out companies that have engaged in the very behavior government is supposedly safeguarding us from?

And really, what’s more risky than letting Washington handle your money?

Tunku Varadarajan interviews a world-class travel writer.

I knew Paul Theroux could turn a phrase, but I hadn’t realized that he could turn heads, too. As we walk to dinner at the restaurant at the Taj Boston hotel — formerly the dowdy old Ritz, now elegantly restored to world-class panache — a number of ladies of a certain age are . . . how else to put it? . . . checking him out. “It’s this suit,” Mr. Theroux observes. Hand-stitched by a tailor in Bombay, the suit — of Italian white linen, with pinstripes — is indeed eye-catching.

Mr. Theroux has not gone through life unnoticed. How could he? He travels widely, talks to anyone who will talk to him — on trains, planes and buses, in cities, villages and jungles — and then writes about all of it in prose too highly spiced for some prissy palates. “They don’t read me in English departments, you know. I’m too rude about people, they say.”

Rudeness-in-print is not, of course, Mr. Theroux’s only skill. Nor is he rude all the time: In fact, much of his writing reflects affection for the people in whose midst he is apt to find himself, and a spirit of inquiry that is part anthropological and part autobiographical. Yet he hates to be thought of as a “travel writer” — in spite of the fact that he practically invented the modern genre of travel writing. “A traveling writer is what I am, and at times a romantic voyeur.” …

Columbia Journalism Review with the story of Times of London snide remark about Wasilla, Alaska. Local paper responds.

… A description which Wasilla’s Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman calls in an editorial today “as inaccurate and unfair as it would be for anyone else to define England by a stereotypical lack of dental hygiene.”  …

Dilbert posts on the campaign and the Palin pick

Recently I was gigantic. Or so it seemed because I was attending a school open house and sitting in a tiny chair designed either for a small child or an elf with one buttock. Context is everything.

I was thinking about context as I observed with fascination McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. The immediate response from my lefty friends was that McCain was insane to pick a running mate with such a thin resume. That’s one possibility. The other explanation is more interesting.

My first response to McCain’s decision was to assume that Republicans did not suddenly forget how to win elections. If selecting Palin was a brilliant strategy in disguise, how exactly was it supposed to work?

Context.

McCain had a context problem. He was an old (too old) white guy from the failed establishment running against a younger and more exotic agent of change. It was a losing context. His choice of Palin changed the context.

Since selecting Palin, the discussion in the media and in kitchens across America has shifted from “Can you be too old to be President?” to “Can you be too young and inexperienced?” McCain has cleverly put his critics in the position of arguing that experience is a good thing. And McCain has more of it than Obama. If you believe that people only vote for presidents, not vice presidents, this was a clever move. …

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David Warren says our election season could be worse, we could be bored to death with Canadian elections.

The prospect of a Canadian general election leaves me, and I would guess most of my countrymen, bored. Now, boredom comes in slightly different flavours, and I will admit that the emotions associated with betrayal enter into mine. But it is like the vanilla in the ice cream; one is so used to it.

We have about five parties representing five slightly different grades of vanilla. The Tories perhaps anger me the most, because they promise chocolate chips, and don’t deliver. Well, maybe a couple of chocolate chips, but the irritation value of the false packaging more than compensates for them.

The chocolate chips in my analogy correspond to the “faith and freedom” values that are baldly presented in any Republican manifesto, and more timidly even in Democrat ones, in the republic to our south. …

John Fund with notes on Sarah’s Surge.

… In fact, since 1968, no Republican has done worse on Election Day than he was doing in major polls taken around Labor Day. On that basis, Mr. Obama should worry that Mr. McCain has now tied him or is leading in current polls.

Willie Brown too in his SF Chronicle blog.

The Democrats are in trouble. Sarah Palin has totally changed the dynamics of this campaign.

Period.

Palin’s speech to the GOP National Convention on Wednesday has set it up so that the Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And we don’t do well on defense.

Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don’t want to be seen as defending the status quo.

From taxes to oil drilling, Democrats are now going to have to start explaining their positions. …

Mark Steyn popped up for a few Corner posts.

A couple of Piper Palin videos.

One of the very good speeches last week that was overlooked in the Palin madness was the one by Rudy. Jay Nordlinger introduces us to it in a Corner post.

… 19.  My friend and colleague, the sagacious Rick Brookhiser, not long ago said this:  “Rudy is a liberal who hates liberals.  John McCain is a conservative who hates conservatives.”  There’s a lot of truth in that.  Only Rudy is not all that liberal.  And I wonder how conservative he would have been, or would be, in an office outside New York City (where he was plenty conservative — on crime, most prominently and crucially).

20.  This man gave one of the most engaging, rollicking, and fun — yes, fun — speeches I can remember hearing.  That’s if you’re a partisan Republican, of course.  And even if you’re not — you might have gotten some sort of kick out of it.

Way to go, Rudy G.  And, following Mike Bloomberg:  Can’t you run for mayor again?  You don’t want your gains reversed by some Dinkinsian Democrat, do you?

Here’s the written version of Rudy’s speech. The You Tube version follows in Pickings (WORD and PDF).

… Look at just one example in a lifetime of principled stands — John McCain’s support for the troop surge in Iraq. The Democratic Party had given up on Iraq. And I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that when they gave up on Iraq they were giving up on America. The Democratic leader in the Senate said so: “America has lost.”

Well, if America lost, who won? Al Qaida? Bin Laden? In the single biggest policy decision of this election, John McCain got it right and Barack Obama got it wrong.

If Barack Obama had been President, there would have been no troop surge and our troops would have been withdrawn in defeat.

Senator McCain was the candidate most associated with the surge. And it was unpopular.

What do you think most other candidates would have done in that situation? They would have acted in their own self-interest by changing their position.
How many times have we seen Barack Obama do that?

Obama was going to take public financing for his campaign, until he didn’t.

Obama was against wiretapping before he voted for it.

When speaking to a pro-Israel group, Obama favored an undivided Jerusalem. Until the very next day when he changed his mind.

I hope for his sake, Joe Biden got that VP thing in writing. …

Podhoretz, and Rubin posts from Contentions.

… The meme that Sarah Palin is some uncouth, unaccomplished and unqualified hick is crumbling under the weight of actual facts. The Washington Post editors have the blow-by-blow on her role in renegotiating a natural gas pipeline in Alaska. The editors observe that:

while her style has been minutely analyzed, very little commentary has focused on one of the few substantive claims she made about her brief tenure as governor of Alaska: that she “fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history . . . a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.” Is Ms. Palin right about the importance of the pipeline and her role in moving it forward? Ms. Palin is indeed correct about the need to tap the 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under Alaska’s North Slope, the same region whose oil made the state wealthy but which has begun to run dry.

And it is not just that she had the right idea — it is that she overrode a plan of the incumbent Republican governor, a plan championed by Senator Ted Stevens and Vice President Dick Cheney, and threw the project open to bidding. The Post editors conclude:

Meanwhile, BP and Conoco Phillips have announced plans to build a pipeline of their own without the state’s backing — a sign that the political and economic wrangling over this immense and risky project is far from over. But it is also a sign that Ms. Palin’s outflanking of the oil companies injected some competition and urgency into a process that was previously stalled. Perhaps her Democratic opponent for the governorship in 2006, who campaigned on similar ideas, would have achieved these results. Nevertheless, Ms. Palin actually did.

This raises several issues. First, is there a single item in Barack Obama’s record that compares to this? Nothing comes to mind. Little wonder that the Democrats want to stop talking abut Palin. It turns out she is an accomplished person with demonstrable skills and good judgment. …

And Abe Greenwald.

Barack Obama’s slip-up, in which he referred to “my Muslim faith,” is interesting for a few reasons. Obama’s critics residing in various anti-Muslim fever swamps are harping on it as evidence of Obama being a closet Muslim–he’s not and that’s not what’s interesting.

Obama’s slip of the tongue demonstrates three things. First, he’s getting rattled. While Obama is a bit gaffe-prone, his gaffes are usually political misinterpretation or naïve reactions to world events. (In truth, his gaffes are usually more serious than this, and perhaps not really gaffes at all, but genuine errors in judgment.) That the master of mellifluous oratory would get tripped up on a word shows that he’s off his game. …

WSJ Op-ed on possible auto bail-out.

It was only a matter of time, unfortunately. And now that Michigan is an election-year swing state and Detroit’s auto makers are posting sales declines topping 20% each month, the time has arrived. The issue of a government bailout for General Motors, Ford and Chrysler is moving to center stage.

Barack Obama has said yes to this proposal early on, and last week John McCain climbed on board. So much for change and fighting pork-barrel spending. We’re moving beyond moral hazard here, folks, and into a moral quagmire. At least the Chrysler bailout of 1980 was structured so that taxpayers could reap a reward for taking a financial risk on the company’s future. That’s not what’s happening now. …

Interesting piece from Bob Novak on his brain tumor.

The main reason I am writing this column is that many people have asked me how I first realized I was suffering from a brain tumor and what I have done about it.

But I also want to relate the reaction to my disease, mostly compassionate, that belies Washington’s reputation.

The first sign that I was in trouble came on Wednesday, July 23, when my 2004 black Corvette struck a pedestrian on 18th Street in downtown Washington while I was on my way to my office.

I did not realize I had hit anyone until a shirt-sleeved young man on a bicycle, whom I incorrectly thought to be a bicycle messenger, jumped in front of my car to block the way. In fact, he was David A. Bono, a partner in the high-end law firm Harkins Cunningham. The bicyclist was shouting at me that I could not just hit people and then drive away. That was the first I knew about the accident. Mr. Bono called the police, and a patrolman soon arrived.

After I said I had no idea I had hit anyone until they flagged me down and informed me, Mr. Bono told The Washington Post, “I would not believe that.” Fortunately, the investigating officer, P. Garcia, was a policeman who listened and apparently believed me. While Mr. Bono and other bystanders were taking on aspects of a mob, shouting “hit-and-run,” Officer Garcia issued a right-of-way infraction against me, costing me $50, instead of a hit-and-run violation that would have been a felony. …

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We are heavy with more of our favorites with their Sarah Palin thoughts.

She continues to have a stunning effect on the race. The swing states identified by Karl Rove (CO, VA, MI, and OH) and by The Economist (NV, NM, NC, CO, OH, MN, and MO) are some of the most susceptible to Sarah’s wiles.

If the polls continue to go south on Obama, he’ll have to consider the Torricelli option. (Bob Torricelli gave up his 2002 Senate re-election bid five weeks before the vote, and was replaced by Frank Lautenberg.) Obama needs for Biden to have a health event, and then Hillary can be put on the ticket.

In the meantime, Biden mentioned on Meet the Press he is going to Montana tomorrow. That’ll work. Bush won the state’s 3 electoral votes 59 to 38.

Gerard Baker’s Sarah Palin take.

The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.

“What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”

“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let’s be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.

“The other kills her own food.”

Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile, as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson. …

David Warren says vote for the peace candidates; McCain and Palin.

… The election will necessarily be close, since the American people themselves are about equally divided between “conservative” and “liberal” assumptions about reality, and the swing vote between them is not very large. But in the campaign viewers’ oddly criss-crossed comparison — Obama versus Palin, and Biden versus McCain — the Republicans now have two winners.

The consequence, not merely to the U.S. but to the planet, of a McCain as opposed to an Obama presidency, is almost impossible to overestimate.

As I’ve argued before, the enemies of America and the West will tend to be cautious with John McCain, incautious with Barack Obama. (And with Palin behind him, they’ll be toasting McCain’s health.) It follows that a vote for McCain favours peace and stability, a vote for Obama, instability and worse.

Barbara Amiel, wife of Conrad Black, renews her political columnist vows for a WSJ piece on Sarah Palin, and Margaret Thatcher at age 49.

The glummest face Wednesday night might have been, if only we could have seen it, that of Hillary Clinton.

Imagine watching Sarah Palin, the gun-toting, lifelong member of the NRA, the PTA mom with teased hair and hips half the size of Hillary’s, who went … omigod … to the University of Idaho and studied journalism. Mrs. Palin with her five kids and one of them still virtually suckling age, going wham through that cement ceiling put there exclusively for good-looking right-wing/populist conservative females by not-so-good-looking left-wing ones (Gloria Steinem excepting). There, pending some terrible goof or revelation, stood the woman most likely to get into the Oval Office as its official occupant rather than as an intern. …

… American feminists have always had a tough sell to make. To the rest of the world, no females on earth have ever had it as easy as middle-class American women. Cosseted, surrounded by labor-saving devices, easily available contraception and supermarkets groaning with food, their complaints have always seemed to have no relationship to reality.

Education was there for the taking. Marriages were not arranged. Going against social mores had no serious consequences. Postwar American women (excluding those mired in poverty or the odious restrictions of race) have always had the choice of what they wanted to be. They simply didn’t decide to exercise it until it became more fashionable to get out of the home than to run it.

Sarah Palin has put the flim-flam nature of America feminism sharply into focus, revealing the not-so-secret hypocrisy of its code and, whatever her future, this alone is an accomplishment. As she emerged into the nation’s consciousness, a shudder went through the feminist left—a political movement not restricted to females. She is a mother refusing to stay at home (good) who had made a success out in the workplace (excellent) whose marriage nevertheless is a rip-roaring success and whose views are unspeakable—those of a red-blooded, right-wing principled pragmatist. …

Bill Kristol thanks the people responsible for the GOP success last week.

… Third: A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing–but well-received–presentation the following evening.

The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

By the end of the week, after Palin’s tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren’t being narrow-minded enough. …

Sally Quinn provides a graceful exit for her harsh words about Sarah. Jennifer Rubin has the details in Contentions.

… But now Quinn has seen Palin with her own eyes and is singing a different tune. On Fox today with Bill O’Reilly, Quinn had this to say:

I thought that she was amazing. in her speech. She was funny and smart and poised and confident. She gave a great speech, beautifully delivered. I think she is going to be a formidable opponent. all of that I think is — I was wrong about her. and I didn’t know anything about her. I probably didn’t know any more than John McCain did a few days before he picked her.

(Well, perhaps McCain knew plenty and chose her on this basis, but that’s a quibble.) O’Reilly went on to ask her if  ”your column and other columns like yours rallied the folks to her side and actually helped the McCain-Palin ticket dramatically.” Quinn answered “I  think you’re absolutely right.” …

Jennifer also links to a WSJ Kimberly Strassel piece on Palin’s successes in Alaska.

The notion that Sarah Palin is unaccomplished and untested is frankly a media invention. For those who bother to examine her actual record, the facts tell a different story. Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal rightly notes that from media coverage ” you’ve heard plenty about her religious views and private family matters,” but precious little about what she has done in office. Strassel tries to correct this  by describing in blow-by-blow fashion Palin’s record in bringing down a corrupt machine and taking on the oil companies. …

Volokh reports on the Israeli flag in Sarah Palin’s office.

The Economist bellwether series continues. This time with Minnesota.

ON A hot summer day at Shady Oak Lake, teenagers line up for the high-diving board. Parents with small children wade in the shallows near the sandy beach. This suburban idyll, surrounded by leafy trees and big houses, lies near Edina, a town just west of Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. Despite appearances, it is a political ground zero in a state the Republicans are fighting to snatch from the Democrats.

Minnesota is famous as a liberal bastion. It is the only state not to have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, and has its own (traditionally leftier) brand of Democrats in the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party. …

… But look a little closer, and Minnesota seems a more attractive target. Presidential votes in the state have been very close lately, decided by fewer than four points. Barack Obama leads by only low single digits in most recent polls. Minnesota has a Republican senator, Norm Coleman, who beat Mr Mondale in 2002. Many predicted that the state’s Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, would be Mr McCain’s running-mate. The state also tends to move along with fellow “Frost Belt” states such as Iowa and Wisconsin, with which it shares media markets. Combined, that block has as many electoral votes as Florida, a perennial battleground.  …

Instapundit spots an important story about Chicago and its failed administration.

I think we should just pull out of Chicago: …

Here’s the story from CBS News in Chicago.

CHICAGO (CBS) ? An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That’s nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.

In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.

According to the Defense Department, 65 soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq. About the same number were killed in Afghanistan over that same period.

In the same time period, an estimated 245 people were shot and wounded in the city. …

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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. …