The Debate

I listened to the debate. Since I’m something of a computer nerd, I checked Andrew Sullivan’s Live Blog of the event and also live blogging going on over at NRO’s The Corner. It was interesting to watch the two different reactions. Andrew was clearly biased toward Obama but trying to be fair to McCain. At The Corner? Not so much. Biased toward McCain and . . . biased toward McCain.

Unsurprisingly Sullivan thought Obama won and The Corner denizens thought it was McCain hands down.

Generally pundits think it was a wash and neither won. However, polls at CNN and CBS showed Obama as a decisive winner. Newsweek showed them dead even.

As much as I’d love to say Obama stomped McCain, I sort of agreed with the pundits. It was a wash. Obama was vastly better than I’ve seen him before in a debate but McCain was fully awake and not as creepy as usual. Several people have pointed out that McCain refused to look at Obama. Some people thought it was because of McCain’s contempt for Obama, others thought it was because he was afraid of Obama. For all I know there were tv lights behind Obama that were uncomfortable to look in to.

I’ll be very interested in seeing how it all washes out.

And I’m going to be front and center for the Palin/Biden debate next Friday!

Free Sara Palin! Free Sara Palin! Free Sara Palin!

Free Lipstick Palin!!

“Tonight I call on the McCain campaign to stop treating Sarah Palin like she is a delicate flower that will wilt at any moment,” said Brown. “This woman is from Alaska for crying out loud. She is strong. She is tough. She is confident. And you claim she is ready to be one heart beat away form the presidency. If that is the case, then end this chauvinistic treatment of her now. Allow her to show her stuff. Allow her to face down those pesky reporters… Let her have a real news conference with real questions. By treating Sarah Palin different from the other candidates in this race, you are not showing her the respect she deserves. Free Sarah Palin. Free her from the chauvinistic chain you are binding her with. Sexism in this campaign must come to an end. Sarah Palin has just as much a right to be a real candidate in this race as the men do. So let her act like one.”

Palin Derangement Syndrome

I’ve been trying to get a leash on my Palin derangement syndrome. I do pretty well until some conservative pundit describes her as “authentic.”

When I hear the word “authentic” I think about her little story about how the teleprompter went out during the Republican convention and she had to just ad lib parts of her speech. This was with a bunch of people behind her who could see the teleprompter. In other words, it was a trivial lie, easily exposed.

The same with the bridge–and road–to nowhere. The same with her fictional rejection of earmarks. The same with the little lie about how she “didn’t blink” when asked to be VP. In another version of the story she asked her daughters to vote on it. In her husband’s version they didn’t tell the daughters.

Again, trivial lies.

She is a compulsive liar and the most inauthentic person who ever stood in the position to possibly become president of the United States of America.

In the words of Andrew Sullivan: She’s a farce.

Obama Deals With Protesters

I love the way he deals with protesters:

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=178233

I’ve seen him deal with them before a couple of times. He’s courteous and respectful! It must really gripe their butts that he doesn’t have any reaction beyond “There’s a few young folks hold up their signs.” When they leave (I can’t tell from the video if they are being escorted out by security or just giving up.) He says “See ya later fellas!”

Funny But True

This is funny:

but it’s also true.

Look, Obama isn’t Jesus.

If you go to factcheck.org you’ll see that he can twist, stretch and embroider the truth with the best of them. Let’s get real, he’s a politician. And there’s only so much the president can do anyway.

What I’m hoping to get from Obama is what I hoped to get from Clinton. I’m hoping for a change in the zeitgeist. I didn’t realize at the time that the Clintons are a part of the zeitgeist. Bill, Hillary, McCain, Rove, Bush, Cheney–all of them are talking to fellow Baby Boomers. Obama is talking to the generation that will replace the Baby Boomers.

Obama is–or can be–a turning point. Something that we have been needing for a very long time.

If he is elected, he will be a turning point in history. And that makes me feel like that song.

This is Why Obama

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we’ve been told that we’re not ready, or that we shouldn’t try, or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.
Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.
Yes we can heal this nation.
Yes we can repair this world.
Yes we can.

Barak Obama, January 2008

It is my belief that we are engaged in a battle for the soul of America. We have a choice between someone who will lift us up and someone who puts us down with the cynical belief that we are too stupid to see through his lies.

We have a choice between facing into the 21st century or being dragged back into the comfortable and familiar Vietnam Era-Cold War-Culture War. Even horribly abused children will cry and grieve when removed from their brutal parents.

We have had an abusive government for eight years, but it’s familiar and Obama is not. Obama is the unknown. He’s a leap of faith. To me it’s a no-brainer. It’s leaping out of a burning building. To others? Yes, the building is burning but it’s familiar. It’s home.

Let’s make history. Let’s leave the old century behind and face into the future. It’s what Americans have always done. It’s what we need to do now.

Comparing the Candidates

This isn’t original with me. I don’t think it’s even original with Blah3.com, but I liked it and I thought I’d reproduce some of it here:

Black teen pregnancies? A ‘crisis’ in black America.
White teen pregnancies? A ‘blessed event.’

If you spend 3 years as a community organizer growing your organization from a staff of 1 to 13 and your budget from $70,000 to $400,000, then become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review,create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new African American voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor,then spend nearly 8 more years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, becoming chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, then spend nearly 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of nearly 13 million people, sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you are woefully inexperienced.
If you spend 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, then spend 20 months as the governor of a state with 650,000 people, you’ve got the most executive experience of anyone on either ticket, are the Commander in Chief of the Alaska military and are well qualified to lead the nation should you be called upon to do so because your state is the closest state to Russia.

If you are a Democratic male candidate who is popular with millions of people you are an ‘arrogant celebrity’.
If you are a popular Republican female candidate you are ‘energizing the base’.

If you are a candidate with a Harvard law degree you are ‘an elitist ‘out of touch’ with the real America.
If you are a legacy (dad and granddad were admirals) graduate of Annapolis, with multiple disciplinary infractions you are a hero.

If you manage a multi-million dollar nationwide campaign, you are an ’empty suit’.
If you are a part time mayor of a town of 7000 people, you are an ‘experienced executive’.

If you go to a south side Chicago church, your beliefs are ‘extremist’.
If you believe in creationism and don’t believe global warming is man made, you are ‘strongly principled’.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.
If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years with whom you are raising two beautiful daughters you’re ‘risky’.

If you’re a 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton, the right-wing press calls you ‘First dog.’
If you’re a 17-year old pregnant unwed daughter of a Republican, the right-wing press calls you ‘beautiful’ and ‘courageous.’

If you teach abstinence only in sex education, you get teen parents.
If you teach responsible age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

In other news

A friend forwarded this NYT article to me. Some parts of it sound suspiciously familiar:

n 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.

Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.

“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled. “But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.

Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr. Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus, then the State Republican Party’s general counsel.

“Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Mr. Deuser said.

…

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

…

While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”

So she is secretive, dictatorial and likes to surround herself with cronies regardless of their abilities. It has SUCH a familiar ring! KOFF*(Bush!)*KOFF

The media is doing a fairly good job exposing the lies she and John McCain are telling over and over. I’m hoping that people really are as sick of Bush as they say they are, because if they love being screwed McCain and Palin will be delighted to continue ruling in the grand Bush style.

The Lies of John McCain

Palin=Lipstick, McCain=Pig

I stopped having any respect for McCain when he started answering every question with “I was a POW.” Apparently Sullivan was a tougher nut to crack.

From the Dish:
McCain’s Integrity

For me, this surreal moment – like the entire surrealism of the past ten days – is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It’s about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?

So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him….

Some of Andrew Sullivan Returns

He’s returned. Kind of.

No explanation about what was going on. I have a feeling we will never know (or it will eventually turn up on the grape vine.)

I will be very curious to see how much longer he stays at the Atlantic.