TED spread at 3.5

Chart of the TED spread here. If you click on the 5y view, you can see how before September '07 it was consistently below 1%, but since then has been a lot higher and more volatile--and is now flirting with 4% (to put that in some perspective, I've heard 3% described as "credit hell").

Mildly embarrassed

I should mention that two recent posts--in which I made the foolish error of predicting the future--turned out less-than-prescient. McCain did not end up postponing the debate in order to push the VP debate back, and Thursday's dramatic collapse of bailout negotiations did not cause Great Depression II.

EDIT: Looks like Depression II's on! Woooooooo! Oh wait! I own stock! Awwwwww, fuck! Fuck.

McCain's HO scale solutions

McCain's big emphasis on energy policy has been opening up more coastlines for domestic offshore drilling; his big emphasis on taxes/fiscal policy is to eliminate earmark spending. Here is, respectively, the amount of extra oil that will be produced from drilling, and the proportion of federal spending that is allocated as earmarks:


The bottom line is that domestic drilling will not affect oil prices, and that reducing earmarks--even if you could eliminate all of them without reinserting them somewhere else into the budget--will have no significant impact on spending.

These components of McCain's solutions aren't serious, because they cannot plausibly help to solve anything. Personally, on energy policy I'd like to see a tax on carbon and massive investment in alternative energy and public transit, and on fiscal policy I'd like to see--gasp!--higher taxes. Obama's proposals are signifcantly to the center of those--but at least they deal seriously with the problems we face in reality, and have more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting through Congress.

A McCain presidency will mean a lot of good--or at least, semi-decent--Democratic legislation getting vetoed or amended beyond recognition. If we want to make serious progress in the next four years on energy and fiscal responsibility, we will need Democrats in control of the Congress and the White House.

(Oil chart via Ezra Klein; earmarks chart via Sullivan.)

Beyond Wooster

Over the years, George W. Bush has been maligned as an idiot for his malapropisms, which I always thought was not quite right: Bush isn't an idiot, he's a nitwit. I think the difference is, whereas idiocy implies a definitive lack of intelligence, nitwitism implies a perfectly fine intelligence that, due to a certain kind of breezy temperament, is directed with 100% force towards utter inanity. The nitwit isn't unintelligent so much as incurious; not bloody-minded so much as cheerfully uninterested in reason. And so it is not uncommon for a nitwit to have a certain imaginitive capacity with language, but for it to reveal itself in ways that no serious person can countenance--for example, the ingenious stupidity of a line like, "they misunderestimated me".

The nitwit par excellence is, of course, PG Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, and many observers have noted the similarities between the chummy, Edwardian, blue-blooded bachelor and the 43rd US president (both would do nearly anything to help out an old pal--although whereas for the former this meant ruffling the feathers of an aunt or two, for the latter it meant the destruction of New Orleans). So George W. Bush's distinct style of buffoonery has a bonafide literary pedigree, and is one that can be appreciated, I think, as a subtle form of genius. After all, Wooster is a nitwit, no doubt--but he is a nitwit who has in him the capacity to utter such inspired prose as, "In these disturbed days in which we live, it has probably occurred to all thinking men that something drastic ought to be done about aunts."

In the last few weeks, we have had to come to terms with a new and more advanced type of linguistic trainwreck, in the shape of Sarah Palin. Palin doesn't seem to be a species of nitwit--indeed, her responses to questions are so excessively incoherent that the entire exchange barely qualifies as an act of human communication. The things that Palin verbally responds to--which we would normally think of as questions--are probably better understood more generically as stimuli. For example:

Reporter's verbal stimulus: “Do you think that our continued military presences in Iraq and Afghanistan have inflamed Islamic extremists?”

Palin's response: “I think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation, again, because the mission is to take the fight over there. Do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here, and that was some destruction. Terrible destruction on that day. But since Sept. 11, Americans uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.”

In another case, her response seems to press the Wittgensteinian limits of language's very ability to express any meaning at all:

Katie Couric's verbal stimulus: "Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?"

Palin's response: "That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation."

Unlike the Bush/Wooster engagement with language--with its Bach-like contortions of content and form, its feats of pure imagination, ingenuity, and Dionysian playfulness--the Palin escape from language hints at something that's darker, more subversive, and undeniably absurdist. She seeks not to expand language, but to diminish it as far as possible, to render it alien and meaningless and somehow outside the boundaries of authentic human interaction. She wants to make the audience aware of the limits of language itself, and she wants the awareness to be visceral. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen is her political credo, but she makes us know it not by remaining silent about that which she cannot speak, but by speaking about that which she cannot speak. Random noise, after all, contains just as much information as no signal, but it is tactically advantageous for the signaler: it costs nothing to produce, but time and resources must be expended on the receiving end to verify the absence of information. In the strategic space thus afforded, she airs her true "argument"--which is not an argument at all, but something that eludes language and even reason: the fact of Sarah Palin. There can be no reasons or words about the fact of Sarah Palin, of her Downs baby, of her moose hunting, of her good looks, of her accent--the concept of transition from actual to ideal is transcended by the simple fact of her being, and this juxtaposed with the fact of her campaign suggests--not through any function of reason, but by a sort of directed free association--the fact of Sarah Palin in power. The linearity of reason is dispensed with in favor of the more primal, more visceral one-dimensional point that just is Sarah Palin, reformer--that just is John McCain, maverick. There is no space left for anything that would have meaning; motion is a conceptual impossibility. Words, devoid of meaning, are consequently devoid of force, and their actions cease to cause equal and opposite reactions: words and rationales fly at Palin like bullets but she does not budge, and when she speaks there is no recoil. There can be no laws that govern data because there is but one datum: the fact of the datum. What particular shape that datum takes in any given circumstance is simply the one that most reaffirms itself. Yes. 1. Big. Go. Up. Bright. Fast. We hold on to it for dear life, and steadfastly refuse to accept that it can fail us. This steadfast refusal we call "American exceptionalism", and we have now invested it with so much significance that it keeps us from what ought to be our chief distraction: surviving.

...

It appears that I have gone mad.

Circumstantial evidence

Tell me if the following twos ought to be put together:

• McCain--behind in the polls, paired with a floundering running mate, and desperate to sieze control of the campaign narrative--makes the grandiose gesture of suspending his campaign and postponing the debates--including the VP debate--until a bailout deal is worked out.
• McCain goes to Washington and--in conjunction with House Republicans--scuttles the bailout deal, thus regaining the initiative by appearing to be driving negotiations and pushing back the VP debate to give Palin (even more) time to prepare.
  

Admittedly, it's a leap. It could be that McCain didn't want to scuttle the bailout plan (although, curiously, he never lent it his explicit support), and McCain may yet show up to the debate even with no bailout plan in place. However, I am a big believer in the idea that cognitive dissonance and good old-fashioned self-delusion can exert a powerful--albeit unconscious--influence on a person's decision making. My little conspiracy theory does not require McCain to have evil intentions--it merely requires that he (perhaps with the help of his campaign advisors) has persuaded himself that these actions really are what's best for the country, and that it just so happens that they benefit him strategically in the campaign.

In the end, though, there's no way to know, so this line of inquiry is a non-starter.

Uh oh

Today when I left work, everything looked on track for the bailout. All sides had agreed on the principle points: $700 billion, government buys equity in the firms, oversight of the federal purchase of assets, relief for Main Street, limits on executive compensation. The consensus was that a bill would be signed by the weekend.

But after a thoroughly enjoyable evening dining with Marian and the great Harinder Chahal, I come back home to find this NYT headline staring me in the face:

Talks Implode During Day of Chaos; Fate of Bailout Plan Remains Unresolved

When the economy is on the verge of utter, Depression-level collapse, the last thing you want is some salient public event to panic everyone into thinking that everyone else is panicked, thus causing everyone to pull their money out of the system. It's a collective action problem. So words like "chaos" and "-plode" in the morning headlines do not bode particularly well.

Moreover, it is not a good sign that the level-headed authorities that are supposedly piloting us through these troubled waters are doing things like entreating House Speakers on bended knee and pleading with them not to blow things up:

In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”

Before tonight, I thought there was an air of cautious optimism that some kind of package--however suboptimal--would be agreed upon that would stave off financial collapse. But it seems like that has been replaced with something far more ugly, visceral, and frightening: panic. It's palpable. It's in the language people are using. "Madness", says Krugman. "This sucker could go down", says Bush. Bailout plans are in "disarray", says WSJ. And Drudge? "BREAKDOWN" (although, it should be noted that there are no siren animated GIFs--close shave there). And on top of all this, Washington Mutual failed and was bought out by JPMorgan.

Of course, all this is just one layman's gloss of the whole thing. Hopefully I'm mildly embarrassed tomorrow and nothing extraordinary happens. But I have the sinking feeling that tomorrow will soon have the word "Black" attached to the front of it.

PS: Apparently, the key figure to keep an eye on is not the stock market but the so-called "TED spread". This measures the difference between the interest on 3-month Treasury bills (T-bills) and the 3-month LIBOR. Let's see if I understand this well enough to explain it coherently:

A T-bill is a security that the federal government issues as a way of borrowing money from the general public: you pay, say, $1000 for the T-bill, and the government agrees to pay you back $1100 in three months. T-bills are considered one of the safest possible investments, because they are backed by the federal government--the government, of course, being the only player in town capable of raising funds by coercive force (taxes) or, if it comes down to it, by simply printing more money. Interestingly, the interest rate of the T-bills is determined by a regularly held auction, so that it is constantly fluctuating depending on how much demand there is for people to lend money to the government (or, put another way, how much demand there is for T-bills). If there are lots of people who want to lend to the government, then the government can command a lower interest rate for itself, because lenders will be undercutting each other at the auction with lower and lower interest rate offers. If there aren't a lot of people who want to lend to the government, it will be forced to borrow at a higher interest rate. If investors don't have confidence in private institutions, then they tend to flock to the safety of federally-backed T-bills, driving down the T-bill interest rate.

Meanwhile, in just the same way that the government borrows money from the general public (including big banks), big banks borrow from other big banks. The LIBOR is the average interest rate at which this interbank borrowing takes place.

The upshot of all this is that, when times are good and investors are very confident in the private banking system, then banks will consider loaning to other banks to be as safe a bet as loaning to the federal government--and so the interest rates will be about the same for lending to each, and the difference between the rates (the TED spread) will be small. However, if there is little confidence that banks can repay their loans, then no one will want to risk lending them money unless they get a juicy interest rate in return (e.g., I'm not gonna take the risk of lending First Shitty Bank International a billion dollars unless there's a significant upside in it for me--like, say, that First Shitty will borrow from me at high interest rate). And so the average rate at which banks lend to each other--the LIBOR--will be higher.

To put it all together: if there's high confidence that private banks can repay their loans, then these banks can demand interest rates as low as what the government demands. However, when confidence in the banks' ability to repay is at an ebb, borrowing banks cannot command a good interest rate from lending banks, and so the average interest rate of interbank loans (LIBOR) rises. Moreover, since investors are flocking to the federal government (since it's too risky to lend to private banks), the interest rate of T-bills goes down. The rising LIBOR and falling T-bill rate means a higher TED spread.

The TED spread, then, reflects the amount of credit that is available: a high TED spread means there is not that much credit around (i.e., not much money available that can be borrowed), and a low TED spread means that credit is plentiful (i.e., it is easy to get an affordable loan).

The big danger is that credit will "freeze up"--become unavailable--and that all of the parts of the economy that rely on there being credit--people being able to buy houses and cars, businesses being able to stock inventory and keep operations going during a revenue slump, financial institutions being able to pay investors who unexpectedly want their money back--will simply stop. And this will cause a negative feedback loop of investors pulling their money out of the system (i.e., liquidating their assets--i.e., selling their assets--i.e., turning their assets into cash), leading to a flooding of the market with assets, which will cause the value of the assets to plummet (too much supply, not enough demand), which will cause the financial institutions--whose net worth is tied up in the assets--to have even more losses, which will make confidence in these institutions' ability to repay their loans sink even lower, which will make interest rates even higher (and thus, credit even scarcer), and so on, until we wake up and Depression II is upon us, and a huge chunk of the economy has gone out of business, and unemployment is at 25%.

Phew! So, I'm not sure if all that is correct. It is my best understanding of the whole situation, and I am, I hasten to remind you, a layperson when it comes to this stuff. But I think the basics are there, and in any case, I recommend keeping a tab on Paul Krugman's blog tomorrow, as he will no doubt have some kind of analysis of that all-important TED spread figure.

Oh, and by the way: here is what the TED spread actually looks like. We're already way up in the 3% "credit hell" zone--let's see what tomorrow brings.

California love

Fallows gives it up:

But when it comes to a locale that is actively beautiful and human-scaled and full of creature comforts and with mild climate, and where first-rate work of importance to the world is also underway, Berkeley is hard to beat.

Plus: Cheeseboard!

McCain opens another front on the war on...everybody in the media

So McCain cancels on Letterman at the last second explaining that the economy is "about to crater" and that he is needed in Washington--and then turns around and does an interview with Katie Couric instead. Hoo boy:



Add Letterman to the McCain enemies list, I guess.

Let her remove all doubt

From a TPM reader post, some entertaining video and a knock-down Lincoln quote:

The best part is watching Campbell try to keep a straight face. The media knows darn well why the McCain campaign is keeping Palin away from reporters - and it is not because she is a "delicate flower".

I guess they are taking a cue from a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
" 'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."

I wonder how long this sequestering of Palin can last. A month? Six weeks? Till election day?

I stand corrected

Just a few hours ago I said that Andrew Sullivan's criticism of the McCain campaign's request to postpone the debate was bunk. Looks like I was wrong; it appears that the whole thing is a ploy to give Sarah Palin more time to cram for the VP debate:

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there's no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

In this scenario, the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined....

The jaw slackens in disbelief.

Manipulating political futures markets is friggin' awesome

Just read this 538 post. It's pretty cool.

(BTW Lindsay, I read this before you linked to it in comments, so nah.)

Now it's personal

All out war has broken out between Andrew Sullivan and the McCain campaign.

Sullivan had been airing questions about whether Trig--the Downs Syndrome baby--is really Sarah Palin's biological son, and even a few weeks ago melodramatically let his blog go dark for a couple of days so that he would be free to do research and "figure it out". Eventually he sent a private correspondence asking the McCain campaign to give a response to his request for proof that Palin really is the mother. The McCain campaign did not respond to Sullivan, but they did divulge the private emails to Howard Kurtz at the Post as part of an effort to marginalize Sullivan and dismiss him as "the biggest one-man ego on the planet".

I hope that the McCain campaign's strategy doesn't work, and that Sullivan keeps his cool and stays hewed to the facts. Already, though, I'm nervous that the personal betrayal--of divulging private communications to the world in order to make him look like an arrogant gossip--has affected his capacity to rationally criticize McCain. For example, he has a post called "The McCain Meltdown" where he points to McCain's request to postpone the Friday debate as evidence that the campaign is in some way melting down. But it seems pretty clear to me either that McCain is telling the truth and needs to focus on the financial crisis instead of cramming for the debates, or that he wants to push the debate to a night that will have a larger TV audience (since the debate will be on foreign policy, one of McCain's alleged strengths). It's a pretty weak attack from Sullivan--an attack for attack's sake that will only cost him credibility on the right (although perhaps the ship has sailed).

In any case, this Washington soap opera stuff is extremely entertaining.

Disconcerting

Yesterday, someone observed that, before WWII came along, WWI was called "the Great War"--and wondered whether the Great Depression would soon be in for a similar renaming.

It is beyond numbers now

Seen on Intrade:

"Uppity"

Following up on a previous post, there was a good explanation of the racial connotations of "uppity" in the Times yesterday:

The term “uppity” was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nicer homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites. Race-based wealth envy was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes of violence like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood.

Thanks, Marian, for pointing this out to me.

Ladies Love Cool Oprah

Apparently, Oprah's a big hit in Saudi Arabia:

“I feel that Oprah truly understands me,” said Nayla, who, like many of the women interviewed, would not let her full name be used. “She gives me energy and hope for my life. Sometimes I think that she is the only person in the world who knows how I feel.”

Nayla is not the only Saudi woman to feel a special connection to the American media mogul. When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population.

So it seems that the Obama-Oprah axis now has at least some geopolitical significance, no?

Maureen Dowd ft. Aaron Sorkin

Patrick points us to an authentic, Sorkin-authored dialog between Obama and Bartlet. Hard not to imagine them walking brusquely through a series of hallways while uttering lines like these:

BARTLET I meant the Republicans. The Us versus Them-a-thon. As a Democrat I was surprised to learn that I don’t like small towns, God, people with jobs or America. I’ve been a little out of touch but is there a mandate that the vice president be skilled at field dressing a moose —

OBAMA Look —

BARTLET — and selling Air Force Two on eBay?

Ah, West Wing crack.

Estimating your tax burden

Via Ezra Klein, a tool that estimates the change in your tax burden under Obama's plan as well as McCain's plan. Of course, all this is based on what each candidate is proposing; what will actually come out of Congress is likely to be a lot different (especially in light of the $700,000,000,000 bailout package that is in the works).

Spanio-McCainian relations worsening

From Ambinder:

This is an actual AP lede: "John McCain either doesn't want to meet Spain's prime minister any time soon or isn't quite sure who he is."

He explains the whole thing here, but really I just liked the disjunctive lede.

Drawing a distinction between blameworthiness and foolishness

Reading various 9/11 retrospectives reminds me of a curious thing that happened after the attacks: some people, typically leftists of some stripe, would say that the attacks were "our fault", and then a whole bunch of people would angrily respond, no, it was the terrorists fault. But I think this sort of exchange shows that a distinction was not being made between blameworthiness and foolishness.

If a man gets mugged in a dangerous neighborhood in the middle of the night, we sometimes say that it was "his own fault" because he should have known that there was a good chance of getting mugged. But this is not to imply that the man is morally blameworthy for the crime--of course, it is the mugger who is blameworthy in this sense. What we are more accurately faulting the man with is having poor judgment--of being foolish enough to venture out into a dangerous neighborhood in the middle of the night.

And so I think when people say, "9/11 was our fault" or "we brought it on ourselves", what they really mean is that our foreign policy was foolish because it put America in a dangerous position. I'm pretty sure they would agree that the moral blame for the attacks rests with the people who actually carried them out.

Push polls in Florida

From Phil, evidence of push polling in Florida. He also points out the irony of McCain benefiting from the same nefarious tactics that were used against him the Republican primary in 2000.

To be clear, though, nobody knows who is behind the Florida operation--in all likelihood it is the work of some organization that is independent of the McCain campaign. And it is certainly the case that Democrats have benefited from the same kinds of underhanded campaign tactics in the past.

However, I think it goes beyond normal campaign sleaze to make a blatant appeal to the electorate's racist or prejudiced inclinations--and certainly, implying that Barack Obama is a Muslim--or that he seeks the support of Hamas--fits into this category.

Wending our way through life, we occasionally find ourselves at the dump

McCain's deteriorating reputation

Richard Cohen, who describes himself as "in the tank" for McCain, has turned:

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

I think we're going to see more and more of these kinds of revelations from intellectually honest McCain supporters. I wonder how many it will take to get him to stop this stupid, artless lying.

Best tax chart yet

Via Sullivan, this awesome chart from Chartjunk that takes into account the number of people in each bracket:


The thing that surprises me the most is how much greater in magnitude the tax cuts are for the bottom 60% in Obama's plan. In the McCain plan, they are hardly tax cuts at all.

Sometimes a chart can say it all

View the full LEH chart at Wikinvest

Therapeutic macro time

Via Coates.

The mind boggles

I just now watched the "full interview" of Sarah Palin after having only seen a few clips here and there. Unfortunately the whole thing is very heavily edited, leaving us to wonder what was left out (and, really, why can't they just post the thing in its entirety somewhere on their website?).

Anyway--wow. The word "farce" comes to mind. She simply could not answer the questions. He'd ask a very specific question--what three changes will you make to the Bush economic policy? should the U.S. cross into Pakistan to attack Al Qaeda?--and she would repeat the same scripted phrases over and over, phrases that did nothing to address the question. And in the cases when she finally relented and did answer the question, she rarely made much sense. For example, one of the three "changes" she would make to the Bush economic policy is "cut taxes". Are you serious?

What a train wreck of an interview. So unprepared. So unqualified. So ignorant. Could you imagine her in a debate with Hillary Clinton?

Words are useless. Just watch it for yourself. I'll save you the YouTube search:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
  

Krauthammer's impressive rearguard action

In an interview with Charlie Gibson--her first with a serious journalist since being named to the Republican ticket--Sarah Palin revealed, in painful-to-watch manner, that she did not know what the Bush Doctrine is:



It is difficult to imagine what possible face-saving argument there could be that would explain away her initial failure to answer Gibson's question. However, Charles Krauthammer (who first coined the term "Bush Doctrine") makes an admirable attempt:

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?"

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, "In what respect, Charlie?"

So Krauthammer maintains that she couldn't have answered the question, because it was ambiguous. However, this doesn't hold up, because Gibson disambiguated the question:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine? PALIN: In what respect, Charlie? GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be? PALIN: His world view. GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

So Gibson made it clear which "version" of the Bush Doctrine he was talking about. So it could not have been the case that Sarah Palin was knowledgeable about all the various incarnations of the so-called doctrine, and that she merely required some disambiguation from Gibson in order to answer the question.

However, maybe Krauthammer is not trying to argue that she knew about the Bush Doctrine but could not answer the question because it was vague; maybe, instead, he is arguing that it is no big deal that Palin doesn't know what it is because it's an amorphous, unuseful bit of foreign policy jargon. In other words: perhaps she does know her stuff, just not some of the jargon that comes with the territory. However, what argues against this is the fact that Palin actually proceeded to answer Gibson's question, and yet failed to talk about preemption, spreading democracy, unilateralism, or any other key concepts from any of the various versions of the Bush Doctrine that Krauthammer lists:

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

The "beauty of American elections"? If Sarah Palin had any kind of command of the basics of foreign policy, either she would have had the confidence to ask Gibson what he meant by the term or she would have given an answer that in some way touched upon one of the various concepts that the term could be used to refer to. Instead, Palin treated us to a cringe-inducing tapdance of an answer that began as a generic explanation of "what President Bush has attempted" and morphed, somehow, into a pladitude about civics. Anyone watching could clearly see: she just didn't know what she was talking about.

Even after Gibson finally threw her a bone, her response contradicted McCain's position on the issue:

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

The position Palin spells out--that a preemptive strike is justified if an attack on the country is imminent--has been the policy of the United States for decades. The Bush Doctrine--which is supported by McCain--is that preemptive war is justified, even absent the imminence of any attack. So for example if we think that country X might attack us five years from now, then according to the Bush Doctrine we are justified in going to war with that country today. It is a radical and dangerous departure from American tradition and, indeed, the norms of Western civilization--and all of it, apparently, is news to Sarah Palin.

Though I think Krauthammer ultimately fails to defend Palin's performance, it looks as though he has succeeded in giving her some much-needed cover in the media. Already there is an article in the Post with the headline "Many Versions of 'Bush Doctrine'" with the life-saving subhed "Palin's Confusion in Interview Understandable, Experts Say". Well. I imagine that Post staff writer Michael Abramowitz shouldn't be too surprised to find a mysterious fruitbasket waiting for him tomorrow from somebody called "S.P."

Also, as Matt Yglesias notes, many journalists seem to be going out of their way to observe that many non-vice-presidential candidates--such as ordinary Americans or they themselves--wouldn't know what "the Bush Doctrine" referred to, and so it is therefore understandable that Sarah Palin--a vice-presidential candidate--doesn't know either. It's all very odd.

In any case, I imagine the net effect will be significant damage to Palin's credibility as a potential head-of-state. YouTube, after all, is a slightly more powerful and visceral medium than Charles Krauthammer op-ed columns.

The press: still not capable of calling a lie a lie

The headline in the NYT is "McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as Distortions"; it should be, "McCain Distortions Stirring Outcry". But at least the McCain-has-a-truth-problem narrative is beginning to take shape.

Things Obama should stop saying

What we've seen in the last week or so is a barrage of substantive falsehoods from the McCain campaign and John McCain himself. However, any attempt by Obama to call out John McCain for his dishonesty will be undermined if Obama commits the same sins of misrepresentation and out-and-out lying.

Fortunately, I think Obama has for the most part conducted an honest campaign. However, he has not been above misrepresenting McCain on certain key issues.

The most egregious misrepresentation of McCain's views that Obama has consistently peddled is that McCain wants the US to continue the war in Iraq for 100 years. From what Obama says, it sounds as if McCain would favor continuing the Iraq War indefinitely, even if it took 100 years. But what McCain was actually saying was that he envisioned a US troop presence in post-war Iraq for decades to come, on the model of military bases in Europe and Korea, and explicitly stated that such a presence was predicated on there being no US casualties:



Now, the idea that there should be permanent military bases in Iraq isn't exactly noncontroversial, and there are a lot of reasonable people who contend that such bases would incite violence against US troops. But that does not justify misconstruing McCain's support for permanent military bases in Iraq as support for permanent war in Iraq. (I should add that it seems that Obama stopped making this claim some time ago--however, he never admitted that it was spurious or gave any kind of apology for it).

Another misrepresentation--and one that you hear a lot of lately--is that John McCain believes that the line that divides "middle class" and "rich" is an income of $5 million. If such a viewpoint seems absurd it is because McCain intended it to be: when he said this, he was joking. He even followed his answer with the words "but seriously" and worried aloud, "that comment will probably be distorted". Judge for yourself:


It is obvious to me that McCain was shirking the question by giving a joke answer. Obama can certainly criticize McCain for refusing to answer the question seriously, but this doesn't entitle him to pretend that McCain's joke non-answer was a serious answer. And yet, that is what Obama continues to do, on the stump and in his campaign ads:


These are the only two instances I can think of where there can be no doubt that Obama is distorting his opponent's record. Maybe there are more--I'll post them if I find them or if someone points me to some.

Only by impartially scrutinizing both candidates' honesty can you begin to meaningfully argue that one is more honest than the other. Clearly, both candidates have succumbed to the temptation of misrepresenting their opponent's view and eviscerating the resulting straw man. However, I think it should be clear to any objective observer that the McCain campaign's level of dishonesty is orders of magnitude greater than that of the Obama campaign and very far beyond the pale.

Why we say, "Drilling will not affect the price of oil"

Via Klein via Grist:

This should be made into a T-shirt. Like, now.

September 11

Seven years ago, Osama bin Laden orchestrated a deadly attack on innocent civilians in downtown New York, murdering nearly 3,000 people. When an aide told President George W. Bush "America is under attack", he responded by sitting and doing nothing for seven minutes. He did not ask where the attack occurred. He did not ask if the attack was large or small. He did not ask if further attacks were expected. He did not ask if the attack was conventional or biological or nuclear. He did not ask for a single further iota of information for a full seven minutes. This was the President of the United States--after being told, simply, "America is under attack".

In the months that followed, President Bush persuaded the American public that Saddam Hussein was partly culpable for the September 11 attacks, and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a grave and imminent danger to the United States. Both of these claims were false. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

Today, Osama bin Laden remains at large. Somewhere in the mountainous region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he wakes up every day and breathes the air we breath and gets warmed by the sunshine we get warmed by and experiences the thousands of subtle joys of being alive--joys that he deprived nearly 3,000 innocent people of on September 11, 2001.

And George W. Bush is still the President of the United States.

Jon Stewart: Gadfly

As I might have mentioned before, Socrates used to pass the time by accosting important and powerful people in the public square and annoying the hell out of them by asking them exactly what they meant when they spoke about things like justice, courage, honor, etc. Typically, the important person would start in on some explanation or another until they faltered under Socrates' questioning and contradicted themselves, thus revealing in humiliating fashion which bodily orifice they had been talking out of all along.

Predictably, this got Socrates executed. During the trial, though, he tried to explain to the jury why someone like him was beneficial to the state by likening himself to a gadfly that keeps a sleepy horse active and alert:

For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.

Today in America, 2400 years or so later, the national gadfly remains an important position and one that is vital to the health of the state. I imagine that the press fancies itself in this role, holding leaders accountable and asking them the hard questions, but I think for some time now the press has been symbiotically subsumed into the Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash of Washington, and has fully bought in to its Orwellian obfuscations of language and contrived narratives.

And so the gadfly role has been filled, I think, by someone truly outside the Washington establishment: Jon Stewart. Nobody else gets down to the Socratic nuts and bolts of rigorously exposing blatant contradictions or asking those in power what they mean when they say X. For example, during the Republican convention we heard a lot about Sarah Palin's "small town values"--but only the Daily Show had the good idea of asking people what these values were:



And could Karl Rove--who is perhaps the best exemplar of the revolving-door relationship between the political establishment and the punditry--have been eviscerated like this by anyone other than Stewart?



It's a shame that the Daily Show has been on hiatus during this pig/lipstick flap. The response to it probably would have been pretty entertaining--and pretty good for the country.

Nothing new under the bloggy sun

I was going to write a post called "Parity" in which I noted that according to the RCP meta-poll, 538, and Intrade, the race was about even--but then I saw that Paul Krugman has beaten me to it with a post called "Even Odds". Then I was going to write another post about how the McCain campaign is lying its pants off when it claims that Obama called Palin "a pig with lipstick", but half the internet has got that one covered.

For what it's worth, I think things are about to start turning around for Obama and the Democrats, and that this latest outrageously false claim from the McCain campaign is one outrageously false claim too far. Following Ezra Klein's insightful post the other day, the media renders the continuous onslaught of news data comprehensible to consumers by framing it within running narratives. I would add that--perhaps out of an obligation to "balance", or maybe just because of a bias towards closer and more interesting races--there is a somewhat pendular motion to press coverage, such that a week or two of positive coverage for a candidate tends to be balanced by a period of negative coverage.

I think the press is getting antsy with its rosy McCain-surging-from-convention-and-Palin-pick narrative, which is one that has emphasized Palin's star turn over the steady drumbeat of false claims eminating from the McCain campaign. However, in order for the shift to occur, there has to be something for the media to affix its narrative to. This pig/lipstick nonsense could be it. In the first place, it's a deception that is readily verifiable in print and on video, so mainstream outlets can comfortably show it without fear of seeming impartial: they can just run a clip of McCain people accusing Obama of making the insult, and then juxtapose it with footage of what Obama said in context, with no need for a reporter to connect any dots. Second, it plays into what has become a pattern of questionable or outright false statements from the McCain campaign, giving the story a direction to run in: does the McCain campaign have a truth problem?

Of course, these things don't happen entirely on their own. Obama is going to have to drive the narrative in speeches, through surrogates, and in campaign ads. He is going to have to actively call out McCain and Palin for campaigning on personal attacks, misrepresentations, and outright lies, and for their silence on issues like health care and the economy.

Biden is already sounding the notes (via Fallows):



And looking around the internet, some people have submitted some pretty good-sounding examples of "what Obama should say". From a Sullivan reader:

"Yesterday I talked to a group of voters about how the McCain campaign is trying to call their continuation of just about every single Bush-Cheney policy of the last eight years "change." In doing so, I used a common, hundred-year-old phrase that we all understand: You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Now the McCain campaign demands that I apologize for saying this. Everyone, it seems, wants to hear my answer. Here it is: NO.

No, I will not apologize for telling the American people the truth: That McCain and Palin represent a stunning, and disastrous, continuation of Bush and Cheney's policies. Policies of sacrificing the middle class to give huge tax cuts to millionaires and big corporations. Policies that prevent Americans from getting the health care they need. Policies that would privatize Social Security and take away a woman's right to choose.

[...]

There's a word I've heard from the McCain campaign recently: "deference." No one is going to ask Sarah Palin a question, they say, unless they show her "deference." Joe Biden points out that they oppose all stem cell research, and they are offended he even mentioned it. I point out that their claim of bringing change is ridiculous, and they demand an apology. Apparently we are not showing them enough deference.

Let me explain something to Senator McCain and Governor Palin, as deferentially as I can: This is a democracy -- not a monarchy. You don't get to demand "deference" from the American people as if they were your royal subjects. You -- and I -- and everyone who seeks elected office must defer to the American people, and answer their questions, and fight for them even when it's politically inconvenient. That is what I promise to do. Thank You."

And from Nate Silver at 538:

My opponent's chief strategest just said, "this campaign isn't about the issues." Well, I've got news for you, America. The Republican Party is desperate. They are going to do anything to try and hold onto their power, because they know the damage they've done to our country, and they don't know how to fix it. They know that people are out of work, and they don't know how to help them. They know that people are dying because they don't have health insurance, and they don't know to save them. They know that families are struggling to put food on the table, and they know don't know how to provide for them.

So they're going to try and distract you, America, because that's the only thing they know how to do. They're going to try and scare you. They're going to try and tell you stories, instead of offering solutions. And yes, folks -- these are the same people that have been lying to you for the last eight years -- and they're going to lie to you again.

We'll see how it goes in the next couple of days. McCain has been in the driver's seat for the last week or so, but he's sold his soul to do it. If Obama can regain the momentum, he will be in a strong position heading into the final two months.

Bush administration literally in bed with Big Oil

Sounds like a blast:

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

[...]

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

Is there anyone who denies that this is one of the worst run, most corrupt administrations in the history of the United States?

Injustice: rather pleasant, actually

Phil sends a must-read story that nicely illustrates what I have thought for a long time, which is that affable nitwits in close proximity to each other will buddy up, no matter what. Says Phil:

There's something very charming about this story. It's not just that the man they wrongfully arrested is so damn agreeable (just wait until they start quoting him -- he's such a trooper!). It's that the cops in this story aren't really demonized in spite of their rather ridiculous mistake. We set up these massive legal and procedural systems to maintain civility in this country, but human error always eventually manages to trump justice. I think we usually tend to think of human error as this terrible, exasperating thing, but in this story it seems much more innocent and forgivable. It, in a sense, humanizes human error. Very much like Milos Forman's "The Firemen's Ball."

I would add that I think there's also something distinctly American about the cheerful ineptitude on display at every step of the way that puts a distance between our somewhat serious and melodramatic national mission statement--we are the birthplace and guarantor of freedom, humanity's last best hope, a nation of laws and due process!--and the typical demeanor of actual Americans, which is roughly that of a distracted golden retriever.

"She's gonna have to answer questions"

Sarah Palin has yet to submit to candid and adversarial questioning by the press, and there is virtually no record of her views on governing philosophy, the Iraq War, separation of powers, Constitutional rights during wartime, Guantanamo, free trade, health care, the role of the UN, US geopolitical strategy, China, deficit spending, tax cuts, education, and much, much more.

I wonder what her views are, and what percentage of them were formed in a cram session after she was chosen as McCain's VP.

No posts

As Lindsay points out, Andrew Sullivan didn't have any posts today, which is really weird, since I think that blog's been averaging 20 posts a day since I started reading it.

Goldberg takes on Chabon

This brief interview will make Alex love Michael Chabon even more, but it will take him a year and a half to read it.

A Californian in the linguistic dark

Apparently, calling a black person "uppity" is racist. Being from the San Fernando Valley, I had no idea this was the case. But everyone (including my girlfriend who grew up in Davis) is in agreement that it is.

(Let me reiterate: I'm not arguing that calling a black person "uppity" is not racist; I am simply saying I was ignorant of this fact until I heard about this story.)

GB3 watch

It'll suck, I'm sure, but--Venkman!

Breaking down Romney's convention speech

Key:
Green: coherent and sound
Yellow: puzzling/controversial at best
Orange: a genuinely odd thing to say/basically wrong
Red: detached from reality/complete non sequitor coming out of a Republican's mouth/just plain old non sequitor

For decades, the Washington sun has been rising in the east — Washington has been looking to the eastern elites, to the editorial pages of the Times and the Post, and to the broadcasters from the coast.

If America really wants change, it's time to look for the sun in the west, cause it's about to rise and shine from Arizona and Alaska!

Last week, the Democrats talked about change. But let me ask you — what do you think Washington is right now, liberal or conservative? Is a Supreme Court liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with constitution rights? It's liberal! Is a government liberal or conservative that puts the interests of the teachers union ahead of the needs of our children? It's liberal!

Is a Congress liberal or conservative that stops nuclear power plants and offshore drilling, making us more and more dependent on Middle East tyrants? It's liberal!

Is government spending — excluding inflation — liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? It's liberal!

We need change all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big government liberals and elect John McCain!

It's the same prescription for a stronger economy. I spent 25 years in the private sector. I've done business in many foreign countries. I know why jobs come and why they go away. And I know that liberals don't have a clue.

They think we have the biggest and strongest economy in the world because of our government. They're wrong. America is strong because of the ingenuity and entrepreneurship and hard work of the American people.

The American people have always been the source of our nation's strength and they always will be!

We strengthen our people and our economy when we preserve and promote opportunity. Opportunity is what lets hope become reality.

Opportunity expands when there is excellence and choice in education, when taxes are lowered, when every citizen has affordable, portable health insurance, and when constitutional freedoms are preserved.

Opportunity rises when children are raised in homes and schools that are free from pornography, promiscuity and drugs; in homes that are blessed with family values and the presence of a father and a mother.

America cannot long lead the family of nations if we fail the family here at home!

Liberals would replace opportunity with dependency on government largesse. They grow government and raise taxes to put more people on Medicaid, to take work requirements out of welfare, and to grow the ranks of those who pay no taxes at all. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity.

It is time to stop the spread of government dependency to fight it like the poison it is!

It's time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother!

Our economy is under attack. China is acting like Adam Smith on steroids, buying oil from the world's worst, and selling nuclear technology. Russia and the oil states are siphoning more than 500 billion dollars a year from us in what could become the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history. This is no time for timid, liberal empty gestures.

Our economy has slowed down this year and a lot of people are hurting. What happened? Mortgage money was handed out like candy, speculators bought homes for free — when this mortgage mania finally broke, it slammed the economy. And stratospheric gas prices made things even worse.

Democrats want to use the slowdown as an excuse to do what their special interests are always begging for: higher taxes, bigger government and less trade with other nations.

It's the same path Europe took a few decades ago. It leads to moribund growth and double-digit unemployment.

The right course is the one championed by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago, and by John McCain today. It is to rein in government spending and to lower taxes, for taking a weed whacker to excessive regulation and mandates, for putting a stop to tort windfalls, and to stand up to the tyrannosaurus appetite of government unions!

It is to pursue every source of energy security, from new efficiencies to renewables, from clean coal to non-CO2 producing nuclear, and the immediate drilling for more oil off of our shores! And I have one more recommendation for energy conservation — let's keep Al Gore's private jet on the ground!

Did you hear any Democrats talk last week about the threat from radical, violent Jihad? Republicans believe that there is good and evil in the world. Ronald Reagan called-out the Evil Empire. George Bush labeled the terror-sponsor states the Axis of Evil.

And at Saddleback, after Barack Obama dodged and ducked every direct question, John McCain hit the nail on the head: radical violent Islam is evil, and he will defeat it!

Republicans prefer straight talk to politically correct talk!

Republicans, led by John McCain and Sarah Palin, will fight to preserve the values that have preserved the nation. We will strengthen our economy and keep us from being held hostage by Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad.

And we will never allow America to retreat in the face of evil extremism!

Just like you, there has never been a day when I was not proud to be an American. We inherited the greatest nation in the history of the earth.

It is our burden and privilege to preserve it, to renew its spirit so that its noble past is prologue to its glorious future.

To this we are all dedicated and I firmly believe, by the providence of the Almighty, that we will succeed.

President McCain and Vice President Palin will keep America as it has always been — the hope of the world.

Why we say, "the GOP is out of ideas"

The following chart shows the top US marginal income tax rate from 1913 to 2003:




In 1980, when Reagan was elected, every dollar you earned past $215,400 was taxed at a rate of 50% (70% for unearned income). After the tax revolt of the 80s, that rate was drastically reduced: to 28% at its lowest point. In the Clinton years that rose back up to 39.6% for dollars earned past $250,000 or so.

Under George W. Bush, that rate was reduced to 35%, where it remains through today. Under Obama, the top rate would move back up to where it was under Clinton: about 40%.*

From the way that Republicans have been pounding their fists and shouting to the rafters, you would think that Obama was proposing a top income tax rate increase of epic proportions. In reality, he is proposing an increase of 5%. That's right: a difference of a nickel of every dollar earned after about $300,000. And the top rate would still remain low overall by historical standards--well under the >50% seen in most of the 20th century.

But what about capital gains (i.e., money earned from investments rather than a paycheck)? The current rate is the lowest it has been since 1933: 15%. Obama would raise that to somewhere in the neighborhood of 25%, which is about where it was in the Clinton years and somewhat higher than it was during much of the 80s. So let's put that increase at 10%.

The final tally, then: the top income tax rate increased by 5%, and the capital gains tax increased by 10%--both levels raised to what they were during the prosperous Clinton years.

The Republicans carry on as if the tax revolt of the 1980s never happened--as though the wealthiest Americans--the investors, the entrepreneurs--were still forfeiting over half of their post-$200,000 income to Uncle Sam. But they are fighting a battle that Reagan already won, and that the Democrats already conceded. There is not one serious politician left who advocates that we return to the pre-Reagan tax rates. And yet still, impossibly, bloody-mindedly, the Republicans insist on more tax cuts--despite dramatically increased federal spending (on both entitlements and two concurrent wars), and despite ballooning deficits. And they continue to depict Democrats as if they were advocating the absurdly high marginal rates of the Great Society years.

We cannot, as the backwards saying goes, have our cake and eat it too. To acknowledge the necessity for a modern infrastructure, a quality education system, a functional healthcare scheme, and a superior military is to acknowledge the necessity of a tax rate that is high enough to cover these tremendous costs. Perhaps there was a time when we could believe that the Republicans would offset their tax cuts with reductions in federal spending, but George W. Bush and his agenda of big government conservatism--and his pet war, Iraq--put that idea to rest.

I've noticed lately that I've been describing the Democrats as "adults" and Republicans as "children". No where is this more true than in fiscal policy. While the Republicans shout gleeful impossibilities in between schoolyard taunts--"Obama is a celebrity! I'll pay for $1000 billion worth of tax cuts by cutting $72 billion in earmarks!** Obama eats arugula!"--the Democrats reasonably suggest, as a starting point, that we return to a tax rate scheme that has been shown to work in the past. It is almost as if the Republicans themselves don't really believe that they'll be in power, and that all they have left is the grim catharsis of pretending to be Ronald Reagan in front of an audience of their peers.


*Hm..but is this quite right? According to one blogger, the de facto rate could be higher: "Senator Obama would raise the top individual tax rate back to 39.6 percent, impose an additional 2 to 4 percent tax on earnings for some over the existing Social Security wage cap, and bring back the phase-out of the personal exemption and certain itemized deductions for higher-income taxpayers. When added up, the top effective marginal tax rate rises...from 37.9 percent to roughly 48 to 50 percent." If true, this argues against my point--however, it is unclear from this post whether the additional nickel and diming would affect a large number of wealthy people or a relative few, or what. Also, it would be unfair to factor in these hidden costs of Obama's plan without also factoring them into the historical tax rates that form the baseline we are comparing against. So I think the most reasonable thing to do is ignore the de facto tax rates for now, and look naively at the explicit tax rates to give us a general idea of where Obama's plan stands historically.

**"Permanently extending the tax cuts would reduce tax revenue by $1 trillion over four years. If Mr. McCain eliminated every earmark (including money for the gas pipeline that Ms. Palin wants to build in Alaska), the savings would total about $18 billion a year. He hasn’t offered any idea of where he’ll get the rest of the money." (NYT editorial)

Surf's up on premise beach

From what I can tell from the commercial for Lakeview Terrace, the premise is that Samuel L. Jackson is a really inconsiderate neighbor, but that no one can call the cops on him because he is a cop. So it shows him, like, cutting down his neighbor's flowerbed and shining a bright light into their house at night. I find the whole idea very absurd, and exactly the sort of plotline my dad would invent at around the halfway point of his scotch.

From Kennedy to Clinton

From Bill Clinton's speech to the convention, a truly Kennedy-esque inversion:

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

What a wonderful, succinct way of drawing the contrast between the demented Republican view of the world--in which we are forever serving up bluster and brinkmanship out of some abstract fear of "emboldening the enemy"--and the coolly pragmatic and principled view offered by Barack Obama. What an immense difference in maturity, pragmatism, temperament, optimism, and basic human decency there is between Clinton's speech and Giuliani's sneering diatribe against "liberals", against civil liberties, against imagined Democratic "elites" who, he fantasizes, spend their days looking down on their fellow countrymen and devising politically correct ways of saying the word "terrorist". One man is reasonable, says reasonable things, and is grounded in the empirical world; the other is completely unserious, says unserious things, and seems to be living in some kind of grotesque cartoon where upholding the Constitution comes in a distant third to eavesdropping on the American population carte blanche and unilaterally bombing the shit out of some distant country to show someone, somewhere, who is boss.

I mean--really. This has got to be the lowest, most ideologically bankrupt, most shameful moment in the history of the Republican Party. There are no ideas, only a Down Syndrome baby passed awkwardly from Palin to Palin. There is no acknowledgment of reality, only the bizarre and Orwellian spectacle of a ruling party calling for a "change" in Washington as if it hadn't had a stranglehold on power for the previous eight years. Stern promises that suspected terrorists will be tortured are met with whoops and energetic chants of "USA! USA!" Declarations that evil will be defeated are swallowed whole by an eager audience that is either unaware of or unconcerned by the fact that such statements contain virtually no information, that they are vapid, trivial appeals not to reason but to the raw emotions of nationalistic fervor.

That Republican convention hall is a crystal ball filled with dark, dark visions of a possible future that I hope with all of my being never comes to pass. And over the last few days, listening to the Clintons, Kerry, Gore, Obama--the decent ones, the right ones, the calm ones, the adults--I have never been prouder to be a Democrat.

Keeping track of hypocrisy

There's a lot out there to keep straight:

• "And [Sarah Palin] already has more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket." -Rudy Giuliani, RNC speech. The hypocrisy: By this reasoning, she also has more executive experience than John McCain. So however negatively this charge is meant to reflect on the Democrats, it cross-applies to McCain with equal measure.
• "Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency." -The Obama campaign. The hypocrisy: Obama himself has "zero foreign policy experience" as well. In fact, during the primary he labored to make the distinction between having experience and having good judgment, arguing that having the one does not guarantee the other and vice versa. If the Obama campaign wants to attack Palin, it cannot be for her lack of experience per se; the campaign will have to show that Palin has demonstrated poor judgment in specific instances.
• Any accusation by McCain that Obama is too inexperienced to sit in the Oval Office. The hypocrisy: If McCain thinks that having lots of experience is a necessary condition for occupying the White House, then he undermines this by choosing as his vice-president someone who is very inexperienced (Palin was mayor of a small town and then governor of a non-populous state for two years). If McCain tries to wriggle out of this by claiming that Palin is indeed qualified because she--unlike Obama--has executive experience, then he implies that he himself might not be qualified, because he has no executive experience. The only way for McCain to navigate out of the thicket would be to maintain that either having lots of legislative experience or a small amount of executive experience is necessary for being president, but that having a small amount of legislative experience doesn't cut it.
• Any acknowledgment by the Bush administration that John McCain was tortured in Vietnam. The hypocrisy: the terrible things done to McCain as a POW are precisely the same things that the Bush administration ordered done to detainees in Guantanamo Bay--and are the same things, it is worth mentioning, that McCain himself believes the CIA ought to be able to carry out. Andrew Sullivan makes the argument.
  

Humdingers are easy when you just lie a lot

I imagine most people will say that Sarah Palin's speech went well, but it contained at least one cynically bald-faced lie.

Palin says:

I told the Congress "thanks, but no thanks," for that Bridge to Nowhere.

If our state wanted a bridge, we'd build it ourselves.

It turns out that Palin actually supported the construction of the $223 million bridge that would serve a population of a few dozen residents. According to Reuters, her support continued until the outrageous earmark became a national punchline, at which point she dropped her support for the project--but not really:

National fury over the bridge caused Congress to remove the earmark designation, but Alaska was still granted an equivalent amount of transportation money to be used at its own discretion.

Last year, Palin announced she was stopping state work on the controversial project, earning her admirers from earmark critics and budget hawks from around the nation. The move also thrust her into the spotlight as a reform-minded newcomer.

The state, however, never gave back any of the money that was originally earmarked for the Gravina Island bridge, said [Ketchikan Mayor Bob] Weinstein and [Mike] Elerding [a Republican who was Palin's campaign coordinator in the southeast Alaska city].

In fact, the Palin administration has spent "tens of millions of dollars" in federal funds to start building a road on Gravina Island that is supposed to link up to the yet-to-be-built bridge, Weinstein said.

Ah yes--she was so against the bridge in principle that she kept all of the earmarked money and began work on a road that would connect...to the bridge. Alaska state politics is awesome!

It's facsinating to me that Palin included her "opposition" to the Bridge to Nowhere right there in the middle of her big speech--an appluase line, no less--as if it weren't possible to expose the deception in literally one minute using an invention called "the Google". I wonder if whoever wrote her speech is hip to the internet thing. With the McCain campaign, I guess you never know.

Sarah Palin wreaks cognitive dissonance on us SF hipster types

The problem is that she looks like a cute Starbucks barista, but is in reality the Republican governor of Alaska and running-mate of John McCain.

But she looks like she's into Portishead, I swear...

To be anti-abortion is to be anti-abortion without exception

Sarah Palin opposes abortion without exception--even in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother's life is endangered.

Moderates point to this as evidence that she is on the fringe, but really I have always thought--and I know many of my friends agree--that if you are pro-life, then it would be incredibly odd not to oppose abortion in those instances. After all, you are presumably pro-life because you believe that fetuses are human beings and eliminating them is equivalent to murder. Within this set of beliefs, I don't see why a fetus being caused by rape or incest would make that fetus any less human or its elimination any less of a murder. Even in cases where bringing the fetus to term would endanger the life of the mother, I think it would be difficult to make an argument that would justify killing one human being in order to save another.

And so I think Palin's stance on abortion is perfectly normal and consistent (albeit one I happen to disagree with).

Free the bear

Probably the weirdest bit of news that's happened since I went incommunicado for Burning Man is the fact that McCain has chosen for his running mate someone who was once a member of a party that advocated Alaskan secession from the Union. Hopefully views like this will continue to find their way into the mainstream, so that we Californians can realize our lifelong dream of a roaring, progressive Bear, unrestrained by a parasitic federal government and the vote-diluting bullshit that is the electoral college.