Ramirez and the Pulitzer

Michael Ramirez, political cartoonist for some Texas backwater rag, won the Pulitzer Prize last year. He's the scumbag who lost his job from the LA Times for his bigoted "Hate" cartoon about the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is odd, because most right wing morons are pro-Israel. Not Ramirez. Maybe he's one of those mythical all-around idiots that I keep worrying about.

Anyway, his cartoon from the other day (see below) shows the twisted weirdness of the Right Wing commentariat. For those without images, the picture depicts Obama as the successor for Herbert Hoover because, somehow, Obama/Democratic policies are similar to Hoovers.

Look, this is just strange. The only person alive who can be plausibly be compared to Hoover would be George W. Bush with John McCain a close second (deregulate and stand aside while everything goes kablooie).


This is classic crazy from the Right Wing: depict the enemy (which could be Democrats, liberals, Jews - evidently) as guilty of the crimes only associated with Republicans.

Does Ramirez know how stupid this is? I don't know.

What it does bring up, to me, is the issue of why should newspapers employ cartoonists/columnists who represent not only a very small part of the population (pro-Bushites, hovering at around 30%) and specifically a part of the population that is uninformed. A newspaper should combat ignorance, not perpetuate it! And I'm not being pollyannish - if a newspaper does not try to inform the public, then it's a sad abuse of the "freedom of the press."

Here's another example:


Sarah Palin is somehow just as qualified as Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah. Sure. Let's leave aside that he was a sitting VP when he took over the presidency (he was only in office a few months), and that his 'two years' as a governor was of *New Freakin' York* and not some moose-ridden backwater, he was Asst Scty of the Navy before that (interrupted by military service as head of the 'Rough Riders', head of the NYC Police before that, head of the Federal Civil Service for 6 years before that, etc. Teddy was also a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard (which means he didn't just attend to get a pedigree, he actually stayed to learn something).

So the author of the second cartoon, Steve Breen, who surprise surprise won a Pulitzer in 1998, is either purposefully stupid or ideologically trying to obfuscate and in that sense *harm* the reader.

I know that Bush is still in power, Lieberman has hijacked the Senate, and so Fox News and Associated Gooper Idiots still are considered legitimate 'news' agencies. But, seriously, we shouldn't have to take this anymore. Breen, Ramirez, etc are jokes and an insult to the 'news' business.

Paul Newman, 83, Dies

Paul Newman, 83, Magnetic Hollywood Titan, Dies.

Crap.

Well, he died very close to Rosh Hashanah, that's got to count for something. He will always be seen as an honorary full-blooded Jew, in my book, for being a mensch.

Go with God, Ari Ben Canaan.

Conservative & Liberal Today

Kleiman at The Reality Based Community brings up a point I've been making for some time:

A former publisher of the National Review has endorsed Barack Obama as the “conservative” candidate in this year’s Presidential race. That may sound like a paradox, but it makes perfect sense if you go back to what the word “conservative” originally meant.

“Conservatism” has many meanings. To my somewhat jaundiced eye, the primary practical content of American conservatism as embodied in the Republican Party is a preference for the interests of rich people and employers over non-rich people and workers, combined with hostility to the demands of “outsiders” for equal treatment. All the rest — the preference for “small government” that is nonetheless active in dictating sexual morality, hostility toward environmental protection, hostility toward science, nativism — follows from that basic stance. (The current tendency on the right to support the executive power over the legislative power is merely temporary and partisan.)

Of course there are tensions on both interest-group and ideological lines. Employers tend to be anti-nativist. Many “small government” types are anti-imperialist. Libertarians don’t like the sexual-purity agenda.

But the thing American conservatism most lacks is “conservatism” in the proper sense in which “conservative” is the opposite of “progressive”: a sense of the costs of rapid change and a distrust of pervasive schemes of reform, in the tradition of Burke, Hayek, and Oakeshott. Steve Teles has pointed out, for example, how utterly un-conservative it is to propose drastic changes in Social Security, and of course the same might be said about the project of making Iraq safe for democracy.

As relentlessly partisan as I am on most left/right issues, I find myself right in the middle on the progressive-conservative axis. The Second Reconstruction was a frankly revolutionary effort, and had quite as many unintended side-effects as Burke himself could have expected, but it was no less necessary or glorious for all of that. The same was true of the New Deal, and is true now of the movement toward regulating the environmental impacts of private economic activity. But I still find myself nodding in agreement when someone says “The basic cause of problems is solutions.” Both the freeway and the public housing project seemed like good ideas at the time.

Thinkers with an Oakeshottian cast of mind have been drawn toward Republicanism by the relentlessly progressive mood of the Democrats. And some of them, revolted by the past eight years, are now looking for another option. One of the attractions of Barack Obama’s candidacy was his capacity to speak to those people. I don’t know how many of them are actually out there, but it’s good to know that there are some.

Sounds familiar, no?

Backpost finished 2009-12-07.

Henry Wallace

As I've been immersing myself in electoral politics, especially in the 20th Century, it's important to look at the decisions made by the major parties and how they won in critical years.

For each party, there's usually one president who embodies the modern party. For Republicans it's Ronald Reagan, and for Democrats it's either JFK or FDR. The two are similar in that they are both charismatic liberals, Machiavellian intellectuals, and defense hawks. Because JFK carries a lot of modern day baggage (his wacky adultery, Vietnam, Bay of Pigs), I prefer looking at FDR as the model Democrat. Not only was he the most successful president (4 wins!) but he created the modern United States as the combination of free-market and state-support, a belief in helping every citizen and also watching out for the world. OK, he should have done more to help my relatives escape the Holocaust, but I doubt Wendell Willkie would have been any better (given that the Republicans in 1940 were pretty happy staying out of the War).

Anyway, the crucial election for understanding FDR's success is 1940 - when he broke with the unwritten rule set up by George Washington that a president should only run for two terms. FDR dropped his VP of the previous two terms, John Garner, who pretty much defined the stereotype of a useless VP. Garner said the immortal phrase about the Vice Presidency "not worth a bucket of warm piss." Tell that to Grand Moff Cheney.

FDR chose Henry A. Wallace as his running mate in 1940 - dumping Garner, a Texas conservative Democrat and former speaker of the house. Wallace had been the secretary of agriculture from 1933-1940. Before that, he was, I think, a farmer. Also a Buhddist. Or something. He was definitely a wacko.

Note, when the 1944 Election came about, the Democratic party bosses insisted that the pro-Communist freaky-deaky Wallace be dropped as VP in favor of someone who could actually, ya know, lead the country in the case that FDR would drop dead (which had been expected at any time by those in the know).

I bring up these footnotes to history in order to understand the present day, especially the choices facing Americans in a wartime election (like 1940 & 1944) in a disastrous economy (like 1932) and with a sick old guy who could die sooner than later (FDR vs. McCain). Specifically, how does FDR's decision to reject Garner, accept Wallace, then reject him for Truman compare to the selection of Palin, Biden and even Quayle. Anon.

Swing and Statis States

A quick note about my move from Connecticut to Massachusetts. While the two states have much in common (cruddy weather, hard to spell names, arugula), CT had the benefit of being a bit of a swing state.

The name "Swing" state became popular, IIRC, in the 90s to contrast with the red-blue split that pundits invented to make them sound intelligent. Red means Republican and blue means Democrat because, by some freaky coincidence, a number of the news networks decided to use these colors in their electoral maps. I remember when the colors were arbitrary based on independent decisions of the news editors, but when the hacks get a good hook they run with it, and now we're stuck.

Karl Rove and the millions who listen to him decided to press the "truth" that there was a red America (manly, religious, patriotic, land-locked), and a blue America (pansy, atheist, communist, coastal and/or cold). Yet there are some states that move between, 'swing' as it were, between being red or blue. These are the Swing States.

For those who depend on the red/blue dichotomy, the existence of swing states is difficult to rationalize. What makes it more difficult for these Manicheans, is that, if you look at a projected election map you'd see there are about 15-20 states that are credibly swinging. And, it bears to remind the uninformed voter, that there are only 50 states. Which means that if there are 17 swing states, that's one third of America. Which means that you can't really talk about red/blue without emphasizing that there's many places that don't identify as either.

I won't deny that there are some states that will never go "red" as well as those that won't go "blue." And there's a definite advantage to live in a "swing" state because the candidates will spend much more time, and make more crazy bribing promises, to pander to you.

And because of this dichotomy, that "swings" get all the attention while guaranteed reds and blues hardly get any, it suggests that red/blue is not that significant for analyzing an election while the swingy-ness is.

Hence my preferred dichotomy of Swing States (the 20 or so that could vote either way) and Static/Stasis States (ones that are reliably red or blue).

All of this leads to the contrast between Massachusetts and Connecticut. CT, being a swingish state (especially given McCain's popularity there), would mean that my single vote would matter in a national election. But now I live in Massachusetts. Which is as reliably a blue state as can be expected (1984 was a fluke).

My vote in November is basically useless. I should have kept my residency in CT.

Am I Worried About November?

Well, in a large abstract way, I am worried about the election in the same way I'm worried about death or Nazis. Two national elections have been awarded to a profoundly unqualified man (Bush) and a party that decided to commit themselves to strange and evil policies.

2000 was terrible but until 9/11 most of us thought that the damage would be temporary, given that we were living through peace and prosperity. 2004 was heart-rending because it was clear how bad Bush was and things were getting worse and worse. The past 4 years have been horrifying and I know my kids will ask me about them with the same hushed awe I asked my parents about 1963-1968 (assassinations, Vietnam, Nixon). And if things were teetering on the bad in 2004, the re-election of Bush in 2008 would be a full-gonzo catastrophe.

It bears repeating: all of us who warned about the horrors of a second Bush term, and were ridiculed by Goopers who claimed we were being paranoid hysterics, were proven to be correct. And I was not correct by accident - i.e. many people are correct only by chance. For example, the smartasses who said that John Edwards was *of course* cheating on his wife... basing their assertions on the sole facts that (a) Edwards was good-looking, and (b) they disagreed with Edwards' policies/profession/accent.

Not liking somebody, and thus attributing to the disliked person all sorts of crimes, does not make your criticisms prophetic. You just got lucky.

However, if you said that Edwards was a wife-cheater because of certain provable factors (e.g. you knew of some shady behaviors, you read in his book that 'cheating on your cancer-stricken wife ain't the worst thing a person can do', or if you personally slept with him), then - fine - you can be considered a perceptive prognosticator.

For the record, I didn't believe the rumors that Edwards was cheating on his wife because I didn't think that someone as successful as him (self-made multi-millionaire, young Democratic senator in a red-state) would do something so destructive and stupid. I mean, it was Spitzer-esque! And even then, I had some glimmering that Spitzer was a sexual-schkutz because he intermarried. Ya see, that's a provable indicator. Sex crime here leads to sex crime there. But Edwards? Why would someone running for president - someone who constantly references his wife's terminal cancer - have an affair on the campaign trail.

Anyway, I went on this tangent to talk about the stakes of the election: just as the loss in 2004 was bad, and I knew it would be bad beforehand, I can say with confidence that McCain winning in November would mean total freakin' disaster for the U.S. of A. McCain is unfit to lead and will most likely die soon in office (based on simple actuarial prediction) leaving the country in the hands of a serial-fabricator hillbilly Evangelical.

And, as some dude pointed out, Bush managed to destroy our country from the starting point of Clinton's peace and prosperity. McCain - an uck-fup of Bushian magnitude - would be elected in the midst of two draining wars and an economy teetering on the brink.

Stop, You're Scaring Me!

I hear you cry. Yes, if McCain wins in November, we are totally screwed. But I don't expect it to happen. In fact, and you can quote me, the only way for the GOP to win in November is through fraud. I say this based on three proofs: (1) the frauds of 2000 & 2004, (2) the 2006 midterms, and (3) American history.

1. The only way the GOP won in 2000 and 2004 was through fraud.

Yeah, the Goopers amongst you will deny that 2000 was fraud, even though, based on facts, it's clear that Gore *would* have won in Florida if the votes that the voters cast were actually tabulated. If you prefer winning at all costs, and see a 'win' as proving retroactively everything done as right and correct, then the fact that the Supreme Court allowed Bush to win Florida, and thus the whole election, to be enough to say that Bush actually won.

But in the world of facts, it's important to remember than no matter what the weird rules stated, Gore won in 2000. A sports analogy, if I may. If quarterback Jack Drake throws a 95 yard touchdown pass while being tackled by a blitz of linebackers, yet the play is invalidated because the second-string slotback was barely offsides, do you credit the QB with a touchdown.

In the official game scoring, Jack Drake does not get credit for a touchdown. In the world of real life and of commerce, Jack Drake will be known as an amazing athlete who can perform under pressure and whose expertise was proven in real events. The rules of sports, while important to those who follow sports, are arbitrary and do not determine actual events.

Gore *should* have won in 2000; and for this argument it means that the country was willing to have a third Clinton term, and to elect Gore-Lieberman, even though arbitrary (and ultimately skewed rules) undermined the true events.

2004 was not as close as 2000 and for months after the election I was devastated not only because Bush was still in office, but with enough of a margin to suggest that people approved of his idiocies.

However, as the numerous scandals that were uncovered from 2006 on have shown, the Bush administration was involved in systematic voter fraud in every election since they took over the Justice department. I don't have time or space to get into great details - yet, they are easily found all over the internet - but event after event has shown that Bush administration politicized every aspect of the executive branch, skewing policy and actions to help Republicans get elected. The very core of the attorney scandal was that Bush/Gonzales were forcing the U.S. Attorneys to (a) suppress the vote of probable democratic voters (e.g. minorities), and (b) indict Democratic politicians or their staff-members close to the election date. The 8 attorneys who were fired all refused to engage in malfeasance.

Read the data, get scared, and conclude - as you should - that 2004 was won via fraud.

Now, this does not deny that the Democratic candidates of 2000 and 2004 were poor candidates. They were pusillanimous, uncharismatic, and not great leaders. But also recognize that conditions were such in 2000 and 2004 that would have made the country vote for an accept a mediocre Democrat.

Barack Obama is not a mediocre politician. He has many detriments, tis' true - he's young, black, and smart. But he also is a galvanizing speaker and a sober thinker who has raised the most money in history and did so with small donations. Which means he excites millions of people. These facts militate against the not-unfounded anxieties that Americans won't vote for a black man with a funny name. I'd have said that - and in fact did - back in 2007. Today, it's an unfounded fear.

2. The 2006 Midterms showed that the country wants change.

Even with the Justice Dept. vote-fraud, even with the Senate lineup stacked against the Democrats, we still managed to win Congress in 2006. Things were so terrible, in just 2 years, that the country threw their bums out. And, it needs to be said, it's hard to throw out congressional incumbents, and a switch-over in the Senate is not a great way to gauge public mood since only 32-33 people are up for election and not always in states that express the public mood. Even with all that, the Democrats won in 2006.

In 2008, the country is in even WORSE shape. The economy is teetering on the brink of collapse, the Iraq war is still hated (and our soldiers are still dying), etc. Add onto that the fact that congressional oversight of the Executive has led to mass firings in the Justice Dept. and elsewhere, making it very hard to repeat the fraud of 2002, 2004 and 2006.

Without the fraud, it's very hard for the GOP to win... even in a good year. And this year is one of the worst.

3. The past 100 years have shown that it's very hard for the incumbent party to win a third term in the presidency.

Since 1900, there have been a few third terms:

1. 1896-1912: McKinley was re-elected, but his assassination makes things difficult to gauge, so we start with Teddy Roosevelt. He had two terms, and he was succeeded by Taft who only had 1. Note, Taft would have been re-elected if Roosevelt hadn't run against him in '12, so following my Gore-2000 rules above, I think the GOP should get real-world credit for winning in 1912.
   
2. 1920-1932: Harding's death led to Coolidge's ascension and his two terms was followed by Hoover's 1.
   
3. 1932-1952: FDR had four terms - the only true 'third term' proof we have - and he was succeeded by Truman who won 1 term on his own right. He would have lost in '52 if he had run.
   
4. 1952-1960: Eisenhower almost won a third term; Nixon barely lost in 1960 (and, following Gore-2000 rules, it could be that this is a third term).
   
5. 1960-1968: LBJ, despite being elected via a grief-fueled nostalgia landslide in 1964, was quite unpopular in 1968. His successor didn't get a third term (even though I could hear an argument that he would have won if Wallace wasn't a third-party spoiler, but it was a complicated year).
   
6. 1968-1976: Nixon led to Ford who lost to Jimmy Freakin' Carter.
   
7. 1980-1992: Reagan was able to secure a third term for his bland VP.
   
8. 1992-2000: Clinton won a third term, but just just barely.

What does the chart prove? That a party can win a third party only when things are going very well, and the incumbent is popular. Coolidge, FDR and Reagan are the successes that prove this rule. Even when the incumbent is pretty popular, and the country is in good shape, the party still has a hard time staying in power: Nixon in '60 and Gore in '00 show this. Even if you want to say that Nixon and Gore actually were cheated out of their deserved victory, it's also demonstrable that the elections were very very close.

The bottom line is that a party gets a third term when (1) people like the outgoing president and (2) the country is in good shape.

In 2008, Americans hate George W Bush and 80% think the country is on the wrong track. The Iraq War is killing our soldiers, breaking our military and draining our coffers. The economy is going through shocks unseen since Herbert Hoover. Just on history alone, it's nearly inconceivable that the voters will reward the incumbent party with a third term.

This is why, ultimately, I'm not so worried about 2008. Barring fraud, which will be hard to do this year, the GOP will lose.

P.S. If my enormously long-winded description above doesn't comfort you, doesn't quiet the 2004-embedded fears that the GOP is so scummy and/or the American people so stupid, that they will defy the rules of logic and history and elect Growly McSame and Jesus S. Palin, I will just say that there are three presidential debates coming up. If the polls are still depressing after the debates, then it will be time to panic.

Way Ahead of Them

Even when it wasn't trendy, I was asserting that George W. Bush was quite clearly stupid. People would gainsay; claiming that - according to unsourced anecdotal evidence - Bush was quite intelligent in a one-on-one conversation. Proofs were also brought as to his education (Yale undergrad, Harvard MBA) and his success in life (president, hello?).

I would counter-argue that (1) education does not correlate to intelligence - especially for wealthy brahmins before 1970 (when most Universities were compelled to matriculate women and minorities). The fact that W's younger siblings were not accepted in Yale (Jeb = UT, Neil = Tulane, Marvin = UVA, Dorothy, BC) is good proof of the pre/post 1970 theory.

(2) Bush, sorry to say, has not been successful on his own. Note, most of the millionaires I know, self-made and otherwise, are not particularly smart. The ones who are intelligent are the exception, to be honest. Bush's successes came from his being well-born. See proof #1 about his education. Anything he did on his own (his businesses are exhibit A-Z) failed. When he became a vapid stooge for the GOP elite - as governor of Texas and Looter-in-Chief of the federal government - then he 'succeeded.' It's in fact much more probable to use Bush as proof that intelligence is *not* predictive of success more than the other way around.

(3) Unsourced anecdotal evidence are not very compelling when punched in the face by facts.

The facts are that intelligence is demonstrated by doing and saying smart things. And for the most part, smart people don't need third-party confirmation for their intelligence. If a person is smart, other people aren't compelled to say "oh, but he's really smart, believe me." Nobody has to confirm Clinton's intelligence, or Cheney's, or Rove's. Their intelligence is assumed because they sound smart. George W Bush, Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, and Gerald Ford all sound really stupid; hence why their friends have to confirm and reconfirm the doubts of their intelligence.

Answer this about Bush: what smart things has he done? Has he written (on his own) intelligent books/articles/essays? When he speaks, does he say smart things or does he sound barely sentient? Note, I'm not even arguing about whether Bush is smart "enough" to be entrusted with great power (an idea - that the president should be talented and competent - that used to be held as an article of belief by most Americans), I'm saying that Bush's speech and behavior is indicative of someone barely smart enough to whiz with his pants down.

The real question about Bush isn't "how smart is he" but the larger question of "how dumb can you be before they start calling you that in public."

Which brings us to John McCain.

I've said on previous occasions that McCain strikes me as a dumb person. There are certain hallmarks of intelligence in his record (e.g. his willingness, before 2008, to speak unfiltered to reporters), so he's in a category above the profoundly stupid George W. But in our present day, whether it's because of age-induced brain-damage, or just inborn handicap, McCain doesn't seem to be that smart.

His inconsistencies in belief and action - what he's done his whole life - are proof for his stupidity. He did one thing right, that I know about: his refusal to be let out of the Hanoi Hilton early because of his family connections. But his undistinguished military career before his imprisonment, his erratic public behavior in Congress, and his despicable acts of private behavior (e.g. adultery), make me think that he just ain't bright.

So, anyway, other people are starting to notice. John Cole, of Balloon-Juice, for example: "Is McCain Just Dumb?" (based on this latest show of idiocy).

Why Aren't They Reporting the Lies?

I mentioned below that the press will try to cover up for the McCain/Palin horrors as much as they can. How do I know this? Well, uh, because they've been doing it. Were Obama, Hillary, Gore, or Billy J Clinton to have said or done the same things McPalin has done, they would already have been laid out on a spit and roasted by the press. So why the double standards? Here's why:

1. Fox News & WSJ plus about half or more of the columnists in the major newspapers are lock-stock part of the GOP. No, they're not paid by them (as far as I know), but they identify closely with the GOP and believe that its crucial to their financial well-being and possibly the existence of civilization that the GOP remain in power. So this group of "journalists" - plus, naturally, all the known scum on the radio - will be campaigning for the GOP, attacking Obama, and covering for the GOP stooges. I suspect that based on the roster above, more than half of the voices in the major mainstream media are part of the GOP. Add onto that what I wrote about here - that the mainstream media is not liberal because of the market for news.

2. Reporters are basically cowards driven by market forces and will support anyone who's popular and attack anyone who's out of favor. People seem to really like Sarah Palin - and who doesn't want a evangelical dominatrix with a Fargo accent? - and the press won't rock that boat. Until people stop liking her.

3. Above all, the press need a horse race. The tension and conflict of politics sells news. We got the Iraq War because the press were cowards and we got a Bush re-election because the press needed to keep the election close. Even though in 2004 the Abu Ghraib story had already broke, and we hadn't found WMDs in Iraq, even with all these horrible things, the press decided that we needed a close election. Thanks.

What this means for 2008 is that even though McCain is clueless, has a temperament problem, changes his views more often than he changes shirts, appears to be very very stupid, and all in all will be a very dangerous president... were the press to point that out, there'd be a landslide for Obama and nobody would watch TV.

And even though Sarah Palin is a crazy Christian who can't tell the truth, bullies her enemies - which include those whose religion she despises - and is manifestly unqualified to be Vice President... if the press pointed all this out, they'd lose advertising dollars because of lack of interest.

As I said before, I think there's a good chance Palin/McCain will end up like Romney, but the press will do it's durndest to make sure we don't hear it from them.

McCain, Palin, and Lying

As has been reported in pretty much every single blog, McCain and Palin have been consistently lying about pretty much everything. Very little exaggeration in that assertion, I'm sad to say.

Many left-wing blogs (see here for an example from the mysteriously named 'Digby' which everyone quotes but nobody has yet given an identity to) have wondered why the Mainstream Media (e.g. the Times) just doesn't have a big ol' headline that says "These Two People Just Don't Tell the Truth!"

I'm sympathetic to these concerns. Especially since the maps on 538 show that, if the polls accurately showed the votes, and if the vote were taken today, McCain would win. This is scary beyond belief.

But here's one word that I've thought of to calm myself down: Romney.

You remember him? He was a very succesful moderate Republican, a governor, a jillionaire, and a very good looking man out of "Politician/Magnate" central casting. He was the GOP front runner for a while. But somehow the word got out - without the mainstream media actually saying it in clear words - that he just didn't tell the truth. And that he switched positions to whatever looked best for him.

He was a political unknown to everyone out of the Northeast and it took a few weeks/months of close scrutiny for the stories to make their way around the news stations and blogs. But the stories did get around; and now he's one of the most disliked politicians out there.

Will that happen to Palin and McCain? I think it will. Mainly because they are doing worse things, in more places, in plain daylight. The press will play down a lot of the bad stories (I'll get to why soon), but I believe that just like Romney, McCain/Palin's fibbing will catch up with them.

The big caveat is: is there enough time before the election?

Palin Scares Me Out of My Wits

I've been crazy busy with grad school, but I need to drop a short bloggy note to emphasize how much the GOP and Sarah Palin scares me out of my wits. I will try to get more of this on pixels, but that just had to be said.

Video of the Day: John Cleese

h/t McArdle.

Faith in His Ability

Found on TNC (with my censoring):

Nice Snark About McCain

Steve Benen in his "Carpetbagger Report" has some good snark about McCain: "Jukebox John keeps changing his tune." Here's his first paragraph:

It’s obvious that the McCain campaign and the RNC have decided to go after Barack Obama as a flip-flopper. What’s equally obvious, though, that Republicans couldn’t have chosen a worse narrative.

I recommend the whole thing.

Pic from here. Backpost finished 2009-12-03.

Video of the Day: SNL on Palin and Hillary

Oh, this is SNL at what they do best. The 'press conference' of Palin and Hillary.


Backpost finished on 2009-12-03.