How high is your horse?

I'd have thought the expression "up on your high horse" had gone out of style. Who's riding horses these days? We may feel irked when other people seem to be looking down on us, but — in the metaphor in our head — is a horse part of the picture?

But yesterday, I encountered — and blogged about — a NYT column by Nicholas Kristof, "On Their High Horse, Too Many Liberals Disdain Oliver Anthony" (NYT).

And now, this morning, I stumble into another high horse. I'm reading "Disqualify Trump in 2024? It’s clear what the NC Supreme Court would say" by North Carolina lawprof Gene Nichol, who takes the position that everyone knows the North Carolina Supreme Court won't go along with this theory about Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Because we all know they’re politicians first and judges, at best, an exceedingly distant second. We know it. They know it. They just swear otherwise. And they swear from a very high, very hypocritical, horse. You would think the words would turn to ashes in their mouths. They wear cool black robes, no doubt. But as the patriarch of TV’s “Succession” puts it, they “are not serious people.”

"Where Do Republicans Go From Here?/The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches. But off in the corners, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment."

That's just the new David Brooks column, but I'm linking to it because it has a very cool illustration by Tim Enthoven. And I like that it fits so squarely into my tag "what Trump did to the GOP" which you might enjoy clicking on for a trip down memory lane.

Here's some Brooks:

If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues — people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes....

But somehow that wasn't enough. Other Republicans offered other "paradigms." First on the list, Brooks himself!

On Sept. 15, 1997, William Kristol and I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on what we called National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government.

They argued for "ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility." Brooks thinks John McCain, in 2000, represented their idea. George W. Bush, who won that year, had his own paradigm:  Compassionate Conservatism. That was, per Brooks, "an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism." There were more paradigms offered up:

Sam’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns. Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities. The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods. The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.

Why would Democrats take advice from Bill Kristol?

I'm reading "The Simple Answer/Don't overthink your Super Tuesday vote" by Bill Kristol (Bulwark).

There's an illustration of a Joe Biden wearing a blue Make America Great Again hat and smiling boyishly.

Under the illustration is a quote from Ronald Reagan: "They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers."

From the Kristol text:

You are a normal American. You don’t like demagogues of the right or the left. You want competent, responsible governance somewhere in the vicinity of the broad center. You cherish American exceptionalism, and you know that means rejecting European-style demagoguery of the right and left that exploits people’s anxieties and seduces them with false promises. You dread a future featuring an authoritarian and illiberal party facing off against a socialist and illiberal party. And so you don’t want to face a choice–you don’t want the country to face a choice– between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in November.

What are you to do?...

Duh! You vote for Biden.

Hey, I have just the right tag for this: "over-complication."

ADDED: I had to publish this post to click on my "over-complication" tag, and the most recent post with this tag — from January 11th — says:

ADDED: I had to publish this post to click on my "over-complication" tag, which I probably could have used a few more times if I'd kept it in mind. It's the kind of tag I love, specific but abstract, so it collects things from scattered topics that resonate. Today's post is only the 6th time I've used it since I created it in 2009 to observe that I'd "crossed the over-complication line" with a post that had a strange set of tags ("abortion, Althouse + Meade, Beccah Beushausen, beer, blogging, dolls, fake, James Frey, Meade, Oprah, Orson Welles, prayer, writing"). It took me a year to use it again, with this great quote from Gertrude Stein: "She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting." Didn't use it again until 2011 — "A Very Simple Venn Diagram of Where the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Agree" — and then once in 2017 (a labyrinthine sentence about feminism) and once in 2019 (a New Yorker critic bothered by the complexity of the movie "Joker").

The topic of that January 11th post was, like this post today, the Biden vs. Sanders question. But things were different then. Nate Silver had written:

So while Biden’s in a reasonably strong and perhaps even slightly underrated position, it’s slightly more likely than not that Biden won’t be the nominee. Sen. Bernie Sanders has the next-best shot... Like all of our models, it’s empirically driven... Since the primaries themselves are fairly complex process, the model is fairly complex also.... Models with more complexity are easier to screw up and can be more sensitive to initial assumptions....

Nicholas Kristof uses the phrase "Free at last!" to describe Hillary Clinton in a NYT column titled "Hillary Clinton, Free to Speak Her Mind."

I was going to blog about what I first saw, that headline, "Hillary Clinton, Free to Speak Her Mind." Hillary Clinton sat for an interview this week, but did she actually reveal what's in her head? Even if she's free to be revealing, is that something she did or even something she's able to do? And I was considering going super cruel and asking what it would even mean for a person who is dishonest to her core to "speak her mind"?*

But then I skimmed the column and was amazed that Kristof had seen fit to appropriate the "Free at last!" exclamation — the last words of Martin Luther King Jr.'s sacred text: "we... will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

In a week when Kendall Jenner got excoriated for appropriating "Black Lives Matter" to sell Pepsi,** why would Nicholas Kristof appropriate "Free at last!" to sell Hillary Clinton?

Talk about tone deaf — Pepsi never came out and said "Black Lives Matter." It watered BLM-ish protest down into demands for "love" and "start[ing] the conversation." Kristof lifts the slogan verbatim:

One gauge of Clinton’s new freedom is the simplest: her name... When she ran for United States Senate in New York she was Hillary Rodham Clinton, but her 2016 campaign book and ballot name downsized her to Hillary Clinton to avoid antagonizing traditionalists. Her Twitter page and website are still just Hillary Clinton — but after our interview we walked backstage together to sign a poster for Women in the World, and she scrawled: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Free at last!

And I don't think Kristof meant that as cutting sarcasm. If he did, though, I'm laughing with him.

______________________

* This sentence should be recognized as employing the rhetorical device called apophasis.

** Last night's "SNL" made fun of the Pepsi debacle, here.

How will Clinton and Trump and their proxies talk about the Orlando shooting/terrorism?

We saw how the different political candidates talked about the San Bernardino massacre, which happened last December. As I remember it, roughly, Clinton and Obama centered on guns and lectured us about the need for gun control, and Republicans talked about immigration policy and Islamic extremism.

Now, closer to the election, what framework will be imposed? Something was learned from the politics around San Bernardino and the primary season is over, so I suspect that Democrats will not choose to emphasize gun control (unless this turns out to have been a lone mentally ill person). The Democrats may try to use the idea of an attack on a gay club to criticize Donald Trump for creating a divisive atmosphere of hate, even though none of his alleged hate-mongering has been about gay people. As for what Trump and his proxies will say, it depends on who the murderer turns out to be.

I'm going to watch all the Sunday morning talk shows, and I will update this post as I hear various statements. The previous post is for comments about the terrible incident itself. Forgive me for being so brutal as to go immediately to the effect on presidential politics, but please keep the comments here to this topic, which I think is important because — like the San Bernardino massacre (and even more than it) — this event is a skewing point in electoral politics, and everyone speaking for the campaigns knows it. Sympathy will be expressed, along with warnings to wait to hear the facts, but the politics are underway, and I'm going to tell you about what everyone does on the TV shows this morning.

1. "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper devoted nearly the entire show to news coverage of the event. In the final 5-minute segment. Tapper displayed the tweets from Donald Trump — "Really bad shooting in Orlando. Police investigating possible terrorism. Many people dead and wounded." — and Hillary Clinton — "Woke up to hear the devastating news from FL. As we wait for more information, my thoughts are with those affected by this horrific act. -H" Tapper noted that the "H" at the end of a tweet on Hillary Clinton's account indicates that "she herself wrote that tweet." After that the guest is the Republican Congressman Peter King, who knows the name of the shooter but won't say it and knows of indications of "Islamist leanings," but the discussion was focused on the facts of the incident.

2. "Fox News Sunday" with Bret Baier went straight to politics, with Senator Jeff Sessions as the Trump proxy and Senator Amy Klobuchar as the Clinton proxy. Sessions, asked about the Orlando incident, said it "certainly looks like... Islamic extremism" and stressed the need to "openly and directly" confront the extremist element within Islam, including restricting immigration. Baier prompted him to connect the incident to guns and to Clinton's support for gun control, and Sessions slotted in his talking point about the Supreme Court and the supposed precariousness of the Second Amendment individual right to bear arms. Klobuchar emphasized waiting for more information and the importance of not seeming to accuse all Muslims (and she credited Sessions for having said the same thing). She brought up guns only when Baier asked her, and then only to blandly reference common-sense limits that wouldn't infringe the gun rights that she assured us Clinton believes in.

3. "Meet the Press" began with news and news analysis, and that analysis went heavily into the subject of guns, how much damage one person could do in a crowded place with the kind of guns this murderer had. The name is now being said, Omar Mateen, and there are repeated references to the man's father saying that his son was recently enraged when he saw 2 men kissing. I get the sense that the show would like to forefront hatred of gay people and minimize the significance of his religion, which is Muslim. The show switches over to Chuck Todd with the this set up: "Obviously, there are many elements to the story, we don't want to play the politics too much... but obviously, this will play into the presidential elections." That's not in the official show transcript (here). I guess the show got re-edited. Todd credits Trump and Clinton with being low key, but complains about the excessively political tweets of other, unnamed, politicians and homes in on gun control.

4. The "Face the Nation" time slot was straight news, no political spinning.

5. "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos had by far the most coverage of the presidential campaign, with a pre-recorded interview from Paul Ryan (that's worth discussing, but didn't cover the incident) and interviews with Trump's man Manafort and with Bernie Sanders. But there was a panel in the end — transcript —that eventually touched on the incident in the way that the second paragraph of this post anticipated. Katrina Vanden Heuvel was attacking Donald Trump for his "fear mongering and exploiting racial anxieties and bigotry" and, bringing up the Orlando incident, she said:

Donald Trump's idea of a counterterrorism program is banning all Muslims, bombing all families in the Middle East, essentially [sic] -- ISIS families, and torturing -- I think the, you know, grief and anger today. But we can't lose sight of senseless gun violence and the gun epidemic in this country. 66 people killed in Chicago in May. Hillary Clinton has a very strong gun control program. Trump, he's tethered to the NRA. I think that has to be...

When I heard that I said out loud, "That does not help Hillary." Then Donna Brazile followed on with generic references to "mass shootings" (and not terrorism), and I was saying "This isn't what Hillary wants to hear." That set up Bill Kristol, who prefaced his remark with "Look, I am anti-Trump" and proceeded with what I consider absolutely apt political analysis:

[I]f this was an act of Islamic terrorism, whether a lone wolf, or perhaps a lot of lone wolves turn out to have connection abroad one way or the other.... But if he was motivated by Islamist jihadist ideology, these talking points are not going to work, it's going to -- Donald Trump, the best moment, I say this with regret, the moment that helped Trump win the nomination was the San Bernardino massacre and his calling for a ban of all Muslims, which is an insane -- bad public policy, undoable, and we shouldn't do it. Having said that, it helped him. And I think we shouldn't kid ourselves. And, frankly, if these are the Democratic talking points here, senseless gun violence, it's not senseless.

It's not senseless. That's right. It's the sense of some people who have a specific ideology of hate and violence. Blaming the guns was the Democrats' instinctive move last December after the San Bernardino massacre, and it was the wrong choice politically. Hillary needs to set herself up as a resolute fighter against terrorism, and I think she will. Obviously, Trump will. It would be stupid to cede that ground to him. But real left-wingers like Katrina Vanden Heuvel — not helping Hillary —  head directly to the their anti-gun safe space.

ADDED: As noted above, what showed on "Meet the Press" for me wasn't the same as the transcript. I'm reading that now. There was a panel with Tom Brokaw, Hugh Hewitt, Amy Walter, and Joy Reid. Tom Brokaw went first and said it didn't matter whether the facts end up showing that the shooting was "connected to some kind of an international group," because, for him, the problem is guns. Hewitt focused on ISIS, but Walter and Reid stuck with the gun theme. When Hewitt said, "ISIS would do this to a hundred million Americans if they could," Reid rejoined: "But so would white nationalists."

Bill Kristol just met with Mitt Romney to try to persuade him to run as an independent candidate for President...

... or at least to support another independent candidate if Kristol is able to rustle one up. (WaPo link.)

Here's the top-rated comment over there:

William Kristol has no shame. Remember this:

"The other journalists who met Palin offered similarly effusive praise: Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”

Why anybody gives this loser any credibility is an absolute mystery to me. If I were Kristol, I'd be ashamed to show my face in public much less offer political commentary. Loser.

ADDED: Let me add a line so you can see where the left margin is. At least one commenter seems to think I wrote that "Why anybody gives this loser any credibility" business. 

"Next week, Scott Walker will go to the Packers' game, root for his state's team, & sit in the cheap seats & freeze with the common people."

Tweets Bill Kristol, right after "Chris Christie cavorting with Jerry Jones in the owner's box. Numbers plummeting in IA & NH. OTOH, will Jones write big Super PAC checks?"

Then: "And Rick Perry and Ted Cruz will go to Green Bay to root for Dallas, but will sit out in the cold with the voters rather than the donors," "What about Jeb? He doesn't watch football. He'll be at a polo match," "Huck will watch the game at a church-affiliated youth center in Des Moines," and "Rand Paul? Doesn't watch football. Doesn't approve of team sports."

"The easiest way Hillary can be stopped is if she stops herself."

"There is a reasonable chance she’ll decide not to [run again]," writes Bill Kristol (reacting to TIME's question "Can Anyone Stop Hillary?") 

She’s an intelligent woman. She remembers that her last experience of running for president wasn’t fun and didn’t end well. She knows that winning the Democratic nomination won’t be as easy as the media now pretend and that the general election will be, at best, a 50-50 proposition....

Hillary has no agenda different from that of other generic Democratic candidates, or for that matter from Barack Obama, the man she would succeed. Hillary’s first term would in reality be Obama’s third. She’d be tinkering with his successes and trying to cope with his failures. Becoming president in 2009 after eight years of dastardly Republican rule, with a chance to make things anew, was an exciting prospect for a liberal. Succeeding the modern liberal president after two terms?

Not worth it... maybe. When's the last time we had a President who followed a 2-term President from his own party? It was when we had Bush I, the man Hillary's husband defeated. Basically, Americans don't want more than 2 terms of the same. The 22d Amendment, barring anyone from election to a 3d term, was our reaction to FDR's election to a 3d and a 4th term. Before him nearly everyone followed the principle demonstrated by George Washington, serving only, at most, 2 terms, and the few who tried for a 3d failed.

Since the ratification of the 22d Amendment (in 1951), not only has it been impossible for anyone to serve a 3d term as President, efforts by other members of the President's party to follow on, being — to use Kristol's phrase — "in reality" the "third" term have all but one have failed. The one exception, George H.W. Bush, not only had Reagan as his predecessor, but also had a weak opponent (Michael Dukakis).

"The fact is that Obama is the only president we have."

"We can’t abdicate our position in the world for the next three years. So Republicans will have to resist the temptation to weaken him when the cost is weakening the country. A party that for at least two generations has held high the banner of American leadership and strength should not cast a vote that obviously risks a damaging erosion of this country’s stature and credibility abroad."

 From Bill Kristol's explanation of why "yes" is the correct answer for Republicans.

Some clarification about what the government does with the 3 billion phone records it collects every day.

I'm not saying the first guest on today's "Fox News Sunday," Rand Paul, wasn't sharp and interesting, but I really appreciated the knowledge and calm expertise that General Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA and the CIA (under Bush), brought to the table. (The boldface is mine.)

CHRIS WALLACE: General Hayden, let's talk first of all about the general reaction you have to Senator Paul. I'm going to get into specific issues with you. As a man who used to run these programs, how important and how effective have they been in keeping us safe and how do you feel when you hear Senator Paul talk about class action lawsuits to the Supreme Court, new congressional restrictions?

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN, FORMER HEAD OF NSA AND CIA: Well, first of all, Chris, with regard to how effective they are, I think they're very effective. We had two presidents doing the same thing with regard to electronic surveillance. Now, that seems to me to suggest that these things do work. Now, with regard to what the senator said -- if I believed NSA was doing some of the things the senator fears they're doing, I would have been backstopping him during your first segment. He said we're trolling through millions of records. That's just simply not true. The government acquires records as business records from the telecom providers, but then doesn't go into that database without an arguable reason connected to terrorism to ask that database a question. If you don't have any link to that original predicate, terrorism, your phone records are never touched.

Why did the White House deceive us after the Benghazi attack?

Ask Bill Kristol and Peter Wehner in The Wall Street Journal:

Presumably for two reasons. The first is that the true account of events undercut the president's claim during the campaign that al Qaeda was severely weakened in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The second is that a true account of what happened in Benghazi that night would have revealed that the president and his top national-security advisers did not treat a lethal attack by Islamic terrorists on Americans as a crisis. The commander in chief not only didn't convene a meeting in the Situation Room; he didn't even bother to call his Defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not a single presidential finger was lifted to help Americans under attack.

This is an embarrassment and a disgrace. Is it too much to hope that President Obama is privately ashamed of his inattention and passivity that night?  

I think he is ashamed. Here's what I've been assuming happened: It looked like our people were overwhelmed and doomed, so there was shock, sadness, and acceptance. But then the fight went on for 7 or 8 hours. The White House folk decided there was nothing to do but accept the inevitable, and then they witnessed a valiant fight which they had done nothing to support. It was always too late to help. It was too late after one hour, then too late after 2 hours, then too late after 3 hours.... When were these people going to die already? After that was all over, how do you explain what you did?

IN THE COMMENTS: CWJ said:

Althouse's surmised timeline if true is the ultimate in —

"What difference, at this point, would it make?"

Perhaps Hillary was telling us more than met the eye. 

Congressman Cotton was excellent on drones and Benghazi on "Fox News Sunday."

(Transcript. Video.) I had never heard of the guy, but he impressed the hell out of me, in part because the host Chris Wallace, introduced Cotton — a Republican from Arkansas — this way:

Congressman Cotton, for people who don't know you, you are kind of an interesting figure. You went to Harvard, you went to Harvard Law School, and then you spent five years on active duty, on the front lines, in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you have got a lot of credibility on this issue on both sides of the equation.

I'm not a complete pushover for credentials, but this made me want to pay attention when Wallace invited him to respond to Senator Dianne Feinstein's idea that we need, as Wallace put it, "a secret drone court, where the president would have to go to get approval before putting terror suspects on his kill list.... How do you feel about this idea? Before the president could target someone for assassination, especially an American citizen, he'd have to go get approval from a judge?"

"Over the weekend, the newest, and by far the most disturbing, revelations surrounding the Benghazi attack were revealed."

An item at FrontPageMag.com:

Several sources have pointed to the possibility that a major CIA gun-running operation aimed at arming anti-Assad Al-Qaeda-affiliated forces was in danger of being exposed. If true, the information casts an even more devastating pall over the Benghazi terrorist attack and the administration’s botched handling of the region.

The decision to stand down as the Benghazi terrorist attack was underway was met with extreme opposition from the inside. The Washington Times's James Robbins, citing a source inside the military, reveals that General Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Africa Command, who got the same emails requesting help received by the White House, put a rapid response team together and notified the Pentagon it was ready to go. He was ordered to stay put. “His response was to screw it, he was going to help anyhow,” writes Robbins. “Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he was now relieved of his command.”

If true, Ham has apparently decided he wants no part of the responsibility for the decision not to help those in harm’s way. He is not alone. As the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol revealed late Friday, a spokesperson, “presumably at the direction of CIA director David Petraeus,” released the following statement: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”

Sarah Palin wants Akin out.

"... Palin championed Sarah Steelman, who was her choice for the ticket in Missouri’s bloody Republican primary, and added that if Akin doesn’t drop out by the end of September, 'it’s going to be a third party then.'"

AND: This, from Bill Kristol:

Now is the time for kind, unassuming—and private—persuasion by conservatives, by pro-life and pro-marriage advocates, by serious people who've worked with Akin and by his fellow Missourians. I have reason to believe that's now beginning to happen behind the scenes. And I suspect that by the Democratic convention, by Labor Day, Akin will have stepped aside. 

Condoleeza Rice is "either very worried about a socialist threat to America, or she wants to be Vice President."

Said a "Romney surrogate" about the 13-minutes speech Condi gave at a recent "closed-door fundraising retreat" for Romney in Park City. Audio of the speech at the link.

I arrived at that link via Drudge, who is pushing the Condi-for-VP story big time. Here's what Drudge looks like as I write this. Continuing with its recent black-and-white design theme, Drudge has a big photo of Condi, with a headline leading to a Drudge Report "exclusive":

Late Thursday evening, Mitt Romney's presidential campaign launched a new fundraising drive, 'Meet The VP' -- just as Romney himself has narrowed the field of candidates to a handful, sources reveal.

And a surprise name is now near the top of the list: Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice!

The timing of the announcement is now set for 'coming weeks'....

It was Condi who received two standing ovations at Romney's Utah retreat a few weeks ago, and everyone left with her name on their lips.

Rice made an extended argument for American leadership in the world.

Romney could use a sidekick who will speak with gravitas about foreign policy. But does Condi know how to run for office? (She knows how to behave in the national spotlight, so she's in a better position to jump into this role than Sarah Palin was, even though Palin had run for office in Alaska.) What about the fact that Rice supports abortion rights? (Romney is going to need a lot of votes from people, like me, who support abortion rights. If we are willing to vote for him even though he opposes abortion rights, pro-lifers should be able to deal with a pro-choice VP.)

"I’ve got to think Monday night’s debate further swelled the groundswell of support for Mitch Daniels."

It's Bill Kristol again:

The liveliest part of the debate was at the beginning, when Mitt went after Newt—and Republicans all over America watched with fascinated horror at the thought that these are the two GOP frontrunners. The only spectacle in American politics more off-putting than Newt Gingrich in self-righteous defense mode is Mitt Romney in self-righteous attack mode. I thought Mitt’s attacks were somewhat more dishonest than Newt’s defenses were disingenuous, but it was good to move on to the rest of the debate, where little further damage was done.

My conclusion: If Mitch Daniels’s effective tax rate is 30 percent rather than 15 percent, and if he was never paid $1.6 million by Freddie Mac, he can be the next president.

By the way, Mitch Daniels was my original, provisional choice for the GOP nomination, in part because I'm sentimental about Indiana.  Kristol's recent Mitchomania interests me!

I'm working on slogans playing off the similarity between the names Mitt and Mitch... but I keep including the word "bitch," so I'll spare you the examples.

William Kristol: "A Candidate to be Drafted Later?"

He floats the possibility and ends the post: "I notice a new online petition was launched Saturday night to try to produce one possible outcome. It’s at runmitchrun.com."

James Taranto: "Rick Perry was awful in last night's debate. Just awful."

"The swaggering Texas governor kept scrapping with the chipper Mitt Romney, and he kept losing.... The low point came when he seized on Romney's greatest vulnerability and ended up babbling:"

"I think Americans just don't know sometimes which Mitt Romney they're dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it--was before he was before the social programs, from the standpoint of he was for standing up for Roe v. Wade before he was against Roe v. Wade? He was for Race to the Top, he's for ObamaCare, and now he's against it. I mean, we'll wait until tomorrow and--and--and see which Mitt Romney we're really talking to tonight."

Yeah, when I heard that I said: "Perry has a long 'he was for it before he was against it' routine to recite about Romney, but his delivery is slow and halting, like he's getting tired."

ADDED: William Kristol says: "Yikes...  no front-runner in a presidential field has ever, we imagine, had as weak a showing as Rick Perry.  It was close to a disqualifying two hours for him. "

Bill Kristol: "Bob Dylan Said It Best."

Yeah, he did, but you didn't. That's the most pathetic appropriation of Dylan I've seen in a long time.

Here's a rule. If the only Bob Dylan song you can think of to quote is "The Times They Are A-Changin'," don't quote Bob Dylan. Please heed the call.

"According to Bob Woodward, National Security Adviser Jim Jones called Emanuel and his fellow political aides 'the water bugs.'"

Writes William Kristol:

“They flit around,” Jones said. “Rahm gets an idea at 10 a.m. and wants a briefing by 4 p.m., and I will say no,” because the work can’t be done that quickly. According to Woodward, Jones believed “the water bugs did not understand war or foreign relations .  .  . and were too interested in measuring the short-term political impact of the president’s decisions in these areas.”

But Emanuel turned out not to be particularly good at measuring the political impact of the president’s decisions. Or was his sage political counsel too often rejected by the president—as he has suggested on not-so-deep background to friendly journalists?

UPDATE: Jones goes.