"John McCain received the fake and phony dossier. You hear about the dossier? It was paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton."

"And John McCain got it. And what did he do? He didn’t call me. He turned it over to the FBI hoping to put me in jeopardy...."

Trump explains why he didn't like John McCain. It's about more than the dossier.

President Trump on John McCain: "I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve. I don't care about this. I didn’t get thank you. That's ok. We sent him on the way, but I wasn't a fan of John McCain." pic.twitter.com/hG4XwOiIBO

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 20, 2019

Also in this clip is the part that I believe is getting the most press: "I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve. I don't care about this. I didn’t get thank you. That's ok. We sent him on the way, but I wasn't a fan of John McCain." The way....

The NYT fact-checks Trump's speech and doesn't find anything false... though it finds a lot of things "misleading." Like this, about the dossier:

Senator John McCain did obtain a copy of the so-called Steele Dossier, which outlined a range of often salacious but unproven misdeeds by President Trump and his associates — and he did turn it over to the F.B.I. — but this occurred after the 2016 presidential election. The information provided by Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier, had already reached F.B.I. agents investigating Mr. Trump in September, and he met with agents in October.

I find the fact-check misleading. The most important thing I need to know is whether McCain knew the FBI already had the same information, and that's not in the NYT fact-check. Trump's main point has to do with McCain's state of mind, which was to put Trump in jeopardy, so give us what we need to judge the truth of what Trump actually said. Why won't you do that? Fake fact check!!

The NYT fact-check is also misleading in writing "outlined a range of often salacious but unproven misdeeds by President Trump." It should say something like "unproven allegations of misdeeds." It's written as if the NYT means to assert that Trump really did those things, but the dossier didn't prove it. Trump called it "the fake and phony dossier," and the NYT fact-check declines to talk about whether it's "fake and phony," and I have to presume that's because they don't want to say Trump is correct about that. Instead, the Times is still trying to float the idea that these really were "salacious... misdeeds by President Trump." Fake fact check!!

Fall colors.

"Trump colors the fall campaign landscape: ‘He’s been the only thing that matters’" (WaPo).

The striking split screen as this week wound down — former president Barack Obama made his campaign-trail debut mourning the departure of decency and lawfulness from the White House just as President Trump called on the Justice Department to hunt down a nameless personal enemy — neatly framed the midterm dynamic.

The prose is by... hmm... it says Philip Rucker...

That's with the "reader view" button pushed, but if I go back to the standard view, I see Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker...

I wonder what the Parker/Rucker division of labor was? That is, who tarted up the prose? Who turned up the saturation on the fall colors? Color us Trump. He's always had the color dialed up. Color him ORANGE! Yeah, that's a very fall color. Pumpkin spice!

The spike in Democratic enthusiasm....

Spike my latte with nutmeg and clove.

The funeral for John McCain was as much a commemoration of the Vietnam War hero and senator-statesman as it was a rumination by official Washington on the existential threat of Trump.

All week, doubt hovered over the president about his intellectual capacity and fitness for office....

The Trump stories were all consuming....

The one-two punch of the Woodward book and anonymous Times column inspired Trump to take the extraordinary step of publicly defending his very mental capacity....

Obama came out of political hibernation Friday.... Even Obama, who until now had pulled his punches and studiously avoided mentioning Trump by name, found himself addressing his successor directly and forcefully. He called Trump a “symptom” of a dark turn in the nation’s politics toward bigotry, fearmongering, corruption, dishonesty and an erosion of institutions....

Trump brings out the fall colors by being his usual self — orange — but he's got everyone else turning up the saturation — even though John McCain died that civility might live....

“This is not normal,” Obama said at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.....”

“The three Democratic pillars are raising wages, fixing health care and cleaning up corruption,” said Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist. “But I just don’t think you can sugarcoat the fact that people are fearful of Trump, and if that makes them turn out to vote in record numbers for the midterms, then that is fantastic.”

Yes, it's just fantastic to scare the hell out of people if it makes them vote the way you want. Everybody's Trump now. Everybody's orange. Because look, it worked for him, so let's all do it.  Even though McCain —  The Icon of Civility — died that we might all come together.

This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. These are dangerous times....

The part of the famous anonymous NYT op-ed that's about civility and John McCain.

I'm rereading "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration/I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations." And I'm struck by how much of it is boilerplate that has nothing to do with what this individual purports to know about weird happenings within the White House.

Here are the last 3 paragraphs before the final paragraph:

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Civility! I never believe it when they say "civility."

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap...

I spent yesterday watching the Kavanaugh hearings, and I can tell you that the Democratic Senators and the shouting protesters they brought into the hearing room blithely do their own incivility whenever it suits their political interests. It's not a special Trump thing. Trump is just more straightforward about speaking his mind or lying to us or whatever's going on with him.

... with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

Sorry, I don't need another funeral oration. That sort of thing is okay within a death-ritual context, but in ordinary political discourse it's fusty, gassy blather. And I'm not buying the repackaging of McCain the Dead Man as the Anti-Trump. McCain was the feisty maverick who didn't lean in hard enough to get elected. Trump is the man who got elected President of the United States. That's a fact, no matter how hard it is to swallow.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

McCain was a real person. He was not a paragon.



Back then McCain was too crazy to be President, but now that he's dead, he's a symbol of the virtue everyone wants for the other guy: civility.

What would John McCain, with his profound civility and wonderful bipartisanship, think of the disruptions at the Kavanaugh hearings?

If you, like me, consider all calls for civility bullshit, you wouldn't have to ask that question.

All the interrupting, all the shouting, all the impugning of the integrity of a man who presents himself as a thoroughly good person....

Senate Democrats tore into President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee on Tuesday, painting Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as a narrow-minded partisan as the opening day of his confirmation hearings verged on pandemonium. Dozens of screaming protesters were hauled out of the hearing room in handcuffs.

That's Sheryl Gail Stolberg and Adam Liptak in the NYT.

The verbal brawl began moments after the hearings began.... [T]he hearings were dominated by Democratic theatrics and crackling protests. For more than an hour at the outset, irate Democrats and a frustrated Mr. Grassley parried back and forth.... Protesters, most of them women, shouted down senators; by day’s end, Capitol Police said a total of 70 people had been arrested, including nine outside the room....

Stolberg and Liptak do reference the calls for civility at the McCain events:

The session... gave Americans their first extended glimpse of Judge Kavanaugh, 53, who... talked about going to ball games with his father and coaching his daughter in basketball, drawing bipartisan smiles when he gave a shoutout to each member of the team.

But that was about the extent of the comity; just days after members of the Senate had gathered together in a bipartisan show of civility at the funeral of Senator John McCain, the crowded hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building seethed with antipathy....

A show of civility. That's all it was. Nice to have the truth smack us in the face so abruptly, lest we get starry eyed. I wonder if the Senate Democrats debated about whether jettisoning civility so soon after conspicuously bullshitting about it would be too egregiously hypocritical. Whatever. If they did, they decided it was worth the risk.

The first person to interrupt and breach decorum was Kamala Harris. And:

Republicans countered that Democrats were harping on access to documents because they could not quibble with Judge Kavanaugh’s qualifications. And they took digs at their Democratic colleagues on the judiciary panel, several of whom — Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala D. Harris of California — are weighing presidential runs.

Plainly, Harris, Klobuchar, and Booker don't think civility is how you get elected. And that's my "civility bullshit" theory: "civility" is what you say to con your opponents into standing down. Not something you impose on yourself.

This makes me think of the old feminist slogan, "Well-behaved women seldom make history." Here's the original context for that saying, from a scholarly article by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:

Cotton Mather called them “The Hidden Ones.” They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard. Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all.

I'm not a proponent of civility. I'm a proponent of calling bullshit on calls for civility, which intimidate and inhibit some but not all of us. And that's not because I like rudeness. It's because I like fairness.

*** 

Interesting correction at the bottom of the article:

An earlier version of this article misstated the proportion of documents from Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s time in the White House Counsel’s Office that have been made available to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee was given 445,000 of 663,000 total documents, which is a portion but not a small portion of the total.

All that smeech.

I learned a new word yesterday. It's an old word — it's been in English since Old English — but it happened to be newly featured in the sidebar at the OED site, due to some recent editorial tweaking of some kind. The word is "smeech":

Smoke, esp. foul-smelling or pungent smoke; dense or thick vapour; fine dust suspended in the air. Also as a count noun: a quantity of smoke or dust; a stench. Also (and in earliest use) fig.

It's a rare word, but not obsolete (though "chiefly Eng. regional (south-western"). And look how useful it is, especially figuratively.

I'm working up the energy to write up a post about the orations about civility at the McCain memorials and how the Democratic Senators saw fit to behave at the Kavanaugh hearings yesterday, one more post that will get my "civility bullshit" tag, a tag that stands for the proposition that calls for civility in American political discourse are always only about quieting other people down and not to be followed yourself the next time you think your side will profit from getting loud, rude, and hyperpartisan.

But sometimes I don't like to say the BS-word. When I'm feeling delicate, maybe I'll be saying "smeech."

Some historical examples of "smeech":

1899 S. Baring-Gould Bk. of West II. vii. 110 Gases escape in puffs from the furnace doors, which the men designate ‘smeeches’, and these contain arsenic in a vaporised form....
1985 in Dict. Newfoundland Eng. (1999) (Electronic ed.) Suppl. (at cited word) I fair feels the niceness and the mildness coming off me in waves like..the smeech off a pair of lumberwoods stockings.

"When Is It OK to Blow Off Weddings, Funerals, and Other Major Milestones?"

That's a good etiquette question, answered at Lifehacker in 2017 during "Evil Week," when Lifehacker covered "less-than-seemly methods for getting shit done."

The author of this piece — the delightfully named Lucy Cohen Blatter — says things like "Depending on how far you live from the person who’s invited you, that’s a useful rule of thumb for most of us—closer relationships will almost always take top priority." It's pretty focused on maintaining relationships and not hurting feelings too much. So there's one answer to the question that she never gets anywhere near.

It's totally OK to blow off a funeral when the previously alive person said explicitly and publicly I don't want you at my funeral.

Now, you've get the best excuse ever: You were disinvited. And funerals don't even have invitations. The now-dead person went out of his way to tell you to keep out. You've got a lock on nonattendance. Who can say you blew it off? You're respecting the dead man's wishes.

But here's a thought experiment: What if Donald Trump decided that in fact he should attend John McCain's memorial service in Washington (the one with the eulogies from Barack Obama and George W. Bush)? What if he analyzed it and determined that — despite McCain's pointed effort to absolve him of obligation to attend — it was not OK to blow it off?

This is kind of a 2-part question, because first you have to figure out what plausible analysis could take you there. I see the path to that conclusion, so I'm convinced it's possible. The second part of the question is how would Trump do this strange thing and attend the service when we all know John McCain's expressed preference? What would Trump say, where would he sit, how would he act?

Here's an analogy to help you think about it. A married woman dies, and her husband and children are the dominant figures at the funeral. But she had a lover, X, and the husband knows about X, hates him, and the woman, before she died, told X that he must stay away from the funeral. X might nevertheless decide that he must attend and concentrate on how to do it, maybe slip in quietly and find a place in the back.

IN THE COMMENTS: D 2 Dylan-parodied:

I received your non-invitation yesterday
About the time the flagpole broke
You told me not to come a'mourning
Was that some kind of joke
All these People that you mention
Yes I know them they are quite lame
So I rode an escalator and give them all bad nicknames
Right now I can't read too good
Guess I'll make it all up as I go
And in three days time they'll report another
Horrid Trump No-no.

Yesterday, I watched one episode of "The Daily Show" and one episode of "The Colbert Report," and immediately afterwards bought the new books of the 2 authors I'd seen interviewed.

That was weird, although I see the connection to my long-time habit of feeling the need to buy 2 things if I'm going to buy 1 thing. I don't have a problem buying nothing, but 1 seems to require 2.

Here's the video of Matt Bai on "The Daily Show," pushing "All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid."

Here's the video of Walter Isaacson on "The Colbert Report," pushing "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution."

The secret video reveals Romney as "the sneering plutocrat..."

"... fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party," says Jonathan Chait.

[Romney] believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)...

The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable.  It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.

There are plenty of conservatives who will celebrate all of that. Not the "sneering plutocrat" part, but the Paul Ryanism.

Chait is demonstrating how Democrats can stir up antagonism to Romney, but much of that antagonism will be felt by people who were never going to vote for Romney... like Chait himself. I have never hated Romney, he says. Yeah, you didn't hate him because he seemed so bland and ineffectual, and you didn't think he'd win. But Paul Ryan and his crisp conservatism — that, you hate. I'd say Romney ought to avoid sucking up to Chait. That's the McCain mistake: You get liberals to like you, but they don't vote for you, and the conservatives lose interest.

Chait gives it all away when he brings up Ryan and portrays him as contemptuous. "Sneering plutocrat" is a great phrase, and I expect Democrats to take advantage and plunge forward with that meme. But Ryan is no sneering plutocrat. He brings youthful vitality and intelligence to the conservative cause. If Romney seemed like Ryan in the secret video, that's a useful revelation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Crimso said:

Did Chait actually suggest it is wrong to have contempt for looters and moochers? 

And edutcher said:

When you've lost Jonathan Chait...

you've really started to scare the Lefties. 

Things said about Dick Cheney lead me to reaffirm my decision to vote for Obama.

Instapundit picked up on the Cheney-hate wisecrack I blogged yesterday:

CIVILITY CAMPAIGN NOT CATCHING ON: “Cheney’s heart transplant. Wouldn’t that be the worst day ever? Not only are you dead but they’ve given your heart to THAT prick!”

Plus, from the comments: “Obama ends up adopting half these policies in his continuance of his war on terror. And yet, whereas these policies made Cheney Darth Vader and the Emperor rolled into one, under Obama these policies are not even worth mentioning.” That Obama adopted them too only makes Cheney more evil — for undermining the fierce moral urgency of change. And then mocking The One for going along.

That last link goes to Tom Maguire, who notes Glenn Greenwald's moaning over Cheney's solemn observation that Obama, as President, has recognized the importance of the Bush administration's policies and made them his own:

“I think he’s been through the fires of becoming president and having to make decisions and live with the consequences,” Cheney said. “I think he’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate ... I think he’s learned from experience.”

And I just want to say that this is part of why I voted for Obama. I explained my vote on November 9, 2008, just after the election and made a prediction that I think you should now see was right. Here's the key part, where I quote what I blogged on October 30:

October 30: I come to terms with the problem of 1-party government:

Usually, I prefer divided government, but that doesn't mean I need to support McCain. I've seen McCain put way too much effort into pleasing Democrats and flouting his own party, and I can picture Obama standing up to the Democratic Congress and being his own man. What, really, will he owe them? McCain, by contrast, will need them. And we've seen that he wants to be loved by them.

Sometimes, I think that letting the Democrats control everything for 2 years would work out just fine. Let one party take responsibility for everything. When they can't whine and finger-point, what will they actually step up and do? It will be interesting to know. And it will do the Republicans good to retool and define themselves, with an eye toward the 2010 election. I'd like to see this clarification after so many years of obfuscation.

This goes along with my problem that McCain had abandoned the effort to define himself as conservative. I could see myself voting for a conservative. I would like some good conservatism. But I did not see it in McCain. Certainly, just bringing in Palin was no substitute for having his own clear principles.

Also in that November 9th post I quote something I wrote on November 3:

One thing I don't like about John McCain is that he never showed respect for Bush. He was all about distancing himself from Bush, but if it's distance you want from Bush, there's Obama. And Obama had no reason to defend the other party's President, but for all his criticism of Bush's policies, I don't remember Obama taking ugly potshots at Bush. McCain treated Bush like an outcast. Was there even a word of defense for the man who protected us from terrorist attacks for 7 years?

Before you bitch about Obama, do a clear, honest visualization of where we'd be right now if McCain were President. Take account of the benefit we have received as the Obama administration has had to embrace many of Bush's policies, and these things have become the norm. And look at what the Republicans have done with their period of exile. Now, seriously picture what the political discourse would be if the Republicans had held onto power.

I know some of you are ready to list the terrible things the Democrats did in their 2 years of dominance. I'm not saying there wasn't a down side. The Democrats did a lot more damage than I thought possible. But McCain would have gone along with a lot of things, and there would be continuing partisan criticism about the wars. Everything having to do with national security would be pinned on McCain and presented in the worst possible light, for the aggrandizement of the Democratic Party.

If McCain had won, we would not have experienced the revitalization of the conservative movement that had such a tremendous effect on the 2010 elections and is shaping the next presidential election. Finally, think about all the angst there would be right now over the lost opportunity to experience the brilliant hope that was Barack Obama. Instead of the wistful imaginings of the glories of Obama administration that could have been, we have the reality. We get to see it, criticize it, and sharpen our conservative politics on it.

"Would you ever in your wildest dreams imagine Chris Matthews flatteringly comparing Sarah Palin to former President Bill Clinton?"

Noel Sheppard asks before speculating:

Are Obama-loving press members trying to orchestrate an outcome by giving an abundance of attention to the person they hope Obama will face in November 2012?

That's basically what they did in 2008, he notes.

But the press liked McCain, I think, because he was relatively liberal. Palin isn't. Palin is good at getting all the attention, and I worry that it will prevent better candidates from getting the early support they need to survive the caucuses and primaries.

As for Chris Matthews, I suspect he's just desperate for ratings and knows how many viewers he could get if Sarah would bring her celebrity-power to his little show.

Sarah Palin is dumb.

By her own words, Sarah Palin is dumb. Here's the excerpt of pages 255-257 of "Going Rogue: An American Life":

By the third week in September, a “Free Sarah” campaign was under way and the press at large was growing increasingly critical of the McCain camp’s decision to keep me, my family and friends back home, and my governor’s staff all bottled up. Meanwhile, the question of which news outlet would land the first interview was a big deal, as it always is with a major party candidate.

From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News. The campaign’s general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn’t have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon.

Why didn't you have a say? There's that "really" hedging: You didn't really have a say. You're pleading passivity and impotence but you want us to think you have what it takes to be President of the United States?

“Katie really likes you,” she said to me one day. “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom. She has teenage daughter like you. She just relates to you,” Nicolle said. “believe me, I know her very well. I’ve worked with her.” 

It is inane to be swayed by this blather. Most of Palin's opponents would probably say the same sort of thing — or at least would have said the same thing at the time, back before any negative stories about her family had appeared. Isn't it lovely that Sarah Palin has a nice husband and kids and she has a great job too?

Women have been patted on the head like that for years. It does not express more profound respect. Indeed, it often betrays disrespect under the surface. If — back when my sons were children — someone had told me that he was impressed by my work as a law professor because I was a "working mom," I would have felt insulted. Perhaps he only meant well, but I would make a mental note to be suspicious of him. The famous Samuel Johnson quote would spring to mind: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

If Sarah Palin did not see the limited value of Nicolle Wallace's comment about Katie Couric, then she is too pollyannaish and unsophisticated to be trusted with presidential power. Couric is a pussycat compared to the world leaders who will smile and exude pleasantries and then stab you in the back.

Nicolle had left her gig at CBS just a few months earlier to hook up with the McCain campaign. I had to trust her experience, as she had dealt with national politics more than I had.

Had to trust? Because of your limited experience? Who else would you trust? Wallace was pushing for her own former employer, CBS! Her recommendation of Couric had an element of self-interest and should have been discounted.

But something always struck me as peculiar about the way she recalled her days in the White House, when she was speaking on behalf of President George W. Bush. She didn't have much to say that was positive about her former boss or the job in general. Whenever I wanted to give a shout-out to the White House’s homeland security efforts after 9/11, we were told we couldn’t do it. I didn’t know if that was Nicolle’s call.

Why didn't you know? Why did you trust this person? Why do you now think it makes you look good to blame her for your traipse into the lioness's den?

Nicolle went on to explain that Katie really needed a career boost. “She just has such low self-esteem,” Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.”

Katie has low self-esteem?! Bullshit! Anyone with the stuff to be President would have said bullshit. Or something like: Look, I'm running for Vice President. I can't be distracted by some TV diva's need for an emotional boost. Not unless I know it will translate into making me look great. But how would that work? Her boost is only likely to come if she makes me look terrible. Even if she has low self-esteem, #1, I don't care, it's hardly a pressing issue I need to be thinking about, and #2, that makes her more dangerous to me. She can't trust anybody? Well, I don't trust her. And Nicolle, how can you even present me with such an argument that is so specious on its face?

I was thinking, And this has to do with John McCain’s campaign how?

Nicolle said. “She wants you to like her.”

She wants me to like her or she wants America — especially the media elite — to like her? Come on, Nicolle, Katie Couric can't be that much of a sad sack. And if she is, I don't want to be seen with her.

Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

You know who I feel sorry for? Kim Jong Il. I'm afraid he's lonely.

“You know what? We’ll schedule a segment with her,” Nicolle said. “If it doesn’t go well, if there’s no chemistry, we won’t do any others.”

Chemistry? What is this, a date — perhaps just a coffee, so that if you don't like her it will be over soon, and you won't need to see her again?

Meanwhile, the media blackout continued. It got so bad that a couple of times I had a friend in Anchorage track down phone numbers for me, and then I snuck in calls to folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and someone I thought was Larry Kudlow but turned out to be Neil Cavuto’s producer.

She had trouble getting phone numbers? She "snuck" around, relying on friends? Like it's a Nancy Drew caper. And did she not see the downside of allowing right-winger to draw her out? That wasn't fair to McCain. McCain's people locked her down? Did she think carefully about their reasons? Does she think carefully about anything? Why did she agree to be McCain's running mate? She won't take responsibility for her own difficulties.

Apparently, they were afraid you were not ready, and they were right, so why didn't you trust them or at least accept that you owed them control over the presidential campaign? You agreed to take the subordinate position, and you had to know that their reasons for picking you had to do with image and style. If you weren't prepared to do it their way, you should not have accepted the part. At the very least, you should not have been mystified about the way they were treating you. You should have been looking at the campaign strategy from every angle and building your sophistication, not just aching to burst free and expose yourself to the world — which, as you soon learned, did not go well.

It seems that Sarah Palin wasn't able or didn't want to bother to analyze whether she was ready to debut on the big media stage, and she wasn't large-minded enough to think beyond herself to what it would mean for the whole campaign. That is, she was dumb. She was too dumb to handle campaign responsibilities properly, so she was clearly too dumb to step into the role of President of the United States.

Could she build up her political intelligence? Might she have it now or by 2012? If these 2 pages of  "Going Rogue" are any evidence, she is displaying her weaknesses all over again, and she is still too dumb to be President. And, most scarily, she doesn't know how dumb she still is.

Voting against McCain, irked by the over-promotion of Obama.

Christopher Hitchens vents, post-election:

And I found it pretty easy to cast a vote that told the Republican Party, for which I recommended a vote last time, not to try any of this shit again. No more McCarthy tactics; no more stumblebum quitting of the campaign trail and attempting to pull out of the first presidential debate in order to wind up voting to save Lehman Bros.; no more driveling Christian fundamentalism; no more insinuation that only those silly enough to endorse them are "real Americans." No more sneers at San Francisco as if it weren't a real American city. McCain and his preposterous running mate will just have to believe in an afterlife in which they can live down the shame of what they attempted this year.

But I might possibly have voted for them all the same, clothes pin clamped over my nose in the voting booth, if only because of the crucial struggle for a free Iraq and an autonomous Kurdistan. And, in such a case, I would have been very annoyed at the suggestion that my vote was a racist one. "Historic," yelled the very headline across the top of my morning newspaper. (Just the news, please, if you would be so kind.) Would the letters have been so big for the first female vice president? And isn't it already historic that millions of white Christians voted, win or lose, for a man with one Kenyan parent, that parent having been raised as a Muslim?

More at the link.

The reports from inside the McCain campaign are not pretty.

Carl Cameron is on fire, spilling the dirt on Sarah Palin (and reducing Bill O'Reilly to near silence):

[View video here.]

Via Allahpundit, who comments:

Unlike the first clip, this one does corroborate some of the details in the Newsweek report — sort of. Newsweek claims Palin appeared to McCain’s aides in a bath towel; Cameron says it’s a bathrobe. It’s not clear if he’s lifting that story from the piece or if he got it from a source firsthand; if the latter, then there’s either one very determined person leaking to multiple news outlets or … it’s a full-court press....

I assume this is a sign that Maverick’s headed back to the center, because if he thinks the base is sore at him now, wait until his cronies’ attempts to scapegoat their idol start percolating.

More from Carl Cameron in this clip (which you've probably already seen):



We don't know who's telling these stories, but obviously, there are many people with the motivation to blame others. Even assuming the stories are true, they don't have to be told. Why destroy Palin, a rising star in the Republican Party? Who wants her ruined? I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to be ruined. I want to know if the stories are true, and I want them in their most accurate form. (She thought Africa was a country? Really? Was this the slip of a tired, inattentive person, or someone who is clearly an ignoramus?) But I also want to know who wants us to know all these ugly things and why. It can't be simply a matter of defending McCain. McCain chose Palin, and if she's no good, he bears more blame than she does. And McCain isn't going to run again, so he would do well to be gracious and low-profile right now.

ADDED: Rush Limbaugh is raging about this story. Who is doing the leaking? "Why do it on Fox?... These are the people who work for moderate Republicans." His theory is the "country club" Republicans are trying to protect their own interests and to prevent the rebuilding of the party on genuinely conservative ideology.