Traveling in south Texas this summer, we stumbled through Maverick County, a surprisingly populous county made up mostly of scrubland on the Rio Grande. It is named for Samuel Maverick, one of the great ranchers of early Texas. Maverick owned so much cattle and land that he refused to brand his cattle as a point of pride. Unbranded cattle found wandering on the range were presumed to be Maverick’s. And the word came to refer to someone who stubbornly insisted on doing things his own way.
P.S. For another great moment in Texas language history, Maverick’s grandson, Maury Maverick, gave us the word “gobbledygook” to describe bureaucratic jargon he encountered as part of the Smaller War Plants Committee during World War II.
Watching the RNC, I am really glad McCain didn’t pick Tim Pawlenty. Seems nice enough, but he’d fire up the base like a bell pepper straight from the fridge. The sort of fellow who would have given a very gracious concession speech after a 5 point loss.
Now speaking: Bill Frist. One of the worst delivered speeches I’ve ever seen from an elected (or formerly elected) official. Congress really sucked when he was majority leader.
Update: Later now, it’s Tom Ridge, another fellow who would have made a bad VP pick. He too would have given a decent concession speech.
Last night made Palin look great; today, watching all of the people he didn’t pick, his choice looks better.
Apollo posted this at 7:16 PM EDT on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
Remember Obama The Post-Racialist. Its one of the chief reasons The High Priest cites for his worship. Well apparently his followers haven’t gotten the message:
The Harvard-educated couple that the Democrats want to install in the White House are part of an elitist, “uppity” class, a Republican congressman said Thursday.
Lynn Westmoreland, a two-term Republican who represents some of Atlanta’s suburbs, commented about class when asked about the performances under pressure of his party’s vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov., and the Democratic nominee’s wife, Michelle Obama, as they introduced themselves to the nation in their separate convention speeches.
“Honestly, I’ve never paid that much attention to Michelle Obama,” Westmoreland said. “Just what little I’ve seen of her and Senator [Barack] Obama, is that they’re a member of an elitist class . . . that thinks that they’re uppity.”
Westmoreland declined to elaborate further, though he did repeat one part of his comment when asked to clarify.
“Uppity, you said?” he was asked.
“Yeah, uppity,” Westmoreland replied.
Later, Westmoreland’s press secretary offered a clarification.
“This was an adjective for elitism, not a code word. It was obviously not a racially tinged remark,” said the press secretary, Brian Robinson.
Westmoreland is white. The Obamas are black.
Vanessa Beasley, who teaches political rhetoric at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said “uppity” is a word that hits the ear of African-Americans in a negative way — evoking images of the pre-civil rights era, when powerful whites sometimes punished blacks who spoke up for themselves.
“It has very clear roots in the history of slavery in the South,” Beasley said. “The term ‘uppity’ has such a specific, contextual historic meaning. It is more evocative of a particular moment in history and particular set of fears that exist today within certain parts of the electorate.
“The racial politics that it reanimates are very worrisome.”
For all you clueless morons out there here is the definition of uppity:
This story makes me a sad panda. I don’t want to live in a world where “hot” is “20 years out of date.”
In fact, some argue Palin might be a little too long in the tooth for such tresses, sparking another squabble: to cut or not to cut after hitting 40. Yes, long hair evokes youth, but long hair after 40 can flirt with desperation.
Anyone who can write the phrase “flirt with desperation” in relation to Sarah Palin should stop writing about such things.
So let’s say you’re an experienced senator running for president, and you’re lucky enough to have as your opponent someone who declared his candidacy after barely two years in the senate and no notable experience before that.
And then let’s say when you announce your vice president, your opponents make her lack of experience their number one talking point for all those pissant news shows your opponents like to go on.
And then let’s say you have a national audience of 20-25 million people the first night your vice president speaks. Hmmm. What should the topic be?
I think the McCain campaign was masterful tonight in making it about Obama’s lack of experience; the chants of “zer-o”, while not as good as 2004’s “flip-flop”, were not bad. And I think the Obama campaign led with their chin, right into Giuliani’s snearing jabs and Palin’s smiling uppercuts. Hillary could never quite turn everyone on to the fact that Obama is a frighteningly underprepared lightweight. Through their own over-aggressiveness, the Obamaniacs gave McCain a chance to do just that.
Update: Good grief, looks like I underestimated Palin’s audience by 1/3. Drudge shows her having 37 million viewers, compared to 38 million for Obama’s speech and 24 million for Biden.
McCain should send out thank you notes to every scurrilous reporter, every sexist Democrat hack, every scummy blogger who couldn’t control themselves for four measly days and just haaaaaad to pass judgment on and spread rumors about Sarah Palin before they knew poop about her. Thanks to them, nearly as many people tuned in last night to see a smiling, beautiful, articulate Republican tear their candidate to shreds as tuned in to watch his sermon from the Barackopolis.
This one goes out to the scuzz buckets:
Apollo posted this at 2:30 PM EDT on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
2) From the beginning, the internal controversy (such as it is) over Sarah Palin has been a controversy not about Palin herself, but about John McCain. What kind of a decision-maker is he? How much information and consideration does he bring to bear?
If John McCain gambled on Palin without adequate research and preparation, the fact that he won his gamble does not reassure me very much. Gamblers sometimes do win. But the longer they play, the more they lose.
When I think of gambling, I think of two people, a family member and my friend, whom we’ll call Bill. The family member used to go to casinos occaisionally and play slot machines. She did this to amuse herself, and, win or lose, it generally worked. Almost certainly the long-term trend was losing, but that wasn’t really the point.
My friend Bill, on the other hand, is an actor and a math savant who played poker at casinos for spending money throughout college. When he’d get close to broke, he’d use the last of his money to buy a train ticket to a casino and a few chips to start himself off. And the next morning he’d leave with $500 in his pocket. True, even great poker players have bad nights. Luck is still a factor, but it’s not a very big one, and the definite long-term trend is winning
So when people off-handedly say that something is “a gamble,” I always ask myself what sort of gamble it is. The later sort, the types of gambles Bill took, are more correctly thought of as calculated risks. I think that accurately describes the Palin pick. She’s the governor of a frickin’ state, so there’s a lot of easily accessible information out there on her; idiots insisting that McCain didn’t know much about her are simply stupid. But she’s never been tested on a national stage, and this is certainly higher pressure than Alaska politics. So there’s a chance she’d fall apart.
Any pick, though, would have been a calculated risk. Picking the “safe” Romney would be betting on his inherent weirdness and stiffness not turning off voters; picking the “safe” Pawlenty would be betting that people would have actually paid attention to him; picking Liebermarn would have been betting that Republicans wouldn’t care that they disagreed with him on almost every issue. I think the Palin pick has both lower risks than all of these, and higher possible rewards. It was a smart risk, with significantly higher upsides than all other possibilities.
Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.
This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.
McCain has so little respect for the presidency of the United States that he is willing to put the girl next door (soon, too, to be a grandma) into office beside him. He has so little respect for the average American voter that he thinks this reckless and cynical ploy will work.
There’s a difference between elitism, which is a love of excellence, and snobbery, which is this bit of vitriol from Harris. To fully understand why Harris has blundered thus, we need to understand the difference between ordinary and average.
Average is a statistical category. It’s what people stumble into by default. Almost by definition, average is passive and conforming.
Ordinary is an earned category. It’s something people have to strive for, since common decency isn’t natural to humanity. Oddly enough, one must strive to be ordinary.
In this light, we can see that Palin is both far from average and profoundly ordinary—indeed, extra-ordinary. Average people might become mayors, but they rarely resign from boards in protest over other people’s ethics violations. Neither do average people challenge incumbent governors in primaries; it takes someone with ordinary decency to do that. If the statistics are true that most babies with Downs syndrome are aborted, than an average woman would have never given birth to Trig Palin—but Palin was an ordinary mother. Over the past several days, The Anchoress and Ann Althouse have done a series of posts defending the sheer ordinariness of Palin; they have done remarkable work.
But someone writing over a hundred years ago anticipated Sam Harris, who seems to yearn for his politicians to be Nietzschean supermen. He was G.K. Chesterton, and in his book Heretics, he had this defense of democracy and the ordinary:
Democracy is not philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him. It does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is so sublime. It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of the first Roman republic, a nation of kings.
Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is a hereditary despotism. I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post. Rational despotism—that is, selective despotism—is always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational despotism is always democratic, because it is the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form of slavery is that which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. For that means that men choose a representative, not because he represents them, but because he does not. Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV because they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small.
In this light, McCain’s selection of an ordinary woman shows a profound respect to citizens. He could have picked the hyperachieving Mitt Romney or the blandly average Tim Pawlenty; he instead went with the ordinary Sarah Palin. And the excitement from the grassroots shows that they don’t view themselves as weak, that they trust themselves. Sam Harris, however, views the people as weak and does not trust them. Like his intellectual forebear George Bernard Shaw, Harris cares little for ordinary people and, if he believed in God, would think that He made far too many of them. Like Chesterton, Palin is an ordinary person who believes that ordinary people are blessings.
The issue over Palin has come down, as so many conflicts do these days, to another duel between Bernard Shaw and Chesterton. What’s wrong with the world, as noted here before, is that this is Bernard Shaw’s world. But every now and then, when you least expect it, Chesterton scores a victory, as unexpected as a carpenter’s son changing the world.
Since 1980, only one Republican vice presidential or presidential nominee has gone to law school, Bob Dole, Washburn ‘52. Since 1984, every single Democratic vice presidential and presidential nominee has gone to law school. The only one who didn’t graduate law school is Al Gore, who dropped out after his second year at Vanderbilt to run for Congress.
Apollo posted this at 5:56 PM EDT on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 as Politics
I was perusing some of the comments to posts at DailyKos today and I noticed a strong theme that has become one of the chief talking points of liberals during the Bush II years. They want a president who will respect The Constitution.
WHEW! Finally! They have seen the light. I guess this means that they will all now support unfettered 2nd Ammendment Rights, eliminate speech codes as they violate the 1st Amendment and overturn Roe v Wade because an implied right within an implied right is no grounds for interpreting a fairly straightforward document.
Well now that we have all that out of the way I guess we can get back to fighting terrorists and winning in Iraq.
Jamie posted this at 5:10 PM EDT on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 as Dirty Hippies
The president is speaking to the RNC via satellite. He does so much better in person at these sorts of things.
He wore a pinstripe suit. I’ve never seen him wear such a thing. However, McCain frequently does; if one were to exclude those terrible sweaters, McCain is something of an edgy dresser for a politician. Wrap-around sunglasses, pinstripes, ties that are neither blue nor red, and shirts that are not white. His wardrobe is vastly more diverse than Obama’s. Perhaps Bush wore a pinstripe suit to show that pinstripes can be presidential?
Apollo posted this at 9:05 PM EDT on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
If Sullivan attacks Palin as not being a “Wartime Vice President” one more time while still swooning over a candidate that has never served in the military, never been an executive of any kind and has spent a whopping 4 years in the US Senate, then The Atlantic should offer up his blog to run along side Dave Barry’s.
The best analysis of the Palin pregnancy comes from Megan over at The Atlantic.
If only certain other Atlantic writers could contain their effusive enthusiasm for Obama long enough to stifle the vapors and provide such an insightful analysis.
I’m tired of the Bristol Palin pregnancy story. But I did see two commentaries about it that deserve more attention. First up (H/T) is a piece that discusses the evangelicals reaction, which is much different than how lefties think evangelicals react:
For what the Left sees as hypocrisy, most folks who are not Obama voters just see as falling short. As, of course, we, as humans, all do.
Bristol Palin’s journey is a human story. She tried to be good. She fell short. Instead of aborting the baby she will carry it to term and marry the father. To socially conservative America, there is nothing tragic about this.
You see, to many of the voters Barack Obama has not yet seemed to reach and who have thus far been ambivalent about McCain, this is exactly how these things are supposed to go. Their reality has not been shaken, the scales have not fallen from their eyes.
Sarah Palin did nothing “wrong.” And Bristol Palin did nothing other than sin, which we all do. She is now managing her sin as prescribed by tradition. To the traditionalist the situation is not ideal, no, but it is not a disaster.
This is a human story. The more the left attacks, attempts to expose “hypocrisy”, the more the personal will very much become the political. Unfortunately it will become political in a way that leads all those hard working Bubbas, all those church-going single mommas, right out to the polls to vote for that war hero and and those women they now identify with, Sarah and Bristol Palin.
What’s more concerning is the second take. David Frum essentially asks, why didn’t the McCain campaign handle this better?
Many conservatives, including my friends at the Corner, are outraged that the pregnancy of Bristol Palin has drawn swifter and more ferocious media attention than the adultery and (probable) out-of-wedlock fatherhood of John Edwards. They blame media bias, and probably they are right. Sexual adventuring or embarrassment involving Republican politicians is usually covered much more eagerly than that involving Democrats.
Question though: Is media bias a new or surprising fact about American politics? Wasn’t the reaction to the Palin pregnancy foreseeable? If so, why wasn’t it foreseen?
Obama leads the charge against Palin claiming he has more experience dealing with natural disasters than she does.
Whew! Thank God, Barack is only running for Vice President, oh…wait…
I hope, as soon as the media digs up every detail of Bristol Palin’s high school romance, there will finally be enough free manpower to research how close were Obama’s ties to the proud terrorist, Bill Ayers. But I understand that first we’ve got to pin down the details of a hookup between two 16 year olds. That’s the real story of interest here. I’ve never heard of teenagers having sex and getting pregnant, so we need details about how this oddity occurred. But since 9 out of 10 presidential candidates begin their political careers with fund raisers held at the home of a terrorist, that story is dog bites man.
Apollo posted this at 10:55 AM EDT on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 as Journalism
I’m noticing that the Obama campaign, when discussing Palin, treats her like she’s still the mayor of a small town. I hope she mentions this today or sometime after the convention, because any opportunity she has to show the Obama campaign unnecessarily condescending to her is worth taking. Though it’s a little weird that journalists let the Obama campaign get away with this to begin with. It’s almost like they want him to win and will let him get away with anything.
True, Palin brings traditional political strengths—such as gun enthusiasm and a pro-life record—to the ticket. Her fight against self-dealing in Alaskan politics counters the inside-the-Beltway corruption that damaged the Republicans in the 2006 elections. And her stance on drilling for Alaskan oil admirably bolsters the Republican Party platform on energy issues. But admit it, fellow conservatives: none of these attributes pushed her over the top. Your enthusiasm for her is driven in large measure by the fact that the McCain camp has beaten the Democrats at their own game, and in so doing, driven Obama’s moment of glory off the wires.
Republican strategists openly hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters, who believe that they had a right to a woman in the White House. There are, alas, many women who are pathetic enough to put gender above politics, for whom a candidate’s stand on substantive issues matters less than her reproductive plumbing. But just because such voters are out there doesn’t mean that the GOP can cater to them without permanently compromising its principles.
This election will surely be remembered as the Great Identity Politics Race of 2008. Hopefully that will be viewed as a bad thing. Obama’s candidacy is based almost entirely on his identity as, in the words of his running mate, “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Hillary Clinton based her candidacy on a schizophrenic mix of appeals to her toughness with equal appeals to her niceness and experience as an ex-President’s wife.
Republican Mike Huckabee’s campaign quickly into an appeal to evangelical identity. Dealt a bad hand this way, Mitt Romney was forced to play a more subtle game: that the identity being appealed to shouldn’t be a particular denomination, but theists.
Now comes Palin. Though I have some misgivings, I like Sarah Palin and think she brings good things to the McCain ticket. But my teeth hurt Friday when she tried to appeal to ex-Hillary supporters simply as a fellow sister. That’s unacceptable and shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone. No more of that, please.
Tom posted this at 1:46 PM EDT on Monday, September 1st, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
Judging from this story, that should be the motto of the journalists who covered the McCain veep vetting process. Perhaps we should now list “the news” along with sausage and legislation as things best not seen being made.
Apollo posted this at 12:32 PM EDT on Monday, September 1st, 2008 as Journalism
The Ace of Spades (H/T) proposes a new policy to deal with Andrew Sullivan (please note that I’ve edited out some of the cruder parts of Ace’s own assessment, not because Sullivan doesn’t deserve this electronic keelhauling, but because I don’t like that garbage on our blog):
I’ve written a bunch of the heavy hitters in the right-leaning respectable blogosphere to suggest a full boycott of linking Sullivan, forever.
Yes, I wrote, if you need to refute [his] daily dose of dementia, do so; quote and critique with attribution. But don’t link. Let anyone compelled to go to his site type in the URL and find the post themselves. . . .
There is a limit, and our addled attention-whore of perpetual drama went beyond that a while ago. Now he’s way beyond it. He is not a serious commentator; he is a vicious bridge-troll of a propagandist, a nasty little rotten-hearted b**** who gets his jollies assailing a sixteen year old girl because her mom threatens his wannabe boyfriend’s chances of being elected.
Given that links can spread the venom, I think the “quoting without linking” policy might be the best as regards the High Priest of the Holy Obama. (Precisely for that reason, I didn’t link to the Ace of Spades. I think his idea is good—but what a tasteless way to push for it!) What do my fellow paupers think?
I’ll respond to the substance of his article as such: It falls apart completely if, contra partisan hacks and lazy journalists, you believe there are different qualifications for being president and vice president. He can bring himself to compare Republicans to Communists, but he can’t bring himself to address the difference between president and vice president. Kinsley’s normally a good writer who doesn’t resort to reductio ad Stalinum, but he should have just called in sick on this one. He reads like a run of the mill lazy journalist.
Andrew Ferguson on the Republican party platform [emphasis added]:
“Republicans,” the platform says, “will attack wasteful Washington spending immediately,” even though they can’t. They can’t impose anything on anybody, either, but nevertheless “we will impose an immediate moratorium on the earmarking system.”
Powerlessness opens up a limitless future. It has the fierce urgency of not right now.
Could there be a more perfect phrase to describe such imperfection?
As of today, we’ve moved to our new address, www.federalistpaupers.com. In the next week or so, we should be uploading some new graphics and tweaking our theme. Any permalinks you had to an old snarkybastard.com post will still work as before, and will also be mirrored to the new site.
Everything else is exactly the same: the same eight bloggers (including Knut), the same political bent, the same curmudgeonly grumbles, and the same updates on the machinations of the Animal Menace.
If you encounter any bad links or need assistance, contact me or Apollo.
Tom posted this at 6:21 PM EDT on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 as Uncategorized
I’d been drafting a post defending Sarah Palin, citing Camille Paglia’s take, amongst other things.
I took a break, browsed my favorite blogs for a bit, and then saw that Mrs. Scalia had made all my points, plus several others that hadn’t crossed my mind. So I let my post vanish into electricity; go read her!
We’ve just discovered that here in Texas there are flying roaches. They launched aerial attacks on my wife this evening as she tried to read.
The flying roaches have now discovered that I have purchased some new weaponry, a hand-held bug zapper similar to this. 2300 volts says the handle (actually, says “2300V VOLTS,” whatever that means), “THIS IS NOT A TOY.” For $8 at Wal-Mart and a AA battery, plainly it is.
After I discovered the intruder, the first swat created a bright blue spark and left him walking in circles. Then I hit him with a second electrified swat, which left him largely motionless except for some twitches. Then I hit him again, which got him caught up in the webbing of my swatter and caused a funny smell. He was still twitching, so I pressed the shock button, which made him twitch differently. I’m not an expert on insect nervous systems, so I couldn’t tell whether his twitches were post-mortem or the result of continued life. Shock. Watch. Twitch. Shock. Watch. Twitch. Shock. Watch. Twitch. Shock. Nothing.
Then I took the opportunity to point out to Dorothy some of the things that distinguished him as being Blattaria. Rounded head, segmented abdomen, overlapping wings, all those spines on his back legs. Then he twitched. So he went down the hole.
According to Jonathan Martin, the Republican grassroots love Palin but the elites don’t like her. Considering where mainstream politicos in the Republican party have gotten us lo these last few years, I would not give the caudal portion of a Rattus rattus to find out what they think.
Every once in a while, the number of rotten apples exceeds the number of good apples, and the best thing to do is simply turn the apple cart on its side and start anew. I’m hoping the Palin pick is a sign that McCain sees this as one of those times.
Apollo posted this at 12:10 AM EDT on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
I’ve seen several anti-Palin types deride her because she said she heard about the surge “on the news.” (See, e.g., here.) Well how else is she supposed to hear about it? Generally speaking, governors are not consulted regarding military strategy in distant theaters. I guess some people are so caught up in the politics of the federal government that it sometimes comes as a shock that there are politicians elsewhere. That she heard about it in the same manner as most other people doesn’t mean poop.
Of course, there’s a very obvious reply here. Gaging by how many times it was referenced at the DNC, I think it can legitimately be said that most Democrats haven’t heard of the surge at all. Both Obama and Biden heard about the surge while they were senatoring around, and neither had the wisdom to support it.
So lets have a discussion of the candidates’ knowledge of the surge. On one side, we have the leading proponent of sending more soldiers to Iraq in an effort to bring victory; on the other, we have someone who has been wanting to run away and surrender for years, and who opposed the policy that is now making victory possible.
Democrats will do very, very well not to mention the surge ever again, for any reason. But if they want another round of “party of victory” versus “party of cut and run,” I’m sure McCain and Palin are game.
Apollo posted this at 4:50 PM EDT on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 as Iraq, Audacity of Hype
Andrew Sullivan stoops lower and let’s his readers accuse Palin of being a bad mother since she works and her husband takes care of the kids (H/T). Note that he lacks the backbone to come out and say it himself, letting an anonymous reader do so. Note further that he doesn’t add any comment, giving himself wiggle room in case people complain—”Hey, I just report the reactions of people. Not actually endorsing this kind of slur, but ya gotta respect how people feel.”
The prophet High Priest is flapping his arms so much about Palin that he’ll probably be airborne any minute now. It appears that every post he made today was an attack on her.
Among the more postmodern bits is where he tries to show that Obama is obviously so much more qualified than Palin that it’s “ludicrous” to compare the two. What experience does Obama have that Palin doesn’t? He’s run a presidential campaign, says the prophet High Priest. So running a presidential campaign is itself enough to qualify to be president. If that’s true, it means that there are no qualifications to be president, because even the least qualified person who gets elected president will have run a presidential campaign.
If you think that point is facetious, consider that Sullivan supported Obama before he had run a successful campaign, but now counts the success of that campaign as the distinguishing experience between Obama and someone he calls unqualified for the vice presidency. This is so circular that perhaps I should compare Sullivan’s arm flapping to a helicopter.
Since Palin will have run a vice presidential campaign before she becomes vice president won’t that make her qualified? And what about Joe Biden? It’s not only that he doesn’t have the experience of running a successful presidential campaign, it’s that he has run several unsuccessful presidential campaigns. Shouldn’t his repeated failures count negatively toward his qualifications?
Of course this is all Sullivan’s hackery. It’s comforting to see how badly he’s overreacting to Palin; he knows this pick has the potential to give McCain a decisive advantage. The facts of the matter are that Obama and Palin are both unqualified to be president, but Obama’s running for president and Palin isn’t; the more the Obamaniacs keep arguing that there’s a huge experience gap between the two, the more these facts will become obvious. When that happens, I expect Sullivan to move from arm flapping to pants soiling.
