Today's NY Fishwrap Daily Double: Angry Bob & The Krait

In today's NY Fishwrap, the Op-Ed columnists deliver brickbats in all directions. Angry Bob (Herbert) bounces a lot cudgels off the fashionably-styled head of The Mighty Q. Because her cranium is mostly empty, The Mighty Q has a built-in defense against concussion. Then, The Krait (Gail Collins) rips both The Hopester and The Mighty Q, with a shot at Jumpin' Joe for good measure. If this is (fair & balanced) poison penmanship, so be it. BTW, click on the bracketed numeral of your choice, or not, as is your wont, dear visitor. The clickable links are this blog's tribute to Vannevar Bush, who envisioned this craziness (hypertext) in 1936, but didn't publish his idea until 1945.

[1] Angry Bob
[2] The Krait

[x NY Fishwrap]

[1]
She’s Not Ready
By Bob Herbert

While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.

How is it that this woman could have been selected to be the vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket? How is it that so much of the mainstream media has dropped all pretense of seriousness to hop aboard the bandwagon and go along for the giddy ride?

For those who haven’t noticed, we’re electing a president and vice president, not selecting a winner on “American Idol.”

Ms. Palin may be a perfectly competent and reasonably intelligent woman (however troubling her views on evolution and global warming may be), but she is not ready to be vice president.

With most candidates for high public office, the question is whether one agrees with them on the major issues of the day. With Ms. Palin, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing. She doesn’t appear to understand some of the most important issues.

“Do you believe in the Bush doctrine?” Mr. Gibson asked during the interview. Ms. Palin looked like an unprepared student who wanted nothing so much as to escape this encounter with the school principal.

Clueless, she asked, “In what respect, Charlie?”

“Well, what do you interpret it to be?” said Mr. Gibson.

“His worldview?” asked Ms. Palin.

Later, in the spin zones of cable TV, commentators repeatedly made the point that there are probably very few voters — some specifically mentioned “hockey moms” — who could explain the Bush doctrine. But that’s exactly the reason we have such long and intense campaigns. You want to find the individuals who best understand these issues, who will address them in sophisticated and creative ways that enhance the well-being of the nation.

The Bush doctrine, which flung open the doors to the catastrophe in Iraq, was such a fundamental aspect of the administration’s foreign policy that it staggers the imagination that we could have someone no further than a whisper away from the White House who doesn’t even know what it is.

You can’t imagine that John McCain or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman would not know what the Bush doctrine is. But Sarah Palin? Absolutely clueless.

Ms. Palin’s problem is not that she was mayor of a small town or has only been in the Alaska governor’s office a short while. Her problem (and now ours) is that she is not well versed on the critical matters confronting the country at one of the most crucial turning points in its history.

The economy is in a tailspin. The financial sector is lurching about on rubbery legs. We’re mired in self-defeating energy policies. We’re at war. And we are still vulnerable to the very real threat of international terrorism.

With all of that and more being the case, how can it be a good idea to set in motion the possibility that Americans might wake up one morning to find that Sarah Palin is president?

I feel for Ms. Palin’s son who has been shipped off to the war in Iraq. But at his deployment ceremony, which was on the same day as the Charlie Gibson interview, Sept. 11, she told the audience of soldiers that they would be fighting “the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

Was she deliberately falsifying history, or does she still not know that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

To burnish the foreign policy credentials of a vice presidential candidate who never even had a passport until last year, the Republicans have been touting Alaska’s proximity to Russia. (Imagine the derisive laughter in conservative circles if the Democrats had tried such nonsense.) So Mr. Gibson asked Ms. Palin, “What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?”

She said, “They’re our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska. From an island in Alaska.”

Mr. Gibson tried again. “But what insight does that give you,” he asked, “into what they’re doing in Georgia?”

John McCain, who is shameless about promoting himself as America’s ultimate patriot, put the best interests of the nation aside in making his incredibly reckless choice of a running mate. But there is a profound double standard in this country. The likes of John McCain and George W. Bush can do the craziest, most irresponsible things imaginable, and it only seems to help them politically.

[Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining The Times, Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News." He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.]

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[2]
The Year of the Cloned Candidates
By Gail Collins

We have been approaching this presidential race the wrong way. It’s not political science. It’s science fiction. Something is amiss in the space-time continuum.

The candidates running now are not the same ones we started out with. It’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” all over again. We’re watching the clash of the pod people.

The first hint that things were not what they seemed came when Barack Obama turned into Hillary Clinton. We believe this was engineered by Hillary fans who had seen that early “Star Trek” episode about the woman who wanted to be a starship commander so bad that she figured out a way to switch brains with Captain Kirk. They did not anticipate, however, that the new “Barack” would start giving boring policy speeches and muttering about inexperienced people coming out of nowhere, fooling the voters with oblique promises of change.

Gov. Sarah Palin had only been on the Republican ticket about a week before she became a totally different person. Did you see her being interviewed by Charlie Gibson about foreign policy, trying to slither away from saying anything controversial and rewriting her own history whenever it suited her? She has obviously been replaced by a Sarah shell, stuffed with bits and pieces of John Kerry and Mitt Romney.

The replacement, in fact, announced itself on national TV. Why else, when Palin was describing being asked to run for vice president, did she keep insisting: “I didn’t blink.”

When Gibson suggested that she didn’t believe global warming was caused by human behavior, the replicate rebelled. “Show me where I have ever said that there’s absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect or no effect on climate change. I have not said that,” she insisted.

And, in fact, she had never said any such thing. It was the earlier, earthling Sarah Palin who said that she was not “an Al Gore doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity.” The new one just wants the world to know that the fact that she didn’t have a passport until last year is a positive sign that she is not part of the Washington elite.

The old Sept. 3 version of Sarah Palin had foreign-policy experience because she controlled the Alaska National Guard. The new one has foreign-policy experience because she knows a lot about natural gas pipes. (“Energy is the foundation of national security.”)

The current Sarah Palin does an excellent job of imitating the original when it comes to social issues and the soft stuff. And if she’s been editing her biography, there have been plenty of helpers. “She sold the airplane; she fired the chef,” John McCain said on Friday, explaining why his running mate would be an agent of change in Washington.

If you fire the governor’s chef and then charge the state a per diem for every night you sleep in your own house, does that make you an agent of change or Charles Rangel’s accountant? And the airplane, of course, was sold so ineptly that Palin should have been encouraged to consider a new career in the home finance industry.

Still, you cannot blame McCain for misrepresentation. He has mutated into so many different versions over the past few months, his memory banks are probably totally shot.

The real senator from Arizona was apparently replaced by a cranky android sometime last spring. The switch came to light when the android McCain conducted an interview with Time in which he seemed to be channeling Grandpa Simpson. He refused to say what he meant by the word “honor,” snarling: “I defined it in five books. Read my books.” When asked whether he missed the old John-and-the-reporters-gabbing-on-the-bus way of doing things, he snapped: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Now, the Republicans have acquired a warmer, gender-gap-closing Johnbot, which seems to have gotten its programming from those TV series in which sensitive men spend all their time applauding their girlfriends’ achievements and talking about feelings. This week, when he was not busy appearing in ads denouncing Obama as a person who is mean to Sarah Palin, “McCain” has been hanging out with Rachael Ray and chatting with “The View” hosts.

But we’ve still got the original Joe Biden, I think. Show me the artificial life form that would introduce a state senator confined to a wheelchair by urging him to “stand up.” We worried that once Obama’s running mate got out on the campaign trail and started babbling, he’d have to be replaced by a terser model. But this week, when Biden announced that Hillary Clinton was not only qualified to be vice president, she also “might have been a better pick than me,” we knew for sure we were still working with the original.

[Gail Collins joined The New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of The Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Prior to The New York Times, Collins wrote for the New York Daily News, Newsday, Connecticut Business Journal, United Press International, and the Associated Press in New York City.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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