Amen!

Seen somewhere on the streets of Austin, Texas, in September 2008.

Best Bumper Sticker So Far....

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The Geezer IS Stupid! Now, He's Asking Dutch's BIG Question From 1980!

Georgie Porgie (Will) takes The Geezer to task (kinda) for his brazen attempt to distance himself from the mess the Geezer himself voted to create with his support of The Dubster's bat guano legislation 90% of the time. So, The Geezer — in his brain-dead, out-of-touch manner — asks if we are better off today than we were four years ago. After all, Dutch stumped Mr. Peanut with that zinger in 1980. So, The Geezer and his brain trust of Turd Blossom wannabes attempt to sell The Geezer channeling Dutch. The answer to The Geezer is simple: Hell, NO! We are not better off today than we were four years ago! We have wasted this nation's most precious assets: life, treasure, and international standing for N-O-T-H-I-N-G. We have squandered eight years, not four. The Geezer should be ashamed. He should apologize to every man, woman, and child in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. He doesn't deserve our vote, he deserves our censure and our contempt. Georgie Porgie couldn't bring himself to say it, but The Geezer is babbling nonsense. If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it.

[x Washington (DC) Fishwrap]
In Americans' Quest To Measure Happiness, They Dole Out Life In Coffee Spoons
By George F. Will

John McCain, who is in what Macbeth called "the sear, the yellow leaf" of life, has revived an oldie from seven elections ago with a campaign commercial asserting: "We're worse off than we were four years ago." This, of course, derives from Ronald Reagan's question, addressed to the nation with devastating effect on his opponent, during Reagan's debate with President Carter in 1980.

The nation considered the answer obvious. Reeling from oil shocks, with 52 U.S. hostages in Tehran and with the Soviet Union rampant in Afghanistan, voters resoundingly said "no." Today we know that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan hastened the collapse of the Evil Empire, so some things that seem to make us worse off are not unmixed curses.

Imitation is the sincerest form of politics and in 1996 President Clinton, seeking re-election, urged voters to ask themselves whether they were better off than they were four years earlier. Today we know that the nation's affirmative answer reflected the beguiling beginning of what turned out to be the tech stock bubble, so some things that seem to make us better off are not unmixed blessings.

McCain recast Reagan's question as an assertion to pander to the public's dyspepsia and distance himself from President Bush. Enough.

In contemporary politics, nothing succeeds like excess, so permutations of Reagan's trope will recur. So consider its deficiencies, which are symptomatic of a desiccated mentality.

Unfortunately, the phrase "better off" is generally understood as a reference to your salary, your bank balance and the like. Are you better off being four years older? That depends.

If you are young, since 2004 you might have found romance, had children, learned to fly-fish and become a Tampa Bay Rays fan. In which case you emphatically are better off, even if since 2004 there has been only a 0.6 percent increase — yes, increase — in the median value of single-family homes.

If you are near "the sear, the yellow leaf" of life, in the last four years your expected remaining years of life have declined. But that does not mean you cannot be better off.

Suppose you've read Middlemarch, rediscovered Fred Astaire's movies, took up fly-fishing, saw Chartres and acquired grandchildren. Even if the value of your stock portfolio is down since 2004, are you not better off?

Economist Herb Stein criticized the "are you better off" question" by noting that "everyone has a certain asset, which is the present value of his expected future life." But "all years are not alike." Years that come later in life can have special richness because one has learned things that enable one to appreciate each year more.

Stein noted that the question about being "better off" is thought to be about facts rather than feelings. But feelings are facts. Facts such as delight, serenity and gratitude have values not easily priced in cash.

The people asking and those answering the "better off" question seem to assume that the only facts that matter are those that can be expressed as economic statistics. Statistics are fine as far as they go, but they do not go very far in measuring life as actually lived.

We do, unfortunately, live, as Edmund Burke lamented, in an age of "economists and calculators" who are eager to reduce all things to the dust of numeracy, neglecting what Burke called "the decent drapery of life." A thirst for simple metrics seduces people into a preoccupation with things that lend themselves to quantification.

Self-consciously "modern" people have an urge to reduce assessments of their lives to things that can be presented in tables, charts and graphs — personal and national economic statistics. This sharpens their minds by narrowing them. Such people might as well measure out their lives in coffee spoons.

In 1934, long before mankind strode jauntily into what it contentedly calls "the information age," T.S. Eliot asked:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

So are you better off than you were four years ago? That depends. On what? That, too, depends.

[George F. Will is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing about foreign and domestic politics and policy. His column appears on Thursdays and Sundays. Will attended Trinity College in Connecticut, Oxford University in England, and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in political science in 1967.

Will began his syndicated column with The Post in 1974. Two years later he started his back-page Newsweek column. Will serves as a contributing analyst with ABC News and has been a regular member of ABC's "This Week" on Sunday mornings since the show began in 1981. His books include Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992), Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (1989), and Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983).

Will was the recipient of a 1978 National Headliners Award for his "consistently outstanding special features columns" appearing in Newsweek. A column on New York City's finances earned him a 1980 Silurian Award for Editorial Writing. In 1985, The Washington Journalism Review named Will "Best Writer, Any Subject." He won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1977.]

Copyright © 2008 The Washington Post Company

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The Flatster's Got It Right: $1B For Georgia (Tech) Here, Not Georgia There

The lede in The Flatster's Op-Ed piece today is telling. He mentions reading his own newspaper (the NY Fishwrap) online. No dead-tree newsprint for The Flatster; the latest innovation in mass journalism is the e-paper. In fact, this blogger reads virtually 100% of the fishwraps and screeds that he peruses for blog material online. No more newsprint and no more ink smudges from print pages. Of course, the issue here is not paper made from trees or ink made from chemicals. Instead, the INNOVATION of online alternatives to print publications is the entire point. The mantra of the Donkeys in 1992 was, "It's the economy, stupid." The mantra of 2008 should be (Are you listening, Donkeys?): "It's innovation, stupid." While the Dumbos bray, "Drill, Baby, Drill," at the top of their lungs, The Flatster wisely challenges us to chant in reply: "Innovate, Baby, Innovate." Drilling is 19th century. Innovation is 21st century. Like The Geezer, drilling is an answer from the day before yesterday for tomorrow's problems. Again, The Flatster correctly argues that $1B sent to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia is money wasted. The best place to spend $1B is a grant to Georgia Tech (for the sake of the Georgia-riff) to innovate for the solutions to our energy problems. Instead of drilling dry holes in the ground, we should be drilling into the brains of our best and our brightest for innovative ideas. Innovate, Baby, Innovate! If this is (fair & balanced) augering, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Georgia On My Mind
By Thomas L. Friedman

On Wednesday, The New York Times on the Web flashed a headline that caught my eye: “U.S. to Unveil $1 Billion Aid Package to Repair Georgia.” Wow, I thought. That’s great: $1 billion to fix Georgia’s roads and schools. But as I read on, I quickly realized that I had the wrong Georgia.

We’re going to spend $1 billion to fix the Georgia between Russia and Turkey, not the one between South Carolina and Florida.

Sorry, but the thought of us spending $1 billion to repair a country whose president, though a democrat, recklessly provoked a war with a brutish Russia, which was itching to bash its neighbor, makes no sense to me. Yes, we should diplomatically squeeze Russia until it withdraws its troops; no one should be invading neighbors.

But where are our priorities? How many wars can we fight at once without finishing even one? Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Georgia. Which is the priority? Americans are struggling to meet their mortgages, and we’re sending $1 billion to a country whose president behaved irresponsibly, just to poke Vladimir Putin in the eye. Couldn’t we poke Putin with $100 million? And shouldn’t we be fostering a dialogue with Georgia and with Putin? Otherwise, where is this going? A new cold war? Over what?

And that brings me to our election.

What I found missing in both conventions was a sense of priorities. Both Barack Obama and John McCain offered a list of good things they plan to do as president, but, since you can’t do everything, where’s the focus going to be?

That focus needs to be on strengthening our capacity for innovation — our most important competitive advantage. If we can’t remain the most innovative country in the world, we are not going to have $1 billion to toss at either the country Georgia or the state of Georgia.

While we still have enormous innovative energy bubbling up from the American people, it is not being supported and nurtured as needed in today’s supercompetitive world. Right now, we feel like a country in a very slow decline — in infrastructure, basic research and education — just slow enough to lull us into thinking that we have all the time and money to play around in Tbilisi, Georgia, more than Atlanta, Georgia.

As Chuck Vest, the former president of M.I.T., said to me: “Both candidates have spoken a lot about ‘change,’ but in most areas of need, innovation is the only mechanism that can actually change things in substantive ways. Innovation is where creative thinking and practical know-how meet to do new things in new ways, and old things in new ways.

“The irony of ignoring innovation as a theme for our times is that the U.S. is still the most innovative nation on the planet,” Vest added. “But we can only maintain that lead if we invest in the people, the research that enable it and produce a policy environment in which it can thrive rather than being squelched. Our strong science and technology base built by past investments, our free market economy built on a base of democracy and a diverse population are unmatched to date; but we are taking it for granted.”

A developed country’s competitiveness now comes primarily from its capacity to innovate — the ability to create the new products and services that people want, adds Curtis Carlson, chief executive of SRI International, a Silicon Valley research company. As such, “innovation is now the only path to growth, prosperity, environmental sustainability and national security for America. But it is also an incredibly competitive world. Many information industries require that products be improved by 100 percent every 12 to 36 months, just for the company to stay in business.”

Our competitiveness, though, he added, is based on having a broadly educated work force, superb research universities, innovation-supportive taxes, immigration and regulatory policies, a productive physical and virtual infrastructure, and a culture that embraces hard work and the creation of new opportunities.

“America is still the best place for innovation,” said Carlson. However, we are falling behind in K-12 education, infrastructure and in tax, regulatory and immigration policies that no longer welcome the world’s most talented minds. “These issues must be at the top of the national agenda because they determine our ability to provide health care, clean energy and economic opportunity for our citizens.”

(For a good plan, read the new Closing the Innovation Gap (2008) by the technologist Judy Estrin.)

Alas, though, the Republicans just had a convention where abortion got vastly more attention than innovation, calls to buttress Tbilisi, Georgia, swamped any for Atlanta, Georgia, and “drill, baby, drill” was chanted instead of “innovate, baby, innovate.”

If we were serious about weakening both Putin and Putinism, we would be investing $1 billion in Georgia Tech to invent alternatives to oil — the high price of which is the only reason the Kremlin is strong enough today to bully its neighbors and its own people.

[Thomas L. Friedman (3-time Pulitzer Prize winner: 1983, 1988, and 2002) is an op-ed contributor to The New York Times, whose column appears twice weekly and mainly addresses topics on foreign affairs. Friedman is known for supporting a compromise resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, modernization of the Arab world, environmentalism and globalization. His books discuss various aspects of international politics from a neoliberal perspective on the American political spectrum. In 1975, Friedman received a bachelor of arts in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1973. He then attended St Antony's College at the University of Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, earning a master of arts in Middle Eastern studies.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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The Butcher Cuts To The Heart Of The Election: THE GEEZER IS THE ISSUE!

Forget The Mighty Quinnette, she's a distraction engineered by Turd Blossom's acolytes who run The Geezer's campaign. The Butcher shows us that The Geezer is THE ISSUE in the Campaign of '08. We ignore that at our peril. The Donkey attack ads must hammer at The Geezer's role in taking us to war in Iraq. If this is a (fair & balanced) call to arms, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage
By Frank Rich

Sarah Palin makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.

Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.

The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.

As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)

Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.

We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.

She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

How long before we learn she never shot a moose?

Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.

He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.

That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.

As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a “full vetting process.” She had been subjected to “an F.B.I. background check,” we were told, and “the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her.”

The Times had it right. The McCain campaign’s claims of a “full vetting process” for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they’ve invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically “a Google,” he wasn’t joking.

This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton’s imagination. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.

We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.

In other words, McCain’s hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia (“Today, we are all Georgians”) or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved “the benefit of the doubt” even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain’s blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.

“This election is not about issues” so much as the candidates’ images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the season’s most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its own candidate’s deterioration.

What was most striking about McCain’s acceptance speech is that it had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 — cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It’s in the campaign’s interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in 2008.

That’s why the Palin choice was brilliant politics — not because it rallied the G.O.P.’s shrinking religious-right base. America loves nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what’s frightening about the top of the ticket.

By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received this year — and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 — they just might pull it off.

[Frank Rich is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times who writes a weekly 1500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news. Rich has been at the paper since 1980. His columns and articles for the Week in Review, the Arts & Leisure section and the Magazine draw from his background as a theater critic and observer of art, entertainment and politics. Before joining the Times, Rich was a film critic at Time magazine, the New York Post, and New Times magazine. He was a founding editor of the Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970s. Rich is the author of a childhood memoir, Ghost Light (2000), a collection of drama reviews, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993 (1998), and The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson (with Lisa Aronson, 1987). Frank Rich is a graduate of the Washington, DC public schools. He earned a BA degree in American History and Literature from Harvard College in 1971.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Flash Forward: The Cobra Imagines The Presidential Debate In 2012? Not Pretty!

The Cobra would be an excellent moderator of a debate between The Hillster and The Mighty Quinnette. BTW, Rouge Cou, The Mighty Quinnette's fallback trademark in the private sector, is French for "Redneck." Nothing like a little class in her double-wide. If this is a(fair & balanced) hallucination, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Clash of the Titans
By Maureen Dowd

You know what I’m thinking, because you’re thinking it, too.

If Barack Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate, we would now be looking forward to the greatest night in the history of American politics: the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate between Ma Barker and Sarah Barracuda.

Now, alas, we’ll have to wait until 2012 when the two fiercest competitors on the trail will no doubt face off in the presidential debate, with Palin still riding high from her 2008 field-dressing of Obama (who’s now back in the Senate convening his subcommittee on Afghanistan).

The two women are both aggressive pols who take disagreement personally, accruing a body count of rivals, and who have been known to exaggerate their accomplishments. But in ideological terms, the gun-toting hockey mom and the shot-swilling Warrior Queen of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits are opposites.

By 2012, the 76-year-old John McCain will be on his way out. His vice president will wear him down, making him change the name of the White House to Rouge Cou — the name Sarah licensed in 2005 in case she ever got into business — and turn Camp David into a caribou hunting ranch. Then she’ll scare him, informing him that if he tries for a second term, she’ll challenge him in the primary.

“How would you like this pit bull grandma to clean your grandfather clock?” she’ll tell President McCain in her flat “Fargo” accent. He’ll confide in his pal Joe that being a P.O.W. was nothing compared with being trapped in the White House with “that woman.”

It’s delicious imagining the Debate of the Century between Big Mama, as Bill’s male aides called Hillary, and “Hottie Granny,” as People magazine will doubtless dub Sarah. ESPN will want in.

PALIN: Before we start, Hillary, I want to honor your achievement in 2008. You nicked the glass ceiling. But in the end, as my friend Cheryl Metiva from Wasilla Bible Church said, I was more of a woman and more of a man than you, so I was the one who actually busted up the old boys’ club. Sorry I called you a whiner about sexism. That was before I realized how handy the victim card can be against the press wolves. In Alaska, we just gun down wolves from the air.

CLINTON: I do give you and John credit, Sarah, for following my blueprint to reveal Obama as all cage, no bird. But now the Democrats have crawled back to me and I will close the deal. So pack up your snow boots and antlers and backwoods brood and scram.

PALIN: I’ve got a little news flash for you, Hillary. Your night-shift, blue-collar-waitress, boilermaker routine didn’t fool me. It’s in your polls but it’s in my D.N.A. I’ve actually been up at 3 a.m. — gutting moose. While you got to go to your snooty Wellesley, I had to switch colleges six times in six years. While you got to go to Yale Law, I had to enter beauty contests and turn my back to judges in a bathing suit to get scholarship money.

CLINTON: I’ve got a little news flash for you, Annie Oakley. Dinosaurs disappeared a lot longer than 4,000 years ago. I admit you’ve had a profound influence on America, and I’m not just talking about all the women wearing up-dos and rimless titanium $375 Kazuo Kawasaki designer frames. You and John are now at war with four countries — Russia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, even as Osama bin Laden has opened a storefront in a strip mall in Pakistan to make TV ads.

PALIN: Those wars are tasks from God.

CLINTON: You said you wanted to help women, but you’ve only hurt them with your silly mantra that women can have it all if they just work harder and pray harder. You put Medicare on eBay. You cut funding for special-needs children. The Dobson Supreme Court has outlawed abortion, evolution and gun control. With sex education banned, baby bumps in high schools are rampant. And the head of your Abstinence Outreach Program, Levi Johnston, has failed to force any other teenage fathers to marry their prom dates.

PALIN: Life is always welcome. Unless it’s on four legs.

CLINTON: When it comes to Big Oil, you make Dick Cheney look small bore. You had secret energy meetings to eliminate polar bears. You’ve turned Alaska into Kuwait without the sand. Gas is $50 a gallon and global warming has changed the Rose Garden into the Palm Court. Your only energy plan is to give tax credits to people who put do-it-yourself oil rigs in their backyards. You created a Department of Drilling and More Drilling and put double-dipping Todd in charge.

PALIN: You’re chiding me about nepotism? At least I know how to control my First Dude. If you think that fake sniper fire in Bosnia was bad, wait till you get a load of my hunting rifle.

CLINTON: Adios, Sister Sarah. You’re tough, but I’ve been tougher longer. Slide out of town on that oil slick you made on the Mall. And take that Grizzly throw with you.

[[Maureen Dowd is a Washington D.C.-based op-ed columnist for The New York Times. She has worked for the Times since 1983, when she joined as a metropolitan reporter. In 1999, Dowd was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Dowd received a B.A. in English from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.]

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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The Real Sarah Is Plain & (Pretty) Tall

Give me the real Sarah any day. This genuine Sarah has emerged on the Op-Ed pages of the NY Fishwrap. She knows her history and she knows her own mind. This is a gal you can really ride with to the river. This genuine Sarah is one of the elite; she's not stupid. The other Sarah has an academic pedigree that is as tawdry as her family foibles. She is stupid, but she is cunning. Like the real Sarah, if The Mighty Quinnette is elected, this blogger is not leaving his apartment after sundown. If this is (fair & balanced) spurious blogging, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Party Guy
By Sarah Vowell

Former Senator Fred Thompson, in his folksy and entertaining speech at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night, described his party’s presidential nominee as such a rule-breaking scamp that for a minute there I thought he was nominating Tom Sawyer for president instead of John McCain. When Mr. Thompson described Senator McCain’s progression from Naval Academy cut-up to war hero, all I could think about was a ne’er-do-well West Point cadet bound for military distinction, Ulysses S. Grant.

In the 1868 presidential election, when the American people voted for Grant, the greatest war hero of the 19th century, they had no inkling they had just chosen one of our worst presidents, a largely clueless chief executive who allowed corruption to flourish in his administration and who offered pretty much zero leadership during the depression known as the Panic of 1873.

I am not merely pointing out that military fortitude does not necessarily lead to presidential wisdom — sometimes it does. The nation’s capital that the Republican Party loathes so much is named after one such gentleman. My point is way more obvious and disquieting. No matter how much we voters know about a candidate, the truth is we never can tell what kind of president he’ll be.

Senator McCain has been both lauded and derided as a “gambler” for choosing the obscure governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. That’s nothing compared to the sucker bet the American people are forced to make every four years. For instance, who knew that Herbert Hoover, who had been such a heroic do-gooder for the Belgians during their food crisis of 1914, would turn out to be a president blatantly blasé about Americans who were starving during the Great Depression? And what was it like to turn on the radio in Kansas City on Aug. 6, 1945, to hear the news about Hiroshima and realize that the commander in chief who gave the order to unleash the most terrifying weapon in the history of the world was the guy who used to sell you your hats? Follow-up: How did Harry Truman draw on his executive experience as the proprietor of a haberdashery to decide whether to vaporize a town?

One of my biggest fears about the current president back in January 2001 was that he would fail to make good on his campaign promise to eliminate the National Park Service’s $4.9 billion deferred maintenance backlog. Seven years later, the nicest way I can describe how things turned out is that the park service backlog — now around $8 billion, by the way — is no longer one of my top 50 anxieties about the state of the union.

I’m convinced that the immediate mass flip-out over the Palin nomination can’t be entirely explained by sexism, elitism or partisan animosity. It was a symptom of just how much the presidential future is a suspense movie scored by Bernard Herrmann. It’s enough of a nail-biter to throw in with a two-person ticket for four years. So if newscasters don’t even know how to pronounce the vice presidential pick’s name upon announcement, the violins of apprehension start to screech “Psycho” shower-scene loud.

The good news is that Governor Palin has sufficient experience in public life to leave behind enough of a paper trail that we can discern her positions on many of the most important issues of the day. The bad news is that after taking this crash course in where she stands, I know that if she were elected I would be afraid to leave my apartment after sundown.

During a gubernatorial debate in 2006, Governor Palin claimed that if her daughter, then 16, were impregnated as the result of being raped, Ms. Palin would hope that the girl would “choose life,” which is a polite way of saying she would expect a tenth-grader to give birth to her rapist’s baby.

Here’s a not-so-polite fact about the United States: According to Amnesty International, a woman is raped here every six minutes.

Like his running mate, Senator McCain has been a true-blue opponent of abortion rights during his political career. Unlike his running mate, he supports the right to terminate a pregnancy in cases of rape, incest and to save the life of the mother. So does President Bush. During a Republican primary debate in 2000, Senator McCain denounced Mr. Bush for being in favor of the exception but not having the guts to push for putting it in writing in the official Republican Party platform that year.

This year, Senator McCain himself didn’t bother to stand up to the right wing of his party to insist that the rape and incest exception be written into the Republican Party platform. Just as he failed to stand up to the right wing of his party in choosing his running mate. His first choice was reported to be Senator Joseph Lieberman, a man who stood up to the Democratic Party to the extent that he isn’t even a Democrat anymore.

Contrary to the convention’s constant McCain-equals-Teddy Roosevelt banter, it is actually Senator Lieberman who bears a closer resemblance to T.R., who became so disgusted with the Republican Party he broke off and formed his own party in 1912.

But Senator Lieberman wasn’t a viable option because he is pro-choice and thus an enemy of the Republican base. Which Senator McCain needs to get elected. Because — news flash — John McCain is a Republican.

Despite his consistent party-line voting record, some independents and Democrats still think of Senator McCain as the most palatable, independent-minded Republican. But this is the sort of empty compliment a friend of mine once compared to being called “the coolest Osmond.”

Senator McCain’s name will not appear on ballots under the category “Maverick.” A vote for him is a vote for the Republican Party, which is to say the people who were standing there on the floor in Minnesota all week long chanting, “Drill, baby, drill,” or rattling maracas to cheer on Mitt Romney as he bragged, “Just like you, there’s never been a day when I was not proud to be an American.” Really? Not even on Abu Ghraib thumbs-up photo day? Or Superdome bedlam day(s)?

Those conventioneers are the party faithful Senator McCain will appoint to run our government. Those are the people who have his ear, the people who chose his running mate, the people who will choose his — or in the event of his demise, Sarah Palin’s — Supreme Court appointments. We let presidents surprise us for only four years a pop. Justices can keep us guessing until they die.

[Sarah Vowell is the author of Assassination Vacation and a forthcoming book about the New England Puritans, The Wordy Shipmates. Vowell earned a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude) from Montana State University in 1993 and an M.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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