Sportsetizer

Thank goodness the football season has started again! Nice break from politics, although I have to point out that NFL pre-season coverage, including fantasy football league draft analysis, has been galactically more thorough, robust, fact-based, even-handed, and higher-quality than election coverage. Oh well. That said, there's so much coverage of sports that it's still easy to find some really bad bits, too. Funniest example: an article predicting Notre Dame will do well because they have 16 returning starters. 16! That sounds good, except that those 16 starters laster year won only 3 games. So at least someone out there is excited that the same incompetent people will be getting yet another stab at screwing things up. Wait a minute-- I think I've gone back to talking about Republicans again....

Depressing

I intended to watch the RNC speeches but ended up not being able to stomach much. As Glenn Greenwald accurately put it, they were "mocking, scornful, derisive, demonizing and deeply personal". The Democrats had taken a few stabs, but the theme was that McCain was a good American who is out of touch and outright wrong on the issues. Republicans can't win on the issues, again, so they portray Obama as worthy of contempt. Who are these people? Why does this work? Again, the DNC was castigated by armchair strategists for not doing the same, but, really, I'd prefer they didn't. Even mild, cornball, non-political jabs such as "McSame" are hard to say without a cringe. I mean, we're all adults, right? I guess not. And that's depressing.

P.S. Was Huckabee's big worry about "European ideas" a coded shout-out to the anti-semites in the audience, or simply a deep fear that the US will get all fancy-pants and civilized?

Not Sold In The US

Nice review of the new Seat hatchback, gets 74 mpg per British figures (better than prius, and lower emissions than prius). Converting to non-imperial gallons, that's about 61 mpg in the US, although the US EPA estimates don't use the same "combined" algorithm that the UK ones do I'm sure. Still, it's cheap, very low emisions, and astoundingly fuel efficient. US availability: never.

More Loathing

As a followup from previous post, please enjoy this editorial from 9 years ago. Given McCain's angry grudge-mongering, and given Palin's similar approach to dissent -- first impulse: you're fired (even without the trooper issue, she has a real track record here, from firing the town librarian in Wasilla for not banning books, to firing the police chief for political reasons, to firing Alaska's entire Board of Agriculture and Conservation in order to overturn the decision to close the Matanuska Maid Dairy, which was subsequently closed anyway) -- if McCain wins, this could be the most vendettarific whitehouse ever! And given the Bush and Nixon track records, this would be an impressive achievement for his party.

Loathing in AZ

Since McCain is getting such a free pass from the gullible, the credulous, and the press when he claims to be a "maverick" and vows to "clean up washington" [cough, cough], I found this article very interesting.

governing

Mocking is easy. Governing well is hard.

Republicans have proven astonishingly good at mockery, and crap at governing. The body of evidence is clear on both counts.

Northern Decider

Evidence against the decline of the US as a superpower: Americans' ability to say anything with a straight face. Yes, Russia and China are good at this, too, but do not yet have the top to bottom mastery on display in the US -- from the craftiest high-level political operative to the common American dumbass. Rarely a better example than the support of Palin. What I've learned from both spinners and credulous corkheads:

• being a governor is just like being president... a mini-president!
• alaska doesn't have a lot of people, but it has a lot of land, and that counts for... something; and besides, small populations do not matter, unless the state is Vermont
  
• a governor is COMMANDER IN CHIEF of the state's national guard, which counts for both military and commandery-in-chief experience
• a governor is an expert on international affairs if the governor's state borders on a separate country, such as Canada, unless the state is Vermont
• because it's so executivey, governorship is better experience than senatorship, but only up to a point... it counts more than double senate experience, but then senate experience also works in reverse once you get much past a couple dozen years, so, 4 yrs senate: worthless! 20 months governor: awesome! 21 years senate: even awesomer! 35 years senate: too much, omg, wtf, lol!
• a state pondering secession is engaging in admirable old-timey patriotic thought, just like our founding fathers did every day after reciting the pledge of allegiance, unless the state is Vermont
• family values.... actually, there's too much for me to learn here, as I have no clue what this is supposed to mean! I will have to do some more research and get back to this one.
• anyway, when McCain gets mini-raptured straight to heaven moments after delivering his visionary inaugural address, Sarah Palin is going to be the Best President Ever!

The New Decider's Corrector

Does this mean Palin has to be the one to whisper corrections to McCain when he starts making stuff up, or will Lieberman be kept on staff to keep fulfilling that role?

question this

So the McCain campaign is getting vindictive over CNN doing a bit of actual pushback when an operative doesn't answer the question. This bit of questioning is fairly tame by British standards, but no matter, it's shockingly horrific affrontery! Let the umbrage begin....

Alaska, Not Connecticut

I guess this means there's no more Joementum.

Political Reporting

I heartily endorse Rick's New Rule. The problem, I think, stems for a lack of substantive reporting on politics. There's this grand Analysis of Nothing. I don't know where the reporters went, but mostly we just get commentary and "insight". There's almost no good comparative detailing of tax plans, health care plans, or other planks in the popular press. Instead we get letter grades of speeches and breathless treatments of ad tactics.

I've long wished that US newspapers would do political reporting even half as well as they do sports reporting. Sports fans in the US get the highest quality reporting of any subject anywhere in the world. It's not just analysis and commentary, but thorough and well-researched establishment of facts, plus excellent summaries of current and past state through statistics, tables, illustrations, and photos. Apply that thoroughness, passion, craftsmanship, and work ethic to political reporting, and the results would be shocking in contrast to the crap we're offered now.

FUD & FOTUGI

It must be really easy to be a right-wing political operative. There's an uncritical laziness of thought that must be a relief after you allow yourself to wallow in it. You get to talk big and sit at the tough-guy table. You have pre-defined templates for attack and defense: FUD your primary offense, and for the fallback defense is FOTUGI (Feign Outrage, Take Umbrage, Get Indignant).

Why this works, rather than being laughably incoherent, is an enduring and depressing mystery. That the same guys who castigate those facing economic hardship as "whiners" can get away with developing delicate sensibilities when they are called on their presumptive leader asking his staff how many houses he has is farcical, but not enough people are laughing.