Update below.

Haven't had time to surf much less blog, and picked an inopportune time to do so, given that we're witnessing something like the collapse of the capitalist system. The following are some pieces that piqued my interest, although they're becoming eclipsed by events almost as fast as they're filed. I'm sure there's much more of interest, but I haven't had time to dig, and ultimately decided I should post this now because I'm traveling tomorrow and prospects of adding to it are slim and slimmer.

As of this writing, the bailout bill has been passed by Congress and signed into law by Bush. Paulson got his $700 billion, but not as free a hand as he wanted. I can't say that there's no good reason to help the bankers, but they're hardly the only ones in need, and I also don't blame anyone who feels resentful that only when bankers bully their way to the front of the soup line. Unfortunately, the US has delegated so much of its financial infrastructure to the private sector that their failure can extend way beyond their own limited liability corporate interests. A better solution might be to shore up public sector finances while letting the nonproductive bubbles deflate, but we haven't covered that conceptual distance yet. I'm not a person who holds any hope for revolution, so I can't take any joy in watching the capitalist system collapse. But at least some lessons should be obvious from this debacle, starting with the fact that the push to deregulate and the Reaganesque glorification of greed should by now be completely discredited. (This, by the way, pretty much explains the Republicans who fought the bailout bill: its passage acknowledges the failure of the Reagan Revolution, as such their only excuse for hanging on to power. Having committed themselves so thoroughly to myth, they have little choice now but to stick their heads so snugly up their arses that they lose all sense of reality.)

On the other hand, I've never bought into the Reagan myth. Even at the time I frequently argued that the only boom industry left in 1980s America was fraud. What we saw through a series of asset bubbles was a gross inflation of increasingly imaginary values. In some ways this just looked like old-fashioned rich-get-richer, but it became increasingly rarefied as more money broke loose to chase its own tail. In reality, the chasm widened less than both sides thought, not least becuase the rich wound up holding bags of debt from the increasingly impoverished poor: default on that debt, which we are seeing primarily in the mortgage area right now, is one way of settling the books. But there's a lot more of that in the pipeline -- credit card debt is an obvious case -- so I expect a lot more leveling in the future, even with bailouts for the politically well-connected.

Paul Krugman: Financial Russian Roulette [09-14]. Published 9/14, 14 days ago (and then some), ancient history, at least far enough back that the Paulson bailout plan was still just a future possibility. Reasons to be nervous, part 1.

And as the unknown unknowns have turned into known unknowns, the system has been experiencing postmodern bank runs. These don't look like the old-fashioned version: with few exceptions, we're not talking about mobs of distraught depositors pounding on closed bank doors. Instead, we're talking about frantic phone calls and mouse clicks, as financial players pull credit lines and try to unwind counterparty risk. But the economic effects -- a freezing up of credit, a downward spiral in asset values -- are the same as those of the great bank runs of the 1930s.

Final sentence: "Yikes."

Paul Krugman: Cash for Trash [09-22]. More on the bailout plan. Sketches out a four-stage analysis of the crisis. Notes that this only deals with the fourth stage, and that even so it only promises to help things (err, bankers' bottom lines) if the taxpayers significantly overpay for the finance industry's toxic waste. Krugman isn't opposed so much as he feels that any such bailout should be in exchange for equity. Otherwise, the people who caused this problem would simply be imdemnified against their own recklessness.

Krugman's blog has been a good source on this period. He accepts the need to do something like the bailout, largely because he fears the consequences of not acting, but he doesn't like the details of Paulson's proposal, and the whole thing is getting to him. One later post [08-02] he commented that "Joe Stiglitz seems to have the same view on the bailout I have: lousy plan, better to pass it tomorrow than not." More emotionally but less concisely, on [08-01] he put it this way: "So am I for the bill? Yuk, phooey, I guess so. And I'm very angry at Paulson for putting us in this position."

Billmon: Things Become More Serious [09-22]. Not sure who Billmon is, but he claim in everyday life to be some sort of financial writer, and he's got this covered pretty well.

That being the case, it was probably inevitable that the bubbles would continue to grow in size and destructive force until they finally outstripped even the US government's ability to manage them without triggering a run on the biggest bank of all -- itself.

We may not be there yet. Both the dollar and the commodity prices could stabilize, at least temporarily -- particularly if the Cheney Administration (or should I say the Goldman Sachs Administration?) and the Dems in Congress can quickly reconcile their differences and ram the MOAB through the legislative colon (and up ours). Further disasters are not inevitable -- or at least, they don't have to happen all at once.

But if and when it comes, disaster (the kind that turns financial panics into searing generational memories) will unfold in a string of events that will look very much like what we saw in the markets today -- only on steroids.

Andrew Leonard: A cry of rage from Wall Street [09-26]. Via Andrew Sullivan, quotes a "distraught e-mail from a money manager":

I am a lifelong (51 years old) "rock-ribbed" conservative. . . . What an eye opener this week has been! I now realize what a blowhard Newt truly is by advocating the GOP bail on the Paulson Plan. As a professional money manager I can tell you I am shocked, dismayed and depressed that the Speaker would excoriate the GOP to abandon this plan which is URGENT and necessary to avoid a financial catastrophe that once commenced may be irreversible. The level of ignorance of financial and economic reality displayed by the Speaker, Rep. Boehner, Sen. Shelby, et al., has been frightening and sad. I thought the GOP had a better grasp of such matters than the Dems. Apparently not. And if this has been pure election gamesmanship as I suspect? The willingness to play politics with the U.S. financial markets is appalling and disgusting.

The Republicans are good at arguing that problems are matters of individual responsibility, not something the public should worry over or bother about. This line is comforting to people who don't actually share the problem. Unfortunately for the Republicans, people who find themselves beset by problems, especially those who can't identify the flaw of personal responsibility, start to lose faith with the doctrine. That's been happening steadily over the last decade, but in small and unobvious dribs and drabs.

James K Galbraith: How Much Will It Cost and Will It Come Soon Enough? [09-29]. Comments favoring passage of the Paulson-Pelosi deal, with reservations and sensible alternative ideas, starting with getting rid of the FDIC cap, which would provide an insured haven for cautious investors, and would help shore up consumer banks.

Glen Greenwald: Bailout follows the 10 normal principles for how our government functions [09-29]. Examples (first line quotes for each of the principles):

1. Incredibly complex and consequential new laws are negotiated in secret and then enacted immediately, with no hearings, no real debate, no transparency.
2. Those who created the crisis, were wrong about everything, drive the process. Experts who dissent from the prevailing Washington orthodoxy, particularly ones who were presciently warning about what was happening, are simply ignored -- systematically excluded from the process.
3. Public opinion is largely ignored, as always, and public anger is placated through illusory, symbolic and largely meaningless concessions.
4. The Government begins with demands for absolute power so brazen and absurd that anything, by comparison, seems reasonable.
5. Wall Street, large corporations and their lobbyists own the Federal Government and both parties, and (therefore) they always win.
6. The people who run the Washington Establishment are drowning in conflicts of interest.
7. For all the anger over what Wall St. has done, the Government -- as it bails them out -- isn't doing anything to rein in their practices.
8. When the Government wants greater and greater power and wants to engage in pure corruption, it need only put the population in extreme fear and it gets its way in every case.
9. On the most consequential and fundamental questions that define the country, the establishment/leadership of both political parties are in full agreement, and insulate themselves from any political ramifications by acting jointly.
10. Whenever you think that the Government has done things so extreme that it can't top itself -- torture, theories of presidential lawbreaking, a six-year war justified by blatantly false pretenses -- it always tops itself.

Andrew Leonard: Byron Dorgan's warning about risk [10-02]. Quotes Senator Dorgan (D-ND) from nine years ago, when he opposed the Phil Gramm-led repeal of Glass-Steagall's separation of commercial and investment banking. He said: "I think we will look back in ten years and say we should not have done this." Didn't even take ten years. Neither did the S&L deregulation -- the cleanup of which was only ten years earlier.

Leonard has also been superb throughout the crisis. His column is called "How the World Works," which he has a pretty good grasp on, giving him a big leg up on almost everyone else trying to catch up.

Update: Found this in the scratch file, never posted, don't know how old it is, but it seemed to fit in here:

Tom Engelhardt: The Fate of the Bear Market. Or, "The Little Administration That Couldn't." A quick rundown of the ongoing train wreck known as the Bush Administration. A few years back I figured this would be the theme of my book. Even then it was clear that nothing Bush did would work, and that everything they touched would have to be cleaned up and rebuilt by whoever came along after then -- assuming by then we hadn't lost all sense of living standards. My little value added was to be the aperçu that the disaster wasn't just a matter of incompetency, which was much in evidence, but was deeply engrained in their very mode and manner of thinking. That's still true, but even that's becoming a commonplace observance.

Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr: For McCain and Team, a Host of Ties to Gambling. Long article on McCain's ties to gaming interests and their lobbyists, with more on McCain's meanderings in mendacity. Maybe it's just my upbringing (or my late mother's upbringing), but I read these opening paragraphs with utter disgust:

Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings.

A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party's evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain.

The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to Mr. McCain's campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world's second-largest casino. Joining them was Rick Davis, Mr. McCain's current campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just Mr. McCain's affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.

I still remember when gambling was near the top of the list of debilitating sins: to describe a person as a gambler was as damning or worse than being a drunk or a junkie. This has changed over the last few decades, mostly because the self-appointed guardians of public virtue have converted to fetish of money and the thrill of winning. The Republicans have led the way here. They've always had a fine appreciation of money, and from Nixon on they've come to believe that winning is the only thing that matters. As they've become ever more unhinged from reality, they come to see no real difference between running a successful business and a lucrative gambling scam. After all, the difference can't be due to labor actually producing something of value. As they've learned in their MBA coursework, the only thing that matters is money, and one way of making money is as good as any other.

McCain isn't alone in this, or even very rare, but he is typical. One reason gamblers were held in such contempt back in my mother's day is that gambling was invariably linked with deception, including self-deception. McCain has had even more trouble with recognizing or respecting truth than any politician in recent memory -- which is to say, the Clinton-Bush era. Most people focus on the risk-taking aspects of McCain's gambling habits, which are indeed scary given how much power has been usurped by the presidency. But worse still is the pathological link between gambling and dishonesty, not to mention the self-absorption nearly every gambler indulges in. This cluster of attitudes is what makes McCain so scary -- not that his idiot conservative jingoism and his warmongering aren't bad enough.

Update at end.

A quick postscript to yesterday's post, which was about how McCain can't shake the party propaganda about how any/all government regulation hurts the economic efficiency and freedom of the private sector. Actually, this is Milton Friedman's propaganda, but it served Reagan well, at least rhetorically, so it's become GOP gospel, even if it isn't honored in fact any more than Jesus's chastisement of the rich and opposition to war.

If the current financial crisis prooves anything, it's that when times get tough, virtually everyone in America looks to government for help: not just the poor and downtrodden, but the rich as well. In fact, the rich have the sort of contacts that let them cut to the head of the line. This point is pretty obvious because it reeks of hypocrisy.

The less obvious point we should take from this crisis is that, much as John Edwards noted their are two Americas, there are now two depressions. The one in the news -- the one the Bush administration is so frantically acting on -- is the depression of the rich. In 1929 it was a depression of the rich that plunged the rest of the country into deep poverty, so vague memory suggests that government action now will save us all a lot of pain down the road. That may be true, but there's been a depression of the poor in this country for several years now, and it's not just one of those two-quarter blips in the business cycle that get the bean counters hepped up. The depression of the poor is something the GOP has had little trouble ignoring, not least because they're responsible for much of it. The Democrats have also tended to ignore it, focusing on the money that feeds practical politics, pointing to the myriad ways Bush has wrecked the country for decades to come, and appealing to the increasingly fragile middle class as the only visible, respectable representatives of the numerically overwhelming non-rich.

The Democrats embrace of government as a system to deliver help to all segments of the private sector and to provide responsible stewardship of the economy and our (recently disastrous) path in foreign affairs is in tune with what virtually all Americans actually believe and expect. Less clear, of course, is whether they can actually do that, especially given the corrupting influence of special interests, but at least they grasp the principle. McCain and his ideologically pure advisers don't have a clue, which is why their reactions are so kneejerk and their proposals are little short of insane.

Oh, yes, the concluding point I wanted to make but didn't: I think the rich and poor depressions are related. The old Keynesian view of this is that depressions are caused by a shortage of demand, which can be remedied by putting people to work -- even on make-work projects, like World War II -- and thereby putting disposable cash into their hands. What we've actually seen is the converse of this: workers have been put on a long-term diet, gradually being starved, which sooner or later has to suck the demand side out of the economy. This process has been stretched out: by extracting more work for less pay, the value of the work has kept the system going, and the missing cash has been partly compensated by easier access to debt, at least until recently. The debt, in turn, has escalated to the point where it has become a giant house of cards: with relatively little labor to back it up, the financial powerhouses of the rich and ultrarich have been running on fumes, absorbed in a self-inflationary bubble that has less and less to do with the real economy. I seriously doubt that you can patch up the financial system without rebuilding the basic foundation of the economy, which whether you like it or not still depends on old-fashioned labor.

Josh Marshall: Innovative products. Quotes John McCain as saying:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

This is wrong on a nearly unfathomable number of levels. It assumes innovation is per se a good thing, which is obviously not true, and in the case of the financial industry of late is almost never true. Their great mission in life has been to suck as much value out of the world as possible, as is demonstrated by the mere fact that they've grown faster and more profitably than the economy as a whole, despite the fact that almost everything they used to do can be done vastly more efficiently with modern information systems. One thing that is true is that health insurance innovations will have the same purpose -- indeed, it strikes me as wrong to suggest that the health insurance companies have lagged behind their financial sector brethren in figuring out how to maximize their take while screwing customers. Moreover, the consequences of this predation are if anything more severe, as should be obvious if you contemplate the question they're so adept at posing: your money or your life?

McCain's comment shows how deeply he himself has been suckered into the party line, and how little capacity for independent or critical thought he actually has.

Paul Woodward: Regulation vs. deregulation. This contrasts a big chunk of an Obama speech to the simplistic idiocy being spouted by McCain. It reminds me of a scene watching some TV "journalist" hammer Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, demanding details on how Obama would react to the current crisis. After several references to a six-point proposal Obama had made, Goolsbee started reciting them in quite some detail, and the interviewer cut him off midway through number two. The lesson is clearly that the GOP talking point will prevail even when its falsity is glaring.

Matthew Yglesias: Good Stuff:

But I'll repeat what I've said before: The ultimate test of what matters isn't one-off articles but campaign narratives. During the 2000 campaign, the press developed a narrative about Al Gore being dishonest based almost entirely on things he didn't even say. During the 2004 campaign, there was a narrative about John Kerry being a flip-flopper. In 2008, a robust narrative exists about Barack Obama being too aloof.

There were also narratives about George Bush being a regular guy, and McCain being maverick moderate. The fact is that McCain's campaign lies more than Gore ever did, and that McCain's flip-flopped more than Kerry ever did. Aloof may not be the right word, but McCain could hardly be more disconnected from the problems of the middle class, let alone the poor. He's blinded both by ideology and by the company he keeps -- indeed, by his own ten house, private plane lifestyle.

But the press narratives keep slanting one way. It's enough to make you wonder who owns the media, but you only need to ask that question to surmise the answer.

Billmon: The Future Belongs to We. This runs through the demographic shifts that are pushing the white Republican backlash ever further out on the plank. I don't think it's anywhere near this simple, but the demographic shift has already had an effect on how both parties contend for votes. Bush and Rove made some (neither sincere nor effective) efforts to woo hispanic and even black voters. McCain's making fewer gestures in that direction, most likely because he wants as much racial backlash from Obama as possible. But even there he needs to be careful, because the white race margin is already thin, and more and more whites are willing to vote for a black or hispanic. Wichita, which is still 65-70% non-hispanic white, elected an hispanic mayor a few years back, then voted him out in favor of a black. On the other hand, those were both conservative candidates backed by business interests. Real progressives, even white ones, have a much tougher time.

Andrew Hacker: Obama: The Price of Being Black. One problem with the demographic shift Billmon wrote about how do you turn raw population numbers into actual votes. Hacker reviews the various ways blacks are still denied their right to vote.

Andrew Sullivan: McCain's Integrity. Actually, lack thereof:

The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?

Probably more convincing coming from a conservative who believes he has a soul. Less so from me, because I've seen through him longer. For me the last straw broke in South Carolina in 2000 when McCain declined to defend the stars and stripes, let alone the Party of Lincoln. Sullivan's endorsement:

McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain -- no one else -- has proved it.

FiveThirtyEight is now showing McCain with a 0.8% popular vote lead, although the electoral vote still gives Obama a very slim edge (1.8). They surmise that this is the full extent of the Republican convention bounce. Looking at the state polls, almost all of McCain's gain has come in red states -- topped by Alaska, where the Palin pick has delivered a 31% margin in what had previously been considered a competitive (although red-leaning) state. Sullivan argues that the bump was in the "Christianist" base, which seems likely. The last week has been exceptionally stupid even by usual Stupid Season standards. Even things that should be hard news have turned to political mush. For instance, Bush's announcement of a trivial drawdown in troop strength in Iraq, albeit not until after his term ends. I keep seeing endless repetition of the "surge has worked beyond our wildest dreams" mantra by people with no idea what "working" means. (I believe the quote was from Obama, of all people, but don't quote me on that.) Meanwhile, the situation in Pakistan keeps getting further and further out of hand, which is all the more worrisome given that both candidates are hawks on it. It's tempting to say that Obama is losing because he's drifting away from the right positions on critical issues of war and peace. But to the extent that he is losing, it's for far worse reasons: because more/less half of the American people, and considerably larger slice of the media and business powers, are still willing to snuggle up in Karl Rove's pocket. What it says about us as a nation is nothing less than shameful.

Sarah Vowell: Party Guy. One of the maddening things about presidential campaigns is the near certain knowledge that you'll never fully anticipate what you'll get once a candidate is elected. Moreover, the risks of those bets keep increasing, as the executive branch concentrates more and more power, especially the power to bull into insane, hapless wars. As Vowell points out, this is nothing new.

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.

Another example:

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?

Then there was George W. Bush, the guy who wanted America to assume a more modest foreign policy:

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.

With Bush we might have been able to read the tea leaves a bit more carefully, especially if the media, or for that matter Bush's opponent, had bothered to ask some tough questions. There's plenty of reason to suspect the worst from McCain, but he still gets a pass from way too many people.

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)?

A persistent theme in Republican attacks against Obama is that you [the voter] don't know what he'll do once he gets into power. All you can tell now is that he says now, but most likely he's just saying that to get you to vote for him, so he can get into power and do whatever it is he really wants to do, whatever that is -- surely something awful bad. Like many effective smears, this is based on a half-truth, which is that nobody ever knows how the future is going to play out. On the other hand, the Republicans have bound themselves together so tightly that their range, for any semi-loyal party guy, looks to be limited to continuing the slow decay as we deny all the problems that are accumulating to driving full-speed into one disaster after another. At least with Obama we have a guy who says he can see potholes and seems to be smart enough and attentive enough to occasionally hit the brakes and/or swerve out of the way (or, as the derogatory term puts it, "change course").

There are few things in life I hate more than betting, but this one seems pretty clear cut.

The last page of the New York Times Week in Review section was filled by a full-page ad for Thomas L. Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It Can Renew America. Looking forward to the Matt Taibbi review. (For last time, see here.) For a whiff, see Friedman's op-ed today ("Georgia on My Mind"). Last two paragraphs:

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 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.

There are almost ten serious errors in those two sentences -- a really remarkable density of denseness. About the only thing he did get right is that the Republicans are morons, but how tough a call is that? The idea that innovation is the answer to all our problems is cornucopian gospel, something the Republicans are quite happy with, even if they'd preface it by claiming that the way to innovate is to stop taxing businesses and profits, as opposed to, like, public investment in education and science. And we're not serious about stopping Putin/Putinism -- we need the enemies to keep us focused on guns (not butter). The oil business has been good to Russia, but Russia's a global power because they're a big country with lots of smart people -- at least if you consider figuring out how to blow up half the earth a sign of brains. They've been called "Upper Volta with missiles," but that doesn't mean that if you'd just (somehow) take away the missiles they'd just be Upper Volta. Moreover, even if you wanted to take away their oil business, you can't, for the simple reason that they got the oil and you don't. Nor is a paltry $1 billion investment anywhere going to invent "an alternative to oil" -- let alone Georgia Tech, who'd probably plow it into football anyway. And so on. Nobody else manages to turn gibberish into cliché more efficiently than Friedman.

I've reprinted several Wichita Eagle editorial cartoons by Richard Clawson. He's usually pretty mild-mannered, but occasionally he does get worked up and draws something interesting. But the following one took me aback. Palin, of course, doesn't have a reform message, let alone a reform record. Even if she did, by signing on as John McCain's running mate she's subordinated whatever she might want to whatever McCain wants -- which is hard to speculate on because McCain himself has given up any hint of unorthodoxy in his quest to become George W. Bush's successor. The next time you'll hear McCain espousing anything remotely resembling reform will be the next time he gets caught red handed, like he did in the Great Savings & Loan Swindle.

Then there's the hockey stick grafted onto a baseball metaphor. I'm not sure how to read that, and I doubt that Crowson knows either. Hockey isn't a sport we Kansas know much about, but I was under the impression that slapping the puck out of the rink wasn't as positive an accomplishment as slugging the ball out of the park. In any case, the elephant's exclamation rings false, and the donkey's confusion has less to do with irony than flabbergasted disbelief. That point is well taken. Palin's big convention speech consisted of nothing more than dutifully reading the text of one of Bush's old writers, following the choreography of Bush's pet Machiavellian, Karl Rove -- like Phil Gramm and so many others, part of McCain's maverick posse.

I think the cartoon appeared in Friday's paper -- not sure, because the rain had reduced it to pulp by the time I got up. I noticed the cartoon when I was trying to track down a letter to the editor, written by Richard D. McKenzie, titled "Elmer Gantry II?":

Barack Obama came into our midst via Chicago, where he no doubt picked up a few good tips on business and contacts useful for later in life.

Armed with dubious credentials, a glib tongue and the ever-present hand mike, he infiltrated one of our most respected political parties. Sadly, its leadership succumbed to his spiel, which is composed of many slogans, problems without solutions and "much blow but very little go."

This brings to mind the widely read book that Sinclair Lewis wrote about the classic flimflam man Elmer Gantry, who mesmerized his gullible followers in order to feed his ravenous ego.

By contrast to Obama, Elmer Gantry was a mere beginner.

I've read a lot of weird attacks on Obama, but this one is so far off the charts I'd suspect satire if it didn't seem even more implausible than idiocy. It's downright weird on more levels than I can calculate. I doubt that this "widely read" novel has been read by as many of 0.02% of the letter's limited readership, so for starters the writer is placing himself in a peculiar elite -- presumably with Obama, who is presumed to have taken the character as a model. (Why is another whole level of weirdness.) I've never read the book, nor for that matter anything else by Sinclair Lewis. Wikipedia has a more coherent synopsis:

The novel tells the story of a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who, upon realizing the power, prestige, and easy money that being an evangelical preacher can bring, pursues his "religious" ambitions with relish, contributing to the downfall, even death, of key people around him as the years pass. Gantry continues to womanize, is often exposed as a fraud, and frequently faces a complete downfall, yet he is never fully discredited and always manages to emerge triumphant and reaching ever greater heights of social standing.

That sounds a little bit like a lot of people, but Obama isn't a name that jumps out for me. It's almost like McKenzie is running through his encyclopedia looking for any kind of slime or slander he can liken Obama to. The fact that this one is a book by an old time left-leaning novelist satirizing rich and pious phonies, a book long hated by the religious right, doesn't even produce any cognitive dissonance. One wonders why Obama's critics so often fall back on metaphors, allusions, and misrepresentations. It's like they can't even bear to contemplate actual issues.

I've been saying all along that the Republican campaign is going to get ugly, but it's starting to look it's just coming unhinged. It's like the Republicans feel like they have this God-given right to win and rule, and they just go crazy when they lose -- it's just something they can't fathom. You got a good look at that reaction when Clinton won in 1992. Clinton more than met them half way, yet they couldn't just graciously claim that even with Clinton in the White House they'd still be getting more than half the loaf. Instead, they went on an eight-year infantile rant. Now, after the sore losers spent their eight-year return to power wrecking everything they touched, they're bound to lose again, and this time not to the sweetheart of the Republican Lite set; no, this time, to, uh, Obama. They seem, thus far at least, to realize that going all Jesse Helms isn't going to do the trick, so they're groping. Elmer Gantry, anyone?

Paul Krugman: The Resentment Strategy. The first few paragraphs give you a sense of how far the convention Republicans have gone to stir up resentment against the Democratic ticket. There is, after all, little more than they can run on, but it's also been in their blood, as far back as Richard Nixon, who brought the Republicans back to power with his "silent majority" coalition of big business, racists, militarists, and old-fashioned individualists. The more they rule, the more they screw up; hence, the more dependent they are on stoking the rage that brought them together in the first place.

By selecting Barack Obama as their nominee, the Democrats may have given Republicans an opening: the very qualities that inspire many fervent Obama supporters -- the candidate's high-flown eloquence, his coolness factor -- have also laid him open to a Nixonian backlash. Unlike many observers, I wasn't surprised at the effectiveness of the McCain "celebrity" ad. It didn't make much sense intellectually, but it skillfully exploited the resentment some voters feel toward Mr. Obama's star quality.

But the Republicans would be doing this to anyone. They can't, after all, run on their own record.

Matthew Yglesias: A Partisan in Maverick's Clothing. McCain still has two months to run away from the Republican Party, but judging from the convention, he's stuck there, and couldn't get far even if he wanted to. Yglesias points out many cases where McCain has surrendered his independent judgment to the will of the party. He could have gone further in exploring the extent to which the GOP has become a hideous thought control machine.

Billmon: Really Proud. While Krugman is still worrying about that the resentment campaign may work against Obama, Billmon -- who on average is a hell of a lot more critical of the Democrats -- takes some pride in what has happened this year:

But there are loyalties that go deeper than policies, deeper than ideas, deeper, even, than folly and cowardice. When I turn on the TV and see the crowd at a Democratic National Convention -- black and white and every shade in between, Anglo and Hispanic, gay and straight, old and young, Jew and gentile, I know somewhere deep down in my gut that those are my people, the Americans that I want to be my fellow Americans.

That's a variant on what I've been feeling. I hate the very idea of identity politics, but despite voluminous policy differences that's what this election is coming down to: in part because that's the way the Republicans want to fight it, but also because a lot of Democrats this year don't feel like ducking that fight -- especially after seeing the Republican convention.

Billmon: The Great White Hope. A backgrounder on McCain, posted back on July 31 -- long time ago, but as history it's still valid. Back in the 1980s, after he parlayed his POW record into a Senate seat:

If John McCain had a problem with the way lobbying (i.e. legalized prostitution) was being done in Washington, you definitely won't find it in the record of the Keating investigation. McCain's fit of Puritan self-righteousness (or political calculation, depending on your view) came after the fact, once he'd already been caught. And yet, from that single Senate speech sprang the shoot that eventually grew into the sturdy tree of John McCain's media image.

You have to admit it was a neat trick: Happily accepting the naughty goodies while they were being handed out, but then winning brownie points for admitting he took them -- after the world had already found out he took them. But that's precisely what McCain did. He's never looked back since.

The lesson he learned, I think, is that pseudo-candor (truthiness) usually trumps the genuine article (McCain was way ahead of his time on this) And so he hasn't hesitated to flip and flop shamelessly if (and these are the key points) it is in his interest and he thinks he can get away with it.

On to 2000, when he ran for president:

As the outsider, one of a number of outsiders, running against the GOP establishment favorite, McCain desperately needed -- and knew he needed -- independents and Democrats to turn out for him in the primaries where they were allowed to do so. But his record and his positions on most issues defined him as a fairly conventional GOP conservative -- what's more, one whose primary passion, national security hawkishness, was way out of fashion. So, McCain and his political advisors used his personal biography (not least his post-Keating Five contrition) to fashion a new political persona that would appeal to independents and/or moderates: McCain 2.0. To demonstrate his bona fides, he even took a totally gratuitous (if entirely accurate) public shot at the religious right, defining them as "the agents of intolerance."

It worked well initially -- well enough to put the fear into Karl Rove and George W. Bush, not to mention the entire GOP establishment. But conservative, hardcore Republican South Carolina turned into the make-or-break primary state, and McCain's supposed appeal to veterans turned out to be much less tangible than the Bush machine's tight connections to the fundamentalist Taliban. So suddenly John McCain, the supposed straight talker, was ducking and weaving around the perennially important issue of whether the Confederate flag should continue to wave over the cradle of the Civil War.

He lost anyway, of course -- but here again, as during the Keating Five scandal, McCain managed to make political vice look like virtue, at least in the media's eyes. In late April, he gave a speech announcing he'd been wrong not to denounce the Stars and Bars. "I chose to compromise my principles," he confessed, and "broke my promise to always tell the truth" in order to win in South Carolina.

With Bush the nominee, McCain waited on the sidelines.

Like Achilles, McCain largely withdrew to his tent for the 2000 general election campaign -- sulking after his defeat, it was said; although, in hindsight, hedging his bets might be a more accurate description. But after the Florida debacle, with the Cheney Administration off to a rocky start and Shrub looking like a possible one-term failed nominal president, McCain re-emerged to re-define himself legislatively as a "maverick" Republican -- opposing tax cuts, slamming the tobacco lobby, embracing campaign finance reform, etc.

But then 9/11 reshuffled the political cards once again. With Bush transformed into the GOP's Maximum Leader, McCain reinvented himself AGAIN as a loyal foot soldier in the war on terrorism -- but managed to keep just enough daylight between himself and the Cheney Administration (on the conduct of the war in Iraq, the use of torture, etc.) to give himself an out if thing went South.

In 2004 McCain flirted with Kerry, but wound up embracing Bush. He got back into the forefront of the neocon war in Iraq, surging even before Bush did. And he started mending his fences with GOP baseheads like Jerry Falwell. Through the primaries he was more unapologetically aligned with Bush than any other candidate, even though it meant backtracking on everything from taxes to Armageddon. And now, with the nomination sewed up, all those GOP aparatchiks who supposedly hated him in his "maverick" days are lined up right behind him: the ultimate party hack.

The poll projections at FiveThirtyEight have Obama up by 3.1% today, his biggest lead that I can remember, with Ohio and Virginia in the blue column, and Nevada teetering. Doesn't seem like McCain got any convention bounce, but it may take a while to work through the algorithms.

Billmon: In Your Heart, You Know They're White. No surprise that the common denominator at the Republican convention is that everywhere you look you see nothing but white faces. In 2004 Bush managed to engineer a little camouflage, but not McCain in 2008. Not sure whether he forgot, didn't care, or couldn't hack it. He might even see it as his leg up, but Billmon argues that all-white crowds are looking increasingly anomalous in America. Tune in after, say, the Olympics, the Democratic Convention, the Hurricane Gustav evacuations, and the Republian convention looks even stranger, not to mention more out of touch.

Paul Woodward commenting on a similar article in the Washington Post: "How can a party that doesn't resemble the country, credibly put the 'country first'?" Actually, the Republicans have a pretty limited definition of country, one pretty much summed up by Todd Snider's song "Conservative Christian, Right-Wing Republican, Straight White American Males" -- plus a few soccer moms, or hockey moms as the case may be. Their pitch is based on two basic propositions: those are the only real Americans, and it's up to the Republicans to protect those real Americans and their country from all the other miscreants living and working hereabouts. Everyone who doesn't fit their model is an object of fear and loathing, and Republican campaigns are based on provoking as much of that as possible.

Otherwise, the Republicans would have to run on their real platform, which is helping the rich get richer and keeping everyone else far excluded from any trace of political power. You can start to see their problem when you start counting up how many people benefit from Republican rule vs. how many are hurt by it. If both camps acted rationally, the Republicans would be hard pressed to get 5% of the vote. They do better than that because they're able to con more people, and this is an iterative process: they pick up a few people and tout them as exemplars of Republicanism and use them as bait for more. One problem with this is that the party keeps getting dumber and dumberer as it's swelled with people who don't know or appreciate their own or the public's interests.

But it's an argument that's losing out on several fronts, including demographically. Matt Yglesias reacted to attacks on Democrats in general and Obama in particular as being elitists, in contrast to the regular folk Republicans claim to be:

The only way to be a "regular person" is to (a) have white skin, (b) not descend from Spanish-speaking people, (c) not go to college, (d) not be poor, and (e) avoid living in a big city. Nevermind that a large majority of the American public falls into one of the Five Forbidden Categories of Irregularity.

The whole elitism complaint is the low point so far of this campaign. It seems to be nothing more than a catch-all way to strike out at Obama for being smarter and more eloquent than McCain. Brains and eloquence used to be qualities that we sought out in presidents, like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. The Republican alternative to brains and eloquence is ignorance and mendacity, and that's about all they have left to sell. It's sad that anyone takes them seriously, except as a threat to civilization.

Matt Yglesias: The Culture Warriors. A little bit more on this, well worth reading. Although I said above that most Republicans aren't being rational about their interests, there is a broader niche that think they are, mostly because they are doing pretty well and haven't factored all the externalities in -- pollution, the risk shift, terrorism, gang crime, government corruption and incompetence, etc. One thing worth pondering is that while rich people in every state vote Republican and poor people in every state vote Democratic, the Democrats wind up winning virtually all of the relatively rich states (Utah is the exception), with the Republicans winning the relatively poor states.

Stories are like diamond cutting. The interesting ones are those that break into many facets each with its own distinctive view of the story. The Georgia war was interesting less for what happened to the poor people in the way than for how much tired cold war ideology it revealed. The Joe Biden nomination wasn't interesting at all: it was the ultimate safe choice, proven by the fact that nobody (aside from Counterpunch) had anything to say about it. In retrospect, it shows how cautious and methodical Obama is, but only compared to McCain-Palin will anyone notice. Anyone McCain could have picked would have reflected on McCain. Lieberman would have been good for publicity, but he's been pretty well aired out by now. I was hoping for Phil Gramm, but he's pure coal compared to Palin: nothing but a source of heat and pollution, sure to cover McCain in soot. Palin's much more than that.

Brent D Wistrom: Brownback pulled as one to nominate Palin. One of the most perverse things about the anti-abortion crowd is how much they adore teenage pregnancies. For these people, the news that Sarah Palin's 17-year-old unwed daughter is pregnant is a sign from God. KS Sen. Sam Brownback is one of them. He was originally asked to give Palin's nomination speech, but evidently McCain's handlers started having second thoughts, as if they recognize that most Americans might not be so joyful over the Palin family's blessings.

Brownback said recent disclosures about Palin will only make her stronger.

He said he thinks conservative Kansans will be supportive of Palin, whose 17-year-old daughter is pregnant and not married.

"Here's a situation you don't like, you wish didn't happen, but you don't kill the child as a response," he said. "You say 'OK, we'll have the child, we're going to surround the child with love, they're going to try to make it go as a family.' And that's what we do."

Brownback said, in fact, that Palin's social conservatism has excited the base of the party for the first time in years. "After her announcement, I talked to people who were giddy about her," he said. "Because there's always been some distance between McCain and the conservative base of the party."

Speaking of giddy, on the opinion page Cal Thomas has a love letter to Palin, annointing her as a "Steel Magnolia." This is actually a far cry from the usual run of Republican pundits, who lined up dutifully behind Palin because those were the marching orders.

So at least one part of the Palin pick is working beautifully, perhaps too much so. The fundamentalist base is rallying behind her, which is a double-sided sword. They got their candidate, and -- unlike the Fred Barneses of the world -- they're going to be hurt if McCain drops her. On the other hand, their fanatic support only adds to McCain's already substantial nutjob factor. When this finally sinks in, a lot of centrist voters are going to be very nervous.

Alex Koppelman: Quote of the day. Actually, the quote, which pertains to the point above, is from Byron York over at National Review:

Perhaps I'm focusing on an irrelevant issue, but the presence, or non-presence, of [Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's unborn child] on the stage tonight strikes me as important. It's one thing for delegates to be understanding and compassionate about the fix these two teenagers have gotten themselves into. It's another to actually celebrate it. And, given what we've learned in the last few days, if Johnston is up on stage with his girlfriend and the Palin family, and Republicans are wildly cheering, it will certainly look like they are celebrating this situation.

I don't usually engage in these scenarios, but I'll do it here. If the Obamas had a 17 year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if that they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.

Actually, if Palin was a Democrat and got nominated, virtually everything in her story would spin around 180 degrees.

Marc Ambinder: What McCain Didn't Know About Sarah Palin. Subtitle: "And why he probably would have picked her anyway." Goes through in pretty substantial detail what McCain's people actually did find out about Palin, and how they planned to use that -- e.g., to turn the "lack of experience" issue around to emphasize her executive experience as mayor and governor, something Obama and Biden (and McCain) lack. The argument that McCain would have picked Palin anyway depends more on the mostly imaginary outisder-reformist narrative. That strikes me as the weakest and most phony of her assets. She offers a sense of human (as in fallible) commonness that McCain sorely lacks (and that he sure wouldn't have picked up with Romney). On the other hand, I'm not sure if that's what America wants in a [vice] president.

Patrick J Buchanan: Johnny's got a new girl. One thing we differ on here at home is Buchanan: whether he's an incisive critic at least on a few points, or whether he's inevitably just a partisan hack. Here's his take on Palin:

The Palin nomination could backfire, but it is hard to see how. She has passed her first test, her introduction to the nation, with wit and grace. And the Obama-Biden ticket, having already alienated millions of women with the disrespecting of Hillary, is unlikely to start attacking another woman whose sole offense is that she had just been given the chance to break the glass ceiling at the national level.

Her nomination, which will bring the Republican right home, also frees up McCain to appeal to moderates and liberals, which has long been his stock in trade.

With his selection of Sarah Palin, John McCain has not only shaken up this election, he may have helped shape the future of the United States -- and much for the better.

I'd say this lines him up pretty securely with the partisan hacks.

Josh Marshall: Risk of Stating the Obvious. Lists two "key facts" in the presidential race:

First, the Democratic base is bigger than the Republican base. The number of self-identifying Democrats is substantially larger that the number of Republican-identifiers.

Second, contrary to what we might have imagined earlier in the year, Republicans have already been substantially more united behind McCain than Democrats have been behind Obama. I would not have predicted that. But the polls have been extremely consistent on this point.

In other words, the GOP 'base' was already substantially united behind McCain, subjective measures of intensity notwithstanding. The people who will win the election for McCain are disaffected Democrats and independents. In the context of 2008, a juicing-the-base strategy is a recipe for a respectable defeat, not victory.

I imagine there was a point where McCain fantasized that picking Palin would have extended his reach: that he might have picked up a big chunk of those Clinton PUMAs. In any case, he did succeed in stealing the news cycle back from the Democrats. But the way Palin is playing out may have just the opposite effect: rallying the born-againers is more likely to unite the Democrats than to split them. McCain may have figured he needed to gamble to win, or he may just like gambling. Lots of Americans like gambling. They think it's about winning, but mostly they just lose.

The question all this raises is whether they like leaders who gamble. After two terms of George Bush doubling and redoubling his failed, hedged bets, I hope not.

Off the Rails: Sarah Palin's Very Bad Day. That's the lead-in title. The link headline is "The Palin Meltdown in Slo-Mo." I mostly wanted to use the picture, which unlike most quickie photoshop kluges does a nice job of capturing this story. Palin reminds me of randomocracy: the half-baked idea that we can eliminate the biases in the election system by simply picking someone at random. Compared to a political process that promotes safe picks like Joe Biden (or steathily sinister ones like Dick Cheney), Palin is almost a random American, at least within Republican white middle class female constraints -- what proves this is the ordinariness of her baggage. Even the corruption issues are normal reactions to the company she keeps: as Molly Ivins used to say, "lie down with dogs, get up with fleas."

Billmon: Ready, shoot, aim On the art and science of vetting vice presidential nominees. One point, which others have also made, bears repeating:

I'm glad to see Obama come out and warn his troops away from the really personal stuff. It's already clear that Palin offers an embarrassment of riches for the Obama campaign, and a wealth of embarrassments for McCain's. There's no need to get greedy -- or cruel and vindicative, which is the one thing that could cause this whole freeding frenzy to circle back and start munching on the Democrats. McCain's people wanted to toss the pregnancy story into Hurricane Gustav? Good. Let it be buried in the muck.

Except for one obvious point: When Sarah Palin praises her 17-year-old daughter for "choosing" to give birth to a baby conceived out of wedlock (and assures us that she is doing it of her own free will) it should never be forgotten that she (and her party) would, if they could, deny that same right of choice to every other American woman, without exception.

Michael Kinsley: No Experience Necessary. And what does the Palin pick tell us about McCain?

That's why the important point about Palin's lack of experience isn't about Palin. It's about McCain. And the question is not how his choice of Palin might complicate his ability to use the "experience" issue, or whether he will have to drop experience as an issue. It's not even about the proper role of experience as an issue. In fact, it's not about experience at all. It's about honesty. The question should be whether McCain -- and all the other Republicans who have been going on for months about Obama's dangerous lack of foreign-policy experience -- ever meant a word of it.

Matthew Yglesias: Alaska Independence. Not a good post, but I felt like adding a comment, not least because something obvious to me didn't occur to first 25 commenters:

The knock on Alaska's congressional representation shows a short memory. Sen. Ernest Gruening voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The only other senator to do so was Wayne Morse of Oregon. Sen. Mike Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. Of course, both were Democrats, and Alaska's congressional delegation has been solid Republican for decades now.

Gruening is long dead now, but Gravel ran for president this year. He was probably the most solidly antiwar candidate in the race, but didn't get any respect. Funny thing is that Palin seems to be about as far off in the Republican fringe as Gravel is relative to the Democrats. Had she run for president she wouldn't have fared any better. Yet here she is, a heartbeat and the small matter of an election away.

In the late 1960s I followed Congress real closely, and Gruening was something of a hero to me. He was well into his 80s at the time, having long been pre-statehood Alaska's most eminent statesman. Gravel was his protégé and successor.

One of the amusing things about the Palin nomination is that on matters like Iraq she seems to be closer to Ron Paul than she is to McCain -- although, as we'll see, she can go any way the party wind blows.

The folks at FiveThirtyEight have dropped their convention bounce compensation metric, which had narrowed Obama's edge to 0.2%, but kept various anti-trend hedge factors, so they're only showing Obama with a 2.4% margin right now. (The average of six nationwide polls today puts Obama ahead by 6.7%, with CNN +2% and everyone else +6-9%.) That was good enough to barely nudge Virginia and Ohio into Obama's column, but Nevada slipped out. It remains to be seen how much more bump Obama can get out of the Republican convention. It all depends on how many people are still gullible enough to believe anything from a gang who'd say anything to hang on to the pursestrings.

Matthew Yglesias: Killing the Brand. This strikes me as the most astute piece I've seen on the McCain-Palin ticket. It also has a theory about why McCain manages to keep so close to Obama, despite the fact that there is no remotely plausible reason why virtually anyone in the US of A should prefer McCain. It's that Obama is running a methodical turtle race, while McCain is playing the hare, jumping on every opportunity to edge a bit ahead, even at the expense of his credibility come November.

Most fundamentally, I think this pick violates the contemporary understanding of the role of the Vice Presidency. With the exception of the four Bush-Quayle years, ever since 1977 we've had a POTUS-VPOTUS team that features a charismatic outsider at the top of the ticket (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II) backed by a seasoned Washington hand (Mondale, Bush I, Gore, Cheney) with "charismatic outsiderishness" generally being an asset, but an asset whose value is enhanced by showing some humility and good sense by bringing a veteran on board.

Seems less like a crazy pick to me than a cute one. That's not just a comment on her looks, but on the superficial level McCain and most Republicans campaign on. After all, they don't really have to understand issues -- when the time comes their masters will tell them what to think. Meanwhile, they gladhand the press and spout their daily talking points. It's only Democrats that have to have experience, smarts, people skills, and common sense, because once they get elected they're on their own.

Palin's political record seems to indicate she's a person who'll do what she's told, and be personable along the way. She's earned her cred with the far right -- like the bit about giving birth to a mutant to show off her opposition to abortion. Given her state's history, I doubt that hardly anyone in the nation would go as far out on a limb to trash the environment in order to extract mineral resources. If McCain has his way, the only economic issue that will register this fall is the need to slice gas prices by drilling and polluting everywhere. Palin will not only support him in that; she's practically Exhibit A.

On the other hand, even if cute makes a nice first impression, it can wear thin over the long haul -- like between now and November. If Obama can get people to realize that the election is about something serious -- not a proposition I have a lot of faith in, but if things get worse voters may start moving that direction on their own -- McCain's superficiality will fall hard.

Andrew Leonard: Sarah Palin: Drill, drill, drill -- all the way. Some background on Palin and the oil industry.

Over at FiveThirtyEight, Obama's popular vote margin has shrunk again, down to 0.2%, although something weird is going on with their "SuperTracker" thingy, with the Trend Line jumping up 6 points and the Projection dropping.

Dennis Perrin: O, Bomb It On the Mountain. One more little thing on the author of Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War. He mentioned this in the Greenwald interview, but more in passing:

I've repeatedly said that I want Obama to be elected so that liberals can show their true colors, and we can dispense with their supposed "antiwar" personas. That still holds. A McCain presidency will only delay what needs to opened and dealt with, to the degree that it can be dealt with. But watching Obama last night gave me another thought, that of driving American reactionaries even crazier, which will happen should the president be of color and have that last name. Obama in the White House will seriously fuck with their fat heads. Good. I can definitely live with that.

I don't buy this argument. I, too, worry about Obama's postures toward Iran and (especially) Pakistan, and I don't trust him to get out of Iraq, let alone Afghanistan, as gracefully as he should. And let's not get started in Israel/Palestine. And then there's the crises we don't know about yet, the ones that have been smoldering over the last 8, 16, 60 years that haven't engulfed us in flames yet: how's he going to react to those, given his political sense, the foibles of his hundreds of advisors, and the state aparatus he'll inherit from Bush's deliberate politicization of everything. All these things considered, it's certainly possible that Obama's administration will be bellicose and reckless enough to fill out another chapter in the second edition of Perrin's book. I hope that's not the case, and I can think of some good reasons why it may not be the case, but right now you got to grant the possibility.

On the other hand, where Perrin's argument falls flat is in his naïve idea that Obama's belligerence will be so aggressive and so dysfunctional that it will finally drive Americans to an antiwar stance so firm that it rejects the Democratic as well as Republican parties. Short of nuclear war I don't see that reaction. No matter how belligerent Obama becomes, the Republicans will demand more, because that's their brand identity; and the Democrats will split, with the hawks shaming the doves into knuckling under otherwise it will be their fault if the Republicans get back in. We already had a dry run for this with Clinton. Nor did the argument that by outdoing their wettest dreams Clinton would fuck with Republicans heads amount to much: by then the Republicans were so divorced from reality and wrapped up in their own rhetoric that they scarcely noticed when Clinton did their bidding. Indeed, hardly anyone noticed, except for the Naderite fringe.

The reason for supporting Obama and the Democrats in 2008 is the old sad one: they represent the lesser evil, and confused as they were they are still far less culpable for the last eight years than the Republicans. Actually, I'm a bit less pessimistic than that. I see a few things in Obama's political approach that I like, plus I see an intellectually flexible realism that gives me some hope that Obama will try to respond to new problems in ways that actually address them, rather than kick them into an ideologically cocked hat. Where I am pessimistic is that I think many of our problems, if not exacerbated at least neglected for 8 (or 16, or 28) years may be approaching catastrophic shifts, that will prove too much for anyone acclimated to our political culture.

Dennis Perrin: Demver -- Day Three. Looking at Glen Greenwald's blog last night, I noticed that he did a "radio" interview with Dennis Perrin, author of a short book called Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War. I can't recommend the interview, which mostly consisted of Greenwald trying to browbeat Perrin into admitting that Obama isn't as bad as McCain, and for that matter Gore wouldn't have been as bad as Bush, and Perrin trying his best to resist. If the art of the interviewer is to make the guest look good, Greenwald has a lot to learn, but Perrin could have made some useful points but didn't. Two probable differences between Bush and Gore are that Gore would have factored more reconstruction into war cost estimates and Gore would have been more realistic about what the US could afford. Bush handwaved the whole postwar expense in order to rig the balance sheet, not that he ever had a clue how to rebuild a country anyway -- indeed, where he got caught was in his administration's failure to handle Hurricane Katrina. Whether those factors would have made much difference in Afghanistan is something one can argue many ways about: Gore would certainly have launched that war; the initial war itself would likely have been the same, given institutional constraints; Gore probably would have made a more concerted rebuilding effort, but many of the reasons "nation building" failed were deeply structured; it's impossible to say whether Gore would have done a better job of handling the critical diplomatic relationships with Pakistan, Iran, India, and Russia. Gore might have done better in Afghanistan if he had been able to defuse the major festering sores in the middle east -- Israel and Iraq -- but his whole past history was aligned with keeping those sores festering. Again, the only good reason for thinking Gore might have done better is how badly Bush actually did. Remember, though, that before Bush invaded Iraq, the sanctions and bombing programs under Clinton-Gore had undermined Iraqi living standards possibly with a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Doing nothing in that context may have been better than doing what Bush did, but not much. But to do anything else would have required a mindset adjustment and political will that Gore (for instance) had never shown any proclivity towards. (Only by losing did he manage to free himself up to the point where now such a change seems plausible.)

On the other hand, Perrin's convention reporting takes some amusing digs at the Democrats, not least the donkey pics. The times mean that we're all Democrats now, but some sense of critical distance is still necessary. Greenwald kept pressing Perrin to admit that we would have been better off had Gore won over Bush in 2000. The obvious response is that we would have been better off still had Ralph Nader won. I watched the Bush-Gore foreign policy debate in 2000, and the only military intervention they disagreed on was Haiti -- which, by the way, Bush wound up invading to overthrow the president that Clinton had re-installed after a right-wing coup resulted in tens of thousands of refugees heading towards the US. Most of those policies Bush and Gore agreed on were dangerous and despicable and, significantly, were opposed by Nader. In foreign policy, at least, Nader was the only candidate in 2000 who offered an alternative to America's increasingly hapless imperial stance. If Gore really was a "lesser evil" than Bush, he should have made an effort to win back the Nader voters, either by showing some concern and respect for Nader's positions, or by showing that Bush was far worse than anyone imagined. He did neither, preferring to build his majority on the right, against the left. He lost his gamble, then went meekly into retirement, quickly forgetting anything he had said about fighting for his voters.

I don't mean to rub this in, but I don't see much value in backing down either. Clearly we underestimated the Bush threat. Clearly, so did the Democrats. The difference is that most Nader voters recognized what Bush was doing in real time, whereas the Democrats kept playing along, making things worse. Even now they aren't all that sure what happened to them, why, what their role in it was, let alone what to do about it. How pathetic is that? Pathetic enough that they keep blaming the people who were right all along for their half-hearted losses in 2000 and 2004.

Glen Greenwald: What's missing from the Democratic convention? Once again, the Democrats have failed to use their opportunity to educate the electorate to fully take the Republicans to task for "the sheer radicalism and extremism of the last eight years." Greenwald has a list, which starts with the trampling of the very fundamentals of American law and civil liberties that woke him from political apathy and drove him to write his little broadside, How Would a Patriot Act? One could add a long book to that list. Instead, Greenwald provides quotes from Republican speakers back in 2004, showing how pros use their convention to hack to shreds a candidate like John Kerry. The point is especially well taken given how parallel Kerry's and McCain's weaknesses are. As Greenwald points out, the Republicans are unlikely to miss their opportunity to do the same to Obama.

Looks like Gallup is showing about a 6-point bounce for Obama from the convention. Thus far that's netted a 0.7% gain over at FiveThirtyEight, nudging Nevada into Obama's column, while Ohio and Virginia are still narrowly leaning McCain (1.1% and 0.6% respectively).

I hear Al Gore gave a good speech tonight. I remember pundits going on and on about how obsessed Gore is with becoming president -- how if he lost he'd lose all purpose in life. This, of course, was from the same people who told us that Bush was so secure in himself that he'd just shrug off defeat -- the same people who told us that Bush would be a fun guy to have a [non-alcoholic] beer with.

I've seen a number of reports that Iraqi PM Maliki is insisting that all foreign troops, which these days are virtually all American troops, leave Iraq by 2011. I saw another report that Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, evidently still in a bad mood after the latest US air action that left 90 civilians (read: mostly women and children) dead, wants to get in on that deal. Given the growing pressure from the socalled legitimate governments of the nations Bush invaded and occupied, John McCain may be hard pressed to fulfill his campaign promise of keeping those wars going another hundred years. At least he has Georgia, Russia, and WWIII to fall back on.

Given Bush's record even before 9/11, few people remember that in the 2000 Republican primaries it was McCain who was the neocon darling, while Bush was calling for a "more modest" foreign policy with fewer or none of those "nation building" adventures Clinton kept getting into. Of course, now we can go back and parse Bush's pre-election statements more carefully, where we find occasional hints of later policy. We can track how McCain's neocon legions infiltrated the Bush administration, settling into strategic cells waiting for opportunities to offer heavy stick solutions to any and all problems that may arise -- or would inevitably arise: if war and the threat of force is your only tool for solving conflicts, no effort need be made to defuse conflicts short of war.

Some people remember how in 1964 Johnson had painted Goldwater as a dangerous crackpot warmonger -- a view that wasn't falsified but at least took on an ironic hue as Johnson spent his presidency ever more deeply mired in Vietnam. I suppose Democrats have some reluctance to do the same to McCain, but the latter's track record is even worse than Goldwater's.

Andrew Sullivan: America Against the World. I don't normally read Sullivan, but TPM quoted this, referring back to a WSJ op-ed by Lieberman and Graham. This resonated a bit more because another conservative, "Crunchy Con" Rod Dreher, had an op-ed in the Wichita Eagle this morning expressing horror at McCain's "We are all Georgians" bluster. (See below.) Sullivan: "In my view, the fear card has only one truly compelling target this election: McCain."

Rod Dreher: Sorry, We Are Not All Georgians. Quotes McCain, then scratches his head:

We are? Spare me. You couldn't find one American in a thousand who could locate Georgia on a map, but the Republican hothead who would be president is ready to bind America's sacred honor to the place. And more than our sacred honor, our military might, too.

McCain, a tempestuous Russophobe to the marrow, demanded that the United States accelerate efforts to bring Georgia into NATO, thus extending a trip wire for war with Russia to Moscow's southern border. Because, you know, having conquered Iraq and Afghanistan while barely breaking a sweat, we're rested and ready to let an adventurous Caucasus nation led by a nut drag us into World War III.

Then he takes a swing at Obama:

One would have hoped Barack Obama would meet Russia's aggression with a more balanced, realistic response. Instead, Obama worked his way into McCain's shadow, joining the call for Georgia's NATO membership to go forward. Thus did Obama prove himself to be about as useful as the congressional Democrats who, having come to power in 2006 promising to bring the unpopular Iraq war to a close, went on to give President Bush all the money he asked for to fight it.

What is it with the Democrats? Are they so afraid of being baited by the Republicans as cowards that they sign on to any foolish policy proposed by GOP jingoes?

Well, of course they are. Personally, I think Obama and Biden could have drawn a line against McCain over Georgia which would have gone far toward painting McCain as the war psycho he is, but they ducked the issue instead. Dreher goes on to quote Bacevich about no differences hetween the party standard bearers, which is comforting for the few war-weary conservatives out there. I took a look through Dreher's blog, and didn't find anything of value there. In fact, I had to dig further to convince myself that there aren't two Rod Drehers.

Glenn Greenwald: Warnings to Russia from Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. Another reaction to the Lieberman-Graham war council op-ed, with more background. One thing worth noting is that the people who keep getting identified as McCain's foreign policy team are way outside even the Republican mainstream. Speaking of which:

ThinkProgress: John McCain's War Cabinet. This probably isn't a complete listing, but it's quite a rogues gallery. Wonder where Michael Ledeen is.