So, Which Is It?

Driving home from work a day after Obama's inauguration, I was listening to a local conservative radio talk show host rant. (Conservative talk show hosts have three basic speeds: roil, ramp up, and rant.)

Obama supporters, he (it was in fact a he, and his name is Jay Severin, WTTK-FM, Boston) said, are infatuated beyond sense, by their man. "Obamatons, Obotics," blinded, besotted by Obama. Irrational. In this nation, he dramatically intoned, we do not profess fealty to an individual, but rather, to an institution, democracy.

Heady stuff.
Almost enough to make me pause in popping my ritual two pieces of "drive-home gum" in my mouth. And almost enough to make me cough them right back up.

Over the last eight years, many on the right complained that those on the left did not feel quite enough fealty to a certain individual, that in fact, their blind "Bush hating" was, well, irrational.

I guess fealty really is all in the eye of the besotted.

Who Knew Joe The Plumber Was So Sensitive?

So, Joe the Plumber feels dirty.

That's saying something.
You know when a plumber feels dirty, and it doesn't even have to do with work, something must be very, very skeevy indeed.

Or at least very Republican.

In an interview, Joe Wurzelbacher says that some of the things he saw while campaigning for John McCain made him feel "dirty" and were "pretty scary."
And Joe, after all, is a man who has seen the kind of back-ups and clogging that would make most of us truly blanch.

None of the dirty, scary stuff involved Sarah Palin, though.
He's utterly entranced with her.
"Sarah Palin is absolutely the real deal," he gushed to conservative radio host Glenn Beck.

And next time Sarah Palin has a scary backup, it sounds like Joe Wurzelbacher is one plumber she ought to be able to get on a weekend.

Can We Get A Bailout...

...For Peter Orszag's wig?
You've seen it, right?

It doesn't even look like a bad hairpiece.
It looks like a really good beret.

Surely, somewhere in that $700 billion stimulus package, there can be $350 bucks set aside for a new rug for the nation's new budget director.

My goodness.

Andy Warhol Called: Your Fifteen Minutes Are Up

Rarely does a political action committee's website, by its very name, unwittingly offer the central argument against its own cause.

But if you're honoring Sarah Palin, and your PAC is called, "Our Country Deserves Better..."

In time, campaign '08 will recede enough to look back nostalgically at it, and perhaps we will even miss the phenomenon that was Sarah Palin.

But you can't miss something that won't go away............

Doubling Down

In this just-begun transition period between #43 and #44, Barack Obama (soon-to-be 44), when pressed about doing this or that prior to his official innauguration, has been fond of saying that this nation "only has one president at a time."

Pity.

For while that little detail may make perfect sense and moreover be technically true, who doesn't feel a twinge of disappointment every time Obama says that?

Bush's approval ratings are trending toward the "too slight to make the needle move" range, the nation's "pessisim" index is the highest ever recorded, and not to put too fine a point on it, but if I were doing the polling, I would ask simply, "Do you feel the country is actually in the crapper, getting buried in the crapper, or is in the process of actually being flushed down the crapper?"

All of which suggests plainly and potently, that if there was ever a time this nation could use two presidents, it's now. Or maybe Bush could simply say to Obama, "Hey, look--I'm basically fried; why don't you move in early, get to work, and I'll be back for your innauguration." Nothing in the constitution prohibits that.

Besides, it's win-win: Obama gets to get started early to everyone's benefit, and Bush, in ceding his office to someone who can use it, gets the first uptick in his approval ratings in years.

Just a little thinking outside the Beltway box.

I'll Go With Leaders of Europe For 20, Please

Big Deal. So John McCain got himself all confused about who he was talking to, and who was the Spanish Prime Minister, and whether he would invite him to the White House, and the interview really was something of a mess.

At one point, the interviewer, clearly perplexed and vexed by McCain's referencing Latin America when she was talking about Spain, after all, said to him, "What about Europe?"
McCain responded, "What about me?"

What about you, indeed John McCain.
"The fundamentals of the economy are strong," he says to begin Wall Street's meltdown week. "I would fire the head of the S.E.C.," he then roars. Only the president can't actually do that.

Funny, how the 17 houses seem entirely irrelevant now.
On the other hand, he has the only running mate in modern times who knows how to field dress a moose.
Cool.
Funny how the 17 houses are the least of his problems now.

Mile-High Hypocrisy

Pity poor Michael Gerson.

As a former professional speech-writer, he felt let down by Barack Obama's nomination acceptance speech in Denver.

"In tone, Obama's big speech was small, partisan, often defensive, and occasionally snide," Gerson writes in his 8/30 Washington Post column.

But then, as a former speech writer for George W. Bush, Gerson ought to know a thing or two about smallness, nevermind a spoken message that was, from the first, rabidly partisan and more than occasionally snide.

84, ooo fervently-cheering Democrats who felt literally a mile high seemed to feel otherwise.

Gerson called the speech "orthodox."
Perhaps it was a wee bit. For a Democrat. Which, Gerson may want to double-check, Obama is.

A man who crafted speeches with George Bush's smirk in mind is let down by the strong, stirring--and yes, partisan--language of the man hellbent on replacing him in the White House and attempting to clean up the sorry mess he will leave behind.

Aw.

Funny, how many on the right, after eight years of partisanship so fierce and unrelenting that some of them talked in terms of permanently "neutering" the opposition, now feel let down that that opposition is being so...partisan.

I would ask Michael Gerson, how does it feel?
But then, that would be snide.