Clothesgate, a bizarre finale

COULD YOU  have ever imagined last August, when the McCain camp rocketed Sarah Palin into the politicosphere, that it would have had such a bizarre ending as the current Clothesgate scandal?   I mean,  to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, not with an intended bang on election day but rather with a whimper?  While she was jetting back to friendlier turf in Alaska, her GOP detractors, obviously fussy about how some of their money was spent,  were said to be jetting a lawyer to Wasilla or wherever to retrieve the fashionable  wardrobe that Palin  laid out for herself and family for more than $15o,00o.  My guess is that they won't find  the kind of goods that would end up in a neighborhood rummage sale.  So far, Palin doesn't appear to be all that repentant about the buying spree.  Besides, she may need every last stitch if she runs for president in 2012.  Meantime, I await the photo ops of an eagle-eyed  Washington lawyer poking around in Sarah's closets with receipts from Saks amid her complaints that her privacy was being invaded by disgruntled McCain males.   On the day she was  assigned to the ticket with McCain, I  wrote that it was political insanity. ( Every now and then I get it right.)  And now Clothesgate.  Weird.  Folks, you can't make this stuff up.  

Lady, it's really over

TWENTY FOUR hours have passed since Barack Obama strode to the stage to address the massive crush of supporters in Grant Park as victor of a bruising campaign for the Oval Office.  It has taken the length of a day to absorb the enormity of the event.  Not only in America did Obama seize an historic  moment as the first African-American to win the presidency. Reports were gathered from around the world of his accomplishment, from Australia to South Africa and across Europe and the Far East.  America was jolted upward in the esteem of others who had grown cynical about our pretenses of leadership, human freedom and racial parity.  As a nation, we needed that lift badly.    

The anti-Obama diehards have already checked in, some fearing him as the antichrist, a radical socialist, an alien.  Their frustration was expressed to a London newspaper by a woman at the McCain post-election gathering in Phoenix.  "It's not over," she cried.  "It can't be over."

Well, lady,  it is.  At least the vote count that confirms him as the  first African-American to take up residence in the White House to deal with the challenges that may be greater than the tasks of Hercules.  At the same time, I found it amusing that Karl Rove, whose "genius" continues to decline with each new loss on his ledger,  spent  his time on Fox News  reciting vote counts for Obama, Kerry and Bush to illustrate - I'm guessing because he lost me with his numbers - that Obama didn't do all that well.  Rove and Sean Hannity are now in hopeless denial.  

Meantime, there was Joe Lieberman, one of McCain's servile courtiers and a minor nuisance, saying  that he was now fully prepared to set aside political  differences and work with Obama.  What gall!   Joe couldn't even help McCain in his home state of Connecticut, which Obama carried with 60 pct. of the vote.  You've had your fling, Joe.  Now get out of the way and go to the movies or something.     

    

Morning in America

THE MORNING AFTER:  Despite the rush of polls in the final days, nobody was more surprised by the size of Barack Obama's victory as I was. With vivid memories of the 2000 and 2004 elections, I winced when MSNBC political analyst Chuck Todd in mid-evening examined some voting figures and said,  "It's beginning to look like 2000 and 2004."  Shortly thereafter a funny thing happened to the equation:  Ohio turned over its 20 electoral votes to Obama and the 7 million vote rout of McCain was on in an election that was  widely viewed around the world.  The influential Italian newspaper, La Repubblica,   rushed into print with a  big quirky headline  that declared, "Obama presidente, l'America cambia pelle". (President Obama, America changes skin)   The editors probably  thought better of it and soon replaced it with "Obama presidente, E un altra America". (President Obama, it is another America." )

The point is, Europeans care deeply about what happens in our politics, which is a kind of flattery that we do not extend to them. I can't imagine any American newspaper running a big headline on front page recording a victory by Silvio Berlusconi.  

So, some bleary-eyed random thoughts:

As the New York Times noted this morning, the hard work now begins.  Considering the profoundly ingrained mess at home and around the world, it is fair to ask why anybody would work a couple years for a job that is fraught  with so many obstacles.  In Obama's case, it may be a major test of the irresistible force vs. the immovable object.  Let's hope not. 

For the Republican Party, when will it wise up to the fact that its "base" represents no more than 25 pct. of the electorate;  I thought it might have learned that much in 2006 when Ken Blackwell, a social conservative who claimed the support of a sea of ministers, was pummeled in Ohio's gubernatorial contest by Ted Strickland, who kept his own ministerial background out of view.  

More bad news for the aging GOP:  two-thirds of the voters under 30 years old cast ballots for Obama.  The Republicans' farm system is still mostly tied to senior citizens and rurals. Where, one might ask, would Obama have ended up in the party primaries if he had been a Republican? 

As for McCain, his finest moment came in the somber half-light of his concession speech; for once he seemed to be dictating his own conscience rather than the orchestrated cliches that misfired time and again.  His endless insistence during the campaign that he would curb lobbyists and veto earmarks was intellectually dishonest, to say the least, inasmuch as his campaign manager, Rick Davis, has been paid $2 million  as a lobbyist  to build a firewall around Fannie  Mae and Freddie Mac against regulation.    And what of Charlie Black, his senior advisor, who served well as a lobbyist for Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile  who led us into Iraq with his misinformation camapaign?  So now McCain will return to the Senate and his advisors will return for their big loaves of daily bread on K Street.  

As for Sarah Palin, one of McCain's horrendous campaign decisions (with plenty of nudging from his advisors) she can go back to Alaska to prepare for her 2012 presidential campaign.  No one up there will blame her for McCain's defeat.  Alaska is a numb  politically isolated state that even sent a convicted felon back to the U.S. Senate yesterday.     

Oh, George Bush and Dick Cheney?   I'm sure there are some back doors at the White House where both could slip out in the middle of the night with all of their cronies and not be seen again.  I never thought Bush's two terms would ever end. But we're getting close.  As of today, 76 more days, and as Gerald Ford declared upon succeeding Richard Nixon:  "Our national nightmare is over."    

Organizationally, there might have been a strong hint of the outcome when McCain called to Joe the Plumber in the crowd and Joe wasn't there.   I have a hunch that would not have happened with Obama's ground troops.

As for me, I'm going for a long walk.  My Steelers have a tough game on Sunday with Indianapolis and I want to figure out a game plan.  Maybe I can call on Obama''s textbook-perfect organization to offer me some hints.   On the other hand, we may all be too weary to do anything for... oh...three or four hours.    

The shame of McCain's refrain

SHAMELESS. How else can you describe the torrent of political pornography gushing from the McCain-Palin camp in the final days of the campaign?  John "Country First" McCain, desperate to put himself first, has left no rumor, whisper or slander unturned in leading his mob of Republican lemmings to the living rooms of American voters.  

Unable to clearly articulate his plan for America other than resorting to  such cliches as  being "pro growth and pro jobs" - whatever the hell those rhetorical placebos mean - McCain's only other non-radioactive bid to stroke the voters is that he is, um... tested.  Surely no one would discredit his POW experience, but he is in fact saying that any POW- and there were many -  is prepared to be president.  I think not. No more so than Sarah Palin is prepared to be president.  Since she was summarily added to the ticket she has proved to be no more than an anatomical expression for leering guys and a vacant substitute for Hillary Clinton as a not so subliminal walk-on role for the benefit of the ladies in her audience. 

In the final days, the McCain camp's rap sheet on Obama has included outrageous charges that he threatens to bring on a Holocaust (courtesy of a rightwing Republican Jewish organization), that he would be a threat to the peace and tranquillity - with maybe even bodily harm - to your family and mine  (you must know the origins of those fears with an African-American challenging McCain);  that Obama favored criminals over cops; that he was not an American citizen (don't kid yourself, folks; this is as racist as it gets without mentioning the n-word. )

The GOP has fallen so low into the muck that the Rep. John Boehner, the Republican minority leader from Hamilton, Oh.,  didn't hesitate to refer to Obama as "chicken shit".  Boehner? Wasn't he the guy who was seen passing out lobbyists' money on the House floor? 

However Tuesday's election turns out, neither McCain nor his party deserve to win.  The antagonists in this race would need more than $150,000 for clothes to freshen up their images after giving their brand of moral values a bad name, not only in America but to a watchful world whose support the U.S. will desperately need in the months and years ahead. The only   good news landing in the Democratic camp from their adversaries is that some guy named Cheney heartily endorsed his friend, John McCain.  With friends like that, you don't need many  enemies. 

Hemingway once described courage as "grace under pressure."  I didn't see any of that in McCain's frantic appeals to our worst instincts as we headed  to the polls. No honor.  No decency.  Even for the hysteria of ugly politics, it was despicably out of bounds.

Multiple @%#&%*@?! choice

I'VE DONE my  best to keep up with the McCain campaign's nasty name-calling and it's wearying, unlike anything I've covered since the days of LBJ, whose opponents were kind enough to unify on one word: Communist. Earlier, with Eisenhower, it was slightly more respectful:  They simply accused Ike of being a  comsymp, if you know what I mean.  Jack Kennedy had to defend himself against being called a Catholic, for heaven's sake.   And Nixon, was Tricky Dick, but firmly denied that he also was a crook.    Al Gore was described as an "alpha" man, but few people outside of   Maureen Dowd's inner circle quite knew what that meant.    I had better stop this little political history lesson before I  get to Bill Clinton and George Bush. The Internet, after all, has a mixed audience and kids.

Still, I have all of these terrible terms aimed at Barack Obama by the McCain School of Lesser Invective Politics, and I can't think of anything else to do with them but to dump them on anyone who has read this far.  So, here goes:

Lucifer admirer; traitor; terrorist; Muslim alien; socialist; uppity;  elitist; street man ; closet socialist; communist; dirtiest campaigner; redistributionist-in-chief; drug addict; most liberal member of congress; baby murderer; black power threat; unprepared; stylist without substance; Ivy-league egghead; tax-and-spend 

Democrat; and finally, a Democrat.  

You'd think that by now that a presidential campaign with a specific message would have settled on one.  You could think that, but you would be wrong.  

McCain: It's a question of answers

AS A college freshman,  I was terribly challenged by my first essay exam in a history course.  The professor, a tall distinguished man who wrote the book for the course, passed out blank 16-page  booklets for our responses to his questions.  I filled up the pages, turned it in and walked out of the room confident that I had nailed the test.  Several days later it came back to me with a big "F" on the cover.   I was shocked and met the professor at his desk.  "I clearly wrote 16 pages and you gave me an F!  How could you do that to me?"    With obvious experience in such student complaints, he raised his long arm and replied:  "Indeed, you did write 16 pages.  But I think you wrote that much in hopes that the right answer would be in there somewhere.  And I'm not confident that you still know what the correct answer is."

It might explain my reaction to Tom Brokaw's interview with John McCain on Meet the Press this morning.  To each question, McCain went on and on, zigging and zagging,  hoping to convince his  doubters that he knew the answer even if  it spun off from the original question.  

Fully conditioned by my old history professor, I had no choice but to give McCain an F.  

She said it wasn't so

FOOTNOTE TO the sad story of a confused young McCain worker who fabricated a report of being assaulted by a tall black man in Pittsburgh: Ashley Todd needs professional help rather than condemnation. But that's not the end of the story.  The condemnation should be directed at Matt Drudge, a modern carnival barker who gave the phony story national visibility, and McCain's communication director in Pennsylvania who reportedly called TV stations instantly to report a brutal attack on Todd.  How quickly the word spread to McCain,  Palin and Obama, too, all of whom are said to have called her with their concern before her tale collapsed.    It would be hard not to see a Willie Horton type racial subplot by the McCain people in a crucial battleground state in the closing days of the campaign.  They may or may not have orchestrated the hoax.  But they didn't hesitate to dive in to exploit the earliest narrative  before she confessed to police.   It's hard for me to believe otherwise.    

Just in time for Christmas

JOHN AND SARAH are now off on what they are calling their Joe the Plumber campaign tour to lure blue-collar workers in the final days of their  war hoop.  I have to salute them:  Never has an obscure human being meant  so much to the rhetoric of a presidential campaign as Joe the Plumber.  His name will be added to the pantheon of  American pop culture alongside Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman as inspirational reminders of how pro-America goes about its seasonal business.  Obviously blindsided by the introduction of a free agent into the McCain playbook, it appears anti-America Obama has nothing to match it, proving once again that he doesn't have the imagination and experience to run the country.    So much for the October surprise.

As long as we are in the business of naming names, Palin, who is failing as McCain's first-round draft choice,  says that when somebody called her a "redneck", she said "Thank you."  There's obviously a tough woman under that $150,000 designer wardrobe.  

Loopy Michele

MICHELE BACHMANN, an intense Christian conservative, knows things.  She knows that Barack Obama is anti-American.  She knows that if he is elected  we will have "tax increases, socialized medicine and climate change taxes."   She knows that kids who go to charter schools will get a better education than those who go to public schools.   She knows that if the American media thoroughly investigates congress it will doubtless find other duly elected anti-Americans in the House and Senate. She knows that as a pro-life activist who has picketed abortion agencies  she will contribute to overturning  Roe vs. Wade.

Michelle Bachmann is not a garden-variety activist.   She is a first-term Republican congresswoman from a district on the edge of Minneapolis-St. Paul.  I watched her rant on the  Chris Matthews show.  You get the idea that only Christian conservatives are  patriots.  In one way or another, such vacuous logic is being pedaled every day by the McCain campaign.  It's 

McCarthyism at best.  Worse,  it has the seeds of fascism.  Earlier today, I saw an image on TV that should worry all of us.  A guy in southwest Ohio hung an Obama effigy in his front yard.  Not content to be a one on one racist, there was a Star of David  drawn on the head.  The guy told a TV reporter that we must remain a white Christian nation. 

 

 Meantime, McCain was blind-sided in one of his regular visits to Fox Television today when Chris Wallace asked him if he approved the content of his campaign's  robocalls  inasmuch as he was destroyed by such tactics that  the Bush campaign used against him in 2000. McCain soberly responded that the ones used by his campaign this time were, eh..."legitimate"..."truthful"... "accurate." But he didn't seem all  that happy the question came up.  

That brings me up to date on the current state of this wearying campaign.  

 

What's that, Sen. Voinovich?

I'VE READ  that Sen. George Voinovich arrived in the tiny town of Pomeroy, Oh. in Meigs county Friday  with his carefully articulated Republican talking points  that the party hopes the voters will love. Speaking to a partisan audience across the river from West Virginia, Voinovich called Barack Obama a "socialist" and argued that the Democratic nominee was to the left of Ted Kennedy.   On the other hand,  he praised John McCain for "maturity and experience and a proven record of reaching across the aisle."  Case in point, he said, was - good Lord! - Joe Lieberman, who has been crossing the aisle for McCain  since he was the pathetic choice of Al Gore to be his veep running mate. The worst kept secret in political circles is that Joe  is quite hopeful of being a higher-up in a McCain Administration now that Sarah Palin cost him an opportunity to be on the ticket with McCain. . 

Voinovich's reference to Obama's mythical  place as an outriding socialist in an otherwise centrist government (bailouts and all)  is  the least toxic of what the McCain campaign has been saying about him.  But it does confirm for potential  voters their fear of "socialism" even though some of the less thoughtful ones might have a dickens of a time defining it. You mean, Medicare and Social Security, too, Sir? 

There is one element of  Voinovich's warm  support of McCain  that revived some old memories about Voinovich's own rising career.  At one point in the upcoming return of Jim Rhodes to challenge Dick Celeste in the 1978 Ohio governor's race, George didn't mind telling me (although he did mind later when I reported it ) that Rhodes was "too old" to be governor and that the Republican party ought to be looking for younger,  fresher faces.  Let's see.  At the time Rhodes was not quite 69, a mere child.  McCain is 72.  But who's counting?  

P.S.  In another ironic twist of fate, Voinovich ended up on the ballot in 1978  as the lieutenant governor candidate, running in tandem with...yep, Rhodes.   You never know.  

McCain's October surprise?

DEVELOPING UPDATE:    The New York Times and some other news outlets are now questioning the authenticity of  John McCain's October surprise at last night's debate: Joe the Plumber, aka Joe Wurselbacher,  aka a would-be small  businessman supposedly threatened by Barack Obama's tax proposals, aka the opening chapter in what someone near to me has already labeled Plungergate.    Here's the follow-up to  JTP's hardluck story, which McCain referenced 15 times by name:

JTP is a confirmed Republican and McCain supporter,  works for a  plumbing  business in Toledo, does not earn enough to be higher-taxed by the Obama plan (which actually would cut his tax since he is under the $250,000 cap) is unlicensed as a plumber himself and doesn't belong to the plumber's union, and has a $1,000 lien pending against him. It does raise questions about the man who said Obama tap-danced around a question  "almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr."  It's not the kind of report that the McCain people need back at their dimly-lit headquarters.  

If only some of this is true, you have to feel sorry for JTP.  Either he was recruited for a voluntary  hit job, or the McCain campaign vetted him with no more skill than it applied to Sarah Palin.  

Husking corn in Omaha

HEY!  WHAT's wrong with this picture:  McCain is reassuring his rabid audiences that they need not be "scared" if Obama would become our  next president because Barack was a decent guy.   But there was Sarah Palin's profile of Obama at a campaign rally Sunday night  in, of all places, Nebraska, a state where the only way any Democratic presidential candidate  could win is if all of the Republicans took early retirement and moved to Florida.  Asserted Sarah:  You must question Obama's patriotism since he used to hang out with terrorists.  Time out again from McCain's sweet talk to hear from the surrogate assailants. .

If you think you know who McCain really is you might take a look at the McCain profile in the Oct. 16 issue of Rolling Stone.  Written by Tim Dickinson, a Republican who voted for McCain in the California primary in 2000.  In the lengthy piece ranging  from clumsy Navy pilot to erratic presidential candidate with a couple of marriages in between, McCain loses on all counts.   All.   

Probing the name game

LET'S PLAY the name game.  You know, the sort of thing that's going on somewhere in America every day as the McCain forces try to shore up their ticket.  The name we are playing in this game?  Hussein.  You've heard of him, I'm sure.  A household word, as in Saddam,  the cruel and corrupt dictator sans WMD's.   And surely by now you have heard that Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein.    Wow.  Reason enough to suspect Barack of being a dangerous Tigris 

 traitor.  And an ignorant one, at that, for urging  his parents to stick him with that name at birth.

To press farther into the darkness of name games, let's consider, say,  George Walker Bush, the current vanishing incumbent.  Walker,  for heaven's sake?  I don't blame you if you don't know where I'm going with a simple, non-threatening Anglo-Saxon  name like Walker.    But in this case, I am recalling Gen. Edwin Walker.   OK, it's no longer a household word.   But wasn't he the much-publicized segregationist who fiercely resisted President Eisenhower's orders to desegregate the schools in Little Rock, a racist John Bircher who later resigned from the army after he was accused of trying to indoctrinate his troops with Birch propaganda?  Oh, you mean that Edwin Walker!    But  why bring that up when it never came up during Dubya's two presidential campaigns?  Makes no sense.  To which I add:  You are right.  It makes no sense, but it does make my point.

I won't even go into my late mother's middle name:  Sarah!   It might not be easy these days, but  RIP, Mom.  Alas, RIP.  

A soul-less John McCain?

The tenor of the McCain-Palin campaign is becoming more chilling by the hour.  Both want you to believe that Barack Obama  is, at best,  a fellow-traveling terrorist - the unholy word that George Bush played so inelegantly in leading us into a dismal five-year war.  Today, when McCain questioned the true identity of Obama to a partisan audience, someone shouted: "Terrorist."   That's dangerous stuff.  Instead of lowering the temperature of his shouter, McCain drew a blank expression and moved on,  obviously pleased that he had a like-minded audience.    It recalled a moment during the primaries when  a woman  asked him how best to dispose of  Hillary Clinton, whom she called a bitch. McCain smiled.  Fun-eee.  He made no attempt to scold her.   Is he serious about getting to the White House by courting the worst in uncivilized behavior?  

OK.  Since the GOP ticket has dragooned the the Biblically-pure family values guide for its personal use in the campaign, may I humbly add a Biblical passage that is becoming more appropriate in these horribly dissembling final weeks: "What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?"   It's happening, folks.   

Striking preemptively

Talk about public indecency!   The McCain campaign released an Internet ad today that said McCain won the debate -" hands down"   Let's see.  the debate isn't until...um....tonight.  Oh, I see. It was a preemptive strike.  Right?    No, I don't see.  Still not used to the weirdly erratic elements in this campaign.    

Ghost in the attic

SADLY, THERE there was something terribly grotesque about President Bush's appearance before the TV cameras last night to tell us what we already knew - and what his administration should have known a long time ago.  As he recounted a Gothic tale of a "serious financial crises," "rescue effort" and "collapse",   he seemed to be a ghostly presence  returning to remind us that he once, by God,  served as leader of the free world before his own party (and the public) exiled him.  No longer the decider, he was now the faded outsider trying to explain, as best as his speechwriter could offer him to the public,  how America became impoverished by the sleight-of-hand Ponzi schemes of the highest rollers on Wall Street.  

But something in his presence had changed.  It lacked the bravado of his post-9/11 breast beating   when he promised to return the terrorists' war with our own war, defiantly asserting "Bring 'em on!" and later declaring the mission accomplished.  Who would he now "bring on"?  

And what mission could be accomplished by his authority  during the remaining days of his failed presidency?  

Even his pallid effort to reassure the nation was upstaged  by John McCain's theatrical decision to suspend his campaign, cancel his Friday night debate,  and return to Washington to cast his first vote in the Senate since - well, only the congressional archivists can recall the date.   

How bizarre.  In purporting to play a leadership role ,  McCain emerged as a Hollywood stunt man in the virtual reality of his perilous climb to the White House.  Did he really think that Obama would accept a few days off from his own schedule?    And did he really think that in the clumsy rearranging of the debate calendar that he could offer Sarah Palin more time for her on-the-job training on the path to the vice presidency?   Were the Democrats dumb enough to offer her a delay in her scheduled debate with Joe Biden?

If we can assume that that McCain has to be smarter than he sounds at times, the fallback position is that he is taking a lot of bad advice from the people around him - people who have a great stake in spoon-feeding him to the safe-keeping of the Oval Office.  That's the polite version.  And as each day passes I have to wonder what's under his $5,500 cosmetics that would tell us who John McCain really is.

I am Abe Zaidan and I approve this message. 

 

Flopping the flips

GRUMPY CONFUSION:  Reviewing McCain's instant replays, I must say his  flip flops are so prevalent that I can't decide which  are the flips and which are the flops.  Slow down, John .  I'm older than you are and as I'm sure you must be aware, the brain cells don't kick in as quickly as they used to.    

One for McCain

As one who has assailed John McCain as a liar, I must in fairness give him a little slack when he responds to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the biggest piggy banks on Wall Street, by insisting that the "fundamentals" of the economy are strong.  McCain wasn't lying about the economy.  Like Bush, he doesn't know.  

The McCain mudslide

As a young Air Force officer, I was taken aside by a battle-ribboned  colonel who counseled me. "Young man," he said sternly, "there is one thing you must remember as long as you are wearing that uniform.  You must never do anything to dishonor it."  Years later, when I was the Beacon Journal's politics writer,  John S. Knight, the last of the great newspaper editors,  confided during a meeting in his office his commitment not only to his newspaper but also to himself.  "As long as my name is on this paper,"  he said, " I will never tolerate anything that will bring dishonor to me or the paper."

In both instances, damn good words to live by. Unfortunately they are being grossly ignored by John McCain.  To his discredit, his sleazy campaign - how else can you describe the lies that he hopes will vault him to the White House? - has stripped him of the honor of a bona fide war hero to that of a third-rate politician groveling to the finish line using an equally deceptive Annie Oakley as his crutch.   Even Karl Rove, a master of deception himself, allows that the McCain/Palin attacks on Barack Obama have gone over the line. That translates easily into references to indefensible lies by the Republican team.

You can find the seeds of the McCain philosophy in Orwell's 1984. 

              "He who controls the past controls the future." 

We won't know until election day whether that will prevail.   Until then, I'll settle for the reproachful words of Joseph Welch, the Army's civilian counsel,  as he challenged Sen. Joseph McCarthy at their combative Senate hearing.   Bolder than most who had been slandered by the villainous senator, the comparatively meek Welch dressed down McCarthy. "You have done enough.  Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?"

We can continue to wonder about McCain's slide into the darkest side of politics.  Maybe the answer would explain why he finished near the bottom of his class - 894th of 899 - at the U.S. Naval Academy. 

  

rw 

Pogo returns

More  grumpiness:  

      Please.  What was all of the indignant fuss at the GOP convention Wednesday night over entrenched special interests, fat cat lobbyists, big spenders and do nothing pols who raid the federal treasury every morning before breakfast?  You know.  "The Beltway business-as-usual crowd" that drew an even meaner scowl from Fred Thompson.    That's what speaker after speaker wanted us to know, without once acknowledging that the party's presidential nominee(and a lot of the others in the audience)  has been around for 26 years as part of the Capitol Hill mix and has  more than a few lobbyist friends to look after his and their best interests.   Or that Alaska is doing very well with millions in earmarked funds?  What I didn't hear from any of them is Pogo's historic insight:  "We have met the enemy and he is us."

....And what was Rudy Giuliani's hyperventilating problem as he elevated himself to personally untested spiritual heights when he rose and applauded Sarah's self-congratulatory comments on her many happy years of wedlock.   As mayor he shared the role of husband to one  and boyfriend to another. He also was the guy who foisted his friend, Bernard Kerik, a New York City police commissioner  on the  White House to run Homeland Security - a ploy that didn't get very far before Kerik was convicted of nimble corruption.  In retreat, Rudy was forced to describe his pal as a "good criminal"  while tooling around on the speaker's circuit for upward of $200,00o per appearance.  

         .....And it soon became obvious that Palin hadn't vetted McCain very well, either, having promised the crowd that her  team would work diligently on alternate forms of energy.  If she had gone through some clippings, she would have known that McCain repeatedly was a no-show for the Senate votes on renewable energy. The work could have started by harnessing the windpower from the stage.  

         Finally, how quickly the rules change in presidential politics.  Four years ago John  Kerry's military service was scandalized by the Swift Boaters committed to sending Bush and Cheney back to second terms as committed  lifelong civilians.    This year,  praise of military valor is pouring from the lips of the McCain people as an overwhelmingly positive issue to seat him in the White House.  For them, on this and other blatant contradictions, a losing candidate is not an option.  But he was the very same POW that Bush & Co. trashed in 2000.  You'll  find it somewhere in the fine print of this year's campaign.