Brown-Mandel debate: Josh just being Josh

Having just watched the final debate  between Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and Republican challenger Josh Mandel,   there are a  few points that I want to get off my chest:

Mandel's repeated pledges (including the one he signed for mega-lobbyist Grover-Norquist)  that he would never raise taxes cherry-picked the old Republican theme that there are other ways to pay for the things that  Americans want, eliminate the deficit and sustain a healthy society. (On this score, we learned more about his grandparents and parents than we did on how he would replace the tax loss).
 
His cadence and mechanical gestures were stylistically perfect, indicating that he was still young enough at 35 to remember his lines for a class play without a flaw. My notes asked, Is this fellow the young Mitt Romney?

He stressed his opposition to the auto bailout without once acknowledging the huge number of jobs that it saved.

He also added a new spin, that polls show him to be one percentage point ahead (The latest average of several polls show Brown more than 4 points ahead.)

Finally, he enthusiastically talked of his future as a "bipartisan" problem solver in the Senate.

On that point, history is not on his side.    Most of his talking points are  clearly on the hard Right, as are the super-rich wealthy right-wing contributors who have dumped upward of $20 million into his campaign.  An important condition that he has yet to learn if he ever reaches the Senate floor is in the book of Ancient Political Realities :

                            You must dance with the  people who brung you there

She qualified for the role!

Some debate, huh?  What  restraint Joe Biden must have called upon to remain a perfect gentleman against an opponent who appeared to be auditioning for a high school class play! Sarah Palin would have won the role easily.   She repeated her lines perfectly as they skidded from one Republican talking point to another.  As scripted for her, she went after Obama/Biden like the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:  Win the war without surrender...cut taxes for Joe Sixpack ... reform the government (without mentioning  George Bush's central role in the meltdown)... deliver all of us from evil.  Tax-cutting has been a GOP staple  in the GOP playbook as far back as I can remember.  And guess what?  Read-my-lips Bush  (the present incumbent's father) campaigned fiercely against taxes and then went on to support new taxes.  Of course he did. So have others. 

Paul Krugman pointed out that Palin's closing testament to freedom was lifted from Ronald Reagan's appeal to the the wives of physicians in the early 1960s (not yet president) to resist, um...  socialistic Medicare.  Is that what she really wants to tell Joe Sixpack?

She also told Fox News (where else?) that she was annoyed by some of Katie Couric's questions and that she wants to talk to Americans "without the filter."  Bush, the current one, used to refer to filters, too.  He preferred to read the unfiltered morning briefings from his staff rather than  newspapers.  My hunch is that he was peeking at other printed words, too, but it's always comforting  to attack the left-wing media,  which is largely owned by Republican businessmen.

I've been thinking about filters and decided there is no higher calling than to filter the filters, the latter being those politicians and others who command public attention.  So journalistic filters must figure out how to discard the nonsense and find the stuff that is often purposely left out by the newsmakers.   That may be confusing, I know,  but I can live with it.