Right now, my college is undergoing an accreditation review. For those who don’t know what that is, it is essentially the licensing for the school. You can’t offer a degree worth more than the paper it’s printed on if you don’t continuously win and re-win accreditation from one of the major agencies.

Today we met with the consultant evaluators, and they asked some pointed questions. These are professionals, they’ve been in the business a long time, they’ve done this before and they know their stuff. And of course, it’s their job to know what you should be able to show them, namely that your institution is doing what it is supposed to be doing, that the students you teach are getting what they should be getting.

And it occurred to me in this process that if we did something like ignore a question and address something else we wanted to point out instead, it wouldn’t fly. We might get a long stare that asks us to change our minds and answer the question asked. That if they asked us what the institution could offer students, and we replied that we were real close to a city library, so we had access to lots of information we could give the students, we would probably have to sit there in silence while the evaluators worried about what fate our students would suffer at our inexperienced hands. Or that if we hired someone for a vital position who had no qualifications worth mentioning for the job, they would rightly question our ability to staff the school. And if we knew in advance that our answers would be inadequate and simply denied the evaluators access, it would be even worse.

In short, we could lose our accreditation, our jobs, our school.

Now, we’re just a small school which runs a basic general education program, small potatoes in the bigger world of higher education. It’s not like we want to become leaders of the most powerful nation on Earth.

And yet, it occurred to me in this process, that we are being held to a far higher level of accountability than is the McCain campaign. And it’s not like McCain and Palin are being evaluated by chimps; it’s not as if the entire field of journalists don’t know their jobs, their responsibilities, their duties. It’s not as if they don’t know how to ask the tough questions, how to report on what’s really happening. It’s not like they can’t tell that proximity to Russia has zero value, that McCain and Palin are lying through their teeth, that Sarah Palin is not qualified or appropriate for her position, or that denial of access is equal to an admission of fear and incompetence.

But if you want accountability, head down to your local community college. I can speak from experience that in order to stay in business, they have to answer to a far higher level of scrutiny, and live up to their promises, with no lies, evasions, or bull.

Don’t try to get that from the McCain campaign, though; they don’t even come close to living up to those lofty standards. In fact, they don’t even try.

They could not succeed in running a small junior college; how can they claim to be qualified to run the entire country?

According to MacRumors, emoji support is coming to the iPhone in v. 2.2:

Hard to believe that some people would look at the iPhone and say, “yeah, it’s got massive expandability with cheap and free software in addition to being an all-in-one cell phone, iPod, email, (best portable) web browser, calendar & contacts, GPS with Google-maps integration, etc. device…. but I don’t want to get it because I can’t insert cute cartoon images of puppies in my text messages!”

And yet.

Still, the iPhone has a big “Wow!” factor here; even months after its release, whenever students in my school see me using it, they “ohh” and “ahh” and are delighted when I let them play with it-and are still blown away when I show them the search feature on the maps app.

As usual, SNL did a great job showing a lot of truth via comedy in the latest debate:

On that note, here’s a quote from the real debate by Sarah Palin:

And I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I’m going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.

News flash, Sarah: if no American people asked you a question and you don’t respond to any question asked to you, then you’re not talking to the American people, you’re talking to yourself–and by ignoring the moderator, who represents the people (as you agreed to when you decided to join the debate), you’re ignoring the American people.

Yeah, I know, this is very late commentary. But it’s been on my mind and I just wanted to get it out.

It’s probably the other things going on in my life, but I have not been strongly into birding recently. Still, from time to time, I drop by a birding spot and give things a whirl… but to be honest, now that I’ve gotten most of the species you’re bound to see without a big surprise, it’s a bit less exciting. All the same, the birds are nice to see, even when they’re nothing new. Here are some from today:

A Grebe (kaitsuburi):

A Cormorant (kawau) preening while drying its wings:

A pretty stilt (seitaka-shigi):

Various sandpipers (I’ve given up trying to differentiate them, to be honest):

This one is of a large Piper chasing a smaller one that caught a morsel it fancies:

Wagtails are always pretty, however common:

The return of the Tufted Ducks signals the beginning of the massive flocks soon to come:

And there were a few Kingfishers (kawasemi) also in attendance:

Flying off, the Kingfisher is such a pretty flash of red and blue-green:

A bull-headed Shrike made an elegant farewell from the park:

Spiders were everywhere, mostly of this variety–this one snacking an a slightly less-colorful bug:

And what bird park would be complete without a wishful cat?

And the crabs, of course:

I’m just throwing this last one in–you get to see Tokyo Tower down the street on the way back, on Route 1:

One of the down points about having a nice view is that sometimes you see stuff that you can’t explain, and it would take too much effort to investigate. This morning was one of those times. We heard a loudspeaker voice from outside, and when I looked over at the World Import Mart at the Sunshine City complex, I saw this:

Now, you often see lines outside Pachinko parlors, movie theaters, and comic book stores, presumably when they have some hot new game/movie/comic. This kind of thing, you never know. Some convention/trade show? Most in line seemed to be young men, many carried bags with green “SC”s written on the sides.

Ah, a mystery for the sake of not caring enough to go outside to check it out. Seriously, though, it would take like twenty minutes or more and I probably still wouldn’t care. But it still bugs you not to know.

Movie critic Roger Ebert gives an apolitical review of the debates which has a lot of interesting stuff. He analyzes, among other things, a point that many have brought up: that Palin, after Biden’s genuine emotion when speaking about his family, spoke with a jarring lack of sympathy or emotion herself. I hadn’t seen that bit.

My apologies to those who were hoping for links to streams, transcripts, or other resources from here; I’m afraid that that I have not been able to do very much blogging because of demands of my job. The college where I work is undergoing an accreditation review, and yesterday was crazy busy for us; from just before 11am to about midnight last night was back-to-back nonstop business.

I was able to catch the first half of the debate myself before I ran off to work, and have seen a variety of reports since then. One of my thoughts even before the debate began was a realization that there would most likely not be any Katie-Couric moments. The reason for this that occurred to me was that a debate format is way different from an interview format; debates tend to question the major issues of the campaign and the major events of the day, something easy enough to predict in advance and make sure Palin knows well. We’ve seen her Alaskan governor race debate clips, and she can be very cutting and precise when she is well-enough prepared. Even more to the point, the McCain campaign had made sure as much as possible that Ifill was warned away from trying to manufacture any “gotcha” questions (you know, the ones which might show that you don’t know something vital that you didn’t think you’d be asked about). They pre-accused her of bias and all that, so if she asked anything too specific or unpredictable, they were all set to fall on her for being “in the tank for Obama.”

But it turns out that Palin had another technique to help her even further: ignore the questions asked her. And not only did she ignore some of the questions, she didn’t even pretend that she wasn’t ignoring them–in fact, she declared that she wasn’t as a badge of honor, saying that she preferred to talk “straight to the American people.” How charmingly dishonest. Whenever she didn’t like a question or thought that she might flub the answer, she would just say, “you know, instead I’d like to talk about energy!”

Very hard to go deer-in-the-headlights when you are effectively asking yourself your own questions.

Not that this was too surprising considering the source, but it is even more telling.

No, what really surprised me about this debate is that Palin does not seem to have won the expectations game. Surely, a lot of people did expect her to get all kerfuffled (surprisingly, that’s not Yiddish) at some point or maybe several times during the debate, and that Biden would just stand a mile above her. But for some reason, the McCain campaign did not play up the expectations (again!) and perhaps that’s why there are so few people today saying that Palin won by not losing. There was no narrative set, no spin campaign to dominate the news cycle. People noted that she did not do as badly as many might have expected, and that she saved her career by not self-destructing, but she was not credited for boosting the McCain campaign last night or for turning the campaign around.

In fact, the verdict seems to be that Biden won, by swaying uncommitted voters more than Palin, and that Palin’s major accomplishment was convincing people that she’s not quite as dumb as they thought she was.

VP debates rarely do much anyway, so perhaps this debate was overblown. Right now, Obama is killing McCain in the polls, and McCain needs some kind of game-changer to turn things around. While this debate may not have been a disaster averted for McCain, neither was it anything close to what he needs to save his faltering bid for the presidency.

With the economy tanking (with McCain’s fingerprints all over it) and Sarah Palin’s shine beginning to dull, Barack Obama is not only ahead in pretty much all the national polls, but has started recording significant leads in most of the battleground states as well, including Florida–a must-win for McCain. CNN’s latest polls give Obama a 4-point lead in Florida and New Hampshire, a 6-point lead in Wisconsin, an 8-point lead in Ohio (which has started voting as Republicans again try to squelch the vote), and a 9-point lead in Virginia and New Jersey. But Obama now has double-digit leads in Minnesota (up by 11), Michigan (13), Pennsylvania (15), and Iowa (up by 16 points). In the remaining battleground states (Indiana, North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado), McCain holds only a 1- to 3-point lead. That’s pretty damn weak. Other polls reflect these trends.

Other polls show similar gains by Obama, and unless something really big happens, hope for John McCain seems dim at this point.

That would explain McCain’s desperation move to pull his forces out of Michigan, a state where Republicans thought they had a chance after Obama “didn’t count the votes” in his fight against Hillary. Instead, McCain will now focus on the other battleground states and rely on picking off one of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Minnesota–states which, as noted above, are now favoring Obama by 15, 6, and 11 points respectively. Getting one of those will not be easy, and that’s assuming that McCain will somehow win back most if not all of the other battleground states.

There’s a month left to go. McCain is still doing far better than his actual performance merits. Anything could happen.

But things are looking good.

I find it interesting that conservatives, who generally dislike Affirmative Action on the grounds that it requires businesses to hire people who are unqualified for the job (they are referring to quotas, not Affirmative Action, and neither makes any such requirement in fact) approve of Sarah Palin as the candidate for vice president.

Just saying.

Something pretty surprising has come to my notice as of late. We’ve been pre-registering students at my college for next semester’s courses, which means that we show them what’s available and they let us know their preferences. One of the course we’re offering is a class called Majority-Minority Relations. When describing this class to them, I want to emphasize how they, as Japanese, have lived in such an overwhelming majority all their lives–according to the CIA World Factbook, 98.5% of the Japanese population are ethinic Japanese, with the last 1.5% being almost evenly divided between Chinese, Korean, and “other foreign” populations.

But when I ask my students to guess what percent of Japan is Japanese, the most common answer is 80%. That’s a pretty huge variance from the actual number. I thought that maybe that’s just the idea of young people who (a) live in cosmopolitan Tokyo and study at an American college located near a large Korean population center, and (b) never considered the question before. But still, even in Tokyo, even in central Tokyo, to imagine that one in five people are not Japanese is still a bit surprising.

Has anyone else living in Japan tried asking this question to anyone? I intend to ask it a lot more to Japanese people I know to see what more general impressions are, but would be interested in what others find out.

Sachi and I just got our wedding photos from our guy in Japan, and we are very, very impressed. He worked for about six hours at the wedding all told, and his fees were very reasonable. He was unobtrusive, mostly in the background, and I was not aware of him most of the time.

We just got the photos–express-mailed to us just three days after the wedding. In that time, he sorted them into groups, saved them onto 4 DVD-Rs, and printed contact sheets, including them in clear-plastic binder sleeves. And the images–all 435 of them at 21 megapixels–were very well-taken. He covered everything, getting good photos of everyone, with some really great shots in there.

We are really very, very pleased. It’ll take a while to get through all of these, and we’ll have to resize all of them (they average at about 15 MB each), but we could not have asked for better. This is a guy who used to work for my school, taking photos of events there. If you need photos taken in the Tokyo area, you should call this guy. His name is Yuichi Yoshitomi, and his business number is 042-332-5771. If you want his email address or other business information, leave a comment and an address I can reach you at.

Here are a few sample images from the first disc, with 1200-pixel-or-better blow-ups on click:

For the past eight years, George W. Bush and the Republicans have trashed the economy with massive giveaways to corporations and the wealthy, deregulation of critical industries, and encouragement for companies to move production overseas. They also starved the lower and middle classes–weakening unions, refusing to raise the minimum wage, allowing pensions to fail, attempting to sabotage medicare and social security, reducing federal services, and ballooning costs for education, medical care and insurance–an equation which drains the flow of the economy by making it difficult for people to spend money, which is what fuels the economy in the first place. The economy is an engine where money has to flow, but instead the right-wingers have succeeded in hoarding all the fuel into one part of the engine and have refused to allow it to cycle through. (This is one reason the Democrats don’t want to just flood the engine in the part where the fuel is currently amassed.)

Now we have a banking crisis based upon deregulation and predation on the poorest members of our society collapsing into a stinking, heaving mass of greed. All part of the problem, but distressingly, only one fetid corner of it–which may be why the markets are reacting the way they are, because they know full well that McCain’s claim of the economy being “fundamentally sound” is complete and utter horseshit. If the economy were sound, then the markets would have more confidence in the banking crisis being cushioned and contained. They don’t.

So, here we have McCain “suspending” his campaign (while not really stopping very much) for a few days, charging into D.C. to manage the crisis. A petty show of impotent grandstanding, but he made a huge deal out of it. “I’m doing something!” he cried, but when it came to action, he didn’t stand up. And when it came to a vote, he failed to get even his own party–much less Washington D.C. as a bipartisan whole–to toe the line. 60% of Democrats voted for the bill, but only 33% of Republicans did so–the major reason why the bill failed. So if McCain really was the leader here, he failed miserably, and stocks plummeted. I didn’t even want to look at Apple stock, but I did, and regretted it. Thanks a bunch, John.

But at least McCain was not partisan about it, right? Hell, of course he was. Despite saying “Now is not the time to fix the blame, it’s time to fix the problem,” blame from McCain and Republicans was effusive. Immediately before talking about not fixing the blame, McCain said that Obama “and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process.” Har! McCain’s grandstanding was the partisan pillar of this entire mess, and probably was just as responsible, if not more, for the eventual failure than anything else. Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, are surging to blame Nancy Pelosi for the bill’s failure. McCain blames Obama for just “watching from the sidelines.”

News flash John: Leadership means actually leading, not failing pathetically and then blaming the opposition.

This failure is owned by John McCain; he claimed the mantle, he broke it, he bought it. Now he’s trying to palm it off while boasting that he’s not palming it off.

Disgusting.

Tina Fey nailed Palin in the intro to last week’s SNL, in case you happened to miss it:

The amazing thing here is that it appears that segments of the script were lifted from transcripts of the real interview; the audience was laughing even before they got to the embellishments.

In real life, The Adventures of Sarah Palin continue to be revealed. A Wasilla native reports that Palin insisted that humans and dinosaurs lived together just a few thousand years ago, citing human footprints in dinosaur tracks as evidence. It needs to be said that the source is biased; however, it would be harder to believe if we didn’t have footage of Palin standing to be blessed by a pastor going on about witchcraft, a guy who started his career by accusing an innocent woman of causing traffic accidents with dark magic.

But if you’d like to instead focus on her more secular side, read this article, which reveals that Palin was pretty corrupt as mayor of Wasilla, sailing past rather blatant conflicts of interest, helping friends get special breaks, and changing zoning rules so she could profit from the sale of her property which had zoning violations. This aside from receiving various gifts while in office.

Oh yeah, and CBS has two more Palin interview responses to Couric which are “embarrassing.” More than what we’ve seen already? That would be something. The source of that news, by the way, reports that the media is scaling back it’s criticisms of Palin for fear of looking like they were “piling on.” Sorry, but when you have a completely inappropriate candidate acting like a complete loon and lying her ass off like this, piling on is absolutely called for.

When Palin first appeared on the ticket, more than a dozen scandalous points just toppled out of what would become a cornucopia of shame, most of that initial stuff still unanswered in fact. But it just kept on coming, and it still keeps on coming. The more and more we learn about Palin, the more and more we realize the terrible depth of poor judgment John McCain demonstrated by choosing her.

All that said, we do now have to be careful regarding the upcoming debate: unlike McCain, Palin has become somewhat of a public laughingstock from her gaffes, and so stands to win from the expectations game. Biden is expected to do well, so it will be difficult for him to “win”; this debate is Palin’s to lose, as she’ll be seen as a victor if she can get through it without looking like a complete ass. The bar is set very, very low for her–so we have to watch out for relativity to hand her an ill-deserved victory.

First there was the selection of a beauty queen-turned-governor as a vice-presidential running mate. Then we had the shutting down of the convention, if only for a day. Then Palin had to go silent while she saw off her son to Iraq. Then there was the “suspension” of the McCain campaign to become the supposed hero of the bailout. And now, there are rumors that the Bristol Palin quasi-shotgun wedding is going to become a central campaign event, possibly taking time away from Sarah Palin’s availability to the press. The McCain campaign has turned into a gimmick train, trying to win the public over with a series of outrageous PR stunts, each one outdoing the last.

The media, of course, loves this, and that’s probably a major reason why McCain is resorting to stunts like this. Manipulating the media, giving them razzle-dazzle to sell ads, that’s central to the McCain campaign. Which is why I am not totally discounting the whole wedding event thing–it sounds exactly like the kind of thing they’d do.

Interestingly, there are some parallels in fiction; in the movie The Birdcage, a right-wing politician tries to revitalize his campaign marred by scandal by using his daughter’s wedding as a centerpiece of his public relations.

I am also reminded of a book by Neal Stephenson called Interface, in which a politician given a microchip implant in his brain is swept into office via a campaign of surprise gimmicks slickly engineered by a power broker using the politician as a front. The coincidences in the book become creepy when you remember that the guy’s vice-presidential candidate, Eleanor Richmond, was a working-class mother swept into politics after showing down a corrupt politician, and she becomes president after the candidate wins the election and dies. The coincidences end there, however–in the book, the woman is a person of honor and conscience, not even close to Sarah Palin.

John McCain is slowly–no, make that quickly turning this campaign into a fictional melodrama. All we need now is product placement; everything else relevant to fictional storytelling and movie promotion & distribution is in place and running.

Update: The following mock movie trailer would be a hell of a lot funnier if it weren’t so potentially close to reality:

Obama seems to have won this one, that much is fairly well agreed upon. A lot of people are talking about the fact that McCain refused to look at Obama as a major point, and while I agree that this was significant, I think that there is another significant reason that most people are not talking about.

First, a little about the eye contact thing. This was immediately apparent; before looking at any blogs, I watched some of the debate. (I recorded it while the wedding was going on and saw a good piece of it after going home that evening, while Sachi took care of some other things) The fact that McCain almost resolutely refused to look at Obama was one of the first things that stood out to me. As some mentioned, it looked like a stance of utter contempt, like he wouldn’t deign to even look down upon Obama, a kind of ultimate gesture of disrespect. That, along with him repeatedly calling Obama naive, saying that he doesn’t understand things which he clearly did understand, made McCain come across as both arrogant and condescending.

What I have not heard commented on is how this played with African-Americans, or even minorities (and perhaps even women) in general. If you’re white and male, this usually will not even register with you, but if you have been at the receiving end of discrimination, McCain’s attitude could very well resonate with your past experiences and come across as more than just condescending. I have no idea how that played out, but would be very interested to see any figures on that. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I have the feeling that the reactions amongst minority groups would be stronger. However, the end effect would not be so great, as McCain has little support from these groups in any case. Suffice it to say that the direction of McCain’s gaze, whether it was a planned tactic or not, worked against him in any case.

The other reason I think Obama won, the reason I think has been overlooked, is that this was the first time that people were able to see Obama and McCain together in an unfiltered setting. Before now, people have seen them apart, but mostly in forums where the media filtered, edited, and gave immediate commentary. McCain’s worst blunders have been either toned down, excused by commentators, or even completely edited out from media coverage, while a good deal of the coverage regarding Obama has been negative to outright hostile–I remember tuning into CNN where they were doing an absolute hit piece on Obama, taking a clip where he said “no one questions my patriotism” and made it out to be a threat of bodily harm in the style of corrupt, “bare-knuckled Chicago politics.”

It certainly didn’t hurt that Jim Lehrer was moderating the debate, giving questions that were as cogent, relevant, and reasonable as the ABC Clinton-Obama debate questions were not. Lehrer is one of the best, if not the best anchors out there, recognition aside, and he ran the debate like a pro, or so it seemed to me.

So while the media has filtered the public’s exposure to the candidates in the past, at today’s forum, people got a chance to see both of them directly, side by side. While McCain appealed to his own people, I think he lost a lot of independents. Obama came across as reasonable, respectful if disagreeing, more warm and personable; McCain came across, as mentioned before, as condescending and cold. With audio only, McCain may have fared better, but the visuals made a big difference.

Both came across as studied and understanding of the issues–which only hurts McCain, as his narrative says that Obama doesn’t understand, something he reiterated throughout the debate. But Obama’s performance showed up how wrong that accusation is, showing that Obama could hold is own and maybe even then some, when face-to-face with an opponent who was supposed to be superior on such issues. Obama also put up a fight, taking McCain on whenever McCain misrepresented him, and I think got his point across. People who may have worried about Obama’s experience were given a chance to see him in a better context relative to McCain. So McCain actually lost ground despite not making any gaffes himself.

It is also here that McCain not only lost the expectations game, but arguably handed that win to Obama. McCain passed on the chance to allow his many gaffes to work for him. The media’s efforts to tone down and even edit out McCain’s rather significant errors in the past made him look more astute before the debate began. Had the public seen more of the real McCain, it could have lowered expectations for him, something which I expected his people to play up. They did not, and I think that average people did not really expect McCain to stumble. As a result, McCain did not gain from such expectations (like Bush did in 2000); had they played this tactic, McCain may have very well been declared the winner on the simple grounds that he didn’t do badly during the debate. Instead, ironically, it was Obama who benefited from low expectations, expectations which the McCain camp itself set up and perpetuated.

If you were watching the debate, you probably noticed the audience reactions showing in the graph at the bottom of the screen. While hardly definitive, they did show that the independents went strongly for Obama; that when Obama spoke, the Independents’ line rose, and fell when McCain started speaking. With minor exceptions, things seemed to go that way for much of the time I watched.

McCain needed a clear win; instead he lost, or at the very best, fought to a draw–which really equals a loss, as the focus on foreign policy was supposed to be his strength.

It will be interesting to see how this is reflected in polls already trending in favor of Obama.

Sachi and I just got back from dinner with the family. It was a good day. We got married in March, but just by paperwork, and again last week, in the United States, with family. This was, in a way, our third marriage.

We woke up early this morning, knowing we had to go to the wedding planner’s office by about 10 am. Sachi’s family had arrived the night before, and were staying at the Sunshine Prince Hotel, just a few blocks away. We met, and Sachi took her mother by taxi for some mother-daughter time, and her father, Junzo, and I took the subway. Junzo had not been to Tokyo much and was not used to its ways, but stuck to it like a trouper.

At the wedding hall, Junzo and I waited for a few hours while Sachiko underwent the hair-and-makeup treatment. As before, she came out looking beautiful. We were taken by car to the wedding hall (just a few blocks away, but we would have looked odd walking in a wedding dress and tuxedo). As guests started to arrive, I set up the computer and tested the connections. While we had already given the music coordinator the CDs, I had to manage the Skype connection (everyone seemed to love the fact that my father spoke to use by video chat on the hall’s big screen), show two movies I had made with iMovie (a photo montage of Sachi and I growing up, meeting, and marrying, and a video of the U.S. wedding from a week ago), and manage a slide show for the wedding’s main activity–the “Luis & Sachi Quiz.” My brother was among the two winners with 16 of 19 answers correct.

While (I hope) everyone had good food and good, relaxed conversation, Sachi and I were kind of trotted around like show horses some of the time, the staff giving us directions on what to do and where to go at any given time. It felt strange, inviting all of these people to come join us, and then have the Emcee on our behalf ask everyone to give us standing ovations as we stood on a balcony and waved down to everyone. But maybe that was just me.

In the manner of most weddings in Japan, we gave everyone gifts on their seats; in the past weddings I had attended, it was always a bit awkward, as they had to choose a one-gift-fits-all kind of thing, so everyone would get some cookies and a mug or something. A new wrinkle is instead to give guests photo albums presently stuffed with pages from gift catalogs, so they could choose the gift they like, ordering it and getting it by Takkyubin. I like that system a lot better.

In the end, it was somewhat of a spectacle, a bit of a union of friends and family in celebration, and a bit of an emotional release. After dinner with the family, which went quite well, we came back home and had a good, happy cry and fell even more deeply in love.

It was a good day.

Watch Jack Cafferty from CNN:

Note especially at the end how he contrasts with Wolf Blitzer. Cafferty calls the shot accurately: Palin’s answer was pathetic. He spoke the truth–baldly and clearly, he characterized exactly what we saw, and gave an accurate analysis of how this relates to her being McCain’s running mate. Blitzer, on the other hand, immediately–indeed, reflexively–began equivocating, making excuses and using euphemisms.

Why the difference? Well, part of it certainly is because Cafferty is a crusty old curmudgeon whereas Blitzer is somewhat of a putz. But I think more of it has to do with how journalists have been emasculated by politicians using access as a way to cow the media; Blitzer has to worry about his relationships with the campaigns, lest he lose access or not score the next big interview; Cafferty has no such worries.

This is more than just amusing (though you gotta love how Cafferty looks like he wants to slap Blitzer in the face there); this is actually an excellent contrast demonstrating an important quality now a rare commodity in journalism.

A journalist’s job is to report the truth, and if a politician is lying or failing, you don’t go all soft and fuzzy and say they are “playing with the truth a little” or “having a hard day.” When a politician is in the interview seat across from you and answers a question with a clear, easily provable lie, you do not enable that lie by nodding sagely and moving on, or even by pressing for details in the hopes of catching them up; you must simply look them in the eye and say, “that’s not true,” explain why if necessary, and then quiz them further on it.

The point is not to curry access, the point is not to score the big interview. Being a journalist is not a job just for show, nor is it a responsibility that can be casually regarded. Journalism is, after all, unless I am mistaken, the only profession outside of government service specified in the Bill of Rights and given specific notice as having protected rights.

There’s a reason for that: the press is the lifeline we depend on for clear transmission of vital information necessary to make the right choices in electing our public officials and maintaining our democracy. Politicians will of course try to game the system, but it is the job of the journalist to resist that. Most reporters, like Blitzer, have succumbed to that influence, and are worth than useless to the nation.

How can any conscious human being watch this and not conclude that Sarah Palin is an idiot?

Transcript:

Couric: You’ve cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundary that we have with Canada. It’s funny that a comment like that was kinda made to … I don’t know, you know … reporters.

Couric: Mocked?

Palin: Yeah, mocked, I guess that’s the word, yeah.

Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.

Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…

Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

Palin: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.

Yeah, it’s funny that reporters would be so exasperatingly stupid to suggest that Sarah Palin doesn’t have foreign policy experience because Putin flies several miles over her head once in a while. Those darn reporters, what lunkheads!

Even if Putin did fly over Alaska on his way to America (which I don’t think he does), that’s a remarkably stupid thing to say. What, she and her staff go on high alert and contact foreign leaders when Putin is in the air overhead?

And trade missions? Um, how many have you headed up, Sarah?

Even with Palin’s complete lack of foreign policy experience, it staggers the mind that the campaign could not engineer a better answer than that.

There is just no tiptoeing around this: Palin comes across in this interview as laughably stupid–as would anyone who would watch this and then state that Palin made some sense to them. Just no two ways about it. No wonder they want to cancel her debate.

Sarah Palin was McCain’s first big stunt. In a move that made no sense from a “country-first” standpoint, he hired someone supremely unsuited for the presidency or vice-presidency on the gamble that he could energize his base, capture women voters, and somehow turn things around without taking damage from Palin’s lack of ability and vetting. It was a high-stakes, Hail Mary gamble which was designed purely to help his campaign while not helping the country, indeed by putting the country itself at risk. And while initially it appeared to pay off, that gain has now melted away and McCain is back where he started–but now with a potential albatross around his neck.

Apparently McCain decided that it was time for another desperate gamble. Along the lines of the highly untraditional suspension of the GOP convention due to Hurricane Gustav, McCain is now using the bailout crisis to generate an even bigger publicity stunt, while running away from facing up for his past actions and current scandals. For McCain, the upcoming debate presents a huge risk: he faces a potential pasting as he would have to face questions about his history of deregulation in the banking industry and why his campaign manager has turned out to be a lobbyist for the biggest offenders in the crisis. Suddenly, McCain, who blasted Obama for not wanting to debate more, finds himself incredibly vulnerable to a forum where he cannot pack the audience with fawning loyalists.

So he decides that the only feasible thing for him to do is to cancel the debate–but he can’t just do that, he has to come up with a whopper that’ll make it seem like he’s actually doing something good or even necessary; ergo his decision to use the bailout crisis, saying that he has to rush to Washington to manage things. But even that would just look like posturing, so he adds the element of suspending his campaign to make it look like an act of self-sacrifice. While tactically a good move for his campaign (he gets more publicity without spending money), this again does not benefit the country, and in fact hurts it, in two ways: by suspending the debate, he robs the country of a chance to judge the candidates more on the issues and their merits (not a surprise–McCain’s entire campaign has been based upon the strategy of dodging the issues), and by injecting himself and the GOP’s election focus on the bailout, he risks upsetting balances and compromises with volatile political moves.

But more to the point, McCain’s act is really nothing more than self-serving aggrandizement; just like his PR trip down to the areas preparing for Gustav, there is really nothing he can contribute, and only stands to get in the way and muck things up (Obama responsibly steered clear of relief efforts so as not to interfere with their progress, offering only whatever help was possible from afar). But McCain cares less about getting things done than he does about grabbing the political advantage; ironically, his “Country First” posturing, while attractive for the cameras, only makes things worse for the country so McCain can benefit politically. Not to mention that the cancellation would deal a huge blow to the university that has spent so much money and effort to host the debates.

Potentially, this suspension tactic has great advantages for McCain: he could avoid the debate where his own hand in the crisis could be put in the forefront, he could come out looking like a self-sacrificing, dutiful reformer while putting Obama in the position of either following McCain’s example or risk being seen as less dutiful, and stands to grab a big chunk of credit for a bailout when all he is doing is getting in the way. Whatever happens, one can bet that McCain will either take credit for any success or blame Obama for any failure. Not to mention that his call to suspend fundraising would primarily hurt Obama, as McCain gets his funding from the state. Bonus: McCain’s people are trying to use this to cancel Palin’s VP debate, apparently white-knuckled over what she might come across looking like.

There is also a risk: if the public sees this for what it is–a self-serving publicity stunt and an attempt to run from the debate–then McCain could see his numbers fall even more. (Dave Letterman has reportedly hit at McCain, saying: “He can’t run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she? What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We’ve got a guy like that now!”)

In the end, however, we come away with an even more enduring impression: John McCain is a long-shot gambler, prone to make lurching, desperate moves when he feels threatened politically, with more concern for his political career than for his country or the truth–a quality which speaks volumes about his character and his temperament.

This is not a man suited to be president.