Sometimes these unpleasant thoughts run through my head late at night. One recent concern relates to today’s anniversary, and what the Bush administration might do if Republicans lose the election. Overtly, they could do anything outrageous up to and including starting a war with Iran; considering what Bush Sr.–a relative saint compared to his son–did, sending our troops into Somalia after the election was lost, one can imagine that almost anything is possible. This administration has nearly decimated the Bill of Rights, introduced massive spying on our own people, introduced torture prisons worldwide, shown incredible disdain for the rule of law, and injected virulently partisan politics into every nook and cranny of government. They are capable of virtually anything.

If Obama wins, what will they do? We know that the whole “W”-keys-gone-missing from White House keyboards was fictional, but even that would have been the worst the Clinton bunch did, had they actually done it. But would the Dubyas do something far worse, like set Obama up for failure by intentionally fumbling the handover?

For example, the Clinton administration did an admirable job briefing the Bushies on national security; they highlighted al Qaeda and bin Laden as one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat to the U.S., and presented the Bush people with a fully-formed, highly-functional system for dealing with terror intelligence. The Bushies then completely disregarded that and dropped the ball, leading to 9/11. This is a failure of massive proportions (failure for the country, immense boon to the Bushies) which the Bush administration has felt the sting of over the years.

So if and when Obama wins, will they try to set Obama up for a new attack? Will they try to make themselves look more effective, or set Obama so he’ll lose influence and maybe re-election? Will they withhold vital information? Will they fail to brief his people fully and accurately on how to handle things?

Don’t tell me they wouldn’t possibly dare do that. They would. In a New York minute, if they thought they could get away with it, and they probably believe they could. All they’d have to do is lie about it later, and then attack any attempt to expose them as a partisan political ploy to escape responsibility and smear the opposition.

I just hope that if Obama does win, he keeps this threat in mind and depends on more than just the departing Bushies for support. There will still be untold numbers of Bush’s minions burrowed into the soil of the bureaucracy, ones that Obama won’t be able to dig out even if he attempts to sweep the rosters clear of badly-chosen political appointees.

I hope this is jut a worry, and I try to tell myself I am just being paranoid. But I think back to the fact that Oliver North was the man behind the mission to rescue the hostages in Iran–the ones that met with mechanical problems, crashed, and the mission failed. That mission was the do-or-die moment for the Carter administration, and its failure meant that Reagan became the next president. And one of its planners, Oliver North, turned out to be one of the most rabidly right-wing partisans in recent history.

These are vile, hateful thoughts, that such treason could be possible. But like I said, these are the kind of people we are dealing with.

The McCain campaign went ballistic with faked outrage after Obama, referring strictly to McCain’s continuation of Bush’s policies and making no reference whatsoever to Sarah Palin, called McCain’s claims about his policies “lipstick on a pig,” as well as “old fish in a newspaper.” Somehow this was supposed to be a slur against Palin, though there is literally zero connection to Palin in the statement, and the expression “lipstick on a pig” is a common one, especially in politics. But the idea is that lipstick must refer to a woman and therefore Obama called Palin a pig is somehow in order, and, we are forced to assume, Obama must from this point on refrain from using any metaphors which contain any reference to anything related to the female gender, even when talking about things completely unrelated to Sarah Palin.

However, a statement made by McCain late last year was found to include the same expression; when talking about Hillary Clinton’s health care plan, he said, “I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” McCain repeated that expression this year in May. So by the McCain campaign’s own standards, McCain’s statement was offensive, disgraceful, and sexist, and he owes Hillary Clinton a sincere apology. It was worse than Obama’s, in fact, because McCain was referring to a woman’s policy, and so the expression was far more direct in its insult. Not to mention that McCain only laughed and sympathized when one of his supporters called Hillary a “bitch.” (Of course, McCain has called his own wife a “trollop” and something else I won’t print, so this should be nothing new.) So McCain really needs to apologize to Hillary and to women everywhere. By his own campaign’s standards.

Or we can recognize that the McCain campaign is dishonorable, disingenuous, and hypocritical, and just leave it at that.

Here’s what Obama said on the campaign trail recently, something that he’s been saying for months:

“That’s not change. That’s just calling something that’s the same thing something different. You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper and call it change. It’s still going to stink, after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

No problem, right? Been saying this for months. Talking about McCain and his policies. On the attack, but nothing untoward. Even Republicans regularly use this expression.

Well, get a load of how the McCain campaign reacted:

“Senator Obama uttered what I can only describe to be disgusting comments, comparing our vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, to a pig.”

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

The claim is that Palin is “the only one of the four — the presidential and vice presidential candidates — who wears lipstick,” according to the spokesperson for the Palin camp.

This comes just days after the McCain campaign cried “sexism” after the Obama campaign did nothing more than criticize policies and judgment by the McCain campaign. It is also reminiscent of an attempt by McCain to play the Age Card–when Obama noted that McCain was straying from his promises and doing things that were not above board, he used the expression “losing his bearings,” which the McCain campaign then angrily denounced as a slur against McCain’s advanced years.

Essentially, they are doing nothing more than using every single opportunity to take an Obama statement and stretch it to incredibly ludicrous extremes so they can then take angry offense at what a cad he is.

If that’s all there was for the day, that would be one thing. But look at the visual the McCain campaign is now using to attack Obama:

They’re claiming that Obama’s “one accomplishment” in Illinois was to teach kindergarten kids about sex, making him out to be some kind of pedophile. Of course, the legislation–aside from not being the only thing Obama did in Illinois–was about pre-existing sex education classes that already exist in K-12 education, a generic category referring to any pre-college material–in this case, clearly referring to teens. To say that this is “teaching comprehensive sex education to kindergartners” is outrageously false. Not to mention, the bill in question was to take existing sex ed classes for teens and focus them more on STDs, on warning teens about the dangers of sex. McCain’s not just making egregious lies here, he’s making perverse ones at that. Note the images of kindergartners in the ad–how utterly obscene can you get?

Anybody who supports McCain should be ashamed and disgusted. These people are scum.

As both Palin and McCain continue to repeat, again and again, the baldfaced “Bridge to Nowhere” lie, I checked the major news outlets: only one, CBS, had a story on the bridge lie on their front pages. Everyone else had stories about McCain and Palin getting big crowds (I thought that was a “celebrity” thing) and enjoying their post-convention poll bounce. A few other major news sources–including, surprisingly, Fox–have stories in their databases fact-checking the claim (MSNCB and CNN don’t show such a story after a cursory search), but none feature the story–a story which should be a big one, because McCain and Palin continue to repeat it, often, even after it has been wholly discredited and shown up for an outright lie–and the McCain campaign is even basing their major theme–“a pair of mavericks”–on this claim.

Vet Voice has the story; go and read it. Short version: Alaskan National Guard Major General Craig Campbell makes several objective, factual statements which reveal Palin’s limited role as commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard. But then suddenly, he changes his colors and gushes about what a “great leader” she is. Just a few days later, Palin promotes Campbell to Lieutenant General, giving him a third star.

How blatant do you have to be?

I thought that this time there would be a chance of some light being cast: an article which promised a “fact check” on whether the charges against McCain and lobbyists were true. The piece started out OK, but quickly started making unnecessary equivocations.

The first is limiting the attention only to “top advisors,” ignoring the fact that the campaign hires dozens of other lobbyists at all levels of the campaign.

The second comes when the article stresses McCain’s BS line about how none are “currently registered,” a distinction without a real difference, as the New York Times pointed out. For example, one lobbyist who is mentioned, Randy Scheunemann, received payments from Georgia just months earlier despite being currently “unregistered”; additionally, while Scheunemann is unregistered, the firm from which he is on a “leave of absence” is still highly active. In short, “none are currently registered” is a false front meaning that they made some changes on paper to make it look like they aren’t lobbying–but they obviously are.

However, the kicker comes in the end of the article, when the author makes the same old stupid argument of equivalency:

But the bottom line is, both sides have ties to lobbyists, meaning whomever wins will have a hard time backing up the rhetoric about change and shaking up Washington.

“Both sides”? True in a technical sense, but wildly inaccurate in a quantitative and qualitative sense. Saying that “both sides have ties to lobbyists” is like saying “both sides have candidates of advanced years.” In the case of one candidate, the statement is barely true; in the case of the other, it is far more strongly the case than is made to appear.

The Liberal Media™ at work again, remaining ever-vigilant.

Update: Steve Benen points out another example of CNN equivocating and refusing to do the most fundamental tasks of journalism, this time on the “bridge to nowhere” lying issue.

Here we go: Churches want full power to play in politics and still maintain their tax-free status:

Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules.

The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.

“For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church,” ADF attorney Erik Stanley said. “It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It’s not for the government to mandate the role of church in society.”

One can only suppose that these churches have become so used to their tax-free status that they believe it is a gift from god, and not part and parcel of the separation of church and state; that the whole reason for being tax-exempt is not because churches just naturally deserve it, but because paying taxes is inextricably tied to representation. Churches already get away with so much–they have powerful lobbies, they get mentioned far more than is comfortable in places of legislative and executive power, and candidates bow and scrape before their leaders and covet their endorsements, all this without being taxed. Now they wish to tear down the last remnants of the wall separating church from state and become fully, openly political, completing the transformation they have been fighting to achieve, merging the church with government, while still claiming as their inalienable right freedom from being taxed–setting them up as a special, elevated group which gets full political privileges without having to pay the cover charge everyone else does.

The timing of all of this is also clearly opportunistic; coming just two months before the election, they want to have the full impact of supporting McCain, and they are probably hoping that they can use the Supreme Court challenge for cover–that if they lose, they can claim that they were shielded by the blanket protection of that challenge and can keep their tax-exempt status afterwards. And with the Bush administration covering things at least until January, they might be safe in that assumption.

But there is a very good chance they will not lose, or at least that they will make some gains; the new Bush court leans somewhat in that direction. You know that the Wingnut Four will always vote as a block for anything the right wing wants them to, so it’s a matter of getting Kennedy to agree with them just enough. And even if they don’t get that, they might be able to use this to energize the base–kind of a reverse Roe v. Wade, a way of telling Christian conservatives that if McCain wins, they get even more influence.

It’s very good political strategy, which should scare you, unless you like the prospect of religion gaining more power in politics–which many religious people probably think is a spiffy idea. But if you are religious, you should be afraid of religion marrying into politics. Very afraid.

I will now step aside and let Tim continue in the comments.

I always know when some aggregation site has linked to one of my posts when I start getting a bunch of comments from people I’ve never heard of before. About 11,000 visitors came from Reddit. And of course, it happens to be one of the briefest posts I’ve written–but on a topic I think is important. I just hope a few people looked at more than just the one brief post.

An associated problem from this: for the next month, my Google Analytics chart will look like this:

The one peak flattens out the rest. Google’s service may be free and have a lot of analytical tools, but they do a bad job on that main-page graph in a few ways.

The McCain campaign’s utter gall is getting more and more impressive with each passing day. The latest:

Rick Davis, campaign manager for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., just told Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace that McCain running mate Gov. Sarah Palin won’t subject herself to any tough questions from reporters “until the point in time when she’ll be treated with respect and deference.”

I wanted to say that she’d better not go anywhere near Bill O’Reilly, but then I recalled that it’s only Democrats that Bill-O treats like scum.

All snarkiness aside, just exactly how snide and abusive does the McCain campaign have to get with the media before it all backfires? Pretty snide and abusive, is my guess, but you never know–the media can be fickle, but I think they know that if they start reporting straight, Obama will start running away with it and it won’t be the close race they’re hoping for. But I betcha there are a lot of reporters out there who are chafing at the bit, held back only by their editors and publishers.

Still, demanding “respect and deference” before granting a media interview? And they call Obama an “elitist”? What a ripsnorter that is!

Update: The McCain campaign announced that they would grant an interview to ABC (how magnanimous of them!). One can only guess at what level of “respect and deference” ABC had to scrape and bow to in order to get the interview. We won’t know until we see it. The McCain campaign claimed that there were “no ground rules on our end,” but the details took two days to work out–so we’re really buying that load of bull about no ground rules. And there may be significance in the fact that they specifically chose Charles Gibson for the interview–the same guy who tore into Obama during one of the debates, so viciously that the audience started booing him.

One of the big themes of the McCain/Palin campaign has been about how elitist Obama is, how he and liberals in general snidely look down upon those in rural areas, with “common” American lives and values.

I have said it before and will say it again: it’s conservatives, and at least some rural people who seem to be elitist, feeling that their way of life is far superior, looking down on the urban liberals. Back in the San Francisco Bay Area, anyone who made snide remarks about “hicks” would be excoriated and generally regarded as an ass; in the notably liberal atmosphere of the college office where I work, anyone who put down rural America just because of their lifestyle or common values would be instantly looked down upon with scorn. Those are “San Francisco values.” Apparently, they don’t have the same kind of values in the GOP.

Apparently, at least among conservatives, it is perfectly acceptable to look down on urbanites for no other reason than the perceived arrogance, and to presume a superiority inherent in their own preferred way of life. Note that when people like Palin sneer at the straw-man “elitists” they create, they then act like it is their own way of life that is superior.

Imagine if a Democratic politician went before a crowd and said the same kind of thing in reverse–instead of putting down “Washington elitists,” they put down “small-town hicks,” and generally lorded the urban experience over rural folk. Imagine if Barack Obama had made this speech:

A writer observed: “We produce good people in our big cities, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.” They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America … who manage our businesses, run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America. I had the privilege of living most of my life in a big city, working as a community organizer. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a community organizer is sort of like a “small-town mayor,” except that you actually help people.

Imagine that Obama then sneered at how right-wingers actually looked down on working people, saying, “We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in New York and another way in Podunk.” Now imagine the conservative response. Would this, or would this not, produce cries of “liberal elitist!” from the right wing? Would they not decry it as a call of left-wing arrogance? Would they not attack Obama for taking on airs of smug superiority? And yet, that is the text from Palin’s speech, with the terms reversed, from right to left.

I recall a member of one of my Linguistics classes back in college who made an interesting point about wealthy families and the way people in the middle class perceived them. Not just the stereotypes, but the specific language used. Wealthy people don’t use words like “chauffeur,” they use “driver”; they don’t say “mansion,” they say “house” or “home.” The point being that the popular view of wealthy families was one that presumed a haughtiness, a smug arrogance that, more often than not, did not in fact exist. It was an imagined attitude, a straw man opinion that made it easier to look down upon rich people, seeing oneself as superior. In short, manufacturing the illusion of arrogance on the part of another in order to justify one’s own arrogance over them.

That’s what we have here: the entire “elitist” mythology is a carefully constructed straw man created for the sole purpose of justifying an arrogance conservatives want to themselves enjoy. Like an office employee imagining his company is corrupt as a way of justifying his embezzling from it, the idea of liberal elitists is nothing more than a way for conservatives to commit the very wrongs they assign to others.

I just love this caption. From Kiko’s House:

That pretty much sums it up. And talk about being prettied up for show. How much you wanna bet that suit’s fresh off the rack and paid for from a political fund somewhere? And I’m sure he has always worn a flag pin everywhere he goes. Some talk about shotgun marriages–I think the lucky kid has found himself a gravy train.

McCain just doesn’t care about the truth. He is lost in a fog of his own truthiness. It began with some pretty outrageous stuff–Obama canceled a visit to the troops because reporters with cameras wouldn’t be there, Obama wants to lose the war so he can win the election, and so forth. He lied about himself–that he doesn’t know how many houses he has, that he is reluctant to talk about his war record, that he’s a reformer, he’s not surrounded by lobbyists, he will bring change from the Bush campaign, etc.

And now, he has a whole new half of the ticket to lie about, and the lies come more smoothly and quickly, as if he has stopped trying to make the lies sound plausible in the light of any fact-checking, as if he can change any detail he wants to make it sound good. Palin was thoroughly vetted. Palin was against the “bridge to nowhere.” Palin fought against pork. Palin has executive experience because she lived in proximity to Russia. Palin is the best qualified person in the Republican Party to step up and be president should McCain pass away.

Now he seems to be starting a Two For One sale. He said:

You know what I enjoyed the most? She took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor, and sold it on eBay — and made a profit!

Except that she didn’t sell it on eBay, and she sold it for a loss. Now, maybe somebody told him that story and he just bought it fully, showing him to be irresponsibly gullible and irresponsible with the facts. But frankly, I think that at this point, he’s just making things up. I think that he has gotten away with blatant lies so often, for so long, that he thinks he can just let them flow like a river and nobody in the media will call him on it.

After all, Gore, at most, lied about a few small things, like how many times he’d visited the scenes of forest fires and with whom–the kind of thing that is far more easily seen as a slip or something in the blur of PR appearances–and got branded a serial liar, a label which the media gleefully adopted. McCain has been lying outright for quite some time, and even now, with the eBay story, you get headlines like “The eBay Myth,” or “McCain version of Palin’s eBay story goes a bit far.” Myth? Goes a bit far? McCain was lying.

Gore told the truth when he said he took the initiative in creating the Internet and is still called a liar for that to this day; McCain makes crap up out of thin air and says the most preposterous untruths, and he “goes a bit far” in his “mythmaking”? As John Kerry said, you gotta be kidding me.

Just one more thing, not fully related. How can the Republicans all cheer when their candidates so snidely insult the act of community service, when half the people in the arena are waving “service” signs, and when the theme of the entire campaign is “country first”? As if being mayor of a small town, firing people because of personal vendettas, and running up a huge debt is far more noble and selfless than helping build housing for the poor and the needy? “Country First,” my ass. These people simply have no morals when it comes to winning elections, none at all.

This really needs to be pushed. Palin has lied repeatedly about having “killed” the already-dead “bridge to nowhere,” when she was actually a big supporter. She’s being cast as an anti-Washington, cost-cutting, reformist earmark-killer, when, in actuality, she was a positive earmark shark, hiring lobbyists to bring more pork to wherever she was.

I thought so. I recall that the networks pulled back to pundits yakking and failed to show John Kerry’s speech at the Democratic convention–but when I was flipping through channels here and hit CNN, they were showing the Republicans airing a “Country First” video–not even a speech, but a canned video which was purely for promo purposes–without comment.

But that’s the Liberal Media™ for you.

The new commercial with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates is out. It is, to put it mildly, bizarrely unfunny. Watch:

Are you as mystified as I am? The commercial seems to have been written by Gates, not Seinfeld, it is so unfunny. I think the biggest line in the commercial is “they run tight.” Maybe worthy of a small chuckle, but not much more. There is the inside joke of the mug shot, but even that kinda fell flat. And I’m not the only one to think it’s not funny, but that’s hardly a surprise. And what does any of this have to do with Microsoft? Some people try to suss it out, but if they’re right, it’s so weirdly metaphorical as to require a literary critic to explain it.

Not to mention, this was supposed to be a campaign that fought back against Apple. Does it? Well, in it, Seinfeld & Gates are experts at discount shoe shopping. A hit at Apple’s prices being higher? If so, then it’s a bizarre slam, because–aside from being so indirect that most people would miss it–although Apple hardware is sometimes more expensive than equivalent PC hardware, and although Apple doesn’t make super-low-end, bargain-basement machines, neither does Microsoft. Microsoft makes software–and Microsoft’s software is more expensive than Apple’s. Windows is priced higher than Mac OS X, and Office is priced higher than iWork. So the price thing doesn’t work.

However, I am of the opinion that, even though it’s confusingly bad, Microsoft’s ad actually hits the nail on the head. Here’s why:

Apple’s “Hi, I’m a Mac” ads are perfect: short, simple, funny… and perfectly clear. You come away from the ads pleased, and understand very well the message that was conveyed, that Macs are better machines with better software, and that Windows is riddled with problems.

Microsoft’s new ad is the reverse: long (at 90 seconds), bloated, and unclear, leaving you shaking your head at what the hell Microsoft was thinking when they made it.

In other words, both commercials express perfectly how the respective products work, and what impressions users have after having used both of them.

So in that sense, the Microsoft ad makes perfect sense.

Everyone’s onto this: an embarrassing screw-up, right smack in the middle of McCain’s speech. What first appeared to be a green screen, it showed what could have been a luxurious mansion owned by John Cindy McCain. It was supposed to be Walter Reed Military Army Medical Center. It was really Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood. (Hollywood? McCain’s an elitist!!) Bizarre error, considering that Google Image has great high-res images of the medical center; how they screwed that image up is rather surprising. Not just that one person got it wrong, but that they either (a) had only one person checking what went on the screen behind McCain, or (b) they had lots of people and no one caught it. Once again, a lack of preparedness and responsibility.

The McCain campaign can’t go very long without yet another screw-up. Not that we should get over-confident, but neither should we worry too much. McCain just had his convention. When that’s over, things will get a lot tougher for him–and the Obama campaign is running things pretty well, going after McCain and not Palin, showing the kind of restraint most of us have not had.

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So, now that the convention is over and Palin does not have the excuse of training and practice for her speech, of course she’ll be appearing in public and answering questions, right? Weellll, maybe not. If these reports are correct, she’s going to “hole up” in Alaska. On the surface, she’s doing it to see off her son. More likely, they want to keep her away from an unscheduled moment in public until they can get her trained well enough not to make a wrong move. After the Campbell Brown incident, they’re probably scared to death some uppity reporter will try to ask Sarah a question she can’t answer well. I think they know how paper-thin her popularity is outside of conservatives, and what propensity she has for lying, badly. So no wonder they’re hiding her.

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John McCain a few weeks ago: “I still believe the fundamentals of the economy are strong.” Reality: Unemployment hits 6.1%, a 5-year high.

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Obama faces off with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, and handles himself very solidly in the face of strident attempts to attack and/or catch Obama in a slip-up. (Seriously, watch the interview–if any reporter treated McCain with such snide disdain, the McCain campaign would go nuclear and viciously attack the reporter, the network, and anyone else with a ten-mile radius.)

Now it’s McCain’s turn to appear on Olbermann. McCain? McCain??

Hmm. The War Hero™ seems a bit chicken. Obama can take it; McCain can’t. Maybe he can send in his #2.

Oh, wait, I forgot, she’s hiding out in Alaska, too afraid to talk to anyone in the media. Put her up against Olbermann, and we’d see her “foreign policy executive experience” go up in flames in ten seconds.

So much for the idea that Palin is more capable than Obama.

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Finally, a note: the McCain’s aren’t elitists, and here’s why: not because they only use four of their seven or maybe ten homes, not because McCain likes to ride nine-car motorcades to pick up his grande cappuccino from Starbucks. The proof comes in the fact that during the convention, Cindy McCain wore an outfit and accessories priced at roughly $300,000. That proves they’re not elitist: with “rich” starting at $5 million a year, Cindy was slumming it in an outfit barely worth chump change.

Here’s McCain just a few months ago:

“I kind of reacted the way I did because I have a reluctance to talk about my experiences,” he said, noting that he has huge admiration for the “heroes” who served with him in the POW camp and said the experience taught him to love the U.S. because he missed it so much.

“I am always reluctant to talk about these things,” McCain said.

Today? Not so reluctant. His entire campaign is pretty much two things: “I’m a war hero” and “Obama is a traitor.” But the “I’m a war hero” is something he talks about far more than anything else.

Reluctantly, of course..

First Fox’s Steve Doocy said it, then Cindy McCain. Now, John McCain himself is backing up the claim.

What is the claim? That Sarah Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska is not that far away from Russia. I swear to god, I am not kidding, I did not make that up, I am not exaggerating this one tiny little bit, McCain actually said exactly that:

GIBSON: But as you know, the questions revolve really around foreign policy experience.

Can you honestly say you feel confident having someone who hasn’t traveled outside the United States until last year, dealing with an insurgent Russia, with an Iran with nuclear ambitions, with an unstable Pakistan, not to mention the war on terror?

MCCAIN: Sure. And one of the key elements of America’s national security requirements are energy. She understands the energy issues better than anybody I know in Washington, D.C., and she understands.

Alaska is right next to Russia. She understands that. Look, Sen. Obama’s never visited south of our border. I mean, please.

So she is experienced.

Again, I swear to you by all I believe, I did not make that quote up. It’s 100% real. It is fully in context, I didn’t cut anything out in the middle or change any of the words. Check out the transcript yourself.

Wasilla is 700 miles from the closest part of Russia, Juneau is 1220. When you change that to any relevant part of Russia, then we’re talking thousands of miles. But let’s be generous and call it 700 miles. Just living that distance away from Russia apparently gave Sarah Palin all the experience and knowledge she needs to become president of the United States.

Just by the 700-mile rule, I am a “foreign policy expert” on not only Russia, but on North Korea, South Korea, and China. I am much more qualified that Palin! Plus, I have executive experience–I have run the branch campus of my college. So I have “run something,” as Giuliani just defined as also a necessary part of the presidential package.

In any case, it looks pretty certain now that they have no intention of dumping Palin, they are running with what they’ve got. They have their talking points, stupid as they are. They are leading with the “small-town soccer mom” personal appeal, and they are going with the laughable “executive experience” charge and are trying to make it real through big-lie tactics–repeat the lie often with a serious demeanor and get upset when anyone calls you on it–and now they have a defense set up, namely that any criticism against Palin is sexist. They’re suited up and ready to go. All that remains is to see how unabashedly the media plays along with their incredible line of BS.

This is in most of the Japan-related web sites, but in case some of you don’t read those, this should be of interest. A couple walking their dog in the mountains of the Izu Peninsula were horrified to see a human form bound in plastic, hair showing out of one end, feet the other. They called the police, and more than a dozen officers arrived on the scene and cordoned it off. The media arrived and took photos, and a huge story began to circulate.

Police carried the body off to the pathology lab, and set about interviewing a large number of witnesses, launching a massive investigation.

Until, that is, the pathologists unwrapped the body and found it to be a life-size, life-like sex doll. One which, they reported, showed “signs of repeated use.” They speculate that the owner didn’t want to throw it out in his usual trash–that could be embarrassing–and so dumped it in the mountains, without thinking about how that might look. Apparently, he did nothing illegal other than dumping trash where you’re not supposed to, but he cost the city quite a lot of money and embarrassment. One would imagine that they have more than enough, er, biological samples to identify the guy should they find him.

As technology improves to this point, so should certain standards–one of which is, if you absolutely have to have lifelike sex dolls, provide a means to safely dispose of them without causing quite this much commotion. Heaven knows the guys who buy these dolls probably don’t desire this kind of attention. I can only imagine the guy who owned the doll and how much he is cringing right now.

Wow, that didn’t take long. As McCain is hiring for her the same agent who ruthlessly smeared McCain in 2000, Palin uses Alaskan taxpayer money to hire a slick lawyer to defend her in the Troopergate scandal, and that lawyer is now using every Bush tactic in the book. First, she won’t testify, using the bogus “executive privilege” dodge–the Bush’s “screw the law, I’m not talking” tactic. Second, her lawyer wants the investigation handed over to a state review board–which is run by three appointees hand-picked by Palin herself–the Bush “we’re in charge of investigating ourselves, and we won’t” tactic.

In short, she’s trying to tell the American people, as well as the people of Alaska, that she’s better than they are–she’s above the law and doesn’t have to answer for her actions.

Meanwhile, the avalanche of scandals, lies, and generally sordid details around Palin continues. How about this one: just two weeks ago, Palin was in church listening to her pastor announce that Jews suffer terror attacks as part of god’s justice for not being Christians. Those silly Jews, they apparently don’t know that Jesus was Jewish! According to Palin’s pastor, anyway. Of course, the media isn’t reporting on this, probably because there’s no way they can verify it, I guess. Check out audio and transcripts of Palin’s church’s sermons here.

Also, it appears that Palin herself spoke at the church, calling the war in Iraq a “task that is from god,” and that in addition to Iraq being a holy war, the Alaskan pipeline is just as holy. But we all knew that.

And oh yeah, in my last post I mentioned that the McCain people who were insisting that they thoroughly vetted Palin relied on claiming to have used methods that cannot be checked out, like online searches–indicating that they were making it up. And indeed, they seem to have been doing just that. One of the methods they claimed to have used was an FBI background check. What they didn’t figure on was the FBI denying they did any such background check. Oops.

Do you think that the McCain people are keeping Palin locked up so no one asks her how well abstinence education works? Nah, that’d be too easy for Palin to take and make herself seem like a victim. Maybe they’re worried that they’ll pull a Campbell Brown and ask her to give an actual example of an executive accomplishment that isn’t embarrassingly trivial. Or perhaps they’re concerned that she’ll just say anything at all–let’s face it, not an hour goes by without some new, excruciatingly tawdry revelation about Palin coming to light (which reminds me, did you know that the ass-kicking redneck hockey-playing high schooler who knocked up Palin’s underage daughter is actually going to attend the Republican convention?) and they don’t want her to become unhinged on national teevee. Or, most likely, they’re just too busy attempting to encase Palin in a block of impenetrable plastic before anyone with an uncontrolled mic can get close to her.

Meanwhile: Obama’s Revenge. In return for McCain walking all over Obama’s speech to the nation by announcing Palin’s nomination just hours later, Obama has taken a rather daring risk himself–he has agreed to appear on O’Reilly’s show on Fox opposite McCain giving his speech. Though frankly, I’m having trouble believing this is not a hoax of some sort. While I believe Obama could argue O’Reilly into a smoking pile of cinders, I don’t trust O’Reilly to do something incredibly stupid. Which could have benefits for Obama just as easily. But then, the volatility itself is probably good for very high ratings, which could draw more people away from McCain and maybe even win some respect for Obama from conservatives.

Still, that’s just weird.

Update: Like I said, not an hour goes by. Now it appears that she fired the Wasilla police chief because (a) he made bars close at 2 am instead of 5 am so as to reduce drunk driving, and (b) the NRA didn’t like his stance on concealed weapons laws. This in addition to Palin trying to fire the city librarian after she refused to censor books Palin didn’t like.

I’ll see if I can stay up another hour and catch the next story about Palin.