Sauce for the gander

How can a man who swoons over Ronald Reagan on a regular basis (and twice in this column he sets Ronnie as the standard) write this?

[Obama] was the newcomer and the stranger, he rose above the crowd on pure special effects: dazzling rhetoric, natural charisma and a magic carpet ride of transcendence and hope.

It worked for two reasons: Democrats believe that nonsense, and he was new.

Charles Krauthammer, like many conservatives, lacks that essential germ of morality that applies the same set of rules to himself that he wants to apply to others. This lack is why the morality of these particular conservatives, such as it is, is a pastiche of taboos that must be received from authority rather than reasoned about. It's also why they don't believe in the concept of law as binding even the king.

Spooky

Republicans don't demand a lot of their Presidential candidates. They're looking for a figurehead, a national daddy or mommy to blow them a kiss. They're even o.k. with a shadowy apparat of operatives running the President, just as long as the animatronics don't show. Toto, get away from that curtain.

In normal times, Sarah Palin would have been perfect - and the reaction of the die-hards shows that she still is for the base. Hits her mark. Looks good. Down to earth in a Stepford kind of way. Not too smart.

The part about not being too smart is part of the Republican job description for President, which is predicated on riding wave after wave of advisers to do the thinking for you. Not being too smart is an advantage. Knowing stuff that "ordinary" people don't know (the ones who can't tell that the Republicans are patronizing them) is as dangerous to popularity as making an A in 7th grade math, especially if that means you know trickonom-- trigamonetry-- angles and stuff. If you know stuff, you may have to explain your thoughts, and the Republicans know that Americans want entertainment, not explanations.

Palin would have been perfect ten years ago. No one would have cared that she's already confirmed the Peter Principle by reaching the level of her incompetence as governor of Alaska. No one would have cared that she has so far proven to be less trainable than Dan Quayle even to give foolishly simplistic answers that succeed at staying on a sound-bite message.

Ten years ago was before Duhbya screwed it up for really dumb people everywhere. Even the political Rip Van Winkles who sleep for four years between elections - even lapdog political journalists - have been enlightened like the slowest Grasshopper thumped in the head in a Zen koan. Electing someone too dumb for the job can have really, really bad consequences. Even Republicans want to hurry home to daddy in the form of Ronald Reagan, because by god he could read a cue card with the best of them.

Why am I being so mean to Palin?

First, I saw the Tina Fey send-up of Palin's latest mind-blowing disinterview with Katie Couric. Hysterical! What a send-up of Palin's irresistible tendency to descend into a gibberish of phrases so disconnected that you might expect to find them if you spilled your Magnetic Poetry kit into the garbage dispose-all.


Then, I watched the actual answer from St. Sarah of 600 miles from Russia.


Verbatim.

I already liked Tina Fey, just from the commercial where she ran back and forth putting out fires. Now I find out that she hardly even deserves a writing credit for her skit. She does however deserve kudos for having the judgement to let the unsatirizable Palin absurdities speak for themselves.

It doesn't take a genius to run a good government. FDR was famously dubbed a second-rate intellect by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who nonetheless appreciated his first-rate temperament. But it does take someone with something serious on the ball. Sarah Palin ain't got it, and it looks as though she never will.

Tina Fey on the other hand? She's got brains and judgement. I'd vote for her.

(Thanks, Tom!)

Teen pregnancy - IOKIYAR

Click image for full Matt Bors cartoon.

Party of senile nostalgia

Rebecca Sinderbrand, my new favorite journalist at McCNN, counter-programs her network today, nailing the Republican retro-fantasy machine. I would of course go a bit further than the nostalgia she sees in waves - these conservatives, like most conservatives I've ever known, may talk about the future, but they pine for a golden age of righteousness long past that never actually existed.

Nowadays, it's the 1980s and Ronald Reagan, but in the 1980s they pined for Eisenhower and in the 1950s for anyone before FDR, even Herbert Hoover and his problems in the housing market. Too bad the mean Democrats wouldn't let the market have enough time to sort out the Hoovervilles.

It may be this propensity for imagining a golden age is what made the Republican Party such a natural fit for white Southerners, many of whom (not me, of course) look back on race-based sovereignty with wistfulness and angry defensiveness.

Just a sound check

Click image to see full Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution cartoon.

McCain steals one of Ronnie Reagan's infamous throwaway lines. Hey, that couldn't be bad, could it? Pretty sly on Luckovich's part, though.

Reagan's heir

In 1980, Ronald Reagan promised three things:

• Lower taxes
• A balanced budget
• Increased military spending

This was obvious bullshit from day one, but the media didn't care to notice about the last Teflon candidate.

In the end, we got one of them, increased military spending. Those early tax cuts had to be replaced because the deficit was so far out of control.

In 2008, John McCain promises three things:

• Lower taxes
• That "runaway Federal spending will end on my watch"
• A hundred years in Iraq if ever - oh so hopefully - the killing stops, merely indefinitely if it doesn't
  

Take a guess at which one we'll get if we elect this pretender.

Of course, McCain's not as handsome as the Gipper, and he can't deliver a speech as well, but at least he's older.

Was Reagan that oblivious?

Lou Cannon tells us that Ronald Reagan could not possibly have been willing to use racism while having on occasion shown personal concern for blacks. Why, he even had a couple of 'em up to the house one time! OK, sorry, that's unfair, but even Cannon has to admit that Reagan supported continuing Jim Crow voting discrimination.

Uh, Lou, wake up. Even Reagan could not have been oblivious enough to fail to understand the symbolism of advocating states' rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi. If Reagan was not a bigot personally, he didn't mind bigotry much in others.

Michael Deaver dead at 69

Deaver taught the Washington press corps that they could be manipulated and like it. He made all those pretty Reaganite pictures that meant so much more than mere words and lowered the common denominator - though not nearly as far as subsequent GOP media people. But Deaver was never evil like Lee Atwater or Karl Rove or smarmy like Ken Mehlman and Ed Gillespie. I guess he could always leave the dirty work to Roger Ailes, who has a network full of hacks who are both evil and smarmy. Ironic that CNN has the headline before Fox, though there's as yet no story to link to.

It's continually amazing how the depredations of the Bushist regime make me nostalgic for previous, less nasty Republican Administrations - for just a second or two, anyway.

Update: I had forgotten about Deaver's felonies. Just another Republican criminal, I guess, even if he did have a pleasant manner.