You'd think that given the serial bombshells that dropped from the Senate Arms Services Committee report, that the chair of that committee, whose name has become synonymous with the bombshells, would have been a prime booking for the Sunday chat shows. Instead, the debates over the "Levin Report" were confined mainly to the pundits, who were content to debate the vagueries of "politicizing policy," rather than the concrete lawbreaking and outrageous descent from civilization that torture represents.

Levin appeared on just one program: Fox News Sunday, and even there, what would seem to be the most relevant question of all was never asked. That question was framed by Frank Rich on Sunday:

The [Levin] report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: "A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful." As higher-ups got more "frustrated" at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, "there was more and more pressure to resort to measures" that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration's ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee's memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) "Downing Street memo," in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." A month after Bybee's memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on "Meet the Press," hyping both Saddam's W.M.D.s and the "number of contacts over the years" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus "intelligence" from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

In short, to a show, and to a reporter, the media have treated the Levin report as if its most important finding was that waterboarding took place. Well, we already knew that. What we didn't know, and what the media has to date, almost completely erased from the coverage, is that the waterboarding was confined to so-called "high value detainees" of a very specific sort: men who the Bush administration must have considered credible witnesses to a lie (if only they could torture them enough to get them to tell it) ... namely, that an invasion of Iraq would be justified because Saddam Hussein was somehow complicit in 9/11. As Rich, who was the only member of the media, to my knowledge, who even brought up this incredible set of facts (and by the way Levin, who told Rich plainly that the torture for false information scenario was accurate, didn't bring it up on his own, either...) sums up:

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality.

And yet, that is the very possibility the media is, en masse, refusing to contemplate. You've really got to wonder why.

Has CNN adopted an editorial policy of ignoring altogether, the finding reported last week by McClatchy, that the serial torture of "high value detainees" Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah was done not to prevent another terrorist attack, but rather to try and extract false confessions that would tie Saddam Hussain to 9/11?

John King this morning (Sunday) had on Diane Feinstein, Lindsey Graham and the treacherous Mr. Lieberman to discuss, among other things, the release of the torture memos. Lieberman and Graham were allowed, unimpeded by King, to repeat the meme that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) was used, in Graham's words, "not to commit a crime against individual people, but to save us all from another attack."

At that point, King might have interjected that a senior U.S. inteligence official and a former Army psychiatrist have stated that the Bush administration's desire to invade Iraq was central to the torture program (a desire that was shared by Mr. Lieberman for many years, by the way...) and asked his guests for comment.

He interjected no such thing. In fact, I don't recall hearing the McClatchy story repeated on CNN in any daypart since the news broke last week. Has anyone else noticed what seems like an editorial decision to stick to the official (Bush-Cheney) narrative about torture being necessary to prevent another attack? Perhaps CNN simply doesn't believe McClatchy's sources, or maybe they don't want to open up this line of inquiry against the prior administration for reasons unknown.

(Not that NBC has been exactly aggressive, other than Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow's shows about making this point, either, but CNN seems to be particularly determined to hew to the Cheney line.)

Meanwhile, what will Howie Kurtz do...?

I've just sat through a half hour of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," as Scarborough, Mika and their guests, including Chuck Todd, pretend that yesterday never happened.

To review, yesterday, the Levin report revealed some startling things, none more startling than this:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation -- widely considered torture -- as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

In other words, the push from Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even Condi Rice, was not about preventing an imminent attack, or, as Joe Scarborough keeps insisting, a matter of political differences between the old and new administrations. The torture programs devised by Rumsfeld, largely, via reverse-engineering the SERE program was being used in much the same way the Maoist Chinese used it against our soldiers during the Korean War: to produce false confessions that would justify an invasion of Iraq that President Bush was at the time claiming he wasn't even considering... More from McClatchy:

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

This is damning new information, and you'd think it would have made it into the discussion this morning. Instead, Chuck, Joe and company ignored this point altogether, and argued the torture question as if the Levin report didn't even exist. In the end, it hardly matters what the Morning Joe cast chats about -- but the fact that the show takes place on the same network that covered the Iraq-torture connection extensively just last night, is strange, to say the least.

A fundamental shift has occurred in this debate. If torture was used, not to avert an imminent attack (the "ticking time bomb" scenario still being sold by Republicans to justify the unthinkable) but rather to gin up false evidence to justify an illegal attack on a country that posed no threat to us, essentially further politicizing 9/11, and trashing everything America stands for, all in the quest to fulfill the neocon dream of Iraq conquest, then there's no "looking forward." What we have, it seems to me, is a criminal conspiracy to lie, distort, and even torture us into war.

Somebody please brief the MSNBC morning crew.

The one thing that I respect about Republicans -- at it happens to be the only thing I respect about them -- is that they are not afraid to use power. In fact, Republicans are so confident in their ability to use power, they tend to abuse it without a second thought (think Dick Cheney, the "unitary executive", and the shredding of the Constitution over the last eight years.)

Democrats are exactly the opposite. They are either too shamefaced or too fearful of wielding governmental power, to ever really be effective. In fact, they seem to be always looking for permission to use even the authority given to them overwhelmingly (think 2006 and the impeachment of George W. Bush ... oh that's right, there was none.) And the permission they seek is usually from Republicans, and it is usually denied, without the GOP ever having to vocalize the denial (think threatened, but never, ever carried out, filibusters.) What Democrats seem most concerned with, is gaining and holding power, and doing so generally by not using it, which is why they were afraid to impeach George W. Bush and company, and remain terrified of indicting former Bush administration officials, for fear of offending enough voters to lose them their precious gavels, drivers and corner offices.

The Democrats' strange relationship to power is usually a source of annoyance for me, as a member of the party. Right now? It's downright dangerous to the country, which is shedding jobs like a spring spaniel.

By letting Susan Collins of all people, who owes her seat to her ability to hide behind Olympia Snowe at election time and pretend they're both Democrats, to dictate the terms of the economic stimulus plan, and to threaten to walk out if the Cruelle de Ville cuts to programs for all of those horrible old people, poor people and children that she and "Democrat" Ben Nelson foisted on the bill are reintroduced, is the height of idiocy. And the fact that Harry Reid doesn't simply call for an up or down vote and dare Susan, Olympia, Arlen "Blue State" Specter, or one of the eternally wrong and historically lethal southern conservatives to vote against it and then face their voters, or to go ahead and filibuster the bill -- but to do it the old fashioned way, cots and all, proves his weakness and fecklessness (which we knew already, after watching him bow and scrape for Joe Lieberman.) And unfortunately, the seeming obsession with bi-partisanship coming out of the White House, before President Obama finally had enough and started calling a stimulus a stimulus last week, gave Republicans far too much room to run. So now they're running, stomping and peeing and crapping all over what should have been a straightforward, large, potent stimulus bill. As Paul Krugman laments today:

Even if the original Obama plan -- around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts -- had been enacted, it wouldn't have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

If Democrats were Republicans, they would have announced from the well of the Senate that for every Republican Senator who refuses to back the bill, half of the money intended for their state would be cut out of the final bill, meaning that, for instance, Refuseniks John McCain and John Kyl's Arizona would get nothing.

I mean, where are the infamous head cracking techniques of Rahm Emanuel? I half expected him to be busting windows out of people's cars! What happened to the muscle Joe Biden was gonna employ on the Senate? Where is the vigor that (well, sometimes) marked the campaign's push-back against Republican slime?

I will watch President Obama's live news conference and speech tonight with great anticipation. What I'm looking for, in short, Mr. President? Is more FDR and less "can't we all just get along," because we can't. Republicans believe, fundamentally, in doing nothing, and letting the working stiffs go to hell. That's what you might call their "philosophy." You have the majority of the American people on your side, and the majority is hurting. If you and the Democrats can't deliver, then the "do nothing" Hooverites win. They, after all, believe that there is no emergency, since massive layoffs create cheap labor, and that tanking the economy is just another way to create wealth for those with lots of reserve capitol to spend on deeply discounted, "toxic" (for now) assets. Message: they are not on side, nor are they on ours. So for once, let's give 'em hell.

It's hard to believe that Rod Blagojevich could be considered a winner, well, ever, after his nasty travails with Patrick Fitzgerald and his handy wiretap, but it appears that Blago has found a way to win one against an admittedly easy target: Harry Reid and the wussified Senate Democrats.

Reports that the Dems plan to block Blago's choice to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat, one Roland Burris, by any means necessary, have taken on dramatic proportions:

The Democratic leadership's current contingency plan for next week is reportedly for Burris to be met at the chamber by a doorman telling him he's not allowed inside. If he still tries to go in, armed police officers could intervene to get him away. Burris told the Los Angeles Times that he wants to avoid a scene and have all of this negotiated before he arrives, but it's unlikely that he could negotiate his way towards actually being seated.

And even if Burris does manage to physically enter the chamber, there are still a whole lot of avenues to keep him from being sworn in. The Senate is expected to launch a Rules Committee investigation to determine the legitimacy of his appointment, thus delaying him from being seated. They'll look at everything from the facts of the Blagojevich scandal to Illinois Sec. of State Jesse White's refusal to sign the certificate of appointment. Every undotted "i" and every uncrossed "t" will be scrutinized.

At that point, Burris might just be able to go to court and force the Senate to admit him. Many legal scholars believe he has a genuine case here. But even this could take a while -- which would appear to be the whole point.

Really? Do they really plan to do all of tthat? For real for real??? Because if they do, we will have the intriguing mental picture of the party that used to be the party of segregation sending armed police-like figures to stand at the Senate chamber door, George Wallace-style, to keep a black man from taking up the seat being vacated by the first black president of the United States, who was also the lone black member of the United States Senate, who was nominated to the presidency by the former party of segregation. If the circular irony is killing you, join the club.

Enter Bobby Rush, former Obama nemesis, and current Spokesman Pro Tem for Black Illinois:

"The recent history of our nation has shown us that sometimes there could be individuals and there could be situations where school children--where you have officials standing in the doorway of school children. You know, I'm talking about all of us back in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas. I'm talking about George Wallace, Bull Connors and I'm sure that the US Senate don't want to see themselves placed in the same position."

Well, Mr. Burris is no schoolchild, by nominating a black candidate who is by all accounts qualified, and more importantly, posesses a burning ambition to have the seat, and therefore will fight for it, Blagojevich has succeeded in chumping the party in the midst of its tissue rejection of him. His nomination of Burris is, whether the Dems like it or not, probably legal, and if Burris fights for the seat all the way up to the Supreme Court, his affirmation would be a giant spit wad in the fact of Harry Reid, whom the right (and some black folk who are not on the right,) could then portray as the Bull Connor of our time. I can just see in-coming RNC Chairman Ken "Shady Election" Blackwell, his candidacy having been energized by the Democrats' blundering, wailing before black America, begging them to come home from the party of Robert Byrd. Of course, few black folk will buy it, but it will be one hell of a spectacle.

The fundamental problem is, of course, bigger than the Democrats. The fact that so much wrangling is taking place is testimony to the fact that despite the Democrats' superior electoral diversity, the Senate remains virtually an all white institution. The fight recalls the upheaval over filling the "Thurgood Marshall seat" on the Supreme Court. As flawed a character as Clarence Thomas was (and is, I mean, referring the "where was Obama born" lawsuit to his colleagues was a new low, even for him...) the vast majority of black America supported his nomination (and viciously rejected Anita Hill. Oops...) and I'll take a wild guess that most black folk will react rather negatvely to pics of Burris being frog marched out of the Senate. Just guessing. This despite the fact that Blago has earned no cool points in black America with the nomination. For most, this won't be about him.

The Republican Party is officially Out of Gas, consigned to three-fifths of the former Confederate States of America, and demographically moribund. But thanks to my party, and its crackerjack Senate leadership, they're being handed the race card.

Thanks for nothing, Harry.

As the niche controversy over President-Elect Barack Obama's choice of megachurch pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his swearing in continues to fester, it strikes me that we may have another Elian Gonzales-style saga in the making.

Elian, you may recall, was the adorable 6-year-old boy who washed ashore in Miami during the Thanksgiving of 1999, after losing his mother in a deadly attempt to "float to freedom" from Cuba. Elian quickly became the center of an international custody battle between his father, who wanted to return him to the island nation, and his Miami relatives -- people he had never met before finding himself in their care -- who wanted him to remain in the United States, with them. In the course of several months, Miami's Cuban-American community erupted, surrounding the Miami relatives' house with protests and human chains, their leaders daring the Clinton Justice Department to come and get him, making a spectacle of the bewildered little boy as he played with new toys and politician-issued puppies in full view of the crowds and cameras, causing a weary nation to scratch its collective head and ask, who are these people, and why won't they just let the boy go home?

Of course, at the heart of the Elian drama were real and deeply felt issues of communism versus freedom, the wrenching pain many Cuban-Americans continue to feel regarding their homeland, and international politics that most Americans find either too compliated, or too tedious, to contemplate. But those issues were subsumed by the high drama, and a seeming obsessiveness among a single, niche constituent group that most other Americans simply could not relate to. Eventually, Elian went home. But the Cuban-American community had lost more than the boy. In fighting so loudly and so lavishly for him to remain, they lost credibility with the wider public.

The gay and lesbian community is facing its Elian moment. By screaming so loudly about Warren's inclusion in the inauguration, and making gay marriage a kind of litmus test for true progressiveness and humanity, they have embraced a fight that only a small sliver of the population can relate to, and put their credibility on the line by painting Barack Obama as an enemy, at a time when most Americans consider him their only hope. The "Elianization" of the gay marriage issue is made worse by the fact that some of the arguments being made against Warren simply don't hold up. Examples:

Rick Warren is a fringe preacher not fit to occupy a place of such high honor on January 20th. Really? Warren's breakthough book, "The Purpose Driven Life," which TIME Magazine in 2005 called the best-selling paperback in history, has sold something like 56 million copies since its release in 2002. That's just 10 million fewer readers than Barack Obama had voters, and roughly 2 million fewer people than voted for John McCain. Far from a fringe player, Warren might be the most widely known and best liked religious figures since Billy Graham. His 22,000 member church boasts a global network of 44,000 other churches, united in advancing an agenda focused not on opposing gay rights, but rather on fighting global poverty, AIDS and climate change. Warren may be a lot of things, but "fringe" is not one of them.

Warren's views on gays are out of the mainstream. Perhaps Rachel Maddow, the inimitable Barney Frank and those at the left-most end of the poltiical spectrum wish it were so, but it is not (actually, Frank recognized as much when he criticized San Franciso Mayor Gavin Newsome for pushing the envelope on gay marriage in 2004.) Warren does not support the idea of gay marriage. Neither do a majority of Americans. Neither, by the way, does Barack Obama. Or Hillary Clinton. Or Joe Biden. Or any Democrat who ran for president this year with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. But most Americans do support equal access to such things as healthcare benefits through civil unions or domestic partnerships, a view with which Warren, despite the hype over his "incest" comments, concurs, as he stated during his recent, but rarely fully quoted, interivew with Beliefnet:

Q: Which do you think is a greater threat to the American family - divorce or gay marriage? A: [laughs] That's a no brainer. Divorce. There's no doubt about it.

Q: So why do we hear so much more - especially from religious conservatives - about gay marriage than about divorce?

A: Oh we always love to talk about other sins more than ours. Why do we hear more about drug use than about being overweight? [Note: Warren is quite overweight.]

Q: Just to clarify, do you support civil unions or domestic partnerships?

A: I don't know if I'd use the term there but I support full equal rights for everybody in America. I don't believe we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles so I fully support equal rights.

Q: What about partnership benefits in terms of insurance or hospital visitation?

A: You know, not a problem with me.

(Hat tip to Bob Ostertag.) By painting Warren's views as out of touch with those of most, or worse, of the "good" Americans, the gay movement risks marginalizing itself, not Warren, since most people agree with him. In fact, it would be difficult to find a mainline preacher in this country who didn't concur with his reading of the Bible's stance toward homosexuality or marriage, but Warren is unique among evangelical leaders in being openly supportive of equality via civil unions. Moreover, had Obama reached for a "fringier" minister, one who openly supported gay marriage, to give his invocation, he would have touched off yet another round of the tiresome culture war, and given himself needless hurtles to getting crucial things done. In fact, there are only two reasons Obama has NOT been attacked for having a preacher who supports gay marriage on the dais on January 20. One is that Rev. Joe Lowry is no ordinary preacher -- he is a dean of the Civil Rights Movement, and is expected to speak from the perspective of Dr. Martin Luther King. The other is that the hew and cry over Rich Warren has sucked up all the oxygen.

And then there is the final meme, which might be the most marginalizing of all:

Barack Obama has betrayed his base. Barack Obama was elected by 66,882,230 Americans, a figure that includes a majority of the roughly 6 million Americans who are either gay, lesbian, transgendered or bisexual. But it also includes strong majorities of the much larger cohorts of African-Amerians, Latinos, Catholics, women, and young voters, some of whom support gay marriage, most of whom do not. Obama's "base" this year included 9 percent of registered Republicans, and 20 percent of self-described conservatives. Anyone want to place a bet on whether they feel betrayed by Warren's inclusion? As Obama has said repeatedly, his base is the American people. Attempting to pigeon hole him into a base that consists entirely of those on the left, is suspiciously like the right's expectation (which unfortunately was met) that George W. Bush would govern only on behalf of evangelical Christians, wealthy individuals and multinational corporations.

It seems to me that many on the left actually bought, lock, stock and barrel, into the cartoon caricature of Barack Obama peddled by the likes of Fox News and right wing talk radio  throughout the campaign, when he was painted as some wild-eyed leftie. Well surprise! He is not, nor has he ever been. The left will be very happy with the Obama agenda, which, since its aim is to save this country from the three-fold blight of economic ruin, needless war and a loss of global credibility, should make the center and the right happy, too.

The reality is that Barack Obama is coming into office with a tremendous weight on his shoulders, and gay marriage simply cannot be at the top of his agenda (the aforementioned economy and wars come first.) And he has decided to govern as he ran: as a man determined to bring Americans together, exclude no one from the conversation, and to declare no group to be "untouchable" -- not even evangelical Christians, of whom he, you wil recall, is one.

Obama is being true to that promise by inviting Warren, and the millions of people he reaches, to be a part of the inaugural. By bringing them into the tent, he is not saying that he subscribes to all of the Christian right's beliefs. But he is signaling that there is room for believers in the tent. Does the LGBT community really want to be the ones standing at the door saying they may not come in? If they do, they will find that it's a lot more crowded outside.

http://blog.reidreport.com

In tonight's debate, Sarah Palin delivered 90 minutes of word salad. She was like a "talking points shooter" you'd purchase on one of those cable infomercials, growing wide eyed and automatic while churning out whatever was locked in her memory banks regardless of whether the verbal lettuce and cucumbers flying out had any relationship to the question being asked. The theme of the night could have been, "and now, for something completely different." Shouldn't you wait for the moderator to ask you about energy before you start spouting off about it?

In 90 minutes, I'm honestly not sure the woman directly answered a single question. Gwen Ifill didn't even need to be there! Asked about A, she answered about tomatoes. Asked about B, she declared that she wasn't going to answer the question at all. She was folksy to the point of being a Clampett. But would you elect Ellie Mae president?

Clearly, Gov. Palin was coached to the hilt, crammed with information (some of it off key, like General "McClellan", the non-existent military general in charge of Iraq, or the dangerous announcement that a McCain Palin administration would be moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem) to help her get through the evening. But she spit out those memorized talking points like she was anxious to pump them out of her brain before they dissolved. How many times did she say "Ahmadinejad," exactly? Joe Biden, several times, had to keep from visibly laughing out loud!

This is the woman who wants to not only be a cancer recurrence away from the presidency, but who also would like to expand the powers of the vice presidency beyond with Dick Cheney has done??? What's she going to use her newfangled powers for? To blather the Congress into submission on drilling?

Jeez...

A bit of free advice to Joe Biden in his debate tomorrow with Sarah:


1. Pretend she isn't stupid -- The available video suggests Gov. Palin is actually a pretty good debater, and a master at diffusing specifics with shiny, pleasant sounding generalities. Besides, you get no points for treating her like an idiot, no matter how dumb she might sound. So no matter how absurdly general her answers, treat them seriously, and treat her like she's a serious politician, and an equal. Refer to her as "Governor," not "Sarah," and try not to make faces when she's talking that translate on television as "oh my god, what a moron!" See Katie Couric's therapist-like interview faces for reference.


2. Don't be snide -- Governor Palin isn't good at putting together complex thoughts, and she isn't in possession of a lot of words, but she does do one thing well: the snide laugh line. She'll probably have one or two zingers rehearsed for Thursday night, and when she drops them, be prepared with a snappy, but jovial, comeback. Let her come off as the nasty one.


3. Don't be a smarty-pants -- Unfortunately, Americans don't seem to like the smartest kid in the room. Even when the country is going down in flames, most prefer someone they like, to someone who seems to know more. Keep your answers short and simple, and not larded up with "I've been theres" and "I know that leaders" -- just ask John McCain. It doesn't work.


4. Don't look at her legs -- One of Palin's key strategies could be taglined, "pretty always wins." Since she's a "conservative" brand of "feminist," she's not above using her looks to her advantage. That's why she wore her hair down in the Fox News interview -- she knows that the geezers who watch that station like a little cake on their plate. And she wears skirts that highlight her lower limbs. So whatever you do, don't look down (if the debate is behind podiums, apply the same advice to her cleavage area.)


5. Don't go easy on her -- A tie goes to Ms. Palin, who will get tremendous credit from both the punditocracy and the public if she literally doesn't drool or fall on the floor. So hit the issues hard, without making it about her. Your target during the debate should be John McCain, and Palin figures in only to the extent that you can tie her beliefs and policies to his, and to the extent that her shortcomings point out HIS irresponsibility in putting her on the ticket. Let the moderator point out her dubious record and odd past performances. One exception: do use the phrase "bridge to nowhere" sometime during the 90 minutes, and feel free to point out Alaska's penchant for earmarks and pork. Those issues are relevant because they expose McCain's hypocrisy.


2. Don't count on her to stumble -- Gov. Palin will be so completely rehearsed and robotically programmed by the Rovites, she almost can't screw this thing up. Besides, to repeat, a tie goes to her, and if she gets through the 90 minutes without spitting up, crying or forgetting who the current president of the United States is, most of the media chattering class will declare her the winner, just for beating expectations.


Make no mistake: Biden (who I believe won a couple of those debates during the primary, though he didn't get credit for it,) can't just turn in a so-so performance and walk away unscathed. He has to actually WIN this debate, by being more knowledgeable than (which is a foregone conclusion) but also just as charming, as Sarah Palin. Otherwise he'll be the one being ridiculed on SNL this weekend, for losing to a dumb girl.

Every so often, a member of the "conservative movement" offers us a clarifying moment, that illustrates the fundamental differences between the values and ideas of the two major political parties. (Phil Gramm declaring Americans "whiners" for not appreciating how well the economy is doing ... for rich people like him; John "seven homes" McCain declaring that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong," while Rome is literally burning all around him, being just two examples.) This morning on "Morning Joe," CNBC host, GOP booster, laissez-faire economics guru and John McCain sympatico Larry Kudlow, offered up such a moment.


Asked to explain the current crisis on Wall Street and Main Street, Kudlow declared that it's not the fault of the investment banks and hedge fund guys who packaged, bought and sold subprime mortgages for sport and profit, driving up demand for bad loans and incentivizing shady lending, or even the banks themselves, and their coterie of crooked appraisers and greedy mortgage brokers. It wasn't the Republican Congresses who systematically stripped the system of regualtions, thanks in large part to John McCain's buddy Phil Gramm. It wasn't the speculators or the flippers buying second, third, and even fourth homes and condos, or the price-gouging builders raising prices $30,000 a month here in Florida, or the greedy developers and brokers pushing home ownership with "no money down" as the latest fashion trend, or the combined speculative market that juiced up of home values beyond all reason. Nope. Those people are well off, and therefore they're better than you.

No, my friends, it turns out our current economic crisis, led by the massive mortgage meltdown, is the fault of liberals, who literally forced banks to lend mortgage money to poor people so they could assuage their "liberal guilt," and of course, it's also the fault of those icky, horrible poor people themselves. How dare they want to live like the rest of us! Why, they're POOR! ... and that's supposed to mean something in America!

Never mind that percentage-wise, home ownership among the poor is literally negligible, and that a huge part of the housing crisis is the LACK of affordable homes for people with little income, or that the majority of these 3-bedroom, $500,000 homes that are really worth $250,000 are being sold not to the poor, but to the middle class, often at teaser rates that mean their mortgage payments can literally can double after a few years.

Forget all that, and listen to Larry. He knows that it really was those bloody awful poor people, and the whimpering liberals who pamper them, at the expense of the downtrodden, helpless banks.


After a few minutes of this, Joe Scarborough was literally dumbstruck.

"Okay, so you're saying it's the poor people's fault," he deadpanned. Kudlow sputtered, but he had already said too much.

Going into the break, Scarborough sneered that coming up in the next segment, they'd explain how poor people were behind the JFK assassination, too.

Damned poor people. They screw up everything...

A bit of shameless Youtube promotion. Take a break from the campaign madness with a brief stroll through John McCain's many wonderful inventions...

...for that "lipstick on a pig" remark, about which the Murdoch press is now blatantly lying, I quit. I will call the campaign and demand my donation money back, stop blogging about the campaign, stop paying attention to the election, and the next Obama volunteer I see, I will punch them in the face. Okay, maybe not with the punching...
Team Obama should ignore the high school newspaper press corps -- you know what? That's unfair to high school newspapers -- they should ignore the preening, lazy, headline-happy press corps, and have the candidate, not a surrogate, not a spokesman, but Barack himself, walk out to a group of reporters and their microphones, and say something like this:

    "Enough. I'm not going to be lectured on sexism by a man who refused to support a bill that would guarantee equal pay for women.

    I'm not going to be lectured on language by a man who jokes about a woman getting raped, who ridiculed Hillary Clinton's then-teenage daughter for her looks, and whose temperament is questioned, even by members of his own party.

    And I'm not going to get down into the mud with a once honorable man, who is now running the most dishonorable campaign since I've been involved in politics. 

    The American people want to hear about issues, not about sleaze. And yet, John McCain, who lately you never see by himself, interestingly enough, is running an ad, right now, that accuses me, a father of two young girls, of wanting sex ed taught to kindegartners. Lies. Damned lies. And John McCain knows they're lies. He's adopted the same Karl Rove smear tactics, using the same people, including Karl Rove himself, that smeared him in 2000. And he's hiding behind his running mate to play the gender card, when throughout his quarter century in Washington, he can't name one thing -- not one thing -- that he's done to demonstrate that he cares about women in this country. 

    If John McCain wants to debate me about sexism, he should let Sarah Palin do her job as his vice presidential nominee, which I'm quite sure she's capable of doing, unhitch himself from her celebrity status, which is the only thing carrying him in this campaign now, and come talk to me one on one. Until then, Maybe John should look up 'honor' in one of his books. He might need a refresher course."

And then he should turn around, and walk the hell off camera.
What Obama needs right now, to cut through the noise and foolishness of this campaign, is a moment of genuine anger, emotion, and outrage. He's long overdue. He needs to, as they say in the neighborhood, "get gully" with McCain. Call the geezer on the carpet, man to man. That would shore him up with men, whom he's already doing better with, according to the new NBC/WSJ poll,  thanks to the McCain camp's overplaying the "I am woman, hear me roar" card. And it would help him with women, myself included, who want to see that the professor can knuckle up.
Call that press conference, Barack. Do it today. By yourself, with no array of women surrogates standing behind you. Just you. If John McCain respods by going bat crap crazy, you win. Hit him on temperament. If his press flaks issue yet another "noun, verb and POW" statement knocking you, have your press team issue one that says "there you go again." If he says, "I'll tell you what I've done for women, I named Sarah Palin as my vice president!" Your female surrogates hit the talk circuit and ask, "is John McCain saying he only picked Sarah Palin because she's a woman, and not because of her qualifications to be president?" 
You'll lead every newscast, and force the press corps to ask McCain to respond to your charges against him, one day before he has to stand next to you at that 9/11 ceremony. Oh yeah, his convention exploited that tragedy, too.

...for that "lipstick on a pig" remark, about which the Murdoch press is now blatantly lying, I quit. I will call the campaign and demand my donation money back, stop blogging about the campaign, stop paying attention to the election, and the next Obama volunteer I see, I will punch them in the face. Okay, maybe not with the punching...

Team Obama should ignore the high school newspaper press corps -- you know what? That's unfair to high school newspapers -- they should ignore the preening, lazy, headline-happy press corps, and have the candidate, not a surrogate, not a spokesman, but Barack himself, walk out to a group of reporters and their microphones, and say something like this:

"Enough. I'm not going to be lectured on sexism by a man who refused to support a bill that would guarantee equal pay for women.

I'm not going to be lectured on language by a man who has joked about rape, ridiculed Hillary Clinton's then-teenage daughter for her looks, and whose temperament is questioned by members of his own party.

And I'm not going to get down into the mud with a once honorable man, who is now running the most dishonorable campaign since I've been involved in politics.

John McCain, who lately you never see by himself, is running an ad right now, that accuses me, a father of two young girls, of wanting sex ed taught to kindegartners. Lies. Damned lies. And he knows they're lies. He's adopted the same Karl Rove smear tactics, using the same people, including Karl Rove himself, that were used against him in 2000. And he's hiding behind his running mate to play the gender card, when throughout his quarter century in Washington, he can't name one thing -- not one thing -- that he's done to demonstrate that he cares about women in this country.

If John McCain wants to debate me about sexism, he should let Sarah Palin do her job as his vice presidential nominee, which I'm quite sure she's capable of doing, unhitch himself from her celebrity status, which is the only thing carrying him in this campaign now, and come talk to me one on one. Until then, Maybe John should look up 'honor' in one of his books. He might need a refresher course."

And then he should turn around, and walk the hell off camera.

What Obama needs right now, to cut through the noise and foolishness of this campaign, is a moment of genuine anger, emotion, and outrage. He's long overdue. He needs to, as they say in the neighborhood, "get gully" with McCain. Call the geezer on the carpet, man to man. That would shore him up with men, whom he's already doing better with, according to the new NBC/WSJ poll,  thanks to the McCain camp's overplaying the "I am woman, hear me roar" card. And it would help him with women, myself included, who want to see that the professor can knuckle up.

Call that press conference, Barack. Do it today. By yourself, with no array of women surrogates standing behind you. Just you. If John McCain respods by going bat crap crazy, you win. Hit him on temperament. If his press flaks issue yet another "noun, verb and POW" statement knocking you, have your press team issue one that says "there you go again." And then sit back and enjoy the press corps asking McCain to respond, the day before he has to stand next to you at that 9/11 ceremony. Oh yeah, his convention exploited that tragedy, too.

On second thought, it may not be an overabundance of "niceness" or weakness, as some frustrated observers (myself included) have assumed as this wearying general election drags on, that's causing what must be called a drag on the Obama campaign. It may be overconfidence, and a certain dismissiveness about the continuing power of the racial dynamic in America. Listen to what Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told members of John McCain's traveling circus yesterday:

“There’s a lot of hyperventilating about national polls,” Plouffe said, which wasn’t a surprise since both a CBS News poll and the Gallup daily tracking poll showed McCain taking the lead nationally in the presidential race. “When you look at battleground states, we feel very good about where we are.”

Plouffe argued that McCain has “jettisoned the idea” that this election is about experience with selection of first term governor Sarah Palin on the ticket. McCain is now trying to make the election about change, Plouffe said, and “that’s a debate we’re happy to have.”

So why aren't you having it, man? The Obama campaign hasn't taken the race to McCain YET, and we're 56 days from D-day. Worse, they've allowed the McCain campaign to remain on offense, and to dictate the daily news message, even before the Palin pick. Now let's hear why Plouffe is so confident. Two words: ground game:

Plouffe said the election would boil down to which campaign could appeal to undecided voters in battleground states and who could bring out the highest turnout numbers. “We have a huge ability to grow turnout,” he said. “We have a more credible path to 270 [electoral votes, the number it takes to win] than McCain does.”

Of course, he's right that Team Obama has a superior ground operation. The one here in South Florida is something to see, even if it is run by the eternally flat and out-gunned Florida Democratic Party. But what Plouffe is discounting, apparently, is the Republican's trump card, which before the Palin selection, wasn't McCain's to play: evangelicals. They were tepid about McCain until Palin was chosen, but now, they're electrified by the chance to put a woman who speaks in tongues and doesn't believe kids should be taught evolution in school, one heart attack away from power (watch for the evangelicals to begin "believing on God" for a McCain heart attack if he gets elected...) That means that just as in 2000, the GOP will get their churchmembers out on election day. Believe that. (And yes, Focus on the Family does operate here in Florida, where we've also got a marriage amendment on the ballot...)

Now, look at what Plouffe said about the impact of race on the cmapaign:

Both campaigns have attempted to take race out of the campaign, and Plouffe rejected the notion of a “Bradley effect” – voters telling pollsters they would vote for a black candidate, but changing their mind in the voting booth. “Swing voters that are up for grabs are not going to factor race into the equation,” he said.

Sorry, but this sounds exactly like the stuff Plouffe said when he addressed supporters at a private event here in Miami early in the primary, when it looked as if Obama wouldn't be able to put Hillary Clinton's campaign away. Of course, at that time, Plouffe's confidence was justified. But as aggressive and skilled at political marketing as they are, the Clintons have nothing on the ruthlessness of the Karl Rove street gang masquerading as the Republican Party. For Plouffe to continue to be as nonchalant about the very real shifting dynamics in this race is, to say the least, troubling. White women are now very much in play for McCain. Evangelical voters are a lock. And the idea that "both campaigns" have pushed aside race is laughable. Hell, the entire subtext of the McCain campaign is, "look at this flower of white, Christian womanhood. Wouldn't you rather have her, and her red-blooded American family, in the White House, instead of Militant Michelle and Mr. 'community organizer,' foreign, elite, undercover Muslim 'Obama'?"

With Palin on the ticket, rural and even suburban white voters, like the ones I grew up around in Colorado, or who I've encountered in Wyoming, Utah (yeah, I'm black, but I've been there), Texas and Florida, now have a cover story for their race-based vote: "we're makin' history by putting a woman in, see?" Many will fall right through that trap door, and never have to admit they rejected Obama because of race. Obama and his team can discount race all they want to.  It's there, baby. In a big way. And if he's counting on perennially underperforming black and young voters to neutralize the race factor and bring it home for him, he's in bigger trouble than he knows. (Earth to Obama: some Hispanic voters are gonna deep six you because of race, too...)

Bottom line: as much as I like and respect the Obama team members I know here in Florida, and as hard as I'm rooting for them, Obama's team is way too confident, not nearly aggressive enough, and not even close to consolidating a strong, coherent marketing message.

Back when I first graduated college and was working as a beverage industry analyst in the early 90s, I learned the following lesson about the cola wars: Coke is the de facto cola, all over the world, and the market share leader, because when Pepsi tries to market itself as the de facto cola, the Coca-Cola Company squashes them like a bug. They are aggressive at retail, pushing stores to feature Coke, not Pepsi, displays, they are aggressive advertisers, and ruthless price-cutters who win by putting their products at arms length, no matter where you are, what time of day it is, or what you're thirstry for. Coke achieved what you might call "full spectrum dominance" in the soft drink market by crowding out any possibility of message theft, and by co-opting whatever good messaging Pepsi comes up with. This despite the fact that Coke usually loses to Pepsi (and RC Cola and Sam's Club Soda) in taste tests. Go figure. The Republicans are looking like Coca-Cola in this campaign. Better marketers, more message discipline, more aggressiveness, product? Who said anything about the product?

I hate to say it, but this is looking, sounding, and feeling more and more like 2004 every day, and the Obama candidacy more and more like John Kerry's. I watched that mess unfold from my job working for a national 527 here in Florida, and I'm getting the same sinking feeling now that I had then. That's not what Democrats want to hear right now, but it's real (and the proof, unfortunately, is in the fundraising...)

BTW: the Obama camp appears to be getting the message that things ain't going so well. They're now looking to the 527 cavalry to ride to the rescue...

John McCain risks losing that unruly sounding crowd with his phony happy-talk toward Obama. Memo to McCain: the dishonorable way you and your team have conducted this campaign, and the sheer ugliness of the entire presentation yesterday, has ensured that should this country be so dumb as to elect you and Cruella de Earmarks, you won't have to bother asking for the support of Democrats. You'll have to be content to run things with your new evangelical friends and the welfare states they come from.

Remember when Prince Charles married Diana Spencer in hopes of sprucing up his image, and all he got was a place in Diana's shadow? I wonder if John McCain is as pissed as Charles was... and with a big NFL game on tonight, who thinks McCain will getting ratings anywhere near as good as these:

Palin pulled in 37.2 million viewers across broadcast and cable networks, according to Nielsen Media Research.

That's 55% higher than Day 3 of the DNC, when her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, and President Clinton took the stage (24 million).

It's also up a sharp 99% from the Republican convention's third day in 2004 (18.7 million) and easily bests the numbers viewers attracted by George W. Bush when he accepted the nomination (27.6 million). In fact, it came close to upsetting Obama's historic address last Thursday -- the most-watched convention speech in history (38.4 million viewers).

How did the Mac man become the sidekick on his own ticket??? First Barack out-shines him, and now this...