House of Eratosthenes

1. I’m glad she brought up the nasty things Biden said about Obama before he was considered as part of the ticket. I wonder why she just whacked that nail once and then left it alone. Doesn’t seem to me Sen. Biden holds any cards there. He looks, on this topic, like exactly what he is: A lifetime beltway fixture who befriends whoever and whatever is good for him at any given moment.

2. The McCain campaign has been listening to us, I think. Gov. Palin was liberated from her talking points. She wasn’t excellent, but she was much better than people thought she would have been.

3. I was right when I said this was a rehash of the Galloway/Hitchens debate. Biden possesses a lot of momentum Palin doesn’t have. She stutters, she stammers, she barely manages to eek a few syllables out, without ever quite hitting her stride. But — what she says, makes a lot more sense. Yin and Yang. People who looked for a reason to support Obama/Biden, found it, and people who looked for a reason to support Palin/McCain, found that. I mean…wait…which one comes first, again?

4. She should’ve used the word “populist.” This is the true weakness of Obama/Biden. The ticket seems to be bound by a consistent philosophical underpinning that if something has a certain effect on nine out of ten of us, then it might as well have that same effect on us all. This talking point about the tax cut for 95% of us, for example. It’s a dinosaur. It’s lumbered on long past the asteroid already. It isn’t even true.

5. Assuming science is all about voting — which it isn’t — when did we lose this vote on cutting carbon emissions? Obama/Biden is for it, McCain/Palin is for it. Doesn’t Sarah Palin understand how this undercuts all her other pro-capitalism positions?

Palin Underworld 6. I loved it when she made that comment about being for things before you’re against ’em, and how hard it is for her to understand how things work in the beltway. That’s a true Mister Smith Goes To Washington moment right there. If it was some big ol’ Paul Bunyan lookin’ guy in a plaid shirt with a big blue ox and a giant axe in his hand saying that, he’d get voted in in a landslide. Well, that’s exactly what Sarah Palin is. In a skirt.

7. I have to criticize Gov. Palin here. I don’t think she understands how it sounds when she mispronounces “nuclear.” She’d fix that, toot-sweet, if she did.

8. I don’t think Sen. Biden understands how it sounds when he repeatedly uses the name “Bush.” He’d stop.

9. Four years ago John Kerry lost the election by asking us to believe in a dichotomy. He said, I’m brilliant so I can think in nuanced terms, unlike that dolt George Bush who sees the whole world in black-and-white. But I have a serious case of confirmation-bias because George Bush is my perfect reverse-barometer about what to do. If he did something — it must be wrong. Biden left himself wide open by subscribing to this same confirmation-bias: If George Bush did something, it must have been the wrong thing to do. Palin should have struck right there. Stick a javelin right where the armor leaves that gaping hole, and shove it in to the hilt. It would have been a fatal blow to the Obama/Biden campaign, I think. Most Americans understand: If you strive to oppose something at every turn, on some level, you are trying to emulate it. Obama/Biden is failing to deliver something, here, in the very moment it is promising it.

10. Palin was at her best when she quoted Reagan. Americans are glorious and wonderful and deserve everything good that any other country deserves. Credit for being decent, when we are — and we are, quite often — the right and privilege to defend ourselves, to conduct ourselves as a civilized nation as we see fit, and to emit the hell out of everything with our pollution. Okay, that last one I’m just kind of pulling out of my butt. But the point is…fer God’s sake quit apologizing for existing! If you sympathize with that, your choice on Nov. 4 is quite clear, and the An Idea Bomb guys don’t have a lot to do with it.

Update: Ah, I had this one rattling around in my cranium and it leaked out my ears before I hit the “Publish” button. Dang it. It’s probably the most important one out of everything.

11. Comes under the heading of “potentially fatal blows to the Obama/Biden campaign” — another opportunity not taken. It happened when Biden was yelling over and over again, emphatically, and I think (?) pounding his hand on the podium “Obama and I will end this war, we will end it, we will end it.”

His jugular was exposed in that moment. Gov. Palin could have drawn a razor-sharp blade right across it, simply by taking advantage of a dramatic pause and then saying, “You and Barack Obama wouldn’t be able to decide that, Senator. Not unilaterally.”

It’s a critical point to make. That’s really what the election, insofar as foreign affairs go, is all about. When two forces are at war, does one side get to decide unilaterally that the fighting is going to end even though the other side doesn’t have its mind made up to behave-n-play-nice? This year, our liberal democrats insist that the answer is yes. One side can say “Okeedoke! It’s time for some peace!” and all the fighting will come to a stop.

Palin seems insistent on repeating talking points over and over again that help substantiate John McCain is the only decent choice for our nation’s President next year. In this respect, it’s really true. Our democrats think you can end a war just by wishing for it to end. We can’t afford for them to run anything. Not a flower cart, not a veterinary hospital, not a football team, and most certainly, not the country.

Update: Michelle Malkin liveblogged. Enjoy.

Update: Cassy too. And Melissa. And Sister Toldjah. Andrew Sullivan has his contribution, here. Wonkette. Althouse. Stop The ACLU.

Yes, I’m mixing you all up, in no particular order. No offense intended.

On point #11, Gov. Palin could have easily added: there’s only one way to end a war whenever you want it to happen, and that’s by surrenderring. Every war carries with it a lesson for future would-be attackers of our fair country. We, the People, want the lesson to always be: Don’t even try to f*** with us. If that lesson is learned early, generations reap the rewards, and the financial cost is then bearable.
- wch | 10/03/2008 @ 07:50
Yeah, the “nucular” thing bugs me, too. Carter did it back in the day and it bugged me then (and I was 12). In her defense, Bush does it as well. One of my pet peeves.

NEW-CLEE-UR

It’s not that hard.

That being said I think she did quite well last night.
- philmon | 10/03/2008 @ 08:46
Yup. Things I (Phil) Know #13

13. You don’t get to decide when a war is over until you decide to lose it.
- philmon | 10/03/2008 @ 08:48
I saw it as very much like a modern-day debate between Aristotle and Gorgias. Gorgias was a sophist who believed that persuasion was an art that was a means to itself. As long as people were persuaded, that meant that you did it right. (Very much like those who say that Hitler was a good leader). Aristotle said that persuasion was only done right when one was persuading others to the truth.

It seems like those who think Biden won were concerned about things like tone and body language (Biden won because other people will be persuaded – Yang stuff, which is kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy), while those who thought that Palin won were more concerned about what was said, rather than how it was said.

So, pretty much like you said it would be, but I thought you might be interested to know in the historical Aristotle/Gorgias angle.
- JohnJ | 10/03/2008 @ 13:40
4. She should’ve used the word “populist.”

While she didn’t use the word specifically, she MOST definitely deployed the concept. The ONE thing I hate most about the McCain campaign is this faux-populism “greed and corruption on Wall Street” meme. No specifics are ever given (may I have an example, please? Where exactly is this “corruption?”) and there are no specific items in a specific plan to fix it… whatever “it” might be. Nope… it’s just a finger-in-the-wind, focus-group-driven, populist platitude waved around to roil up The Great Unwashed. We deserve better than this and I’m severely disappointed.

I’m beginning to think the McCain campaign is one of the most inept presidential campaigns I’ve ever seen (well, except for the Dukakis campaign. And maybe Kerry’s. But one expects ineptitude on that side of the fence.). Their “handling” of Palin has been a frickin’ disaster and their descent into the populism mud is the icing on the cake, to mix a couple of metaphors. Once again: We deserve better and we’re NOT getting it.
- Buck | 10/03/2008 @ 15:16
To piggyback onto what Buck alluded to:

I also hate the misuse of the phrase “greed and corruption on Wall Street.” Some folks think that’s where all of the corruption originates.

Wasn’t the mortgage crisis because of greed and corruption on Main Street? You know, your friends and neighbors who borrowed money to buy a house they couldn’t afford. Every local mortgage writer who knew the person across from them had no-docs and no money; every person who lied when they signed on the dotted line that they would pay the mortgage back – that greed and corruption.

The reason Wall Street gets such a bad rap is because all of its miscreants are national in figure, and their crimes are so large and can damage so many. The few bad apples are the portrayal to the many.

I’m not sticking up for the corrupt ones, just trying to remind everyone that Wall Street made this country great, too. It wasn’t just the ones on Main Street.
- wch | 10/03/2008 @ 17:20
Thanks, wch… we’re on the same page. New York used to be the “financial capital of the world,” and for good reason. Our current gub’mint seems hell-bent to drive business off-shore… to London and other places that are perceived to be more “business friendly.” About which: WTF? I repeat: WTF?? This attitude and approach is… to put it mildly… detrimental to our best interests. Enough of this “Wall Street” bashing. McCain, as a Republican, damned sure ought to know better than his campaign indicates.
- Buck | 10/03/2008 @ 20:09

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Thursday, October 2nd, 2008