Wombosi!!!

So, I haven't actually left yet...and, in the meantime, Matt Damon sat down for an interview absolutely excoriating Sarah Palin. For those who know me, this interview clearly holds particular appeal.

My favorite line: "I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs lived here four-thousand years ago. That's an important -- I want to know that, I really do....because she's gonna have the nuclear codes."

Seems like a fair question, Mr. Bourne.

Checking Out for a Bit

So, my wife and I are leaving for a much-anticipated vacation tomorrow...far from the buzz of Blackberries and, more importantly, far from the good people at Politico, TalkingPointsMemo, The Atlantic, et al., who have joined together to get me unbelievably agitated every morning the past three-plus months.

And it couldn't have come at a better time. This "lipstick on a pig" story is such complete and utter bullshit, yet it's going to dominate the campaign for two or three days and then enter the campaign shorthand as "Obama called Palin a pig." The McCain knows that getting called on lies has only a short-term drawback...getting the lies out there are re-told at family BBQs and church gatherings is the most important part.

That said, it makes their job significantly easier when the traditional press (particularly the wire services) plays along so willingly. From the AP's dreadful Nedra Pickler today:

""You can put lipstick on a pig," he said to an outbreak of laughter, shouts and raucous applause from his audience, clearly drawing a connection to Palin's joke even if it's not what Obama meant. (emphasis mine)

Hmmm...clearly drawing a connection even if that's not what he meant. What the fuck does that mean????? Seriously. God damn seriously.

Add to that NYT's Adam Nagourney's stunning bit of mind-reading (as pointed out by Josh Marshall)

“That’s not change. That’s just calling the same thing something different. You can put lipstick on a pig – it’s still a pig.”

At that point, Mr. Obama paused for just a moment, no doubt imagining the whoops that were going up at the McCain headquarters where they were no doubt monitoring the speech, and aware of the extent to which both campaigns are seeking to seize on anything even approaching a slip of the tongue.

So he added: “You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

Wow. Why is Nagourney wasting his time on the campaign trail when he could make tons of cash on the late-night infomercial circuit?

Of course, he follows that bit of mind-reading with this sentence:

For the record, Mr. Obama did not even mention Ms. Palin until a few minutes later in his speech. Still, within 45 minutes, Mr. McCain’s campaign – well aware of the competition for the women’s vote and how this might be interpreted among women voters – leapt onto the remark.

So, clearly Obama wasn't actually making the connection to Palin. Yet, since McCain said he did and Drudge front-paged it, the story writes itself.

I hate this shit. Really I do.

So, I'm checking out for a couple weeks. I'll be sipping cappuccino and eating prosciutto outside of this place.


And I will do my very best not to think of this goddamn election for a little while. My heart, I think, will thank me.

Stumbling...

I have mentioned before how much I love the Intertron...and how you can stumble across some of the most interesting perspective in the oddest places.

Well, a music site I often visit, This Recording, is often full of weird and enthralling long posts about life. Today, for instance, they spent more than 1,000 words listing what strong lesbians they would try to date if they had a lesbian time machine. I don't know how it was so endearing, but it was.

That said, editor Alex Carnevale also recently featured what he describes as "The Ten Best Political Speeches Ever." It's a varied and fascinating crew, not limited to the usual suspects (not a Kennedy in the bunch, you'll notice).

Take the time to check out the list yourself (where you can even download the speeches), but in the meantime, here's the rundown:

10. Barbara Jordan’s Address to the 1976 Democratic National Convention
9. Ronald Reagan after the Challenger exploded
8. Barack Obama’s Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention
7. Winston Churchill, We shall fight them on the beaches
6. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
5. Malcolm X, “The Ballot and the Bullet”
4. Mario Cuomo, Address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address
2. Reverend King at the March on Washington
1. Ronald Reagan’s Speech at Point du Hoc

The Legend of Billie Jean?

The ongoing and mercilessly cringe-inducing controversy about the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter is, quite simply, stunning. I cannot believe that these issues have entered into the political sphere...that CNN is really showing the junior-year class picture of a young, pregnant and scared 17-year-old who never asked for any of this. It is a sad day for the political media...and an even darker one for public perceptions of the McCain campaign and of a new VP pick who was seemingly eager to throw her underage daughter under a bus in the name of political expedience. Ugh.

I have very little to say about this particular controversy. It's sad. And grotesque. And just terrible.

But there are some things getting lost that I think need to be lifted above this petty and ugly tabloid fare:

1. The McCain campaign clearly did not do their due diligence on this woman. The pair had met exactly ONCE before last week. I blame very little of this nonsense on Palin...and blame it overwhelmingly on McCain's impetuous, gut-check, Bush-but-more-obsessed-with-his-own-maverickosity nature.

2. Palin made her name in Alaska politics as the head of a 527 for Sen. Ted Stevens, the indicted king of pork-barrel politics who was the father of the Bridge to Nowhere.

3. Palin is set to be deposed next week in the investigation into whether she used her political power to try to get her brother-in-law fired from his state trooper job. It is clear she lied about this case multiple times during the investigation. The deposition will be the first time she has had to answer questions under oath.

4. She was also a member of the Alaska Independence Party, whose primary platform plank is to push for a vote for Alaska to secede from the US.

5. She straight-up lied many, many times about opposing the "Bridge to Nowhere." She ran on it in 2006...and only opposed it after it became emblematic of bullshit cronyism.

And, in the interest of not being too issue-oriented, here is a hilarious video of McCain staring at Sarah Palin's ass many, many times. It is as hilarious and horrifying as you imagine:

The Problems

My friend Geoff left a really perceptive comment laying out what are surely the biggest problems with the Palin pick. Here it is verbatim:

Obviously I have the benefit of a few days of revelations about Palin, and I still could easily be wrong, but I disagree with your assessment of the Palin pick and felt it was rather bizarre from the beginning. I think it's extremely risky, and the possible benefits are relatively small. To wit:

1) I just don't see former Hillary backers flocking to this ticket. At best it's probably a wash. Some women might move to McCain, but probably just as many - if not more - will find the pick offensive to their intelligence (look! she's a woman!) and end any flirtation they may have had with McCain. The McCain people may have bought too much into the media hype with respect to disgruntled Hillary voters.

2) The pick shores up the conservative base and probably will even excite them, but there were almost certainly other, less risky ways to do that. As her extreme conservative stances become more and more well known, I think her cross-over appeal to moderates will be rather limited.

3) Arguably the single most powerful argument against Obama has been "he's not ready." Supposedly McCain's people were ready to junk that anyway, but fucked if I know why because it sure seemed to be working pretty well lately and back in the primaries. It will be tricky for Obama folks to attack Palin as inexperienced because the GOP can still throw that back in Obama's face, but now McCain has lost a main avenue of attack against Obama by nominating someone far less qualified than he for VP. The fact that Palin is unqualified and completely unknown does not magically transform McCain into the "change" candidate - Obama has owned that mantle for far too long for a VP pick to make a difference.

4) Who in the fuck vetted this? An ethics investigation in the Alaska House and a pregnant 17 year old daughter? Even if those blow over, dicey personal matters combined with less experience than Dan Quayle makes this pick a huge risk - and a significant distraction from the GOP message this week.

Like I said I could be wrong but at this point this seems like a real mistake. If he wanted to make a maverick pick, McCain would have been better off with Lieberman, who he at least met on more than one occasion prior to Friday.