Michael Barone in RCP fears a “thugocracy” that will imperil First Amendment rights:

Once upon a time, liberals prided themselves, with considerable reason, as the staunchest defenders of free speech. Union organizers in the 1930s and 1940s made the case that they should have access to employees to speak freely to them, and union leaders like George Meany and Walter Reuther were ardent defenders of the First Amendment.

Today’s liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters. Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that used to pride themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech that they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

It seems from the minimizing of the significant ACORN voter fraud story by the MSM, and the other cover being given by the media to Senator Obama’s radical past, that perhaps Mr. Barone’s fears are not entirely unjustified.

A little problem in Philadelphia (and elsewhere in Pennsylvania too):

Justice Sandra Newman, accompanied by Dauphin County District Attorney Edward Marsico and Pennsylvania Republican State Chairman Robert Gleason, expressed her concerns at a Harrisburg press conference this morning. A thick document replete with photo copies of phony registrations and aerial shots of vacant lots used as “addresses” for “voters” was handed out to journalists…

“Between March 23rd and October 1st, various groups, including ACORN, submitted over 252,595 registrations to the Philadelphia County Election Board” with 57, 435 rejected for faulty information. “Most of these registrations were submitted by ACORN, and rejected due to fake social security numbers, incorrect dates of birth, clearly fraudulent signatures, addresses that do not exist, and duplicate registrations. In one case, a man was registered to vote more than 15 times since the Primary election.”

And another little problem in Nevada:

ACORN had planned a potluck dinner at its Las Vegas office Tuesday night to celebrate the 80,000 newly registered voters its staff had signed up in Clark County as part of its work with low-income communities nationwide. Instead, their office was raided Tuesday morning by agents of the Nevada Secretary of State and Attorney General who alleged in an application for a search warrant that ACORN had hired 59 felons through a work release program as canvassers and submitted nearly 300 apparently fraudulent voter registration cards as part of the drive.

The submitted voter cards included addresses and names that do not exist in Nevada, duplicate registrations, names culled from telephone books and names of Dallas Cowboys players…

The NYT reports on Senator Obama and ACORN, beginning with an assertion by Rick Davis of the McCain campaign:

Mr. Davis said Mr. Obama had worked as Acorn’s lawyer and conducted training events for its leaders. He also noted a payment the Obama campaign made in February to an Acorn affiliate, Citizens Services Inc…Republicans had made much of an $832,598 payment made in February by the Obama campaign to Citizens Services Inc., a consulting firm affiliated with Acorn…

While Mr. Obama did represent Acorn in a lawsuit in 1995, Acorn was on the same side as the Justice Department. The training events involved two hours of work. And the payment to the Acorn affiliate was reported in campaign filings, although they had to be revised because of an error.

Only at the very bottom of the NYT story do we finally get this little nugget:

In 1992, Mr. Obama was personally involved in voter registration efforts when he served as director of Project Vote in Chicago, helping to register 150,000 voters on the South Side…Project Vote and Acorn were not as intertwined at that time as they are today, when a significant part of Project Vote’s revenues flow to Acorn and various of its affiliates as payment for services…Mr. Obama himself linked his 1992 work to Acorn in a meeting with Acorn’s leaders in November. “Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drives in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work,” Mr. Obama said…

Sol Stern in City Journal gave us a little more background on ACORN:

Walk through just about any of the nation’s inner cities, and you’re likely to find an office of ACORN, bustling with young people working 12-hour days to “organize the poor” and bring about “social change.” The largest radical group in the country, ACORN has 120,000 dues-paying members, chapters in 700 poor neighborhoods in 50 cities, and 30 years’ experience. It boasts two radio stations, a housing corporation, a law office…

ACORN’s bedrock assumption remains the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism. “We are the majority, forged from all the minorities,” reads the group’s “People’s Platform”…“We will continue our fight…until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom”…

We’re finally beginning to understand a little bit more about the very interesting profession of “community organizing.” Question: how big a story would this ACORN/Obama business be if it were McCain and a right wing group engaged in all these shenanigans? (HT: Stanley Kurtz)

Roger Simon has reached some conclusions on the media’s collusion with the campaign of Senator Obama that are particularly well stated:

Ever since the first sound bites of the execrable Reverend Wright hit the airwaves, it has been obvious that Barack Obama is a less than candid human being. It was impossible to believe that a man who had spent twenty years in Wright’s pews did not have a pretty good idea of the minister’s vile views. You would have had to have been deaf and dumb not to. And Wright was the inspiration of Obama’s books! Yet when the candidate was confronted by the press about this, he denied knowing about Wright’s excesses and made a speech that was hailed by the media as a monument in race relations equal, some said, to Dr. King.

It was at that precise moment I knew we were living in a media-constructed lunatic asylum. That didn’t take a rocket scientist, I can assure you, only someone with a modicum of common sense. But it only got worse. When Wright predictably “acted out” and let loose with one of his racist screeds of the very type Obama pretended never to have heard, the candidate blithely pushed the minister under the bus with barely a peep from the compliant press.

About that time I learned of his putative relationship with William Ayers, the unrepentant Weatherman. I was assured by the New York Times and others that this was of no consequence, that Ayers was, in Obama’s words, just “some guy in the neighborhood.” Another lie. The more we learn of Obama’s ties to Ayers the more complex and disturbing they become. It is unlikely that we will ever know the extent of them, certainly not before the election. Most of what we do know does not come from the Times or the Washington Post of vaunted Woodward & Bernstein fame, but from Stanley Kurtz of the National Review, who has been following this story of the Ayers-Obama whitewash for months. Under orders or not, the normally voluble Mr. Ayers himself has kept his yap shut.

And now we learn of yet another strange obfuscation or omission. In 1996, Obama was apparently a member of the Chicago “New Party,” a now defunct socialist political party of some stripe or other. There’s nothing wrong with being a socialist. I called myself one for the better part of twenty years. Millions of people have and many still do. But there is something very wrong with hiding who you are or who you were from the electorate — especially if you want to be President of the United States. Yet that seems to be a habit of Mr. Obama’s, with the collusion of the press.

It might not have seemed possible for the press to be more in the tank for the Democratic ticket than they were in 2004, but it would appear to have happened.

Martin Wolf wasn’t all that concerned back in January. He didn’t, for example, favor interest rate cuts as one tool in dealing with the credit issues in the US and EU. FT:

In times of panic, grown-ups keep their nerve. In a financial crisis, central banks must be the grown-ups. This week, however, the board of the US Federal Reserve seemed to panic by implementing an extraordinary 0.75 percentage point cut in its interest rates prior to its next scheduled meeting. The move was apparently in response to a falling (though still more than fully valued) stock market. So should the Bank of England follow suit? The answer is: no.

He seems a tad more concerned now about the current world economic situation and now favors rate cuts and a whole lot more, including very expensive recapitalizations of UK banks. FT:

As John Maynard Keynes is alleged to have said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” I have changed my mind, as the panic has grown. Investors and lenders have moved from trusting anybody to trusting nobody. The fear driving today’s breakdown in financial markets is as exaggerated as the greed that drove the opposite behaviour a little while ago. But unjustified panic also causes devastation. It must be halted, not next week, but right now.

The time for a higgledy-piggledy, institution-by-institution and country-by-country approach is over. It took me a while – arguably, too long – to realise the full dangers. Maybe it was errors at the US Treasury, particularly the decision to let Lehman fail, that triggered today’s panic. So what should be done? In a word, “everything”. The affected economies account for more than half of global output. This makes the crisis much the most significant since the 1930s. First of all, the panic must be dealt with…

This panic is also going to have a big impact on economies. So central banks,other than the Federal Reserve, should lower interest rates. Only last week I thought a half-percentage point cut in rates made sense for the UK. If I were on the monetary policy committee today, I would argue for a full percentage point. The world has changed, greatly for the worse.

The finance ministers and central bank chiefs of the Group of Seven leading high-income countries will soon convene in Washington. For once, these are the right people. They must travel with one task in mind: restoring confidence. History will judge their success. These people may go down as the authors of another great depression. It is a destiny they must now avoid, for all our sakes.

Mr. Wolf had a once held a rosy view of the risks of lowering interest rates back in January. FT: “what are the risks? Unfortunately, they are large. One is indefinite continuation of an excessively low rate of US national saving. Others are a loss of confidence in the US currency and much higher inflation.Yet another is a further round of the very asset bubbles and credit expansion that created the present crisis.” Ah, those were the days.

A rather bizarre AP analysis piece finds a “racially tinged subtext” in Governor Palin’s attack on the Obama-Ayers relationship. See if you can locate it (video here):

By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists” and doesn’t see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign. And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret…Palin’s incendiary charge draws media and voter attention away from the worsening economy…

“Our opponent…is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,” Palin told a group of donors in Englewood, Colo. A deliberate attempt to smear Obama, McCain’s ticket-mate echoed the line at three separate events Saturday. “This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America,” she said. “We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism.”

The AP piece carries the usual disclaimer about Obama and Ayers: “No evidence shows they were ‘pals’ or even close when they worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career. Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers’ radical views and actions.”

The AP piece of course makes no reference to the fascinating and lengthy New York Times article of September 11, 2001, in which Mr. Ayers is quoted saying, “”I don’t regret setting bombs…I feel we didn’t do enough” — and many other memorable things as well.

IBD has an entertaining list of problems in the Palin-Biden debate:

as InstaPundit’s Michael Totten instantly noted after the debate, Biden — the great, seasoned foreign policy expert who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — falsely claimed France and the U.S. “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon.”

Of course, the debate’s moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS’ “Washington Week,” didn’t call Biden on the gaffe; that might not be good for sales of her upcoming book, “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama” (especially if there turns out not to be an Age of Obama).

There was also Biden’s accusation that John McCain is soft on regulation, when in fact he tried to beef up regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — an explanation for why he got so little campaign money from Fannie and Freddie over the years — under $22,000 — as opposed to the more than $126,000 Obama received in his short time in the Senate.

Sen. Biden falsely claimed that Obama didn’t pledge to meet with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; he falsely claimed Gov. Sarah Palin supported a windfall profits tax on oil companies; he said he’s always been for clean coal in spite of his record of voting against it in the Senate.

Biden said we have to drill for more of our own oil, easily leading viewers to conclude he and Obama are in favor of more domestic drilling, but as the American Thinker blog’s Rick Moran noted in a list of “Biden’s Big Lies,” “Biden has opposed offshore drilling and even compared offshore drilling to ‘raping’ the Outer Continental Shelf.”

Gov. Palin called Biden on his claim that Gen. David McKiernan in Afghanistan said that the surge could not be applied in Afghanistan; in fact, McKiernan has said that some aspects of Gen. David Petraeus’ Iraq strategy could be part of our war efforts in Afghanistan.

And Biden was wrong when he claimed that both McCain and Obama opposed troop funding; McCain simply opposed legislation with a withdrawal deadline.

The Delaware Democrat falsely claimed that McCain’s health care plan raises taxes, failing to mention his proposal’s offsetting tax credit. And he was untruthful in claiming that under an Obama Administration the middle class will “pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan.” Obama, in fact, says he will return income tax rates to the Clinton levels, which were significantly higher than those in effect after tax reform during the Reagan Administration.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty noted Biden’s claim that “we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country” and concluded Biden was “off by 2,000%.”

The NY Post added another: “Biden…smeared Dick Cheney as ‘the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.’ To which we must take specific offense: After all, the founder of this newspaper, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel by then-Vice President Aaron Burr.”

Apparently the Palin-Biden debate was must-see TV:

Thursday’s debate was…
– 33% higher than Friday’s top-of-the-ticket debate between John McCain and Barack Obama (52.4 million).
– 61% higher than the 2004 vp debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards (43.6 million).
– 23% higher than the 1984 match up between George Bush and Geraldine Ferrarro (56.7 million), the former title-holder for the most-watched vp debate.

The Biden-Palin summit was expected to overthrow Friday’s presidential debate in viewers due to questions about Palin’s readiness and because the vp match was held on a Thursday — television’s most-watched night of the week. But this ratings blowout exceeds industry expectations. The audience response puts the election back onto the historic and record-breaking ratings territory that characterized the convention coverage.

The Nielsen measurement includes viewers watching the debate live on 11 networks — NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, PBS, CNN, Fox News, CSPAN, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, and Telefutura.

ABC drew the largest debate audience with 13.1 million viewers. Among broadcast networks, ABC was followed by NBC (12.8 million), CBS (11.1 million) and Fox (4.5 million).

On cable, Fox News led with 11.1 million — the most-watched telecast in the network’s 12-year history. CNN drew 10.7 million, the channel’s third most-watched telecast ever. MSNBC had 4.4 million. In addition, PBS projects 3.5 million viewers watched its coverage. Friday night may have been the most-watched debate since Reagan vs. Carter (80.6 million). The total from last night is 69,989,000 viewers.

Palin seems to be willing to go after Senator Obama harder than McCain (via Fox): “Some of his comments that he has made about the war that I think may in my world disqualifies someone from consideration as the next commander in chief…Some of his comments about Afghanistan and what we are doing there supposedly -– just air raiding villages and killing civilians. That’s reckless.” Governor Palin would appear possibly once again have made it John McCain’s race to win or lose.

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Sarah Palin, who has embraced the Joe Sixpack persona:

Oh my goodness, yes, Hugh. I know what Americans are going through. Todd and I, heck, we’re going through that right now even as we speak, which may put me again kind of on the outs of those Washington elite who don’t like the idea of just an everyday working class American running for such an office. But yeah, there’s been a lot of times that Todd and I have had to figure out how we were going to pay for health insurance. We’ve gone through periods of our life here with paying out of pocket for health coverage until Todd and I both landed a couple of good union jobs. Early on in our marriage, we didn’t have health insurance, and we had to either make the choice of paying out of pocket for catastrophic coverage or just crossing our fingers, hoping that nobody would get hurt, nobody would get sick. So I know what Americans are going through there.

And you know, even today, Todd and I are looking at what’s going on in the stock market, the relatively low number of investments that we have, looking at the hit that we’re taking, probably $20,000 dollars last week in his 401K plan that was hit. I’m thinking geez, the rest of America, they’re facing the exact same thing that we are. We understand what the problems are. It’s why I have all the faith in the world that John McCain is the right top of any ticket at this point to get us through these challenges. It’s a good balanced ticket where he’s got the experience, and he’s got the bipartisan approach that it’s going to take to get us through these challenges. And I have the acknowledgement and the experience of going through what America is going through…

Our stocks, you know, they took a hit yesterday. And then of course, just the same thing that other Americans are asking themselves today. We’ve got three teenagers. How are we going to pay for their college education? How are we going to make sure that we’re investing wisely today. We’re putting a lot of faith in other people who are using our money as investments. We have to count on the federal government to be overseeing these agencies and entities, making sure that we’re not going to get screwed on this deal, and that our savings are safe. So there again, John McCain’s got some great ideas on granting authority, for instance, to the FDIC…

I think that that’s been probably the most hurtful and nonsensical slap that we’ve been taking is our position that we have taken, pro-life, me personally, and saying that you know, even though I knew that 13 weeks along that Trig would be born with Down Syndrome, and I said you know, he’s still going to be a most precious ingredient in this sometimes messed-up world that we live in. I know that my son is going to provide a lot of hope and a lot of promise in this world, and I’m so thankful of course that I’ve had the opportunity to give him life and to bring him into this world. But I think yeah truly, that that’s been a hurtful slap that we have taken, because people just don’t understand…

[on her son in Iraq] That little stinker, I guess he’s called his girlfriend a couple of times, but can you believe he hasn’t called his momma yet? He’s over there. They were just leaving Kuwait heading into Iraq, and I am just so extremely proud of Track, my son, and all of the men and women, of course, serving in the military. I’m proud that my son made this independent and very wise decision as such a young man at 18, deciding you know, he realized there’s something he can do to help, to contribute, to help protect our nation, and I couldn’t be more proud of him and all those who choose to serve in our military. They’re serving for the right reasons. God bless them, God love them.

“I’m thinking jeez,” said the Vice Presidential candidate. We’re not sure if Sarah Palin was the right VP choice, but it is certainly the right choice to let Palin be whomever that person is, rather than to try to reinvent her for the debate and the MSM. We wonder how many campaign dollars man-hours were spent debating this decision.

A short report on the media via Instapundit:

“Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.”

So it’s the same as in 2004, though the media seem to have the wind at their back this time. Questions: If the MSM win, will they have buyer’s remorse? How quickly? Will they be asking Senator Biden questions like these on Thursday?

We thought that the SNL parody of the Palin interview on CBS was over the top, but then we watched the real interview. Palin’s performance was pretty bad. However, she still benefits from the media’s attempts to discredit her, such as this report from the AP:

When Palin needed to sell her house during her last year as Wasilla mayor, she got the city to sign off on a special zoning exception — and did so without keeping a promise to remove a potential fire hazard. She gladly accepted gifts from merchants: A free “awesome facial” she raved about in a thank-you note to a spa. The “absolutely gorgeous flowers” she received from a welding supply store. Even fresh salmon to take home…

She asked the City Council to add a friend to the list of speakers at a 2002 meeting — and then the friend got up and asked them to give his radio station advertising business…she tried to help a neighbor and political contributor fighting City Hall over his small lakeside development. Palin wanted the city to refund some of the man’s fees, but the city attorney told the mayor she didn’t have the authority…

Some of her first actions after being elected mayor in 1996 raised possible ethical red flags: She cast the tie-breaking vote to propose a tax exemption on aircraft when her father-in-law owned one, and backed the city’s repeal of all taxes a year later on planes, snow machines and other personal property. She also asked the council to consider looser rules for snow machine races. Palin and her husband, Todd, a champion racer, co-owned a snow machine store at the time.

It isn’t just Palin who benefits from the attention of her adversaries. The NYT has a silly piece today on McCain and Indian casinos, and Frank Rich said that the Arizona Senator “may be the first presidential candidate in our history to risk wrecking the country even before being voted into the Oval Office.” Well, that settles that.

Unlike the first debate of 2004, it is unclear to us who won last night’s contest. A Democrat weighted poll said Obama won. A Republican weighted poll said it was McCain. Frank Luntz said on TV that his focus group preferred Obama because McCain seemed old and lacked passion. Others thought McCain looked good, even on HDTV. TIME Magazine canonized Senator Obama.

Apparently a lot more Democrats than Republicans (by a 3:2 margin) watched the debate, which is interesting, but we’re not sure what it means. Neither side appears to have lost this rather tepid affair. Obama committed a gaffe, but it’s hard to see that anyone will care very much about it. We noticed Obama’s suddenly gray hair for the first time.

If one major purpose of the debates is for the American people to answer “Who do you want to see in your home on TV every night?”, then the first debate did not clarify the matter too much. But there are more debates to come. We note that the same pundit who declared John Kerry the definitive winner of the first debate in 2004 thought that Bush had turned it around by the third debate and declared that “this election is over.” So perhaps we’ll just have to stay tuned and see what happens in the coming days.

UPDATE — The more we think about the debate, the more we appreciate Senator Obama’s apparent strategy of making himself look like a safe and noncontroversial choice for undecided voters by, among other things, agreeing with Senator McCain on many issues, and even invoking (incorrectly) Henry Kissinger, a name with meaning only to older voters. Whether it works remains to be seen.

This is apparently campaign advice for Senator Obama from either Aaron Sorkin or Maureen Dowd or maybe both, it’s hard to tell. NYT:

GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!…

If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

Didn’t we read something like this just the other day?

Like John Burns of the NYT, Dexter Filkins was impressed with how conditions have changed in Iraq. On his return to Baghdad, he didn’t know where he was at first:

Baghdad — I didn’t recognize the place. On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world. Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.

Abu Nawas Park — I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become. These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene…

if this is not peace, it is not war, either — at least not the war I knew. When I left Iraq in the summer of 2006, after living three and a half years here following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, I believed that evil had triumphed, and that it would be many years before it might be stopped. Iraq, filled with so many people living so close together, nurturing dark and unknowable grievances, seemed destined for a ghastly unraveling. And now, in the late summer of 2008, comes the calm. Violence has dropped by as much as 90 percent…

The Washington Post also noted the improvements recently. It will be interesting to see how Senator Obama handles the success of the surge in the upcoming debates with Senator McCain — perhaps even more interesting to see if the media press him on his opposition to this clearly successful effort.

We scanned a couple of the NYT’s columnists to see what clever and amusing attacks on Sarah Palin they might dream up. We were a bit disappointed. Frank Rich, for example, says that since John McCain is “too weak” to be President, a “McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man”:

A week ago the question was: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The question today: What kind of president would Sarah Palin be? It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive…

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney. The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too…

This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, “run our factories” and “fight our wars” and are “always proud” of their country.

It is a bit unclear why this passage was “chilling,” in Rich’s opinion, except that the fellow who praised Truman was a right-wing newspaperman we never had heard of. Pretty weak material. As for Maureen Dowd, she claims, based on the Charlie Gibson interview, that Sarah Palin is the new George W. Bush:

An Arctic blast of action has swept into the 2008 race, making thinking passé. We don’t really need to hurt our brains studying the world…our new Napoleon in bunny boots (not the Pamela Anderson kind, but the knock-offs of the U.S. Army Extreme Cold Weather Vapor Barrier Boots) is ready to face down the Russkies and start a land war over Georgia…

The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra…

She tried to finesse her previous church comments about Iraq, asking worshipers to pray “that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.” Earnestly repeating after her tutors, she said she had meant to echo Abraham Lincoln, that in war we must pray that we are on God’s side rather than that he is on ours. But her original comments sounded more W. than Abe…

Poor Ms. Dowd. She seems to have been duped on the Georgia issue by ABC’s bad editing of Palin, and on the Iraq issue by the journalistic malpractice of the AP. Not that these things would have mattered.

The entire MSM seem to have lost their bearings for the moment. The NYT reported on page one today, “Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes,” as if that’s a page one story in politics. Meanwhile, the WaPo countered with a page one barnburner of its own, “As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin Cut Own Duties, Left Trail of Bad Blood.” SNL had a not very funny Palin-Clinton joint appearance. And Senator Obama, who is back to talking about McCain, sounded flat. These folks need to regroup, get back to basics, and forget about Palin if they want their side to win in seven weeks.

We wrote about John Boyd’s OODA loop — observation, orientation, decision, action — back in 2004. The idea of getting inside an opponent’s OODA loop is to mount an attack or series of attacks so that the attack is shorter than the opponent’s ability to make a decision and respond effectively. Michael Barone has a piece on it today in an attempt to understand what has gone wrong in the Obama campaign of late:

John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama’s OODA loop…Observe, Orient, Decide, Act….

Obama chief strategist David Axelrod admitted of the Palin pick: “I can honestly say we weren’t prepared for that. I mean, her name wasn’t on anybody’s list.” But it was known that McCain’s VP adviser had traveled to Alaska, and anyone clicking on youtube.com could see Palin’s impressive performance in political debates. The McCain campaign shrewdly kept the information that she was on the short list and that she was the choice to a half-dozen people, who didn’t tell even their spouses. The Obama team failed to Observe.

Then they failed to Orient. Palin, as her convention and subsequent appearances have shown, powerfully reinforces two McCain themes: She is a maverick who has taken on the leaders of her own party (as Obama never has in Chicago), and she has a record on energy of favoring drilling and exploiting American resources. Instead of undermining these themes, they dismissed the choice as an attempt to appeal to female Hillary Clinton supporters or to religious conservatives.

Then team Obama and its many backers in the media failed to Decide correctly, so when they Acted they got it wrong. Their attacks on Palin tended to ricochet and hit Obama. Is she inexperienced? Well, what has Obama ever run (besides his now floundering campaign)? Being a small-town mayor, as Palin said, is like being a community organizer, “except that you have actual responsibilities.”…

Perhaps the Obama campaign strategists expected their many friends in the mainstream media to do their work for them. Certainly they tried. But their efforts have misfired, and the grenades they lobbed at Palin have ricocheted back and blown up in their faces. Voters are on to their game.

The smart move for Senator Obama would have been to ignore Governor Palin and let her celebrity die down. Continue slogging and after a while, the magic would fade. This is a Vice Presidential candidate after all. But Senator Obama couldn’t do so. Instead, he overreacted. He went directly after Palin himself. Worse still, he made the lipstick comment, and didn’t apologize and move on quickly — which made some people connect dots that went back to calling the reporter “sweetie,” flipping Senator Clinton the bird, and, indeed, to Obama’s own peculiar upbringing and relationship with his mother.

Whether Senator Obama’s campaign’s current poor performance is explicable by tactical misjudgments or whether something deeper is the problem is unknown at this point. But we are reminded about how little we actually know about this man who wants to be President.

Governor Palin addressed a church audience in June. Among the topics were soldiers going to Iraq. She asked the congregation to “pray…that our national leaders are sending them on a task that is from God” (via Huffington Post and Hot Air):

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan. So bless them with your prayers, your prayers of protection over our soldiers…

Here’s how Gene Johnson of the AP misreported Palin’s address to the congregation and made a clearly false assertion in a news story:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a “task that is from God.”

Here’s how ABC took the journalistic malpractice of the AP one step further, taking for granted that the quote was accurate, in an interview of Governor Palin:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

What to say? In a world where journalism still took its declared standards seriously, Gene Johnson of the AP should be reprimanded or fired for the obvious and gross distortion of Palin’s words. As for ABC, they should get off their duffs and use primary sources when available (and we’re giving ABC the benefit of the doubt that it was simply lazy in this case). Leaving aside the journalistic malpractice in this case, Governor Palin’s response was noteworthy and impressive:

the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said — first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words. But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God’s side. That’s what that comment was all about, Charlie.

We haven’t watched this on TV, so we can’t judge how the incident looked, but in print, Governor Palin clearly came out on top.

David Axelrod of the Obama campaign was interviewed on Fox News Sunday:

David Axelrod: “One of the first things that Senator Obama did when he came to the U.S. Senate was push for the most far-reaching ethics reforms that we’ve seen since Watergate. That didn’t please people on either side of the aisle…people like Dick Lugar, the very respected Republican senator from Indiana, spoke out and said, These are just partisan attacks. I’ve worked with Barack Obama.’ They worked together on arms control…”

Chris Wallace: “because you guys always talk about ethics legislation and the nuclear non-proliferation deal with Dick Lugar, I went back and looked — both of those measures passed by unanimous consent. They were so accepted by the Senate that there was not even a vote.”

What is most notable about the exchange is that, this late in a campaign, Axelrod would think he could get away with this on a national news program. (HT: Powerline)

Speaking to a group in Duryea, Pa., Senator Obama said, regarding guns, “Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress.” No doubt this will reassure NRA members about an Obama presidency. The WSJ reports Obama’s comments and paints a picture that makes the Illinois Senator look like he’s very much out of his element:

“If you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking it…Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress…This can’t be the reason not to vote for me. Can everyone hear me in the back? I see a couple of sportsmen back there. I’m not going to take away your guns.’’

Perhaps not surprisingly, the LA Times neglected to include the very revealing “don’t have the votes in Congress” remark in its account of the event. Hugh Hewitt has more on this topic.

Jonah Goldberg discusses the strange week of the new and old media:

Liberal reporters inquired of conservative journalists, Republican delegates, right-leaning janitors, free-market short-order cooks, even the guys walking around in elephant suits: Will Sarah Palin drop out? What about the Eagleton Option?…it was hardly the only journalistic will-o’-the-wisp unleashed from the media bog.

The claim that Palin was a Buchananite — and hence an acolyte of a “Nazi sympathizer” according to Florida Rep. Robert Wexler — was not true. The claims she cut funding for pregnant teens, that she was a member of the more-goofy-than-scary Alaska Independence Party, that Trig Palin — her special-needs baby — was really her daughter’s: these were all bogus. As for the even more disgusting smears peddled at the Daily Kos and one blogger at The Atlantic — smears that drove much of the prurient investigation into the Palin family’s privacy by more reputable sources — they were as untrue as they were repugnant.

Governor Palin has only been the GOP’s Vice Presidential candidate for one week, and she merited all these wild stories. There are more than eight weeks to go before the election, and it is hard to see how more unhinged Palin’s opponents can get. But perhaps we lack sufficient imagination.

At the very end of his mostly pedestrian but (in our view) very effective speech at the RNC yesterday, Senator McCain said something that struck us as perhaps the most startling personal revelation ever made in a presidential nomination acceptance address. Probably everyone else knows this, but we didn’t. Senator McCain said that he broke under torture:

A lot of prisoners had it worse than I did. I’d been mistreated before, but not as badly as others. I always liked to strut a little after I’d been roughed up to show the other guys I was tough enough to take it. But after I turned down their offer, they worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me. When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn’t know how I could face my fellow prisoners. The good man in the cell next door, my friend, Bob Craner, saved me. Through taps on a wall he told me I had fought as hard as I could. No man can always stand alone.

Perhaps we haven’t been paying attention all this time, but we didn’t know until today that during this two-week long episode McCain says he twice attempted suicide and finally signed confessions given to him by the North Vietnamese. It is certainly unsurprising in light of all this that Senator McCain opposed waterboarding and some other coercive means of gathering information. His sufferings during captivity are almost beyond comprehension.

Inspired by the intriguing confession in McCain’s speech, we did a little further inquiry. We have a copy of Faith of My Fathers (a book with no table of contents or index, by the way), but hadn’t read it. We looked in on the episode that McCain referred to in his speech last night (pp.244-245):

Bob Craner tried to reassure me that I had resisted all that I was expected to resist. But I couldn’t shake it off. One night I either heard or dreamed I heard myself confessing over the loudspeakers, thanking the Vietnamese for receiving medical treatment I did not deserve. Most guys broke at one time or another. I doubt anyone gets over it entirely. There is never enough time and distance between the past and the present to allow one to forget his shame. I am recovered now from that period of intense despair. But I can summon up its feeling in an instant whenever I let myself remember the day.

McCain’s book discusses his post-captivity physical therapy (p.345) but appears silent on whatever psychological treatment he received. It would be very interesting to know about this, but, as with Senator Kerry, this subject apparently continues to be off-limits in political discourse. (Why do we think that the MSM may well wake up to the idea of questioning Senator McCain on this matter in a way that they did not with Senator Kerry?)

Having said that, reading even a little of what John McCain endured for year upon year has fundamentally altered our understanding of this man. We are in awe of what he and his comrades went through and came out the other side. (Of course many did not come out the other side; read the story of Lance Peter Sijan and remain unmoved if you can.) We can only begin to imagine what McCain’s close friend and fellow POW Bud Day was thinking and feeling as he sat smiling on the convention floor, watching a speech that neither man could have dared to imagine forty years ago.