Roger Simon’s verdict on the last four years of the Obama administration is in:

Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness.

Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan - if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all - has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.

On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringeworthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama. Only the Republicans are barely any better.

The Democrats and the Republicans are both awful, and the people don’t seem to be too much better at the moment.

President Obama reacts to the news of the day in a way that sounds bizarre to us, given the level of violence and oppression currently underway in Iran. WaPo:

“I do believe that something has happened in Iran where there is a questioning of the kinds of antagonistic postures towards the international community that have taken place in the past…When I see violence directed at peaceful protesters, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me, and it’s of concern to the American people…That is not how governments should interact with their people.”

What’s the deal with this? Why is the first sentence so contorted and unclear? Why is it so false — the Iranian people are demanding some freedom, not “questioning Iran’s antagonistic postures towards the international community”? Why are the next sentences so at pains not to single out Iran and its government? Why is the murdering of protesters reduced to the banality of “that is not how governments should interact with their people”? This is bizarre. Taking a “wait-and-see” approach to Iran might seem practical, but exactly what sort of enduring, enforceable agreements are possible with governments that do not hesitate to kill large numbers of their own people when they decide it is in their interests to do so?

By contrast, this reaction by a President to a somewhat similar situation seems a lot clearer: “I want emphatically to state tonight that if the outrages in Poland do not cease, we cannot and will not conduct ‘business as usual’ with the perpetrators and those who aid and abet them. Make no mistake, their crime will cost them dearly in their future dealings with America and free peoples everywhere. I do not make this statement lightly or without serious reflection.”

Maybe it’s just us, but we get the feeling from the way that Obama talks that he is desperate to do a deal, some kind of deal, any deal at all, with Khamenei — the man he calls even now “supreme leader“. Obama so appears to want not to offend him, or to say a clear, good word about some real “community organizers“. Perhaps it goes too far to say that Obama seems to identify with the authoritarians around the world, but the question is not unreasonable, given his taking over vast parts of American industry.

Given how far things have gone in Iran, it is a total cop-out to say “the easiest way for reactionary forces inside Iran to crush reformers is to say it’s the US that is encouraging those reformers.” (Even the man once the designated successor to Ayatollah Khomeini has a good word for the protesters.) Furthermore, even if the US is not causing any provocation, the Iranian regime still declares that we are behind the protests, so what’s the point?

It’s a sad day in America when we shouldn’t express our fundamental beliefs about freedom and liberty because some dictator somewhere might try to use them against his own people. If Obama believes the statement he made above, he has poor judgment. If he doesn’t believe it, but is using it as an excuse, the explanations are not pretty to contemplate.

Final thought: Roger Simon’s reflections on this matter seem pretty similar to ours, and even David Ignatius thinks Obama should be speaking out clearly and in favor of the protesters.

The Boston Globe has a collection of pictures of Iran that give a sense of the scale of the protests. Images 39-41 are pretty disturbing. Question: does this comment from President Obama seem appropriate given what is going on: “You’ve seen in Iran some initial reaction from the supreme leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.” Huh?

UPDATE — Charles Krauthammer has had some similar thoughts on this matter of the “supreme leader” and his concerns:

after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.”

Where to begin? “Supreme Leader”? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts — a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election.

Moreover, this incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren’t dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

Krauthammer says: “Obama totally misses the point.” No, that’s not it. Some see a “deeper wisdom” in Obama’s reticence, and we wish that were true, but this is a serious enough situation that you ought to be on one side or the other. Obama’s relative silence chooses sides for him.

The BBC reports that authorities in Iran have announced sweeping new restrictions on foreign media, effectively confining journalists to their offices:

The new restrictions on foreign media require journalists to obtain explicit permission before leaving the office to cover any story. Journalists have also been banned from attending or reporting on any “unauthorised” demonstration — and it is unclear which if any of the protests are formally authorised.

Press cards have been declared invalid. Our correspondent says they are the most sweeping restrictions he has ever encountered reporting anywhere. He says the clampdown comes amid surprise and fear among authorities at the show of defiance by opposition supporters who attended Monday’s huge illegal rally, insisting the vote was rigged.

The Guardian Council — Iran’s top legislative body — said votes would be recounted in areas contested by the losing candidates.

Should be a swell recount, since the regime has already announced that the results won’t change. (Reuters adds: “Reuters coverage is now subject to an Iranian ban on foreign media leaving the office to report, film or take pictures in Tehran.”) It remains to be seen what, if any, impact the micro-P-to-P media will have in coming days.

At ASU President Obama managed to combine criticism of the graduating students’ parents with a stunning amount of projection. (It is worth pondering that this child of a broken home, with a peripatetic mother and multiple temporary “fathers,” thinks it is his business to tell young people to “help end” the passing of traditional American aspirations from parents to children):

Many of you have been taught to chase after the usual brass rings: being on this “who’s who” list or that top 100 list; how much money you make and how big your corner office is; whether you have a fancy enough title or a nice enough car…such an approach won’t get you where you want to go; that in fact, the elevation of appearance over substance, celebrity over character, short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.

Calling Dr. Freud. It is passing strange that Obama derides precisely those things that he has struggled for mightily and achieved at a young age. (He apparently thinks that his intense personal ambition is morally superior because he has hidden it from himself under the guise of “serving the people”.) Any man who has an autobiography at age 33 has no business telling others to curb their ambitions for personal gain in life.

(Jacob Weisberg’s comments at the very bottom of this piece in Slate are also interesting: “He’s ruthless…His cracks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner about Hillary Clinton being an envious loser, Larry Summers’ woman problem, and training his dog not to pee on Tim Geithner skirted cruelty. Obama’s jokes about himself were about how great everyone thinks he is.”)

There is something quite disturbing about this man. It’s not just that he has grandiose rhetoric. It’s not just that he has the worldview of a typical college professor and pursues that agenda with Chicagoland ruthlessness — except when he abruptly decides to change his mind in his self interest. That’s just politics. Rather, it is Obama’s apparent conviction that he has, as his followers believe, a special personal destiny. In our view, at his core, this man may really not believe that he is just another guy. And that’s a scary thing when a man has so much power.

Question: is Obama even aware how over-the-top he is with his constant self-aggrandizement?

We were reading Bill Roggio on the civil war in Pakistan and noticed an ad on his website from an outfit previously unknown to us called Gryphon Airlines. Here’s a sample of their FAQ’s:

Q: What routes does Gryphon currently fly?

A: Gryphon currently flies one regular route between Kuwait City and Sather Air Force Base at BIAP in Baghdad, Iraq…

Q: Can you store my body armor / PPE for me?

A: Gryphon is not able to provide this service.

Q: Can I bring firearms on board a Gryphon flight?

A: All weapons and ammunition must be declared. If you plan to transport weapons on a Gryphon flight, please download the “Firearms Form“…Explosives are strictly prohibited. If any of these items are packed in checked-on baggage, they must be declared…

(Question: what fate would befall someone who tried to hijack a Gryphon flight?) Added bonus: Gryphon has stewardesses and a brochure.

We previously noted the ridiculous EPA ruling that CO2, a gas that is necessary for human life, is now to be considered dangerous. Here’s what the Obama administration is really up to. Ed Markey: “Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation in terms of how the EPA process will include them.” WSJ:

carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public and therefore must be regulated under the 1970 Clean Air Act. This so-called “endangerment finding” sets the clock ticking on a vast array of taxes and regulation that EPA will have the power to impose across the economy, and all with little or no political debate.

This is a momentous decision that has the potential to affect the daily life of every American, yet most of the media barely noticed, and those that did largely applauded. When America’s Founders revolted against “taxation without representation,” this is precisely the kind of kingly diktat they had in mind.

Michigan Democrat John Dingell helped to write the Clean Air Act, as well as its 1990 revision, and he says neither was meant to apply to carbon. But in 2007 five members of the Supreme Court followed the environmental polls and ordered the EPA to determine if CO2 qualified as a “pollutant.” The Bush Administration prudently slow-walked the decision. As Peter Glaser, an environmental lawyer at Troutman Sanders, told Congress in 2008, “The country will experience years, if not decades, of regulatory agony, as EPA will be required to undertake numerous, controversial, time-consuming, expensive and difficult regulatory proceedings, all of which ultimately will be litigated.”

The Obama EPA has now opened this Pandora’s box. The centerpiece of the Clean Air Act is something called the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, or NAAQS, under which the EPA decides the appropriate atmospheric concentration of a given air pollutant. Under this law the states must adopt measures to meet a NAAQS goal, and the costs cannot be considered. For global warming, this is going to be a hugely expensive futility parade.

Greenhouse gases mix in the atmosphere, and it doesn’t matter where they come from. A ton of emissions from Ohio has the same effect on global CO2 as a ton emitted in China; and even if Ohio figured out a way to reduce its emissions to zero, it would still have no control over the carbon content in its ambient air. But under the law, EPA would be required to severely punish Ohio — and every state — for not complying with NAAQS…

Hundreds of thousands of currently unregulated sources will suddenly be subject to the EPA’s preconstruction permitting and review, including schools, hospitals, malls, restaurants, farms and colleges. According to EPA, the average permit today takes 866 hours for a source to prepare, and 301 hours for EPA to process…For now, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson claims her agency will only target cars and trucks.

If industries object to all this, they could become particular targets of punitive regulation. It is noteworthy that Congressman Ed Markey was so open about how government coercion would work: “Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation in terms of how the EPA process will include them.” Swell country.

You paid for this outrageous and ominous-sounding government publication on America’s internal enemies, the so-called “rightwing extremists”. The document was rushed out despite internal objections, just in time to set a context for the tax protest tea parties. It is a pretty bizarre piece of work, but does have its unintentionally humorous moments.

For example, in the footnote at the bottom of page 2, the authors seem not to be able to bring themselves to use the term “illegal immigration” when referring to the things “rightwing extremists” object to: “It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” Very politically correct, don’t you know. However, the document does manage to work in the phrase “cabal of Jewish financiers,” and never lets you forget that its topic is “rightwing extremists.” It uses that term almost 50 times in a mere nine pages.

John Hinderaker dissects this lamentable piece of work. He says, “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this Homeland Security report is politically motivated, and reflects the authors’ political prejudices more than an objective evaluation of a significant terrorist threat.” Indeed.

The Herald Tribune reports a new initiative by the Obama administration:

The Obama administration will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies…The new rules will cover all financial institutions, including those not now covered by any pay rules because they are not receiving U.S. government bailout money. Officials say the rules could also be applied more broadly to publicly traded companies

Welcome to the future, comrade. It’s kind of hard to believe that things have gotten this bad this fast. We wonder what Congressional fundraising for Democrats is going to look like in 2010.

UPDATE — Scott Johnson sort of raises the question of whether there will even be a 2010. Meanwhile, Roger Simon says that there needs to be a lot more transparency in government before it tries to get even more power than it already has.

Camille Paglia:

First it was that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery. Then it was the stunt of unnerving Wall Street by sending out a shrill duo of slick geeks (Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag) as the administration’s weirdly adolescent spokesmen on economics. Who could ever have confidence in that sorry pair?

And then there was the fiasco of the ham-handed White House reception for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which was evidently lacking the most basic elements of ceremony and protocol. Don’t they read the “Iliad” anymore in the Ivy League? Check that out for the all-important ritual of gift giving, which has cemented alliances around the world for 5,000 years.

There are those who say not to attribute to malign intent that which can be explained by incompetence. However, if there were malign intent by some in the administration, could they be making more of a hash of things than they have been?

We started off with Roger Simon’s wondering if his new book would be reviewed in the NYT. That led us to the feud between Simon’s publisher and the NYT book review. The Roger Kimball piece mentioned Harvey Mansfield’s bad treatment at the hands of the Times, and we recalled mentioning Mansfield at one point ourselves. This led us to a review by Mansfield of a book by Richard Brookhiser, and finally to an interview of Brookhiser about George Washington that included this:

Washington is a little hard to figure out, although I do not think impossible. He was an Episcopalian-an Anglican or an Episcopalian-all his life. He was a vestryman. His attendance at church was fairly regular, although not by any means “every Sunday.”

He never took Communion, although Martha always did. I don’t know what to make of that and I don’t know any historian who has figured it out. There was a case in Philadelphia where an Episcopalian minister gave a sermon, when Washington was in church, criticizing people who did not take Communion. And Washington apparently never went back to that church, seeing the sermon as perhaps directed at him.

Washington makes a few references, in public and private writings, to Christ-very few, although some of them are important. The 1783 Circular to the States I just read from ends with an exhortation that Americans should imitate Christ, that that will lead to their political happiness.

But the word that comes up a lot in his writing, both public and private, is “Providence.” He seems to have felt that Providence was an active force, that it was the disposer of events. He speaks of the interpositions of Providence throughout the Revolutionary War. My hunch, my biographical hunch, is it that the moment when this was fixed in his mind was probably Braddock’s defeat in 1755, when Washington is a 23-year-old colonel, Virginia militia colonel, on General Edward Braddock’s staff. Braddock is taking an army into Western Pennsylvania to try to capture Fort Duquesne, what is now Pittsburgh, which the French hold. They’re set upon and more than decimated, one of the greatest debacles of British imperial war.

Washington is one of the few senior officers who survive. Braddock is killed. Most of Washington’s peers in the officer corps are killed. He has two horses shot out from under him. He has bullets shot through his coat. And after this, Washington writes a friend a letter in which he says “See the mysterious works of Providence, the transience of human things.” So I think that was a very sobering experience to him as a 23-year-old. That’s my hunch.

Interesting, and not something we recall reading previously. Finally, that bit on Washington puts us in mind of Fouad Ajami’s fond remembrance of Samuel Huntington, and his “argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture” in American history. All in all, a couple of hours well spent. Thanks, Roger.

The Bush administration seems determined to give the automakers $15 billion or so, letting them have a merry little Christmas and kicking the problem down the road to January 2009 and the incoming Obama administration. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says that’s the wrong thing to do. FT:

The US car industry will not be shut down, but it does need to be restructured. That is what Chapter 11 of America’s bankruptcy code is supposed to do. A variant of pre-packaged bankruptcy – where all the terms are set before going before the bankruptcy court – can allow them to produce better and more environmentally sound cars. It can also address legacy retiree obligations. The companies may need additional finance. Given the state of financial markets, the US government may have to provide that at terms that give the taxpayers a full return to compensate them for the risk. Government guarantees can provide assurances, as they did two decades ago when Chrysler faced its crisis.

With financial restructuring, the real assets do not disappear. Equity investors (who failed to fulfil their responsibility of oversight) lose everything; bondholders get converted into equity owners and may lose substantial amounts. Freed of the obligation to pay interest, the carmakers will be in a better position. Taxpayer dollars will go far further. Moral hazard – the undermining of incentives – will be averted: a strong message will be sent.

Some will talk of the pension funds and others that will suffer. Yes, but that is true of every investment that has diminished. The government may need to help some pension funds but it is better to do so directly, than via massive bail-outs hoping that a little of the money trickles down to the “widows and orphans”. Some will say that bankruptcy will undermine confidence in America’s cars. It is the cars and carmakers themselves – and the dismal performance of their executives – that have undermined confidence. With industry experts saying $125bn (€94bn, £84bn) or more will be needed, with bail-out fatigue setting in, why should US consumers believe that a $15bn gift will do the trick of a turnround?

President Bush apparently does not want to be cast in the role of Scrooge, and seems willing to use the taxpayers’ money for the automakers to get past the yuletide season. Bah humbug! As Mark Steyn began his commentary on Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas: “What a revoltin’ development this is.”

Some holidays endure, and some come and go but thrive for a while. Decoration Day became Memorial Day, Armistice Day became Veterans Day, VE Day and VJ Day just seemed to disappear after a while. But even ephemeral celebration days have their enduring moments. Here’s what Glenn Reynolds reported last week about America’s victory in Iraq:

“The war is over and we won:” Michael Yon just phoned from Baghdad, and reports that things are much better than he had expected, and he had expected things to be good. “There’s nothing going on. I’m with the 10th Mountain Division, and…none of them have fired their weapons in combat during this tour, and about half of them are combat veterans from Afghanistan and/or Iraq…they’ve been here eight months. And the place we’re at, South Baghdad, used to be one of the worst places in Iraq. And now there’s nothing going on.

I’ve been walking my feet off and haven’t seen anything. I’ve been asking Iraqis, ‘do you think the violence will kick up again,’ but even the Iraqi journalists are sounding optimistic now and they’re usually dour.” There’s a little bit of violence here and there, but nothing that’s a threat to the general situation. Plus, not only the Iraqi Army, but even the National Police are well thought of by the populace. Training from U.S. toops has paid off, he says, in building a rapport.

He says the big problem everybody is talking about now is corruption. But hey, we have that here, too. He’ll be heading to Afghanistan next week. “Afghanistan is a bad situation, but on Iraq I can’t believe things have turned out so well.”

The White House waddled in with this the other day: “as a result of the surge, we’ve been able to have tremendous successes…We believe that the conditions are such now that we are able to celebrate the victory that we’ve had so far, and establish both a strategic framework agreement, which is a much broader document and talks about all sorts of cooperation that we’ll have with Iraq from here on out — from trade and health care and exchanges on science, and a real strong bilateral agreement that you would hope we would have with any of our allies. These documents usually take years to negotiate. We’ve been able to compress that and do it within the year”. Never has a victory seemed so much like something else.

Will Americans ultimately celebrate this victory? Who knows? But just imagine if the Iraqis put a statue of George Bush where that big one of Saddam Hussein used to stand.

There are going to be a lot of setpieces over the next four years, so we might as well start getting used to them. The president-elect’s press conference was just such a show, as the array of CEO’s, former Treasury Secretaries and politically symbolic attendees illustrated. Senator Obama’s planned remarks were cautious, and even seemed to imply his potentially backing off from some tax increases. The event was held while the market was open and was designed not to rattle the market.

The Q&A portion of the event was highly scripted and obviously so. ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, CNN, Reuters, the NYT and the local Chicago papers got to ask a question. Opposition press did not. The rather labored dog metaphor was swallowed whole by the adoring media as a genuine ad-lib. The one genuine ad-lib was a flop that the Senator had to later apologize for. So perhaps in the future all impromptu remarks and jokes will be scripted.

Possibly some future moments of levity may be brought to us by the Obama administration’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. According to Bloomberg, Senator Obama “once joked at a charity dinner that when Rahm Emanuel severed his middle finger, it almost rendered him mute.” A pretty funny comment, but the serious point is not to be missed.

These fellows aren’t fooling around; they know how to craft an image and enforce discipline. Already some in the elite media are getting uncomfortable with the self-conscious image making that has been the hallmark of Senator Obama’s campaign. But what will they do, since they know just what happens to those in the media that oppose the administration?

Author Jack Cashill (who admittedly is sometimes given to fairly conspiratorial conclusions) was puzzled at the accomplished prose of Senator Obama in his first book, “Dreams from My Father.” Cashill has “reviewed the portfolios of a thousand professional writers, all of them crowded with writing samples, but only a handful of these writers would have been capable of having a written a book as stylish as Dreams.” Cashill notes that there are almost no writing samples from Senator Obama prior to his having produced his first book, and those that exist are either puerile or pedestrian. He then analyzed Senator Obama’s first book and a Bill Ayers’ memoir, and has reached the shocking conclusion that Bill Ayers ghostwrote parts of Obama’s first book. Excerpt from Cahsill’s piece in the American Thinker:

I identified two similar “nature” passages in Obama’s and Ayers’ respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days:

“I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city.”

The second from Dreams:

“Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.”

These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field. The “Fugitive Days” excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. The “Dreams’” excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.

A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the rubric “cusum analysis” or QSUM. This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable. To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author’s entry into the world of “community organizing.” “Fugitive Days” averaged 23.13 words a sentence. “Dreams” averaged 23.36 words a sentence…

Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama’s conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from “Dreams” and “Fugitive Days.” The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise. By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers…

If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers’ involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message: “A steady attack on the white race… served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair.” As a writer…I would never have used a metaphor as specific as “ballast” unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.

Cashill concludes: “None of this, of course, proves Ayers’ authorship conclusively, but the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have written the best parts of Dreams. The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness — a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores…” Question: is it possible that we know even less about Senator Obama than the little we think we do?

These days in politics, it is an increasingly rare pleasure to be able to enjoy the writing of someone we disagree with much of the time. Camille Paglia has a nice piece today on Sarah Palin:

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is “dumb.” Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism — the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English — beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse — which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant. Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism.

Paglia adds some bonus facts: “When Wyoming joined the Union in 1890, it was allowed to keep women’s suffrage. As late as 1915, the state legislatures of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey (in the supposedly more cultured Northeast) rejected women’s right to vote. But the Western states had been far more open-minded. Washington state granted women’s suffrage in 1910, California in 1911, Montana and Nevada in 1914.” Very interesting.

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.

When you read something like this, it’s 2004 all over again (”Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states”). Salon:

something is being perpetrated upon you and your country that is so obscene that it simply cannot be happening. I sat outside a 7-Eleven and had a sacramental Dove chocolate bar. Jeez: Here we are again. A man and a woman whose values we loathe and despise — lying, rageful and incompetent, so dangerous to children and old people, to innocent people in every part of the world — are being worshiped, exalted by the media, in a position to take a swing at all that is loveliest about this earth and what’s left of our precious freedoms. When I got home from church, I drank a bunch of water to metabolize the Dove bar and called my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too. I asked, “Don’t you think God finds these smug egomaniacs morally repellent? Recoils from their smugness as from hot flame?” And he said, “Absolutely. They are everything He or She hates in a Christian.” I have been in a better mood ever since, and have decided not to even say this woman’s name anymore, because she fills me with such existential doubt, such a sense of impending doom and disbelief, that only the Germans could possibly have words for it. Nor am I going to say the word “lipstick” again until after the election, as it would only be used against me. Or “polar bear,” because that one image makes me sadder…

HT: BOTW

The “McCain can’t send an email” ad from the Obama campaign is very odd. A campaign spokesman said: “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.” So they apparently believe what they’re saying.

Of course McCain supporters point out that, as the Boston Globe reported, “McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from…typing on a keyboard.” Back in 2000, he was called the “most cybersavvy,” of candidates, an “inveterate devotee of email,” who was “the Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist.”

So who is the ad aimed at? Is it aimed at young people, the ones that typically don’t vote but are said to be ready to do so this time? Are these the same young people who don’t know how to use “the Google” to check the veracity of the Obama ad? Glenn Reynolds called the ad “another unforced error from the Obama campaign.” Perhaps so.