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By Kevin Phillips
$17.13
By Christopher Hitchens
$16.19
$13
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Flickr / IowaPolitics.com
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A campaign source tells the political rag that Joe Biden will avoid roughing up Sarah Palin during the debate Thursday, focusing his energies instead on John McCain. That might have something to do with a new poll, which suggests that most people think Biden will prove to be much more knowledgeable, but much less likeable.
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Choosing the winner of the first presidential debate proved to be a tough call, but Stephen Colbert has a few ideas about how to settle the issue, starting with John McCain’s staggering insights about the differences between various Asian populations around the world—and ending with the electrifying moment when McCain “reached out to the key swing vote ... reptiles!”
Posted on Sep 30, 2008
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By Marie Cocco — Americans are reluctant to make John McCain pay for George W. Bush’s sins, but with so many crises on so many fronts, the country can’t afford to cut him any slack.
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By Eugene Robinson — A new internal report confirms our fears about the politicization of the Justice Department. That same contempt for government can be found in the current financial crisis as well as the meteoric rise of the former mayor of Wasilla.
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Calling Sarah Palin’s recent interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric “the last straw,” Newsweek editor and columnist Fareed Zakaria tells Wolf Blitzer on Monday’s episode of “The Situation Room” that it’s not a matter of Palin not giving the right answer when faced with a complex question about the economy or foreign policy, “it’s that she clearly does not understand the question.”
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cbsnews.com
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There was so much excitement last week between the bailout showdown and the debate that many people didn’t get a chance to see Sarah Palin’s tailspin interview with Katie Couric. CBS, it turns out, has even more in store. The network will air at least two more embarrassing clips before Thursday’s VP debate.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — September began as John McCain’s month and ended as Barack Obama’s. McCain’s high-risk wagers aimed at shaking up the campaign turned into very bad investments. And Friday’s debate eliminated McCain’s best chance to deliver a knockout blow.
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By RJ Matson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch —
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Thankfully, Jim Lehrer wasn’t left at the moderator’s podium on Friday, as both Barack Obama and John McCain showed up for their scheduled presidential debate at the University of Mississippi to field questions about the economy and foreign policy.
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AP photo / Chip Somodevilla, pool
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By Bill Boyarsky — Was he too calm? Did he pull his punches in an effort to look presidential? Not really. The viewers got a clear choice: a reasoned and reasonable Obama versus an old-fashioned Cold Warrior who would keep us in Iraq endlessly and extend the boundaries we must defend to Georgia and Ukraine.
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washingtonpost.com
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John McCain has caved as expected and will debate Barack Obama in Mississippi. But rather than give his opponent a chance to win, McCain is already claiming victory. The whole saga has left a bad taste in Mike Huckabee’s mouth.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain’s sudden intervention in Washington’s deliberations over the Wall Street bailout could not have been more out of sync with what was actually happening.
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain is rapidly making his temperament an inescapable issue in the presidential campaign. Does the nation really want so much drama in the White House?
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By Marie Cocco — The candidates heading into Friday’s scheduled debate should heed the politician who first conquered the format, John F. Kennedy, who believed that the images portrayed via TV were “likely to be uncannily correct.”
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Was this the plan all along? CNN reports that Team McCain wants the first presidential debate to “take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday” if there’s no bailout deal by Friday.
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Flickr / soggydan
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Citing the financial crisis, John McCain announced Wednesday that he’d like to skip Friday’s debate so he can put on his senator hat and get back to work in Washington. Unimpressed, Rep. Barney Frank called the idea “the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys.” Update
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By Marie Cocco — Obama shows more promise than McCain, if only because he correctly sees deregulatory zeal as a culprit. But Obama’s economic strategy simply can’t be implemented now: He wants to spend on necessary investments such as health care, but would have no money to do it.
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By Eugene Robinson — There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year—lacking ideas, programs or values—John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain’s campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States.
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AP photo / Matt Rourke
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By Chris Hedges — St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
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Sarah Palin and Joe Biden will go head to head on Oct. 2, but if you can’t wait to see how McCain’s No. 2 handles herself in rhetorical combat, take a look at this 2006 Alaska gubernatorial debate. There’s a lot for Democrats to be worried about here.
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By Marie Cocco — I long for a candidate who would ‘‘focus like a laser beam’’ on the economy. That’s what voters are doing as they see their paychecks shrink from inflation, their jobs threatened and their middle-class dreams diminished.
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By Marie Cocco — In this summer of our economic discontent, it isn’t necessary to manufacture a financial crisis or to make political hash out of discussing a nonexistent one.
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By Ellen Goodman — For a long time, John McCain has believed that Vietnam should have, could have had a different ending. So, too, his attention on Iraq has been less on the war’s origin than on some undefined victorious conclusion.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.
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By William Pfaff — A basic argument in Washington’s war on terror, an argument that one might think settled by now, concerns whether al-Qaida is the powerful global organization the Bush administration says it is or whether it has been, since its retreat into the Pakistan tribal areas, mostly an Internet phenomenon.
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popwatch.ew.com
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NBC News will keep its Sunday lineup intact by giving Brian Williams a temporary stint as host of “Meet the Press,” replacing the late Tim Russert for the time being. Because Russert and Williams teamed up for the Jan. 15 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, many viewers might be primed to make the transition along with Williams.
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By David Sirota — Some say Hillary Clinton’s defeat was the victory of sexism—but Obama faced at least as much racism. No, this resounding defeat goes beyond pernicious isms and beyond one candidate—it is a fist-pounding rejection of a corrupt ideology.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Delaware senator should be at the top of any list of vice presidential picks for Obama. Why Biden? Few Democrats know more about foreign policy, and few would so relish the fight against McCain on international affairs.
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By Eugene Robinson — The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts has rejected a statue intended to stand at the memorial of Martin Luther King. The members expected a more passive depiction. Clearly the commission has some brushing up to do on American history.
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AP photo / Maya Alleruzzo
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By John Cheney-Lippold — On the fifth anniversary of George W. Bush’s infamous stroll across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, The New York Times asked a group of “experts” how they would accomplish the mission in Iraq. Unfortunately, the newspaper turned to some of the same geniuses who thought the war was a good idea in the first place.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — This is supposed to be a big election, but it has given every sign in recent weeks of becoming a small one. As a result, the public and the media are showing signs of exhaustion with what had once been an exhilarating contest.
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Flickr / Jurvetson / World Economic Forum
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Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker quotes a Bill Clinton aide explaining why there has been so much tension between the former president and Barack Obama: “I think this campaign has enraged him. ... He doesn’t like Obama.” Why? Here’s one theory: While Hillary Clinton has adopted her husband’s legacy, Barack Obama has been assailing it.
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By David Sirota — If television is the nation’s mirror, then no two TV characters reflect the intensifying “two Americas” gap better than Chris Matthews and “The Wire’s” Jimmy McNulty.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The result of the 2008 election may come down to how voters decide to define Barack Obama. Is he Adlai Stevenson or John F. Kennedy? Updated.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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By Bill Boyarsky — Journalists are famous for their dogged drive to “get the story.” But when it comes to situations like Wednesday’s campaign debate in Philadelphia, they have the ability to make stories, too—and the story ABC’s pundits created that night buried the most important issues of the day, at Americans’ expense.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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Why were so many journalists so aggravated by the latest presidential debate? According to Politico scribes John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, it wasn’t about George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson’s less substantive questions—instead, the problem was that “this time there were more hard questions for Obama than for Clinton.”
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By Eugene Robinson — Once the meaningless inquisition about loose semantics and questionable acquaintances was done, Wednesday night’s debate between Obama and Clinton got interesting.
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AP photo / Matt Rourke
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The Democrats met in Philadelphia Wednesday night for their 21st and probably finally debate. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales was horrified by what he saw, but not because of the candidates: “For the first 52 minutes ... Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news.”
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Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films is behind this ad targeting Condoleezza Rice for her role in the Bush administration’s torture policy. The 30-second spot is set to air following Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Philadelphia.
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By Eugene Robinson — Hillary “Shot-and-a-Beer” Clinton has given us the perfect illustration of what’s so insane about American politics: the philosophical dictum that could be summed up (with apologies to Descartes) as “I seem, therefore I am.”
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By Eugene Robinson — No, it’s not your imagination: The “debate” about Iraq, and I use the word loosely, becomes ever more surreal as the occupation drags on.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The problem with the debate over our future course in Iraq is that the two sides are not even talking about the same things.
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By Amy Goodman — The American Psychological Association is in the midst of its own heated presidential campaign. The central issue is whether APA members should be banned from participating in “harsh interrogations.”
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Washington Post / Karen Ballard
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A recently declassified memo shines the spotlight once again on John “Take Them to the Point of Death” Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor and once deputy legal counsel in the Justice Department.
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businessweek.com
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With 20 debates between the Democratic candidates already in the books, and another scheduled before the Pennsylvania primary, it’s a little hard to believe that CBS News hasn’t yet had the opportunity to ask a few gotcha questions of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Katie Couric may just get the chance.
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