David Brooks has done yeoman’s work and given us the origin story of dear Blackazoid.

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

That Blackazoid - always foolin’ us by not screaming simple words.  It’s the secret to his power, not talking loudly and scaring white people.  Damn Brooks’ Luthoresque mind!

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

No.  I actually flat out fucking refuse to do that.

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Peggy Noonan writes.  I apologize in advance.

2008 will prove in part to be a decisive political contest between the Dichotomy I Just Created.  Between the thing I wanted to make a point about, and other thing which is the opposite of what I wanted to make a point about.  (I’m not referring here to what you think I’m obviously referring to; some people break the dichotomy enough to prove that the dichotomy is valid.)

Mr. McCain is the thing I wanted to make a point about, of course; Mr. Obama is the other thing.

Roughly, broadly:

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A truly bizarre last line from George Will’s otherwise totally phoned-in Friday column:

Assuming, not rashly, that Barack Obama wins, 2016 is the next time Hillary Clinton, who will then be 68, can seek the Democratic nomination. By then, the median age of the electorate will be 47, so for many millions of voters, Bill Clinton’s tenure will seem only slightly less distant than Grover Cleveland’s, the last Democratic presidency that did not make sensible citizens wince.

Of all the things to sneak into the end of a column, an FDR jibe?  And it’s good to see he’s taking the Grover Cleveland line straight off of the McCain campaign’s blast telegram.

Just visit their groups, and you can talk about politics and faith with the white

moderate

liberal, race with the one black dude…or conservatism with Ramesh Ponnuru.

You should never have to ask yourself why these people hire Anne Applebaum.

(By the way, thanks to the fine folks at the Apple Store at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, MI for fixing my laptop!)

Perhaps the reason that we’re in such a debt crunch these days isn’t because we’re all weak-minded simpletons who look at the national debt and say, “I want me some of that!”, but instead a system which is designed at virtually every corner to maximize the burden on debtor to the benefit of the lender?

Modern debt falls into what I call the cascade of ratfucking.  Debt often begins or amasses because of bad decisions, but is then amplified by a system which makes every bad decision exponentially worse.  You miss one payment, you then pay fees and a higher interest rate on both the fees and the debt you already had (and which you amassed at a lower rate).  You pay the increased payment, but because your bank takes out deposits before crediting withdrawals, you get overdraft fees because even though the money came out on payday, the deposit went in at close of business.  If you have overdraft protection, you paid the fee from your savings account or the finance charges on your card to save yourself from paying the other fee if it was simply a regular overdraft.

This, of course, is if you even have a checking account, and don’t have to pay to cash your check, pay for the money orders necessary to pay your bills (because nobody takes cash), pay the extra fees to process your payment in person, and deal with the late fees from juggling bills month-to-month. 

As much as David Brooks would like to think we’ve turned debt into some sort of perverse, socially rewarded virtue, we haven’t.  Granted, we did have the great APR-Off of 2004, but when we tried to hold it the next year, nobody had the room on their card to put down the deposit at Rent-A-Center for the TV.

Applebee’s doesn’t have a salad bar.

It does serve arugula, though.

He’s just all loathy and whatnot.

Military service is on Bill Kristol’s mind today.  It is, as you’d expect, wonderfully asinine.

There’s another part of the op-ed that leapt out at me, though - we already know Barack Obama hates the military, being a terrorist and a Democrat and all.  But Bill Kristol engages in my favorite form of Republican crotchetism, the “You Broke People Are Secretly Rich” maneuver.

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