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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Macsmind:

Again, quoting Dr. King.

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The left, not the right, has ignored this dream from the beginning of Obama’s run. They - not the right - asked “Is Obama Black Enough”, and refererred to him as “The Magic Negro”. They have exclusively made his race - exclusive. In fact when Hillary dropped out, the leftist media touted him as the “First Black Presidential Candidate”. In the dream of King it doesn’t matter what color his skin is, absolutely none.

Yet it goes deeper than that. The historical party of racism, who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights legislation, is now flipping it around and plans to use Obama’s race as shield to cover him from his lack of “character”. We’ve seen this numerous times every time someone has the audacity to bring up one of his ever growing gaffes. Watch the next time - and since he has about one a week it shouldn’t be long - he has a gaffe, and is called on it, how the left throws out the “race” card to claim he’s being picked on.

Not to interrupt this sage and yet, somehow, utterly mistaken take on Martin Luther King Jr., but the point of that statement wasn’t that one day, black people will assume that all judgment of them is based on the content of their character rather than their skin color, but rather that the judgment of them would actually one day be wholly and legitimately based on the full content of their character.  If King wanted to do the It’s All Good Tour of 1964, he could have.  But that was never the point.

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Lindsey Graham is threatening the fifty-second Republican constitutional amendment of the past ten years because habeas corpus was upheld.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) vowed Thursday to do everything in his power to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision on Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying that, “if necessary,” he would push for a constitutional amendment to modify the decision.

A former military prosecutor, Graham blasted the decision as “irresponsible and outrageous,” echoing the sentiments of many congressional Republicans and President Bush.

I would love it if some intrepid Republican would produce the New Republican Constitution.  It would be interesting to see a bold reimagining of the founding document of our nation if a third of it was about nothing but penises, sales taxes and Arabs.

Yessssss…it’s nice to see the case of Glenn Murphy, Jr. resolved during the campaign season. It’s a reminder that the GOP ranks are rife with Republican Sexual Hypocrites, perpetrating their sexual and criminal deviant behavior while presenting a pious, judgmental image to the public. (Courier-Journal):

The former chairman of the Clark County Republican Party pleaded guilty today to criminal deviate conduct as part of an agreement that could result in two years behind bars.

Glenn Murphy Jr. was arrested after authorities said he performed oral sex on a sleeping man following a July 28 party at a home in Jeffersonville.

...Murphy, who was also chairman of the Young Republican National Federation, resigned from both posts when the allegations were made public in August.

At the time of the criminal sexual activity, Murphy was at a party and spent the night on the top bunk in one of the bedrooms. At some point the predatory former Republican official decided to take advantage of the 22-year-old man in the lower bunk and

The man said he awoke at 6:40 the next morning and found Murphy performing oral sex on him, according to the document.

The man told Burton that he pushed Murphy away and left. Two days later, the affidavit said, the man met with Murphy and secretly taped a conversation during which Murphy apologized and begged him not to report the incident to police.

I don’t know what Murphy thought was going to happen; after all, it wasn’t the first time Murphy’s mouth ended up on someone’s privates while they were asleep. He had a prior arrest for sexual battery. Here’s the 1998 Clark County police report for your perusal (click to enlarge):

Ah, schadenfreude.

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.

Kos has Obama’s birth certificate.  Chuckie J and the Boyz are wondering if they can kern a motherfucker up in this piece. 

The fact that they can’t isn’t stopping other intrepid souls from attempting to cast doubt on an official government document that not only shows he’s Qadaffi bin Laden Obama, but he’s Terrorist McNasty Obama the Second.

Suitably Flip is angry that this incomplete document doesn’t testify to the marital state of Obama’s parents under Allah.

The National Review, apparently deciding that all the questions which needed answering are now irrelevant, now ask another question: what if there was another document based on the exact same information as this one, but different, and Obama’s name was Barack Durham?

This is going to be the best election ever.

P.S.: Should anyone from the Obama campaign be reading this, I’d love to be on your media list.  Pretty please?

UPDATE: Psst - Larry Johnson isn’t a liberal blogger.  He’s an anti-Bush Republican with a fanatical devotion to Hillary Clinton.

Melanie Phillips, begging for adult underwear:

We are entitled therefore to ask whether the Muslim world supports [Obama] because it believes he is still a Muslim.

I might actually take these people seriously if they could convince me they’d ever gotten closer to a Muslim than the movie Aladdin.

DJW’s round-up of National Review’s Campaign Spot blog is pretty hysterical.  The right wing noise machine is a fascinating thing to watch, because as hostile as some wingnuts are to the theory of evolution, they’re sure fond of natural selection when it comes to honing their campaign smears.  By which I mean, they throw a bunch of shit up on the wall and see what sticks, and often it seems almost randomly generated, with the hopes that what works best will survive through, you guessed it, natural selection. 

But evolution isn’t as random as it seems, and neither is the right wing noise machine.  For relatively bright liberals like DJW, some of the smears against Obama being generated seem kind of pointless and empty, but I propose that we should fear them more, because what seems like ripe nonsense to us often resonates with some of the more paranoid, right wing parts of the nation.  At first blush, it might seem like the immediately infamous “fist bump incident” will turn into an embarrassment for wingnuts, but I fear it’s actually going to turn into one of those legends that lives on with those in the Bircher mindset forever.  After reading Nixonland and interviewing Rick Perlstein about the book (which will be on the podcast next week), I think I’ve got an even better idea about what kind of things capture the imagination of the paranoid people out there who, unfortunately, still vote, and because many of the Goldwater/Bircher types are cranky elderly people, they vote in far greater numbers than pretty much any other demographic.  Plus, the post-9/11 wingnut reaping has created an entirely new generation of Birchers that are of the Boomer generation or worse, like Jeff Goldstein and are Gen Xers, and as such will be around for fucking forever.

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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!)

I’m not sure why conservatives keep bringing up the “but this woulda been a senior moment for McCain!” specter when it comes to what they perceive are Barack Obama gaffes (and what actually appear to be some guy behind him continually talking through his speech).  The most famous version of the media harping on “senior moments” is Fox News’ 64-year-old Brit Hume attempting to excuse a McCain flub, which would seem to sort of counteract the idea of McCain’s base going after him.

I remember when Marc Ambinder did this a couple of months back, too.  It’s one thing to declare that something McCain did shouldn’t be declared a senior moment (I’m of the full belief that he has the ability to fuck up just as well as a man half his age), but the idea that you can simply create a press corps ravenously scouring for any hint of McCain’s age peeking through and triumphantly bumping genocides and floods off the front page to blare out “This Motherfucker Is OLD!  O-L-D!” is beyond ridiculous.

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.

OMFG. Echidne posted a link to blinkytreefrog, who found a book from about 1951 called “On Becoming A Woman”.  Which is very fortuitous, as the Human Life Alliance has put a PDF of their abstinence-only rags “Just For Girls” and “Just For Boys”, which are similar to this 1951 book to the degree that they could be plagiarists.  Except I think that woman-hating, sex-phobic nuts basically eat and shit this stuff, so it’s less plagiarism and more the fiber of their beings.  Shall we do a dance of comparison?

1951:

2008:

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There’s a very simple way to explain David Broder.

Bill Clinton ruined the moral fabric of his nation.

George W. Bush ruined the moral fabric of some other shithole.

If you’re not reading the Abstinence Clearinghouse’s website, then you’re really missing out.  Here’s a typical deep thought post:

It’s amazing to me that “no” happens to be one of the first words in a child’s vocabulary.  Yet, when they get to be older, the word simply goes out of their head when it comes to their sexual integrity and, just as important, their sexual health.

I say no to abstinence.  This must cause HotMama the sort of mind-blowing pain that causes you to just get up and change the music in hopes everyone forgets before you return to your beanbag chair, man.

One simple word can separate them years of physical pain and other effects of STD’s as well as unwanted pregnancy.

“Condom”?  Usually it takes more than that, like, “They’re in the top drawer.” 

I don’t think HotMama at the Abstinence Clearinghouse should waste her preciously few working brain cells coming up with these nuggets.  There’s a whole website full of profundities she can cut and paste.

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

Better not take a dog on the space shuttle, because if he sticks his head out when you’re coming home his face might burn up.

...let my Clenis go.