I remember campaigning in Richmond for (I think Mark Warner) just after 9/11, and running across some affluent-looking, middle-class white dude who looked at me like I was crazy for working the election and said something about how we should all be coming together and avoiding partisanship at this time of national crisis.

Like, we should just cancel the election? Spoken like a Coward and a Republican.

I am the way, the truth, and the refrigerator light. Let me try to open myself. Uh-oh, there go my kidneys….

Conspiracy Theory?

  Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

  It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

  But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

The piece adds, “They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.”

“Civil unrest and crowd control?”

The protectiveness from McCain over Palin is getting absurd. I mean, I may think she doesn’t have the experience or policy positions for the job she’s campaigning for, but she’s still a seasoned politician. She’s dealt with the press. She’s not going to embarrass the campaign. I think Campbell Brown has a point. McCain’s treatment of her is getting really condescending and insulting. At first I thought they were just trying to play the expectations game. Make people think he was afraid she’d come to a press conference riding a snow machine and blasting a shotgun so when she came across as, ya know, a professional politician it’d be a victory. The same stuff Bush played with by getting people to expect he’d belonged in remedial civics so his ordinary performance looked like a huge victory. But we’re past that now. Now McCain just looks like he has no respect or trust in his running mate. Maybe he feels burned over his campaign’s failure to properly vet her, but he’s treating her like a child and that behavior merits some mention. I may think she’s an unacceptable candidate, but she’s still a seasoned politician. Her pre-politics career was in broadcasting, for gosh sakes. She knows how to present herself on camera. That McCain won’t let her do anything that isn’t heavily staged is pretty sexist at this point.

I mean, I may think she doesn’t have the experience or policy positions for the job she’s campaigning for, but she’s still a seasoned politician. She’s dealt with the press. She’s not going to embarrass the campaign.

Take a look at the Katie Couric interview a couple posts up from here.

That’s why they’re scared—because Palin makes Katie frickin’ Couric look like Mike Wallace during his “60 Minutes” heyday.

Aaaah! Rudy! Avert! Avert!

Every day I thank my lucky stars that Rudy “Fascist Monster” Giuliani has no executive governmental power.

. . .

Yet.

The Bush Economy

I was walking
down the isle
of the grocery store
and I heard
a little boy
ask his mother,

“Mommy,
can we buy
dog food
with
food stamps?”

This is good! Too good! It’s an open admission that Palin can’t thake the heat. She probably needs exra time to memorize the GRE’s top 100 hit list in case any of those big words come up in the debate.

Heck, I think they’re even afraid of how McCain might do. They are running scared and will do anything to avoid facing their opponents. The Obama campaign needs to depict it this way. If they’re too scared to face Obama how can they protect us from our enemies? I remember when I became an Obama supporter back in February and caucused for him here in TX. Obama was fearlelss, strong, and intelligent. He fought his wa to the top. He didn’t have any VP or admiral daddy who gave him anything. I respected his strength and Obama needs to show that strength. America is fearful. We are involved in wars we don’t understand anymore and the economy is on the verge of collapse. Obama needs t oshow he is colder, cruler, and more cunning than the Old Man and his Space Cadet. Sure this will alienate some voters, but they wouldnt’ have voted for Obama anyway.

Kick the old man in the nuts, have Biden put the Space Cadet in her place. This will demoralze marginal fear-based McCain supporters into staying home. For those of you who play Diplomacy: Obama’s at fifteen centers and faces a loose alliance holding 14 with a couple of stragglers holding the rest of the board. It’s currently a Spring turn and the next Fall turn will be the end of the game. What do you do? Strike as hard as you can and sow dissention among the alliance make the stragglers feel hopeless.

What is there to lose? The people who buy into the “upity nigger” thing think he’s an uppity nigger. They are useless. But some of those looking for a fearsome leader to protect us from the evils of the world just might stay home if Obama puts the beatdown on McCain.

I’m just getting more and more scared of two possible scenarios, either of which I would have laughed off six or eight months ago as tin-foil hat territory.

a. McCain-Palin wins/gets appointed by lawsuit. Palin steps down, either due to Troopergate, or citing personal family issues, or moose season back home. Some appropriately GOP-approved VP gets appointed. McCain becomes incapable of serving. VP takes over, appoints another GOP-approved VP.

b. McCain-Palin wins/gets appointed by lawsuit. McCain becomes incapable of serving. Some appropriately GOP-approved VP gets appointed.  Another puppet president with a Grand Vizier.

Anyone know if it is just semantics that Romney “suspended” his campaign back when he dropped out, or is there some mechanism in the GOP system that lets him charge in on a white horse just before the election if McCain drops out now for some reason?

Any Republican who talks about suspending the election has not looked at the rules closely enough.  Bush and Cheny *must* vacate office on January 21st.  Period, end of story.  If there’s noone in place to take office, it goes to Pelosi.  They could, of course, delay the election to sometime before then to try to get McCain into a better position, but if they want someone besides Pelosi in, they either have to hold it or try to commit what I think might be treason and hope noone stops them.
Okay, maybe I am scared.

she’s still a seasoned politician.

No, she’s not.  She’s a small-town mayor with a year or so of half-assed gubernatorial experience in a nowheresville underpopulated state thousands of miles from anywhere, with no real presence on the national or international stage.  My neighborhood officials are more seasoned politicians than she is.

She’s dealt with the press.

No, she hasn’t.  This is kind of hard to grasp if you’re from the East Coast or southern California, (or a major media market like Chicago or Atlanta), but the most she’s ever dealt with the press in the past is whatever local papers and TV affiliates hold sway in Alaska.  So, no, she doesn’t have experience with, say, a New York Times reporter or the Sunday morning political talk shows.

She’s not going to embarrass the campaign.

Yes, she is.  This is exactly why they’re keeping her so sequestered.  They know she doesn’t have the chops to do anything but give a basic stump speech.

Okay, just one more try…..dammit!

¨It’s an open admission that Palin can’t thake the heat.¨ Yes, it is, and since Palin´s supporters have, since her addition to the ticket, successfully tarnished serious questioning of her qualifications and policy positions as the media´s being mean(!), I have great confidence they will be able similarly to tarnish the insistence that she debate as scheduled. What do we really know about this candidate other than the secrecy and nepotism, courtesy of the creepy Sept. 12 NYT profile of her?