"And let's face it, how excited is everyone now for the next debate between Joe "When FDR Was on Television" Biden and Sarah "Alaska Is Next to Russia" Palin? Less than a week to go ..."

What is the point of a debate between Biden & Palin? Everything he says, no matter how absurd, inappropriate or historically deluded, is okay and everything she says that isn't flawlessly sharp is headlined, along for calls for her to withdraw?

There is no point to a debate. Just feather and tar her and not waste our time with the pretense that what the VP candidates actually say relates to how they are judged.

Obama supporter here. I give creds to McCain's people for prepping him to go on the attack. It worked well. He hit the usual half-truths and lies with strength, kept it simple, kept it sentimental, and most likely won over a lot of previously "unaware of what's been going on in the campaign" folks.

Obama presented himself as brilliant, analytical and enormously capable, but in his failing pretty much across the board, to go after McCain in the same rather simplistic way McCain went after him, he was a bust. He does not come across warm or emotional, although he is most likely both at times.

He needs to remember that most people who appreciate his intellectual background have already made up their minds; it's the ones who go more on gut and "is he one of us?" thinking that he will lose, unless he loosens up and plays dirty, like the other side always does.

Can he? And in the next debate, will he go after McCain's erratic behavior, past illnesses and refusal to release his medical records, and the distinctly cynical, decidedly unpatriotic choice of Sarah Palin? Time will tell.

Obama was suppose to win the foreign policy part of the debate? Ben, you are the only person I have heard say that Obama was suppose to win that issue. I am sure that will also be a surprise to McCain since he has positioned it as his strong suit. In any case the debate was inconclusive, and according to the vast majority of pundits the tie goes to Obama since this was suppose to be McCains home turf issue.

The consensus is on dead trees. Fire and firewood. The Internet is chaos and the paper is order. We need both and can live without the one, but not the other.

The McCain campaign has spent the past two months of advertising trying to convince independent voters that Obama is nothing but a celebrity rock star devoid of substance.

Judging by the polls among independent voters that followed this debate, the Republicans just blew two months worth of advertising money.

I would like to point out that while it is hardly a systematic poll, the Wall Street Journal's query about who won puts Obama up 10-15%.

One presumes a majority of the WSJ's online readers are conservative.

Did you notice McCain never once looked at Obama even though the Lehrer format urged them to both to go at it face-to-face? Obama took him on several times but the old man just wouldn't look him in the eye. Now that's what I consider detached, diper. Or maybe he was just afraid of being thrown off his rigid spin script and his rote emotional tirades by the young man's smile enticing him to a real one-on-one debate.

"And let's face it, how excited is everyone now for the next debate between Joe "When FDR Was on Television" Biden and Sarah "Alaska Is Next to Russia" Palin? "

I bet there'll be a big audience to see who will be taking over from McCain when he strokes out (or dies - estimated 1 in 3 to 1 in 6 actuarial chances of that). Also there's the Palin "hot" factor. And the sheer titillation of seeing a heavy Christian talking-in-tongues god-makes-me-do-it ideologue this close to being the commander of the world's most aggressive and massive military and largest array of "take you out surgically, Tehran" nukes.

What a worthless column!

Note how the author presents totally anecdotal evidence that so and so did good on such and such sections of the debate. Then, he lets it slip that there were quickie "grain-of-salt" (???) polls indicating that Obama did better, without even bothering to report the actual results of these polls, which showed Obama winning by very large margins (52% to 39% and 40% to 22%).

He might also have considered the "fact-checking" reports, all of which showed McCain to make many, many more mistakes and misrepresentations than Obama.

From:
Head of State
http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/09/anger-entitlement-and-contempt.html

Saturday, September 27, 2008
What A Debate Reveals: Anger, Entitlement and Contempt

What I found shocking reflecting on last night's debate was how angry and entitled McCain was, in a very open way.

McCain's manner was one of that who believed he should not even be on the same stage with this person. This indicates a person of extreme rights and extreme wrongs, not a statesmanlike persona, but an angry and impulsive one.

McCain carries strong ideas of what a liberal is, ideas that very little from his cherished ideas of who betrayed the nation during the Vietnam war. A stock character, driven and created by his own rage, carried, as it has been since the '70s, with a virtual ideological blindness--blinded by a contemptuous rage--that there are others who cannot understand the world the way he can. This is not judgment, but angry certainty. This is not readiness, but a just-contained rage that he should be confronted by such ideas.

You can see it in his constricted "can you believe it" rage at one who disagrees with him. This kind of contemptuous, angry dismissal of others ideas leads easily into the impulsive decisions of the last few months--generated with barely contained contemptuous rejection of those who would reject his ideas--only the most recent forms of those essential constructs--a contemptible media, easily fed with false notions and panaceas, as he believes they were earlier in his life; intellectuals, whose reason and deliberation is contrasted with the sharp, impulsive action that for his life has constituted a certain knowledge, and an angry, certain need to sweep away those who would stand in the path of righteous certainty.

What is beautifully ironic is how McCain maintains this contempt even as he switches from one position to another in the opportunistic second--this is when the look of contempt and entitlement turns, for a moment, to anxiety and panic.

Soon, however, the gaze is back. No matter what the new position is--impulsively determined, desperately grasped--if only "they" knew better. If only "they" knew the truth.

This kind of ideological rigidity and certainty (note how Obama could not contain himself from smiling when McCain attempted to compare him to Bush in that regard) combined with impulsive decision making, from the "gut" of sure knowledge, is what has created the outcomes of the past 8 years.

It was--in a setting where one would not expect it to be, where one would expect McCain to contain it--glaring apparent last night.

This is an amplification of the last 8 years rather than a change.

We do not need to experience this type of decision making again.

Cite:
Head of State
http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/09/anger-entitlement-and-contempt.html