Simon Dumenco isn’t all that excited about the economic meltdown, and he points a finger at—who else?—the media for its hysterical trumpeting of the “crisis” now that it’s upon us and its failure over the years to report on the hazards of high finance and Wall Street.

Really, you could argue that Wall Street, during the subprime boom, was simply doing its job: getting away with what it could get away with. (Hey, if regulators were willing to turn a blind eye to the dubious profiteering and financial smoke-and-mirrors … well, if the government says it’s OK, it’s OK, right?) But you can’t say the same for much of the press, which spent a lot of time over the past few years celebrating the feats of financial “wizards” — and not enough time peeking behind the curtains and questioning the too-good-to-be-true magic.

Granted, there’s been increased sensitivity in the past couple weeks among some media in regard to, at least, semantics. For instance, in The New York Times last week in a piece titled, “Amid Market Turmoil, Some Journalists Try to Tone Down Emotion,” Richard Pérez-Peña noted that some reporters are steering clear of terms such as “meltdown” and “panic” to avoid further inflaming an already-twitchy market.

Don’t get me wrong: Politely tip-toeing through the apocalypse after the fact is a nice gesture! But it hardly makes up for the fact that few financial journalists really questioned the meaning and ramifications of toxic Wall Street voodoo such as “credit-default swaps” and such until it was way, way too late.

No one has been covered in glory since this meltdown began to show its ugly face—least of all our elected representatives, beginning with Bush, who is clearly out of his depth and “out of juice,” according to David Brooks, who is being way too kind.

I certainly agree with Dumenco that the MSM comes in for a lot of the blame, but irrational exuberance is a widely known human weakness.

In early January, as Obama was ascending, I wrote:

… mundus vult decipi. (You could look it up.)

People want to believe in magic, as P.T. Barnum, for one, knew.

Despite its prominence in Barnum lore, historians agree that he probably never said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” What he said was less cynical and more astute: “The people like to be humbugged.”

The Times piece from which I took the quote above goes on to note:

Barnum humbugged the highbrow as well as the low. In 1850 he brought the opera diva Jenny Lind, “the Swedish Nightingale,” to Manhattan for the start of an American tour. Neither he nor anyone else in America had heard her sing a note.

“Jenny Lind’s story is perhaps Barnum’s single most extraordinary accomplishment,” Ms. Maher said, “because he took something that was absolutely nothing in American society and created a frenzy, a mania, very much equivalent to today’s rock stars.” [e.a.]

People with their feet on the ground should always know how to protect their interests, even in times of irrational exuberance. Maybe that’s what we have to teach both our children and the nation’s “journalists”—how to reason. Now that we’re enmeshed in a world of 24/7 deceptive and/or ignorant “news” and marketing and advertising, this seems more important than ever

A Chicago artist is obsessed with Sarah Palin—and not necessarily in a good way.

“I’ve been following her religiously,” [Bruce Elliott] said Monday at the bar. “I had never heard of her before, like everyone else. I find her bizarrely fascinating, even though I pretty much despise everything she stands for.”

You will know her name. He will make her even more famous.

No, I haven’t decided to quit blogging (though I’m tempted). I’m saying farewell to a paper that has livened my days considerably over the last few years–most especially in its arts coverage, but also in its editorial voice (which I didn’t often agree with, but I admired those who were willing to stand up and speak their mind even at the cost of social marginalization and ridicule).

Thanks for the memories!

With partisanship having infected most pundits and commentators, it’s rare to read a straight, informative news report. This one, however, struck me as refreshing and as worth noting for its pointed observations about substantive differences between the candidates positions and worldviews:

For all the startling news about the state of the financial markets preceding the first presidential debate Friday night, it was the state of the world that actually produced the drama, tension and real differences between the two men who would be president. …

Sen. McCain defended the war in Iraq; Sen. Obama gave no ground in condemning it as a waste of blood and treasure.

Sen. McCain said the U.S. will exit Iraq with honor and dignity. Sen. Obama said the conflict has cost 4,000 lives needlessly and imperiled the broader war against terrorism. Sen. McCain said Obama policies would have produced defeat in Iraq. Sen. Obama said McCain policies produced years of flailing and bloodshed there.

Yep, the election is about real things, and real challenges, and really scary potential scenarios. Everybody got so caught up in the Bill-hates-Obama aspect of the faux mini-drama that played out last week that they missed the point Clinton was trying to make during his media tour last week. It was captured at the very end of a very snarky article in yesterday’s New York Times [e.a.]:

The night after his appearance on Mr. Letterman’s show, Mr. Clinton was on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” where Mr. Stewart defended him against the charge of aloofness and suggested that the only way to satisfy some Obama supporters would be “to get a tattoo or some type of permanent bumper sticker” placed on his person.

Without smiling, Mr. Clinton said: “The purpose of this election is not for people to pass emotional hurdle tests. This is not a Rorschach test. This is about winning an election that can change the future of the country.”

Yes, that’s true. But politicians are forced to compete for the attention of voters where they live, and most people live in CluelessLand. They have much more pressing concerns and engagements in their daily lives than following politics! And when they do tune in, it’s to InfotainmentLand, an all-entertainment-all-the-time media environment, so it’s not surprising that they would react to the “news” stories about politics as if it were all a big joke.

Though, of course, the entire Congress is treating America’s collective economic future as if it were a big joke.

I had a poster of him on my wall all during high school.

And back when I was a diehard movie fan, I loved him in this period:

Honesty compels me to say that he was not a great actor. But he strived (and strived and strived) to be one, as documented in 1955 by Eve Arnold:

And he was uncommonly generous with the wealth he acquired through movie stardom, setting a great example for future generations of Hollywood stars with a conscience.

Apart from the mischievous look in his eye, what I liked most about him was his plain talk:

Paul Newman on acting:
“Study your craft and know who you are and what’s special about you. Find out what everyone does on a film set, ask questions and listen. Make sure you live life, which means don’t do things where you court celebrity, and give something positive back to our society.”

Paul Newman on marriage:
“I’ve repeatedly said that for people who have as little in common as Joanne and myself, we have an uncommonly good marriage. We are actors. We make pictures and that’s about all we have in common. Maybe that’s enough. Wives shouldn’t feel obligated to accompany their husbands to a ball game, husbands do look a bit silly attending morning coffee breaks with the neighborhood wives when most men are out at work. Husbands and wives should have separate interests, cultivate different sets of friends and not impose on the other. You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each other’s necks.”

Amen, brother. Thanks for the memories, and rest in peace.

NICHOLAS ROBERTS/AFP/Getty Images

Demonstrators protest the proposed $700 billion Wall Street bail-out in front of the New York Stock Exchange in the Financial District in New York on September 25, 2008. In response to the global financial crisis, protesters, from a variety of activist groups, denounced the capitalist system, Wall Street, and the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush

(via Foreign Policy’s Passport blog)

related post (in which rage against “corporate motherfuckers” turns literally murderous)

Somewhere in between impotent rage and murderous rage lies the appropriate amount of rage about those things that are so unfair and that we cannot control.

All of it: the election, the financial meltdown, and the blogospheric and cable-yakker hysteria. I’ve had it.

And in case you’re interested, I think McCain-Palin will win.

Toodles!

In India, when they get mad at corporate creeps, they off the motherfuckers:

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers

Corporate India is in shock after a mob of sacked workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who had dismissed them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi.

Lalit Kishore Choudhary, 47, the head of the Indian operations of Graziano Transmissioni, an Italian-headquartered manufacturer of car parts, died of severe head wounds on Monday afternoon after being attacked by scores of laid-off employees, police said.

The incident, in Greater Noida, just outside the Indian capital, followed a long-running dispute between the factory’s management and workers who had demanded better pay and permanent contracts.

At the end of last week, the MSM gave a collective sigh of relief to find poll results that showed Sarah Palin’s star had dimmed.

What’s that? She drew a crowd of 60,000 in Florida on Saturday?

The Villages, a vast, upscale planned community north of Orlando, has about 70,000 mostly adult residents — many of them military retirees — who vote reliably Republican in statewide races. Tens of thousands inched along roads into the picturesque town square of the complex, where they stood in sweltering heat for about four hours as local GOP officials and a country band revved up the crowd.

“Sa-Rah! Sa-Rah!” they chanted at every mention of her name, applauding loudly and waiving tiny American flags that were distributed — along with free water bottles — by local volunteers. The fire chief estimated the crowd at 60,000.

Admiring throngs mobbed the Palin family’s arrival and departure, snapping souvenir pictures. Autograph seekers thrust campaign signs, caps with the McCain-Palin logo and copies of magazines with her face on their covers, and the Palins responded warmly.

In its headline, CNN refers to a crowd of “thousands.” Inside the piece, the number 60,000 is mentioned.

Though the audience was one of the Palin’s largest to date, the actual size of the crowd was unclear. According Mike Tucker, the fire chief of The Villages who was made available to the press by the McCain campaign, 60,000 people crammed into the streets to see Palin speak.

“There were people down the side streets, people down in the parking areas, people who couldn’t quite make it around to the main areas,” Tucker said, adding that many people were let into the rally without tickets, making the crowd count impossible to verify.

The enthusiastic crowd welcomed Palin with shouts of “USA!,” and she chanted back along with them. As in many of her speeches, Palin promised that hard-working Americans will dig the country out of its current economic woes, lacing her remarks with fulsome praise for the nation’s industrious spirit. She used the words “America” or “Americans” 24 times during her 22-minute speech.

Polls, schmolls.

The genie is out of the bottle.

I can’t believe I have to live through another election stolen by the Republicans … ’cause you do know that’s what’s gonna happen, right?

Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham do, and they’re trying to make sure that their do-nothing colleagues in Congress take note of America’s successes in that godforsaken land. Nothing doing, say the Dems [e.a.]:

The Senators — allies of John McCain — had hoped to attach the resolution to a defense bill under consideration this week. But Mr. Reid wouldn’t allow it. Democrats have often claimed that while they may oppose the war in Iraq, they wholeheartedly support the troops. That’s a defensible position, and this resolution honoring our soldiers and Marines for a job well done gave them a chance to back up their rhetoric. Yet they still balked.

The reality is that success in Iraq has confounded the political left, which placed a huge political bet on our defeat. Senator Reid famously declared the war lost in April 2007. Joe Biden introduced a resolution opposing the surge. And Hillary Clinton said the reports of progress in Iraq required “a willing suspension of disbelief.” In the Democratic narrative, our troops in Iraq are victims of a lost cause, not heroes. They’re allowed to get maimed and killed, but not to succeed.

Thus Democrats are left to argue that success in Iraq is irrelevant because the real fight against al Qaeda is occurring in Afghanistan. Or that the reduced violence in Iraq has resulted not from the troop surge but from the Sunni Awakening and the retreat of the Sadr militias.

Sound familiar? It should, because E. L. Doctorow and Howard Zinn expressed exactly this view when confronted with incontrovertible proof that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged. That truth is irrelevant, those stalwarts of the Old Left claim, because the real fight is against the American government, which overreacted in 1953 and which has forever since been considered guilty even when proven only a little bit guilty.

Isn’t it so much simpler to admit the truth? to be intellectually honest?

I call my blog Infotainment Rules, and I have great fun here at the expense of the cretins and clowns who make their living in front of the cameras of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, but when I actually think about the repercussions of the three ring circus that is American television and of the serious media’s whitewash of inconvenient truths (and its simultaneous hyping of convenient exaggerations) , it scares me a little and it pisses me off a whole lot.

The media is willfully spreading ignorance and covering up the truth with lies.

In case you missed SecDef Robert Gates’s wonderful speech delivered at Oxford last week, I recommend that you read it. Here’s a highlight:

To manage diverse challenges in the years ahead, we – America and Europe together – will need strength and solidarity such as we have demonstrated in the past. Our policies and responses must show a mixture of resolve and restraint – the proverbial arrows and olive branches of Truman’s eagle. To be firm but not fall into a pattern of rhetoric or actions that create self-fulfilling prophecies; to heed the lessons of both 1914 and 1938 but not be trapped by them.

We need to be careful about the commitments we make, but we must be willing to keep commitments once made.

Yes, that sounds about right. Deliciously, when the New York Times reported on Gates’s speech yesterday, underscoring how the West understands that the Russians have legitimate interests, etc., etc., and how we in the West should in general avoid extremes of both force (as in WWI) and restraint (as in WWII), the article ended with this short paragraph [e.a.]:

Mr. Gates spoke here after a separate meeting in London on Friday with the Czech defense minister. The two signed a declaration of strategic defense cooperation and a status of forces agreement for stationing American personnel in the Czech Republic as part of a missile defense radar site, a plan that has outraged Russia.

Now, that is speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Long live SecDef Gates, and may he have a worthy successor!

—-

related post

Writing in the L.A. Times last week, Ronald Radosh said that it’s about time for the left to own up to the fact that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged and that it’s time for the right to own up to the miscarriage of justice in the case of Ethel.

The left has consistently defended spies such as Hiss, the Rosenbergs and Sobell as victims of contrived frame-ups. Because a demagogue like Sen. Joseph McCarthy cast a wide swath with indiscriminate attacks on genuine liberals as “reds” (and even though McCarthy made some charges that were accurate), the anti anti-communists came to argue that anyone accused by McCarthy or Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover should be assumed to be entirely innocent. People like Hiss (a former State Department official who was accused of spying) cleverly hid their true espionage work by gaining sympathy as just another victim of a smear attack.

But now, with Sobell’s confession of guilt, that worldview has been demolished.

In the 1990s, when it was more than clear that the Rosenbergs had been real Soviet spies — not simply a pair of idealistic left-wingers working innocently for peace with the Russians — one of the Rosenberg’s sons, Michael, expressed the view that the reason his parents stayed firm and did not cooperate with the government was because they wanted to keep the government from creating “a massive spy show trial,” thereby earning “the thanks of generations of resisters to government repression.”

Today, he and his brother Robert run a fund giving grants to the children of those they deem “political prisoners,” such as convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Ironically, if there was any government that staged show trials for political ends, it was the government for which the Rosenbergs gave up their lives, that of the former Soviet Union.

This week, the Meeropols made it clear to the New York Times that they still believe the information their father passed to the Russians was not terribly significant, that the judge and the prosecutors in their parents’ case were guilty of misconduct, and that neither Julius nor Ethel should have been given the death penalty for their crimes.

On the subject of their mother, the Meeropols have a point. In another development last week, a federal court judge in New York released previously sealed grand jury testimony of key witnesses in the case, including that of Ruth Greenglass, Julius’ sister-in-law. It turns out that a key part of her testimony for the prosecution — that Ethel had typed up notes for her husband to hand to the Soviets — was most likely concocted.

That doesn’t mean that Ethel was innocent — indeed, the preponderance of the evidence suggests she was not. But what is clear is that in seeking to get the defendants to confess to Soviet espionage, the prosecutors overstepped bounds and enhanced testimony to guarantee a conviction. Americans should have no problem acknowledging when such judicial transgressions take place, and in concluding that the execution of Ethel was a miscarriage of justice.

Nevertheless, after Sobell’s confession of guilt, all other conspiracy theories about the Rosenberg case should come to an end. A pillar of the left-wing culture of grievance has been finally shattered. The Rosenbergs were actual and dangerous Soviet spies. It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.

Nothing doing!, say those pillars of the old left E. L. Doctorow and Howard Zinn, who claim that the Rosenbergs’ guilt or innocence doesn’t matter:

“I never was going along saying I know that they were innocent, and I’m not shocked by the fact that they turned out to be spies,” said Howard Zinn, the left-wing history professor. “To me it didn’t matter whether they were guilty or not. The most important thing was they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria.”

E. L. Doctorow, whose novel “The Book of Daniel” was largely sympathetic to the accused couple even as it indicted the larger society, also said that a larger question superseded whether they spied: “It was what happened to them, as if a society turned its magnifying lens on these people until they caught fire and were burned alive.”

This is the kind of thing that gives the left a bad name, of course—first of all with me, and I am, as I never tire of repeating, of the left. But this quote from the same article really takes the cake [e.a.]:

Many who took up the execution of the Rosenbergs as a grievance are reluctant to let go of it. Mr. Sobell, in fact, was rebuffed by his own stepdaughter, Sydney Gurewitz Clemens, an author and teacher. She said his confession “complicated history and the personal histories of the many millions of people, all over the world, who gave time, energy, money and heart to the struggle to support his claims of innocence.”

The truth “complicates history”! Lies are so much better! Especially when they’re about committed leftists.

What moral rot.

A brother tries to save sister from a really bad boyfriend. Here’s his ad on Craigslist:

I am looking for someone who wants to be my absolutely terrible girlfriend. Why? To help make my sister realize that it really sucks when your sibling dates someone awful…like her current boyfriend. It seems that normal measures (avoiding hang outs, telling her directly, etc.) aren’t working, so it is time to move to more drastic measures. I need someone who is going to be truly awful, not just on the outside, but inside as well.

Candidates should be painful to be around, obnoxious, thoughtless and immature. She should use terms like, “tragic,” “as if” and various internet terms like “omg,” “lol,” “jk,” etc.

Other sought after qualities:

Has expensive tastes while being really cheap
Makes totally inappropriately timed comments
Always wants to go home early
Acts really cold to my sister
Gets extremely possessive and jealous
Constantly touches me at inappropriate times in inappropriate ways
Has a painfully obnoxious laugh or says “that’s so funny” rather than laughing

In return for your “companionship,” you can expect quality dinners, drinks, music and other forms of entertainment. Should our relationship linger (as my sister’s relationship lingers), there is potential for jewelry, trips and other more lavish gifts. Since I am committed to this project, I am prepared to match my sister’s relationship status tit-for-tat, up to and including engagement and marriage. If you do manage to break them up, we can happily end our relationship (you keep all merchandise, of course) and you will be my best friend for life.

• Location: New York, NY

via Gawker, which isn’t all bad.

In order to carry out my citizen’s duty to vote in a responsible way, I’ve been reading up on the candidates’ policy ideas and worldviews.***

This is the first article I’ve read that puts Barack Obama’s foreign policy ideas in context—and it underscores the fact that he is no peacenik, and suggests that the war (among among Dems and in foreign policy circles) is neocons v. everyone else:

Obama believes all of what he said six years ago in Chicago. He has called for, or retroactively endorsed, interventions in Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Sudan. He has advocated a humanitarian-based foreign policy for his entire public career. Since coming to the U.S. Senate in 2005, he has built up a brain trust of academics and ex-Clintonites who, like him, challenge the logic of the Iraq war but not the logic of wars like Iraq. John McCain looks at American military power and sees a way to “roll back” rogue states. Obama looks at American military power and sees a way to solve international and intranational conflict, regardless of the conflict’s immediate impact on national security. McCain seeks to aggressively confront imminent threats. Obama wants to do the same, while forestalling threats of tomorrow with just as much military vigor.

…

Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the center-left New American Foundation, has watched with mounting disappointment as Obama clarifies his stance on foreign interventions. “He’s not the Obama we thought he was,” Clemons says.

Clemons, not alone among liberal foreign policy analysts, believes Obama listens to two groups of experts: liberal interventionists and “progressive realists.” The latter group, rattled by the Iraq war, agrees with one of Obama’s most traditional homilies from his memoir The Audacity of Hope: “There are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention.” But statements like that are not at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Liberal interventionism is.

Specifics (that is: there is no international relations ideology-speak) is are here on the Obama site,

McCain’s foreign policy ideas are examined by serious journalists here and here; and here is a rundown of his positions on previous foreign engagements.

This piece runs down McCain’s “brain trust“; the subject of this interview says the McCain is the past.

I link. You decide.

———

*** I was particularly interested in foreign policy, but I happened to come upon a useful rundown of their approaches to the economy and finance, which I might as well mention. You can read here. (It was written before the “financial meltdown” and so is not entirely up-to-date. The fundamentals, however, are sound. And strong. Ahem. Fair warning: It’s also pro-McCain, if that sort of thing bothers you.)

Regular readers know that I’m no politico. And now that everybody pretty much agrees that the purveyors of the “news” are spreading misinformation, disinformation, and everything in between, I figure the time is right for a rather more judicious view from someone who has been tracking the polls in an intelligent way.

Jay Cost:

As an alternative to discussing Fannie, Freddie, lipstick on pigs, hacked emails, and patriotic 1040 filers - I thought I would put some simple numbers on the board to give us a sense of exactly what has changed since June 3rd.

I’ve broken the national polling into two sorting categories. First, we sort by pollster. We group the Gallup polls together, then the Rasmussen polls, then the remaining polls.

Second, we sort by date. We group the polls for June, then for July, then for August prior to the conventions, then for today.

Here are the results.

…

[e.a.]

Contrary to what one might think if one’s only source for information was the political class - there has not been a lot of movement. The movement we have seen seems to have been pretty orderly - with McCain solidifying his Republican base.

We also see a group of undecided voters who have not yet made a choice. They will probably be decisive. In a race with only two salient candidates - the goal is to hit 50%-plus-one. Both McCain and Obama can still do that via the undecided voters, who are becoming the critical voting block.

I am not surprised by the fact that neither candidate has yet obtained enough support to win. This is an open election with no incumbent to evaluate, nor even a candidate from the incumbent administration. This is a bad year for the Republican Party, but the GOP nominated a guy who has built a reputation opposing his own party. The Democrats nominated a candidate with a background dramatically different from any major party nominee in American history. Between 4% and 8% of the country still does not know what to make of it yet. They were probably part of the 7% to 12% that were undecided in June.

My intuition is that this group is going to sort itself out late. I’d guess that they are the true independents, i.e. those without strong party attachments. [Many people say they are independent but they actually behave like partisans.] I’d also wager that they have not been paying a lot of attention yet. The debates might move them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these folks sort themselves out in late October.

Now excuse me while I get back to the alternate universe of cable teevee.

Tonight, Larry King, the ultimate showman, examines a topic of burning interest:

Tonight: Honeymoon over?

Sarah Palin has made a media splash! How’s she doing since joining the campaign three weeks ago? See if she makes the grade… A report card on Larry king Live.

Tonight, 9 p.m. ET

Note the irony: he devotes an entire hour to talking about Sarah Palin while at the same time claiming that people are no longer interested in her. So he’s in the ratings-losing business now?

Jonathan Haidt tries to explain “What Makes People Vote Republican.” Here’s a hint:

…the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t blame Bill Keller for sounding so disappointed about loss of perceived value of his paper’s reporting:

Mr. Keller, for one, wonders what happened to the big stories The Times reported during the election cycle.

There was a Jo Becker and Don Van Natta investigative piece of Bill Clinton’s relationship with Kazakhstan—barely noticed. There was a piece in the spring by David Kirkpatrick and Jim Rutenberg about John McCain’s relationship with Donald Trump in Arizona—hardly a word.

Even a meaty, damning, 3,100-word, three-bylined front-page Sept. 14 Times piece on Sarah Palin’s management style doesn’t appear to have the same sort of impact on the campaign trail that it might once have, Mr. Keller said.

“And it’s not just us,” said Mr. Keller. “The Washington Post did an impressive review of Cindy McCain’s drug addiction the other day, and I didn’t hear an echo. I could go on, and so could you. This kind of rigorous, intricate reporting is a major contribution to the public debate, and it certainly gets read. (Our Sunday Palin piece is still number one on the most e-mailed list.) But this kind of work doesn’t dominate the discussion the way it might have in elections past.”

Whaddaya mean? the Observer’s reporter wants to know?

Doesn’t 1,050 comments mean something? Doesn’t that suggest an even more meaningful impact than in the old days?

“The answer is no,” said Michael Powell, one of the three authors of The Times’ Palin piece. “It doesn’t get picked up the same way.”

That is, it gets picked up, but only by people who seem to refuse to break the tie between the journalism coming from The New York Times, the spin coming from the campaign trail, and the white noise of punditry and Web-ready opinionizing.

So the Times-man doesn’t like being lumped in with all the other “white noise”; I can’t blame him. But there’s nothing to be done about it. The past is over. We are in a new century.

“Hobbes talked about the war of all against all,” said Mr. Alter. “Now it’s the punditry of all against all.”

I’ve had cable on in the background for a few days now, and I’ve noted the relative absence of Obama surrogates on the air. And then there are the ineffective ones:

In an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, Clinton, who has tried to put to rest rumors of tensions between himself and Obama said, “I’ve never concealed my admiration and affection for Sen. McCain. I think he’s a great man.

“But, I think, on the issues that matter to our future, the Obama-Biden team is, is more right,” Clinton said of the Democratic ticket. “And I believe they’re gonna win. But, I think that it will be competitive until the end.”

A ringing endorsement it wasn’t.

I’ll say!—especially since it comes from Mr. Strong and Wrong rather than Weak and Right. Then of course you knew that Clinton would be a Palin fan, right?

“No, she’s a– she’s an instinctively effective candidate,” he said, “And with a compelling story. I think it was exciting to some, that, that she was a woman. It was exciting that she was from Alaska. It was exciting that she’s sort of like the person she is. And she grew up in a,  came up in a political culture and a religious culture that is probably well to the right of the American center. But, she didn’t basically define herself in those terms,” Clinton said.

“She handled herself very well,” he said, “I get why she’s done so well. She, she’s, it’s a mistake to underestimate her. She’s got good intuitive skills. They’re significant.” [e.a.]

Yep.  But we all know where that horndog is coming from.

When it comes to politics—which is a contest for power—I say “we” can all go pretty damn low, because we humans are all fallible and all of us can—and do—make dreadful mistakes every day, some of which can cause grievous harm. The hacking of Sarah Palin’s e-mail and the actions of various parties subsequent to the initial illegal and horrifying invasion of her privacy, is a case in point.

I’ve been following this all afternoon but I haven’t written anything until now because I was too pissed. Everyday I am learning that there doesn’t seem to be a rock bottom for the scum who support Obama. Today we learned that a left wing nut hacked into Sarah Palin’s private - PRIVATE - email account and splashed the contents all over the internet. Gawker is a website without any scruples and is promoting Palin’s private information even though it was illegally obtained.

It’s been reported in a number of places, the New York Daily News, Caleb Howe, as well as others that Anonymous was behind the hacking. Michelle Malkin, however, got detailed information from someone who is knowledgeable on the subject of all things internet about how this hack job went down:

Here’s the short version: there is a site called 4chan.org. It is an image posting site based on a popular Japanese site. The site contains multiple boards, each of which is dedicated to a particular subject. The most notorious of these boards is called /b/. /b/ is the board dedicated to random images. /b/tards, as its denizens are called, are interested only in their own amusement. Their sense of humor runs the gamut from sick to cruel to merely strange. Lolcats, as made famous by http://www.icanhascheezburger.com, originated on /b/. A lot of memes start there. There is a lot of racist humor — pictures of excited and happy black people in proximity to fried chicken abound. There is a lot of pornography. Sometimes it’s child pornography, although posting that is moderator grounds for banning — no, it’s not a pedophile ring; /b/tards post it because they think doing so is funny.4chan does not log participants. Most people don’t use or have usernames, and post instead as “Anonymous.” And every so often, a number of /b/’s anonymous denizens decide to make somebody’s life hell. Sometimes it’s a random person who offends /b/’s sense of propriety. Sometimes it’s a forum dedicated to a serious topic. Sometimes it’s Scientology. And Tuesday, it was Sarah Palin. Or it would have been.

Sarah Palin’s email account was hacked by one person. Not a group.

No matter who did this, his criminal actions will more than likely help Sarah Palin by causing people to sympathize with her, and he will get him a 5 year sentence in federal prison once he’s caught. This person hacked into the private email of a vice presidential candidate who is being protected by the Secret Service and who is now investigating this crime. Good luck evading them. Head on over to Michelle’s place because her source also includes a message from the hacker himself. Here’s part:

I read though the emails… ALL OF THEM… before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. And pictures of her family (emphasis mine)

If you follow the links in this post from Michelle Malkin, you will find the “explanations” and seriously confused “thoughts” of the perpetrator of this act, who meant to serve the Obama cause by finding out and publishing the real truth about Sarah Palin, and you’ll read about the vultures who pounced on this piece of fresh meat.

If you read this summary, you’ll find an astonishingly “what’s the big deal?” attitude about the incomprehensible invasion of privacy that should (or so I would think) send chills up the spine of anyone (public figure or private individual) with an e-mail account.

As Ann Althouse says:

It’s important to understand that there are people like this.

Read this post, too, for a vigorous defense of the freedom of speech. And note that publishing Palin’s e-mails, while “nasty,” may indeed fall within the realm of the First Amendment.

I’m a First Amendment absolutist. If people want to take the low road, they’re protected by the law of the land.

But they should be mindful of the consequences to their reputation, and, of course, if they’re doing it on behalf of a political candidate, they should spend some time thinking about blowback.

The Rosenbergs were guilty.

Here is the proof.

In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, traveled to Cuba and Vietnam after his release in 1969 and became an advocate for progressive causes.

Through it all, he maintained his innocence.

But on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself, shedding new light on a case that still fans smoldering political passions. In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy.

And he implicated his fellow defendant Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.

The prosecution was horrendous, and the execution a horror. But they did betray their country. I wonder if their die-hard supporters will ever reach the same conclusion that their associate Sobell reached [e.a.]:

Most of the protagonists in the case, Mr. Sobell included, were committed Communists at the time they spied for the Soviets. “Now, I know it was an illusion,” Mr. Sobell said. “I was taken in.”

Eric Boehlert examines the MSM’s recent antics as they “cover” the campaigns—and finds them wanting [e.a.]:

Rather than being cowed by the press’ mini-sermons about truth-telling, McCain and Palin are practically laughing at the press.

Can you blame them? Can you blame any sane observer for dismissing so much of today’s campaign coverage as nothing more than a farce? How could the McCain camp watch the Matthews episode and not laugh out loud at the sheer clownishness?

To recap: The MSNBC host, along with the rest of the press corps, seemed to be in heated agreement that the lipstick story was a worthless joke. And then they covered it ad nauseam. Why would the McCain camp look at that performance and think that political journalism was a serious business? Why would the McCain camp look at that sad display and care what the press said or thought about anything (including fact-checking) as long as the press dutifully spread around McCain’s campaign smears?

The campaign press has become a joke, and McCain and Palin are laughing at it.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers could not have been clearer speaking to Politico: “We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

Indeed. As I’ve been saying for a very long time now: infotainment rules.

And if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

(If you want to be part of the solution, offer more information and better—i.e., high-quality—information.)

As Megan McArdle points out, the financial meltdown is going to hurt my hometown, and bad:

New York City may be in big trouble. The anchor of New York’s financial community is the independent investment banks that are all headquartered there. If their corporate center of gravity starts shifting towards Charlotte and London, will other firms begin to question whether it makes sense to pay $50 per square foot just for the privilege of being in Manhattan?

That would crush New York’s renaissance like a bug. All of New York’s rebound has been paid for by the taxes on the financial industry–a few hundred thousand people in the industry pay the lion’s share of the taxes for the entire city. Take them away, and the city will rapidly lurch back towards bankruptcy.

I’m sure some readers will think it is excessively partisan to point this out on such a sober occasion as a financial fucking meltdown, but methinks Obama’s redistribution schemes, even the more sober ones presented here, are dead fucking meat.

Like the rest of you, I’ve read a lot of stuff about Sarah Palin in the last couple of weeks (annoyingly positive and grotesquely negative), as well as a lot of stuff that tries to account for the reaction she has unleashed (in the commentariat and in Liberal Elite Land—you should see my email!).

Bradley Burston, writing in Ha-aretz,comes closest, I think, to explaining why Palin resonated immediately (as I noted here, a day after she burst onto the scene) [e.a.]:

I get it. I get that millions of Americans have a crying need for someone to stand up and say the things that Sarah Palin has been telling them.

I get that many, many Americans are fed up with big government and shame in patriotism and energy dependence and media condescension. I recognize that there are many on the right who are galvanized by a woman addressing the nation in condemnation of gun control and abortions. It’s clear that many in the heartland and even on the Blue State coasts have been waiting years to hear someone take a take-no-prisoners verbal lash to Beltway waste and liberal political correctness and, by implication, to cultural pluralism and tree hugging and the very mention of the word Washington.

That Palin had struck a nerve with certain Americans who were fed up and couldn’t take it anymore was clear from the reaction at the RNC, where one woman was quoted by the New York Times [e.a.]:

Delegates said they were enthralled by Ms. Palin. “I think she’s great; she’s giving it back to the Democrats for all the sorry things they’ve said about her and about America,” said Anita Bargas, a delegate from Angleton, Tex. “She’s a conservative, and she has a great sense of humor.”

So there was that. But there’s something else in the Amazing Mrs. Palin (other than shades of The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, a delectable British TV film that I suggest you rent and watch***), and a piece in the Rocky Mountain News nails it:

It’s class as much as gender. When you hear women say she’s just like them, they’re talking about someone who’s gone through what they’ve gone through - and made it. They don’t think Palin is average. They think she’s talented - and talented enough to start where they did and make it to the top, even if she had to go to five colleges to get there. [e.a.]

Yep—just like Mrs. Pritchard—and she had problems at home, too:

———–
*** Here’s what I wrote in October 2007 about The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard:

The other day, I was watching a silly but diverting British series, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which puts a sensible woman who’s fed up with politicians’ incompetence into 10 Downing Street to succeed Tony Blair. (Yes. I did say it was silly, didn’t I?)

The screenwriter is not at all sympathetic to Blair or to the war in Iraq, but she is sensible. She shows, for example, just how many decisions, large and small, a political leader must make every day. It occurred to me that if only more people would watch this show, they would have a glimmer of understanding beyond their pet theories about BushHitler and the Vulcans.

But when people want to judge, to condemn, to castigate, and to punish, no amount of understanding will stop them. Their fury has a life of its own.

So it goes.

Sarah Palin-related items have hit the market big time, according to CNN. Here’s one listed on eBay:

One eBay seller is auctioning off a piece of toast that she says bears the image of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

New York Times headline:

A Sense That Wall St.’s Boom Times Are Over

Finally! Greg Gutfeld tells the real truth about that woman:

Palin was “born” in Sandpoint, Idaho - but for murky reasons fled to Alaska - a well-timed move considering that only a decade or so later, Sandpoint would become a destination for like-minded travelers called the Aryan Nations. The organization claims to have disbanded in 2001 - a “fact” Palin might want us to believe, as she made more than several visits back to Idaho - for what observers call “schooling.” Not necessarily an advocate of “white power,” it is safe to say that Palin is white, and full of power.

That’s what some skeptics might call “convenient.”

More conspiracy theories and propaganda here (now offered around the clock!).

I intend to be relentless for the next six weeks, morning, noon and night, weeks and weekdays, exposing the lies of the McCain-Palin campaign and showing their unfitness - in terms of competence, decency, intelligence, and experience - to become president and vice-president of the US. I will be making arguments and presenting facts in ways I do not expect and do not want Obama himself to engage him.

But these last two weeks - and this absurd, insulting pick for veep - has roused me. As I know it has roused many. McCain needs to be more than defeated. He needs to be exposed as the dishonest, despicable, desperate and dishonorable cynic he has become.

It can’t be good for The Atlantic that the photographer they hired to shoot McCain for Jeffrey Goldberg’s the cover story went totally batshit insane.

Goldberg comments:

Like others at the Atlantic, I was appalled to read about the actions of Jill Greenberg, the freelance photographer who took the cover portrait that illustrates my article about John McCain. Greenberg doctored photographs of McCain she took during her Atlantic-arranged shoot, which took place last month in Las Vegas. She has posted these doctored photographs on her website, which you can go find yourself, if you must. Suffice it to say that her “art” is juvenile, and on occasion repulsive. This is not the issue, of course; the issue is that she betrayed this magazine, and disgraced her profession. …

Greenberg is quite obviously an indecent person who should not be working in magazine journalism. Every so often, journalists become deranged at the sight of certain candidates, and lose their bearings.

Wow.

update: an appreciation

If Amy Alexander, writing in The Nation, can admit to it, I suspect that soon enough other women will follow:

Even though I detest her politics, as I watched Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated interview with ABC News’s Charles Gibson, God help me, I had to admire her steeliness. …

[T]here are probably more than a few of us who drift off, from time to time, on the delicious fantasy of what it would feel like to draw down with shotgun on the misbehaving men in our lives. We don’t know if Palin has ever done such a thing, but it appears she sure as hell could. I have to own up to the part of me that admires that. After watching her with Gibson, it’s safe to say that it took a spine of titanium to stay upright in that chair as “Charlie” scowled at her over the top of his reading glasses …

[B]y over-intellectualizing this steeliness factor, and by underestimating its power to sway voters, we are not being true to our cultural history. …

Progressives and feminists who sneer at women unwilling to separate that stimulus-response “I heart ballsy women!” from the business at hand–”Does she have the intellect and experience to be vice president?”–are spinning their wheels. They also conveniently overlook the possibility that Palin’s raw ambition is very close to the self-confidence we want to encourage in our daughters. Sarah Palin is a strong woman, and that is good. Her politics, and what they may lead her to create for our democracy… not so much. [e.a.]

I was encouraged to be self-confident and outspoken by my parents, and I have certainly encouraged my daughter to be self-confident and outspoken.

Judging from the softened attitude I saw this morning from Katty Kay on the Chris Matthews Show and from her pal and fellow op-ed writer Claire Shipman on This Week with George S [transcripts are not yet available at either site], the high-powered women of the MSM have gotten the message to think before they pop off their mouths, and to learn to accommodate other women’s choices—including those who don’t have the luxury of opting out of “prestige” jobs and those whose ambitions include helping to guide the United States of America toward a better course.

Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn’t build and don’t want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours. We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children. Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin’s case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life. More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success in reasonable terms — even if we sacrifice some “prestige.”

I find it very interesting that these two women, who beg for time to be with their families, who are supposedly remaking their lives, both find the time to be front and center on the Sunday talk shows (and one of them appears on air with her husband. So excuse me if I feel it necessary to ask Ms. Shipman and Mr. Carney: Who, exactly, is minding your kids while you earnestly debate John McCain’s disappointingly political campaign for president and while you pass judgment on Sarah Palin?)