Candide's Notebooks: Latest Readables, July 2008 [edited by Pierre Tristam]

The Palin-Biden Debate
Daytona Beach News-Journal
Joe Biden is a brilliant senator who has a reputation for saying dumb things. Sarah Palin is a glittery governor who’s building a reputation for saying dumber things. People sitting down to watch the two debate on Thursday may have had a pre-race NASCAR thought or two: Will there be a crash? Or 10? There were none, except for Palin crashing through the lowest bar of expectations in the history of vice-presidential, and, perhaps high-school, debating. She smiled. She did the Reagan head tilt. She spoke mostly coherent sentences, even if most of her answers had nothing to do with the questions. And, you betcha, she out-NASCARed herself with rapid-fire flips through the Darn Official Thesaurus of Folksiness (Wasilla edition). Mccain's race is too much about her, too little about him. And what there’s been of her as a vice-presidential nominee remains unsettling about both of them: her sanctimonious ignorance, his devalued judgment. More...

Shot of the Day
Candide's Notebooks / October 1, 2008
The artist (and a friend of the Notebooks), just sent this in.

Palin Second-Guesses Bush & US, Not Israel
About / September 28, 2008
Kissinger, whose entire career as a Middle East and Vietnam strategist was based on second-guessing anyone not on his team (including, on occasion, second-guessing Nixon), must not have told Palin what he's said all along about Israel: "Anybody who gets 100 percent of the confidence of the Israelis has discovered something that has not yet existed." Which is to say: never give Israel your own 100 percent confidence, if it's your own country's interests you're protecting. Evidently, Palin disagrees. More...

McCain Blinks, Will Debate Obama
Candide's Notebooks / September 26
You knew he'd have to cave sooner or later, with even his friendliest pollsters telling him he was tanking and now Kathleen Parker, the latest in a string of conservative columnists, to come out against Sarah Palin. (Choice words from Parker: "If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself." And: "Only Palin can save McCain, her party and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first. Do it for your country." Of course, at this point if McCain is interested in doing something for his country, bowing out himself should top the list.

Bail-Out Blow-Up Boys
News-Journal Editorial Board / September 26
Fear, haste and political gamesmanship won't fix America's financial mess. Fairness paired with the kind of transparency and accountability that ensure confidence in markets and government might. Capping off a remarkable day of posturing -- by Congress, by the presidential candidates, and ultimately by the president -- George Bush on Wednesday evening became visible again only to do what he usually does in time of crisis. He told Americans that they should be very, very afraid if Congress doesn't pass his bail-out plan. Instead of Saddam Hussein raining nukes on American cities, or Osama bin Laden unleashing more 9/11s, "the value of your home could plummet. Foreclosures would rise dramatically. More businesses would close their doors and millions of Americans could lose their jobs." Where's he been? The rest…

The GOP's Supremacist Hypocrites
Candide's Notebooks / September 5, 2008

Why I Qualify To Be Secretary of State
Pierre Tristam / Candide's Notebooks, Sept. 3, 2008
WASILLA, Alaska - Dianne Keller, who succeeded Sarah Palin as mayor of this small city, proclaimed Tuesday afternoon that "the process for running the city of Wasilla is probably much like the process for running our country.

I once attended a School Improvement Council meeting where we decided how to distribute a few thousand dollars in bonus money for teachers at my daughter’s elementary school. The experience was revealing, so, thinking “Country First,” I immediately phoned Colin Powell, secretary of state at the time, to let him know that I could be lead mediator in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Powell told me that Bush’s “road map” for peace in the Middle East had taken a turn for cryogenation somewhere in a Fairbanks suburb, where it’s been stuck for the last six years. Wasilla thaws and all, I’m hoping I can put my experience to use in the next administration now that Sarah Palin, boning up on stuff with Dick Cheney in their undisclosed location, has just learned that the West Bank is not, in fact, a financial institution that mortgages subdivisions (or is that settlements?) all over the West Coast.

(And please, Notebookers, like Ohdave, share your reasons why you qualify to be president, vice-president or chief justice of the United States in the era of McPalin.)

Peggy Noonan on McPalin: “It's Over”
Candide's Notebooks / September 3, 2008

You didn't have to wait until today to know that Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan and the first Bush's former speechwriter, was nervous about Obama: he'd seduced her in his acceptance speech. And today she admitted in print, despite a misleading headline by Wall Street Journal editors, that “The choice of Sarah Palin IS a Hail Mary pass, the pass the guy who thinks he has a good arm makes to the receiver he hopes is gifted.” Then did let it all out in this exchange with Mike Murphy, off-mike, during a television appearance. Here's the full transcript and the video:

Murphy: ...because I come out of a blue swing-state governor world. Angler. Whitman. Tommy Thompson. Mitt Romney. Jeb Bush. And I mean, and these guys, this is all like how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And, IT'S NOT GOING TO WORK.
Noonan: IT'S OVER.
Murphy: Still, McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech and do himself some good
Chuck Todd. [Unintelligible]... think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson?
Noonan: ...saw Kay this morning.
Todd: [sounds like 'she's not comfortable talking about it????]
Murphy: They're ALL bummed out
Todd: Is she really the most qualified woman?
Noonan: Most qualified? NO. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives.
Todd: yeah, they went to narratives.
Murphy: I totally agree.
Noonan: Every time Republicans do this, because that's not where they live, and that's not what they're good at, they blow it.
Murphy: You know what's really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is "no cynicism" and this is cynical.
Todd: And as you called it, "gimmicky."

Palin To Be Withdrawn as McCain's VP?
Candide's Notebooks / September 2, 2008

The markets, so beloved by the GOP, have their own idea. Join the trade.

Family Values
Candide's Notebooks / September 2, 2008
“After attacking the morals of the Democrats for years, we find this. And Palin is presenting it as a wondrous gift and her unsupervised daughter as beautiful. And blaming the liberals for talking about it. Who are these people and why have they been inflicted on us?” — rowdy, Florida (one of more than 1,500 comments on Times story, “Palin Daughter's Pregnancy Interrupts Script”

Atheism Just Won't Do
Rebel Yell / August 18
I discovered last night that “atheist” is an extremely simplistic way of describing my spiritual beliefs. I don’t believe in God, true, but I am something of a dreamer (I heard that’s a line from a Stevie Nicks song–have I mentioned that I loathe her music? and Fleetwood Mac as well?). I don’t believe in literal magic, but I do believe in the effect that ritual has on a person; in the effect that worship of a god brings focus to certain traits that one might want; in the connection between people that seems to exist (call it quantum theory, string theory, or Jungian, if you will). But I don’t believe in the hocus pocus, the invisible man (or people) in the sky. I’m too rational for that. What do they call it, “spiritual but not religious?” It would take me a while to describe it. Perhaps I shall. Read the rest at Rebel Yell...

Readables: July 26-27
Candide's Notebooks / July 26, 2008

Vice President Charlie Crist?
Pierre Tristam / July 25, 2008
Word has it the assisted-living candidacy of John McCain is so desperate to take back the glow from Barack Obama's latest Rolling Stone act across Europe and the Middle East that it may announce its vice presidential choice early. It may be down to Mitt Romney, the waxy Mormon, and Charlie Crist, who plays a Florida governor on TV. If Crist is the choice, it will be entertaining during the campaign. Jupiter knows the McCain camp can use the injection of political eroticism that Crist likes to project. But it would be a disaster if the act survived the campaign. Remember Chauncey Gardener in Being There? That’s Charlie Crist. I say that having had the chance to observe him as a reluctant Floridian in the last dozen years, interview him a few times, be vaguely seduced by his charms more than a few times, and watching him once in my office go mildly misty eyed as he pointed at a map of Lebanon I have hanging there, looking for Ammoun, the north-Lebanese village his grandmother is allegedly from (though his tan is all Greek), the whole time thinking he was playing me the way he plays every member of the press—the way Paris Hilton plays for the best camera angles. More...

Readables: July 24
Candide's Notebooks / July 24, 2008

Gas Efficiency and the B-52 Bomber
Pierre / Candide's Notebooks, July 22, 2008
No question: the B-52, with its eight engines, its 185-ft wingspan, its longevity (first flew in 1952, scheduled to stay in service until 2040) is an impressive plane, if you can live with its ultimate aim—to flatten everything below its path with 10,000 pound of bombs and missiles. Based in Louisiana and Missouri, bombing crews have been known to have breakfast with their families at home, head for the hangars, fly a bombing mission to Iraq or Afghanistan, and be home for dinner a couple of days later (whatever the calculations may be). Now they just fly training or scaring runs, one of which claimed a plane near Guam Monday, claiming at least two, possibly six lives. Here’s what the plane also costs: Its fuel capacity is 50,000 gallons for a range of about 4,500 miles, or 11.1 gallons to the mile. The distance from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where a good number of B-52s are based (more are based at Minot Air Force Base in North dakota), and Guam in the Pacific, where they go to warm up for bombing runs, is 7,200 miles—one way. Round trip, a single plane will burn 160,000 gallons of fuel. OK, make that 120,000 gallons, assuming an emptier payload. I commute 300 miles a week or so. I burn 15 gallons a week, because I, too, drive an antiquated, inefficient American car (when I’m sparing my antique Subaru). What all that comes out to is that it would take me 8,000 weeks, or 154 years, of commuting five days a week to burn through as much fuel as a B-52 burns through in a single round trip from Missouri to Guam. The plane is suddenly much less impressive, and a lot more obscene, not just for its ultimate purpose. The Air Force had 94 of these things until this year. It wants to keep 56 and send the rest to the boneyard. No need to wonder why.

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