Nick Beaudrot at Cogitamus has an eliminationism reality check: as bad as McCain/Palin have been the last few days, they haven't quite reached the fever-swamp heights of the Republican Party of the 1990s. That's...comforting. I guess.
The good news is the McCain camp really does seem to be pulling back from the brink on this, with news today that Sarah Palin's stump speech is now Ayers-less. Perhaps this is partly a result of heightened media attention on their rallies; Biden and Obama spokesman Bill Burton were both asked about the rabid crowds on TV today.
In other Sarah Palin news, via Washington Monthly, David Brooks has called the vice-presidential candidate "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," echoing my statement earlier today that if Republicans have any sense they'll put Palin permanently out to pasture on November 5:
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
Posts
|