sisu

"I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb"

"In popular usage, SOS [Morse Code distress signal · · · — — — · · · or three-dits/three-dahs/three-dits] became associated with phrases such as 'Save Our Ship' and 'Save Our Souls,'" says Wikipedia. "These were a later development, most likely used to help remember the correct letters (something known as a backronym). Unattributed illustration from "The origin of the distress call 'May Day.'"

"I will go down with the McCain ship," writes Charles Krauthammer, stalwart on the field of battle as fellow Northeast Corridor Conservatives head for the nearest exit like democrats abandoning ship:

Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years … I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings …

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the last year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism? …

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts, but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

"Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates," concludes Krauthammer:

Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

We quibbled with Charles — may we call you Charles? — that day last August when he told a Fox anchor, in reaction to McCain's VP pick, that the Arizona Senator should have picked someone "safe" like Fred Thompson. As we wrote then:

We LOVE Fred, of course, and our sis will remind us that we have a heart too soon made glad, but the Governor of Alaska gets our girls-just-wanna-have-fun juices flowing. Sarah, get your gun!

Like McCain himself, she can tell the lion from the lamb.

Update: Drudge links Krauthammer's piece, sixth item, central column. You go, boy!

"When people actually meet her, they're blown away"

"Someone called me a redneck woman once, and you know what I said back? 'Why thank you,'" quipped the Divine Mrs. P at one of her rapturous rallies yesterday. She's on a roll, and media fuddy-duddies are falling in droves (see below). Above, statue by Rudolph Tegner (1873-1950) of Sarah Palin lookalike, woman warrior Goddess of Wisdom Athena, emerging from John McCain's Zeus's brow.

"I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful." 'Sounds like something we might have said, but it was "Saturday Night Live" Executive Producer Lorne Michaels (!), cited by the WSJs Daniel Henninger this morning. In fact, all but the most hard-boiled of Palin's critics are falling — like flies  — head over heels. First a few excerpts from Henninger's breath-of-fresh-air column, and then on to the Palin-ing of MSNBC:

The stoning of Sarah Palin has exposed enough cultural fissures in American politics to occupy strategists full-time until 2012. We now see there is a left-to-right elite centered in New York, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley who hand down judgments of the nation's mortals from their perch atop the Bell Curve.

It seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential politics was being able to connect to people in places like Bronko's bar or Saddleback Church. When Gov. Palin showed she excelled at that, the goal posts suddenly moved and the new game was being able to talk the talk in London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow. She looks about a half-step behind Sen. Obama on that learning curve.

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "Saturday Night Live," lives on the forward wave of American life. This week he gave his view of Sarah Palin to EW.com: "I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful. Her politics aren't my politics. But you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her."

Hephaestus (with axe, above, in detail from vase painting) was the "patron of all craftsmen, principally those working with metal [plumbers included?]," who "split the head of Zeus with an axe, from which Athena appeared fully armed," according to Encyclopedia Mythica.

We connected to Sarah, big time, the moment she sprung full blown into our consciousness in a Larry Kudlow interview we stumbled upon at YouTube two months back when rumors were rumbling that the Alaska Governor would be McCain's VP pick. As for the Palin-ing of MSNBC, we happened to catch what may have been a bellwether moment over there this morning. Former Republican Florida Rep and current "anchorman" Joe Scarborough has been unwatchable since he left "public service" and fell in with the Northeast Corridor herd at MSNBC. But today "Morning Joe" was transmogrified, going out of his way to praise the wit and wisdom of Sarah Palin, to the consternation of his horrified fellow anchors:

What we're finding is that when people actually meet her, they're blown away.

"Yes, she's pretty," sniffed the scowling anchorette beside him, attempting to trivialize the issue, but Joe brought out his big guns and left her biting the dust:

When Jack Welsh met her, he was extremely impressed, not with how she looks but with her intellect.

The diehards are still digging, of course. Digging themselves into a hole. Andrea Mitchell & Company are shocked, shocked at Palin's $150,000 clothing allowance [worth every pretty penny, in our view], and Brian Williams is deeply concerned that Caribou Barbie hasn't released her medical records yet [hoping against hope for something nasty, Brian?], but the Northeast Corridor holdouts' desperation speaks for itself.

Update: A totally excellent related post from Bird Dog at Maggie's:

I promise you that, if she had a "D" after her name, she would be a MSM heroine. Colorful and exotic. The Dems would find a way to make her "Josephine Sixpack" - "The fresh voice of the American worker from the American Frontier." Anybody who criticized her would be slammed as "classist" or "intellectual snobs" or "out of touch with real Americans."

Colorful and exotic, a fresh voice of the American Frontier, a real American. YES! So glad she's on our side.

Update: A mental ward full of voices we're glad are on our side at Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities.

Spread opportunity, not other people's wealth

Order your Joe-the-Plumber McCain/Palin T-shirt here!

Quotation of the day:

In this country we believe in spreading [not other people's wealth but] opportunity for those who want jobs and for those who want to create jobs that create wealth.

       — John McCain at a Bensalem, PA rally this morning

"Spread opportunity, not other people's wealth." We'll wear that!

Obama unmasked

We and the immediate blogosphere made note of Barack Obama's "creepy, smirky smile" that transmogrified his human face into "a bizarre theatrical comedy mask" every time John McCain mentioned an inconvenient truth about his opponent's words or deeds during last night's debate. Above left, the mask emerges in full at McCain's evocation of "Acorn."

When Senator Blinky (Confederate Yankee's words) met Senator Government (Senator Blinky's words), "Joe [the Plumber] made Senator Government squirm," writes Michelle Malkin re Obama's studied "I'm thoughtful and earnest and I care about you" body language as he exchanged words with John McCain during the third and final presidential debate at Hofstra U. last night. We liked an NRO reader's take:

First time I've seen Obama blushing and looking frustrated in a debate. McCain is getting under his skin.

Yup. As we wrote in a coda to our previous post, "Johnny's got Barry in the [OODA] loop," but:

Will Obamaniacs notice or be unnerved by it? Probably not, but maybe our fellow citizens who haven't yet made up their minds will.

How do you REALLY feel about your opponent?  Obama (from an Instapundit emailer): "Can't I just be president already?" McCain (loved and hated by the usual suspects for his politically incorrect sense of humor): "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Obam." Photoshopped screenshot above is meant to graphically portray the mental states of the two contenders during their two hours and twenty minutes of forced proximity.

"Blinky" McCain is not without a few facial tics of his own, of course — shall we chalk them up to aftereffects of his Vietnam prisoner-of-war years ? — but when it comes down to words, our man gets to the point three times faster than his opponent:

Obama: "I am a person who believes [fill in the blank]" = 6 words

McCain: "I believe [fill in the blank]" = 2 words

'Must be that "nuance" thing the Democrat elites are forever patting themselves on the back about. We ourselves have always been of the brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit school of intelligence assessment.

Sometimes an acorn is just an acorn

"I closed my eyes and imagined I was there tramping through the woods with a band of knowledgeable and passionate field observers," we wrote blogfriend Greenman Tim of Walking the Berkshires in the comments of his post announcing the first two of a new series of freelance articles (available online with free registration) for the The Lakeville [Connecticut] Journal, "Of seeds and serpents" and "Great Mountain Forest: 99 years of innovation, education." A few excerpts first from "Seeds" and then from "Forest" for a taste of Tim's richly-layered brand of nature writing:

This appears to be a mast year for oak trees, a time when there is a dramatic increase in acorn production. More small rodents will survive the winter after a mast year when food is plentiful, and that in turn could mean a bonanza for their predators in the coming spring.

I was musing along these lines while hiking in the mountains recently when I came upon two timber rattlesnakes [Crotalus horridus] …

They breed on approximately three-year cycles, and gravid females do not eat at all in the seasons before giving birth. Their young are born alive in late summer and have a very small window of opportunity to catch a meal before hibernation.

One might assume that approximately a third of the female timber rattlesnakes of reproductive age would be gravid in any given year. However, researchers consistently observe that they find very little evidence of reproduction in some years, followed by a “pile up” year when most of the female snakes in a population give birth. This corresponds rather well to the availability of prey following a mast year for oaks.

"Saving Great Mountain Forest [in Norfolk, CT] for the benefit of future generations and the regional ecology is a tremendous conservation success story and a remarkable family achievement," writes Tim in the second Lakeville Journal article:

Next year will make a full century since the core of Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk was acquired by U.S. Sen. Frederick C. Walcott and Starling W. Childs. These visionaries were conservation leaders in their day, and where others saw burned-over scrubland and hardscrabble farms, they saw hope for restoring wildlife that had all but vanished from the Connecticut landscape.

Back in 1909, white-tailed deer had been driven from the state, and water birds were in deep decline. Together, Walcott and Childs laid the foundation for the recovery of these species and a healthier reforested landscape …

In 2003, 5,383 acres of the forest were protected through a Forest Legacy working forest easement. The entire property is now owned and managed by the non-profit Great Mountain Forest Corporation, with a mission to conserve forest areas and serve as a living laboratory for environmental research …

Starling W. Childs II, representing  the third generation of his family associated with these lands, recalled that his father Edward used to say that “there was no point in having all this if it could not be shared with others.”

Good stuff. Especially Edward Childs's “no point in having all this if it could not be shared with others," a perfect opportunity for the Queen of the Segueway to segue to the question of the hour and contrast Childs's all-American sentiment of individual civic responsibility with Barack Obama's socialistic notion that he and other self-appointed elites know best how to spend others' wealth, as told to a disgusted "Joe the Plumber" yesterday:

My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody ... I think when you spread [other people's] wealth around, it's good for everybody.

This just in: Right out of the gate at tonight's sit-down presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY, John McCain puts the case of Joe the Plumber front and center [rough transcript]:

He looked at your tax plan, and he saw that you were going to put him in a much higher tax bracket, which was going to make it impossible for him to hire more people for his plumbing business and not able to realize the American Dream. I will not stand for a tax increase on small-business income. Senator Obama's plan would take Joe's money, give it to Obama and let HIM spread it around. The whole premise behind Obama's plan is class warfare. Why would you want to increase anybody's taxes at such a tough time?

We aren't live blogging the debate but will say two things before signing off for the night:

1. Every time McCain mentions an inconvenient truth about his opponent, seated inches away across the desk, Obama shakes his signature thoughtfully tilted head (more in sorrow than in anger), a creepy, smirky smile transmogrifying his human face into a bizarre theatrical comedy mask. Will Obamaniacs notice or be unnerved by it? Probably not, but maybe our fellow citizens who haven't yet made up their minds will.

2. The format is excellent. Our hats off to Bob Schieffer and CBS for a most professional presentation.

Our Johnny's got Barry in the loop.

Update: Good thoughts from Greenman Tim in the comments:

I continue to believe that while nothing excites our political passions quite so much as people or governments telling us what to do with our land, nothing unites us quite like a shared love of place, even if my particular place and yours are different.

Are you listening, Barack Obama?

Update: Nothing excites our furry, feathery and scaly passions quite so much as a visit to Modulator's Friday Ark #213.

Who is the real Barack Obama?

"Who is the real Barack Obama? But you ask such questions, and all you get in response is another angry barrage of insults. Our current economic crisis is a good case in point," said John McCain at a spirited University of New Mexico rally this afternoon where he used his opponent's own words and actions to shine a little light in dark places. [via Hot Air]

"John McCain, today, finally starts talking about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the irresponsible leadership at both, and the Democrats' efforts to prevent serious oversight," writes an ecstatic Jim Geraghty at NRO, providing the quotable quotes we had tried earlier to hurriedly transcribe when we happened to catch McCain's rousing speech live on Fox this afternoon (thank you, Google!). First a few excerpts from the speech and then on to our own crackpot theory about how the speech is part of the former Navy jet pilot's latest maneuver to catch his unwitting opponent off guard in the OODA loop:

Senator Obama has accused me of opposing regulation to avert this crisis. I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed. But the truth is I was the one who called at the time for tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could have helped prevent this crisis from happening in the first place.

Senator Obama was silent on the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his Democratic allies in Congress opposed every effort to rein them in. As recently as September of last year he said that subprime loans had been, quote, “a good idea.” Well, Senator Obama, that “good idea” has now plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

To hear him talk now, you’d think he’d always opposed the dangerous practices at these institutions. But there is absolutely nothing in his record to suggest he did. He was surely familiar with the people who were creating this problem. The executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have advised him, and he has taken their money for his campaign.  He has received more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than any other senator in history, with the exception of the chairman of the committee overseeing them.

"If McCain is going to have a chance at winning," writes Carol Platt Liebau, "he must make sure that the public becomes thoroughly acquainted with the real Barack Obama — the most radical presidential nominee ever. And because the press evidently intends to abdicate its responsibility to acquaint voters with the less-popular parts of Obama’s record, he’ll have to rely on paid advertising to do it". New McCain "Dangerous" ad above. [via Hot Air]

"More, please," writes Ed Morrrissey:

Let’s see quotes from Democrats in ads, along with the bill for their social engineering. We need this for bigger reasons than a presidential election: we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The best way to make sure it doesn't happen again is for the Republicans to win the White House, of course, and that's where John McCain's OODA loop maneuver, referenced above, comes in. Here's the set-up, from a USNews report:

Over the weekend, McCain aides served notice to the media that they would begin an intensive assault on the character and judgment of Democratic candidate Barack Obama — a strategy that is expected to continue through tomorrow night's presidential debate and right through to Election Day. McCain aides say GOP vice presidential nominee [as attack dog in the traditional running mate role] Sarah Palin's critique of Obama last weekend for "palling around with terrorists" marked the start of their final offensive.

It's all part of McCain's effort to change the subject of the national debate from the economy, which is considered a winning issue for Obama, and focus on other issues that may hold more potential for McCain.

Like USNews, the Obama camp bought McCain's story about trying to change the subject:

Obama's campaign responded fiercely. It not only denounced Palin's accusation as a false "smear" but came up with another line of attack against McCain, resurrecting the Arizona senator's connections to businessman Charles Keating and the savings and loan scandal from the 1980s …

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe sent out an E-mail to supporters last night — which was passed along this morning to reporters by the campaign — that said "It's not just McCain's role in the current crisis that they're avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.

Then, this afternoon, came McCain's surprise attack. Instead of changing the subject from the economy — as the Democrats and their fellow travelers in the media had been expecting — he turned the tables on Obama, countering his opponent's evidence-free charges of a "backward [Republican] economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis" with some hard, cold facts about the role of Obama's own poor character and judgment in fomenting the current crisis. As we blogged the other day, "It's the character, stupid." But how to get the word out over the spin and din of a fellow-traveling media in the tank for the Democrat? It's the ads, stupid?

Update: This just in over the email transom from Obama's Campaign Manager, David Plouffe: "Keating Economics: the Making of a Financial Crisis," a "documentary that shows why John McCain's failed philosophy and poor judgment are a recipe for deepening the economic crisis." You're projecting again, David. Note: So far we've been unable to watch more than a couple of seconds of the "documentary" due to the toe-curl factor.

Update II: Laura Lee links with a fascinating tour of her local Arkansas neighborhoods, where McCain/Palin seems to be far ahead of Obama/Biden in the yard-sign polls, suggesting a groundswell of support for the alpha underdog and pitbull with lipstick under the radar -- seismograph? -- of Gallup, Rasmussen, Quinnipiac & Company.

Update III: Joan of Argghh! floats our boat with a link: "Looks like McCain is ready to paint his ship red and decorate it with the dead bodies of all the people Obama has thrown under the bus."

It's the character, stupid

"Good character is made up of three parts," according to a British think tank report released last August: "a sense of personal agency or self-direction; an acceptance of personal responsibility; and effective regulation of one's own emotions, in particular the ability to resist temptation or at least defer gratification." *See more excerpts below. Above, Lesson 1 from McGuffey's Eclectic First Reader, one of a series of textbooks that "molded American literary taste and morality, particularly in the Middle West, from 1836 until the early twentieth century" according to Answers.com.

"It's the character, stupid," we emailed Fox & Friends this morning in response to their viewer question, "Which is more important in this election, character or an economic plan?":

While Obama's stealth radical agenda, Alinsky-style thuggish tactics and hysterical followers frighten me, I'm no big fan of McCain's either, what with Soros-seeded McCain-Feingold "campaign finance reform" and McCain's scientifically challenged views on anthropogenic climate change.

Sarah, on the other hand, floats my boat.

McCain is the far lesser of two evils. Neither of the presidential candidates knows the first thing about economics, so all we have LEFT is character, and for a Beltway pol, McCain's got it way over Barack "Whichever-way-the-wind-blows" Obama.

"Obama is my Jesus?" God help us.

*Fun excerpts re that think tank report:

Reeves's three parts to a good character will be familiar to psychologists. The first is what psychologists call "self-efficacy" - belief in your own ability to achieve something. Shelves of evidence show how important self-belief is for success. Reeves's second aspect - "taking responsibility for one's own actions" - is easy to aim for but much harder to put into practice thanks to the effects of cognitive-dissonance. Psychologically it is extremely hard for us to recognise when we've behaved wrongly or made bad decisions (check out "mistakes were made but not by me" for more on this). Reeves's third aspect of a good character is also well known to psychologists who have built up plenty of evidence showing that self-discipline and self-regulation are vital to success, and may even be more important than intelligence in that regard.

As Reeves explains, the notion that there is such a thing as good character gets politically delicate because of (probably unfounded) claims that bad characters cause poverty and because of evidence showing that poverty causes bad characters. Look away for a second and you find yourself in the territory of blaming poor people for their lot. And you're effectively saying that some people are better than others …

Reeves discusses whether good characters are harder to come by these days and if so why. He finds no evidence for the idea that we've been corrupted by consumerism, but says there is evidence for the idea that liberalism - the anything goes mentality of modern life - may be partly to blame.

In particular, Reeves says the idea that we should all be free to do what we want has negatively impacted on parenting. And it is the family and good parenting that Reeves identifies as one of the most important sources of good characters.

Paging Dr. Sanity.

Update: Our buddy Jill of The Business of Life links, pulling out this fun quote from Richard Reeves's "A question of character":

The first headmaster of Stowe school, JF Roxburgh, declared his goal to be turning out young men who would be "acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck."

John McCain comes to mind.

Shooting Obama out of the sky (again)

John McCain "has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop," wrote Michael Barone (and others) recently, explaining that "For a fighter pilot, that means honing in above and behind the adversary so you can shoot him out of the sky. For a political candidate, it means acting in such a way that the opponent's responses again and again reinforce the points you are trying to make and undermine his own position." Above, "the OODA loop in practice" over Vietnam (Thanks to Bill in the comments for the correction) from HG's World.

"As you know, I'm an old Navy pilot, and I know when a crisis calls, it's all hands on deck," John McCain deadpanned before assembled reporters yesterday, once again catching his opponents off guard — as he did three weeks ago by disorienting the immediate world with his bold choice of Governor Sarah Palin as running mate — by announcing he would put his campaign on hold to join Senate colleagues in the ongoing financial crisis debate, maneuvering his opponent into a position where Obama had no choice but to do the same, if only for a few hours. Even as members of the commentariat on both sides of the aisle were all over the map wondering what this latest "risky" move might mean, our own gut reaction was the same thrill of hope against hope — can you say "landslide"? — we had experienced when Sarah Oakley Palin came out of the gate. As we blogged then, "Oh, yeah!"

Consider, first, a "half-time" report early this afternoon on what goes on behind closed Senatorial doors (our own transcriptions from Fox News live).

Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) — appointed by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to be the negotiator representing the Republicans — is crediting "the arrival of McCain and Obama in Washington yesterday with moving things along and focussing the nation's attention on the [financial crisis]." McConnell adds that "Both of them [McCain and Obama] being there yesterday underscored the significance of moving forward on a bipartisan basis and doing it quickly."

Go, Johhny go! Now listen to Fox News' grand-poobah-in-residence Chris Wallace, a member in good standing of what we term the fuddy-duddy community — J.R. Dunn's "Northeast Corridor conservatives" who "could not comprehend Sarah Palin or what she represents, any more than the liberal-left could" — telling Martha McCallum that he has good news and bad news for McCain now that Congress has gone back to work and tonight's Oxford, Mississippi debate will go forward:

The bad news is that he looked a little silly climbing up on his white horse. The good news is that once he gets up on that stage tonight, people are going to forget what happened in the last 36 hours. They will be concentrating on how each candidate does in the debate.

WHO looks a little silly, Chris? We'll have to wait and see which way the election goes, but we're guessing the flyboy just shot you and your fellow Northeast Corridor conservatives out of the sky again.

Update: Fausta links, playing with our headline in "McCain knocks Obama off the headlines," a rollicking, link-and-image-rich read.

Update II:  "Nice political rant from SISU," says Maggie's News Junkie.

If the shoe fits

Inspired by Sarah Palin's signature bright red Naughty Monkey Double Dare peep-toe pumps with three-and-a-half-inch heels, we ferreted out our own mid-seventies-vintage Elkins rosebud-pink, peep-toe pumps with three-and-a-half-inch heels from the back of a neglected closet where they had languished these many years. All that was old is new again,

"The Governor of Alaska gets our girls-just-wanna-have-fun juices flowing," we blogged three weeks back during the rumor-revved hours and minutes leading up to John McCain's announcement of his VP choice, even as members of the fuddy-duddy community counseled a "safe" pick. Now we're getting some insight into what makes those fuddy-duddies tick. "Clearly, a small but influential number of conservatives — almost exclusively from the New York-Washington axis which we will term the 'Northeast Corridor' — could not comprehend Sarah Palin or what she represents, any more than the liberal-left could," writes J.R. Dunn in The American Thinker:

In fact, the liberals can be said to have had a superior grasp of Palin's impact. They, at least, saw her as a threat.

If this is the choice of the conservative base, one said, "Then we need a new base."

Two points are immediately evident: this rhetoric echoed precisely what the liberal media was saying and at the same time was diametrically opposed to what the rest of the country had to say.

In the same way that liberals view the U.S. a racist, militarist monolith, the Northeast Corridor coterie view it as a cultural wasteland populated by backwoodsmen, halfwits who need to be guided by an enlightened but aloof elite.

We totally agree with reader Wemedge's thoughts in the comments:

This is the first article I've read since the Palin announcement which articulates my disappointment with all the Krauthammers, Noonans, Willses, and Brookses at their rejection of someone who is clearly compelling and fresh.

What most disappointed, as so well put by Mr. Dunn was that "so isolated had the Northeast Corridor conservatives become, so deeply embedded in their Jamesian parallel universe, that they couldn't recognize her clear conservative stance, couldn't recognize her personal courage, couldn't, in the end, be bothered to stand with her when she and her family were victimized by the most repellent political attack of our epoch."

So I came, all by myself to the same conclusion that this article did: they're clueless.

"We sold our Governor a pair of red Double Dare Naughty Monkey shoes a couple of weeks ago," the proprietors of Juneau's Shoefly Inc. wrote Fausta the other day. "She just wore those shoes as John McCain announced Governor Sarah Palin from Alaska as his vice president running mate. Although not everyone agrees with her politics, everyone can agree that she wears 'sexy shoes.'" Fuddy-duddies need not apply. Update: "They look like something Daisy Duck would wear," comments Tuck.

Those Northeast Corridor Conservatives need to get out more, beyond their Pauline Kael bubble, like businessman Jay Randhawa of the San Diego firm that markets the "very edgy, very hip, very street" Naughty Monkey shoes favored by Sarah Palin. "He was surprised to learn that Gov. Palin was introduced as Mr. McCain's vice-presidential choice wearing a red pair of peep-toe pumps with 3 1/2-inch heels," reports the WSJ, but instead of staring in incomprehension, he saw an opportunity:

The shoes, marketed by his company's Naughty Monkey line, generally are geared to women in their early-to-mid-20s who go clubbing, he says.

"The age bracket we target is a little younger. It's a very edgy, very hip, very street brand," adds Mr. Randhawa.

Celebrities like Paris Hilton had been photographed in the brand's shoes, but seldom, if ever, a 40-something politician.

Mr. Randhawa says he realized that Gov. Palin's footwear choice offered the chance to pitch the Naughty Monkey line to a new demographic. The company quickly sent out emails to its retailers with a photo of the Alaska governor wearing the shoes and the slogan "I vote for Naughty Monkey!"

Women in their early-to-mid-20s who go clubbing, 40-something politicians, women d'un certain age who blog. Girls just wanna have fun. Unless you're a fuddy-duddy. Yes you, Peggy Noonan. And you, Miss Hillary:

The organizers of an anti-Iran rally Monday rescinded their invitation to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin after Democrats protested that her presence would turn the event into a political rally, McCain campaign and Jewish community sources said.

The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations created a political tempest by inviting Palin to speak without clearing her invitation with another speaker, Senator Hillary Clinton. Clinton promptly dropped out of the event, saying it would be seen as unduly political.

"I guess now we know how deep Hillary's concern for Iranian nukes really is, skin deep," wrote blog buddy Sol of Solomonia in disgust at the disingenuousness of Hillary's posturing:

As soon as she learned that Sarah Palin would be there, she was out the door. Thanks for nothing. I get the feeling she reacted worse to this news than she would have had she heard that Monica would be there making a speech. Nothing, absolutely nothing, trumps cynical selfish partisan politics on Planet Clinton. Not even Iranian nukes.

Or maybe Clinton backed out in fear of her own sensible shoes' being upstaged by Palin's red peep-toe pumps with three-and-a-half-inch heels.

Update: Northeast Corridor regressives progressives liberals weigh in (Bring on the smelling salts.):

"All of my women friends, a week ago Monday, were on the verge of throwing themselves out windows," an author and political activist, Nancy Kricorian of Manhattan, said yesterday. "People were flipping out … Every woman I know was in high hysteria over this. Everyone was just beside themselves with terror that this woman could be our president — our potential next president" …

Even some prominent figures admitted to being overcome by anti-Palin feelings. "I am having Sarah Palin nightmares," an acclaimed playwright and writer, Eve Ensler, wrote on the Huffington Post. She said she was disturbed by the chants about oil and gas drilling during Mrs. Palin's speech to the Republican convention. "I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination," Ms. Ensler wrote.

That's just how Hillary's Pink Offensive made us feel back in the day, but now the shoe's on the other foot. Why can't we all just get along? Our own Dr. Sanity, quoted in the article, has the last word:

A psychiatrist and conservative blogger, Patricia Santy, said the strong emotional reactions are driven by Mrs. Palin's differing with the left-leaning political agenda of many feminists. "Their entire image of themselves is based on the fact that they are paving the way for women. What do they see? Women getting ahead, women being empowered who don't agree with them," Dr. Santy said.

Sorry. We don't have that in your size.

"Without the advice of Congress or new regulation"

"Charles P. Kindleberger, an economic historian who advanced the study of international finance and helped to devise the Marshall Plan for Europe's reconstruction after World War II … was also known for investigating the role of mob psychology in financial manias and panics, dating back to the tulip crisis in Holland early in the 17th century." Image: Semper Augustus, "the most expensive tulip sold during the tulipomania" (Anonymous Dutch Artist, opaque watercolor on paper, Norton Simon Art Foundation)

"The banking system is reforming itself right before our eyes, without the advice of Congress or new regulation," write the WSJ editors. "Nor is this largely the fault of the Bush Administration, as Barack Obama claims, or of some lack of regulation, as John McCain asserts." What a relief to have someone who knows about these things explain what we knew in our bones, BDS notwithstanding:

The immediate priority is to calm markets and prevent a crash, and to do so it helps to recall how we got here. We are not living through some "crisis of capitalism," unless policy blunders make it so … These politically convenient riffs do nothing to reassure the public.

The current panic is the ugly aftermath of the credit mania that took flight in the middle years of this decade. As students of economic historian Charles Kindleberger know ("Panics, Manias, and Crashes"), financial manias throughout history have shared one trait: the excessive expansion of credit. This bubble was no different.

The Federal Reserve kept interest rates too low for too long, creating a subsidy for debt and a global commodity price spike. The excess liquidity and capital flows this spurred became the fuel for the wizards on Wall Street and in mortgage-finance who created new financial instruments that in turn fueled the housing bubble. As long as it lasted, nearly everyone inhaled the euphoria of rising asset prices and soaring profits. Normal risk assessment gave way to the excesses that always attend manias.

The petals of Semper Augustus were "broken" or variegated, later discovered to have been caused by a virus spread by aphids. "In 1637 the year of 'tulipomania,' it is recorded that a bulb sold for 10,000 florins, the price of a desirable house and gardens in central Amsterdam."

"Lehman's bankruptcy filing is another sign of progress," says the Journal:

The Treasury and Fed have signaled they can say no. While Lehman's failure has spooked markets, the lesson that a storied investment house can fail without a federal rescue is its own crash course in risk management.

"Amid this turmoil and uncertainty, the challenge for policy makers is twofold":

Protect the overall financial system from the fallout of individual bank failures, and protect the larger economy from recession caused by financial distress. They each require different policy levers …

Meanwhile, a new RTC [Resolution Trust Corp, endorsed yesterday by Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker] would provide a buyer for securities for which there is no market, set a floor under the market, hold the securities until markets stabilize, and liquidate them in an orderly fashion, perhaps at a profit. Failed institutions and managers would not be bailed out. There's always a risk that the politicians will meddle, which is one reason for the Bush Administration to do this now so it can insist on enough political insulation.

"As for the larger economy, the last 13 months are a guide to what not to do":

The Fed recklessly cut interest rates, while Congress and the White House dropped "rebate" checks from helicopters. The rate cuts ignited another oil and commodity spike that walloped middle-class consumers, while the rebates did nothing to change incentives or lift investment.

But try telling that to a mewling electorate looking for "quick fixes and someone to blame," as we blogged a month back:

As we wrote during the heat of the primary season last winter, referencing yet another Sowell column, "Unfortunately for the future of the Republic should McCain or either of the front-running Democrats — who all of them seem to believe a President can and should 'manage' the economy rather than step back and let the invisible hand create wealth — should one of them become Leader of the Free World, we'll have an Economics 101 gap in the Oval Office, and THAT worries us and Thomas Sowell, whose Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy ought to be at the top of the Arizona senator's [not to mention Obama's] must-read list" …

Rewarding bad behavior only encourages more bad behavior.

Just in time, master satirist Scott Ott of ScrappleFace delivers the "news" we were longing to hear:

Yesterday Sen. John McCain called for a high-level commission to investigate the current economic crisis and to propose solutions. Today, the commission released its final report calling for the federal government to immediately withdraw from Wall Street, the home mortgage market and “other sectors where government intervention has undercut the principles of free-market capitalism.”

The panel, comprised of a truck driver, a Wal-Mart People Greeter, a self-described public school “cafeteria lady” and “that old guy who’s always sitting by himself at Cracker Barrel,” noted that “as long as people don’t have to bear the consequences of their behavior, or they think that the government will bail them out if they fail, they’ll take irrational risks.”

Weren't we just saying?

Update: "I deal with many business people in my work, and it is my conclusion that the biggest obstacle to business creation, and thus capital creation and job creation and wealth creation, is the government," writes The Barrister at Maggie's:

Note that the biggest screw-ups of the year, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were government agencies. So much for government's role in the financial industry: it inevitably becomes politicized, mediocratized, and corrupted — as with any government involvement in any industry. Few people in government could figure out how to run a candy shop, much less a complex enterprise.

It's the creative destruction, stupid.