Excuse Me!

By Ron Beasley

If there was ever any doubt David Brooks proved today that he is not only a political hack but an idiot as well.  Rather than cut him to ribbons myself I'll let my favorite new blogger, Daniel Larison do it for me.  As an added benefit he take on Peggy Noonan as well.

She is not a person of thought but of action. ~Peggy Noonan

On Thursday night, Palin took her inexperience and made a mansion out of it. From her first “Nice to meet you. May I call you Joe?” she made it abundantly, unstoppably and relentlessly clear that she was not of Washington, did not admire Washington and knew little about Washington. She ran not only against Washington, but the whole East Coast, just to be safe. ~David Brooks

Noonan and Brooks actually fall over themselves trying to compliment Palin on the modest success of being coherent, but these excerpts are striking in that someone might have written them as withering, sarcastic criticism and instead they are supposed to be a celebration of her virtues.  Noonan complains that Biden showed too much forbearance, but this is exactly what Noonan and Brooks show in their efforts to tip-toe around the obvious that for all her mastery of the non-answer and glittering generalities, to borrow Halcro’s language, she did not do very well.  Incredibly, her fans don’t seem to mind debasing the meaning of excellence if it allows them to call what we saw last night excellent.

On FOX this morning the morning blond bimbo was interviewing someone from Rasmussen.  She went ballistic when he said last night's debate would have little if any impact on the polls or the election.  He correctly stated that the best Palin could hope for last night was to not inflict any additional damage.  Larison also knows this:

There ought to have been some acknowledgement that it didn’t matter, that McCain was already fumbling and crumbling under the weight of his own mistakes, but instead we are treated to newfound, baseless enthusiasm:

Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We’ve got a beat! She will re-electrify the base. More than that, an hour and a half of talking to America will take her to a new level of stardom.   

Well, there’s certainly no accounting for why people become excited about celebrities, but it seems to me that if the base is electrified any more it will begin to suffer permanent damage to its already clogged heart.

Update

Even Charles Krauthammer has thrown in the towel:

Part of reassurance is intellectual. Like Palin, he's a rookie, but in his 19 months on the national stage he has achieved fluency in areas in which he has no experience. In the foreign policy debate with McCain, as in his July news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Obama held his own -- fluid, familiar and therefore plausibly presidential.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a "second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

Comments

[Peter G.]

Whereas McCain's "deeply troubling associations would be a list of his campaign team.