#1: Repeatedly Molly Kronberg is working on a book. Interesting. She probably ought be searching around for a publisher. Perhaps she might look into a publishing outlet in Northern Virginia that has published a ton of … um… esoterica (?), publisher by the name of “Benjamin Franklin Books”, which —

[PAUSE.]

I don’t know if that is a “five percent joke”, a “.00005 percent joke”, or if the context of these things pretty much assures anyone reading this will get it. Including the good folks in the Boiler Room in Leesburg. Hi everybody! Has Tony Papert started labelling his Tabs?

[PAUSE.]

Okay. That is what is called a “Call Back”. You would have to go down one or two entries in this subcategory to find I am referencing myself. A self-referntial footnote which does not amount to much, but we’ve been there before.

#2: An attempted explanation for the end-of-the-line which has been met regarding attempting any line on the current presidential election, post the lack of an appearance of Michael Bloomberg, post the end of the line for the “PUMA Movement” — which, I guess will now individually vote for whomever they will vote for — and with just a blip of a published outline on the emergance of Sarah Palin on the National Stage. Whereabouts Obvious. I’m not much more than a “FACTNET Digest” here.:

This may be due to trying to figure out the upside for calling Palin supporters via the boiler rooms. If you take the WABAC machine to 1979 rememebr that one of the first big fundraising lists we began to boil was composed of Western State supporters of Reagan and people in the oil and gas business.

Palin fits the description of what we used to call.

YAHOOS

Those people were fed a steady diet of anti Trilat, CFR and Bilderberger material as we millked them monthly.

AFTER Reagan won the 1980 election, we created another hat to wear in the boiler rooms based on the RTL supporters . Lyn ran as a Dem who spent millions trying to screw Dems while we were calling up right wing lists to give us money to “defend Reagan” from the Dems and the KGB.

If the Salon crowd takes over the Russian franchise from Lyn, I would expect the Russians to be dropped , become Lyn’s latest enemy as the cult battles Al Gore, Obama and Soros in another concoction of delusions before the final exit.

You’d suppose. It seems he’s charging on for the Russian intrusion into Georgia, which leaves McCain on the sideline (unless he’d want to feign a great riff within the Republican Party to take sides in, as he’s pretended to do with the Democratic Party.) No, Mr. Ossifur’s iteration on this being THE SOURCE for understanding the election (shouldn’t he be ranting about Cryonics?) notwithstanding, they can’t place their chips anywhere in this election, for fun and profit. Biden is an obvious target in attachment with their long time crusade against Obama — Delaware Credit Card Industry? — picked up by your Tarpley and Solon. Not too difficult to frame a conspiracy here. Not that I want to do the job for this totalitarian cult in figuring out what to flog for their “Potemkin Village of a Potemkin Village” and donation stream.

#3: But it seems the look is backward. The “New Direction” declared in closing the door on this election promises all new videos at the l-pac website, the follow-ups to the “1932” video, which had been both a connecting bridge into the “Hillary Clinton for President” cult campaign, as well some odd “Lyn is FDR!!!” thought-process for the dozens of “LYM”ers. New videos for Putin-hugging purpose and, seemingly, preparing to die — always the subtext with this entity these days.

Forget the PUMAs. Now that neither convention has panned out the way Lyn wanted it–no Bloomberg candidacy, no Hillary candidacy, no kidnapping of Obama by British agents, no mysterious McCain illness–anyhow, now that Lyn’s past year of blather on the Presidential campaign has evaporated like morning dew, all the org is talking about is … RUSSIA.

And how Putin saved civilization by invading Georgia.

These people are loony-tunes. Meanwhile, Lyn’s telling his inner elites that it’s only because of him that Hillary stayed in the race.

#4: La Rouche’s cult is his failing – his analysis is brilliant — Tarpley is reasonably humble – his writing is 10 times better an. You lost me with the first two stences there, and the slight contradiction in assessment.

#5:  Hm.  Further illustration of the difference between the “Boomer LaRouche Site” (www.larouchepub.com) and the LYM version (www.larouchepac.com ) is Lyn’s “Virtually No Candidate” statement. Nancy has an article on it posted at the larouchepub site ( http://www.larouchepub.com/other/200…pres_cand.html ) that omits the embarrassing reference to “emotional breakdowns in Leesburg” found in the full version posted at larouchepac (http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008…candidate.html ) . The larouchepub.com site seems designed to actually try to win people over to LaRouche’s ideas. I’m not sure what the larouchepac site is designed to do. 
I believe this shows that one thing the “pac” site (obstensibly a political action committee operates to bundle up money for electoral candidates, but that doesn’t seem operable here, which theoretically would have had this money being spent to state senate seats and the like) is to wax the wheel of the LYM, hence the jab at the Boomers in the Central Committee is included in the otherwise identical press releases.  How this phrase been deleted by now?

Dead Since 2003.
[…] but a veteran Japanese expert on North Korea says the “dear leader” is actually dead – and his role is played by a double.

The expert says Kim died of diabetes in 2003 and world leaders, including Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hu Jintao of China, have been negotiating with an imposter.

He believes that Kim, fearing assassination, had groomed up to four look-alikes to act as substitutes at public events. One underwent plastic surgery to make his appearance more convincing. Now, the expert claims, the actors are brought on stage whenever required to persuade the masses that Kim is alive.

The author has been derided by rival analysts of the hermetic communist state. Yet so few facts are known about North Korea’s ruling dynasty that some of the strange things reported in Professor Toshimitsu Shigemura’s bestselling book cannot be readily explained.

“Scholars don’t trust my reasoning but intelligence people see the possibility that it will turn out to be accurate,” he said. “I have identified and pinned down every source.”

The book, “The True Character of Kim Jong-il,” cites sources from inside North Korea and from the intelligence services of Japan and South Korea.

 Just suffered a stroke
U.S. and South Korean intelligence reports that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, recently suffered a stroke raise issues that the North’s neighbors have long feared. If Kim is incapacitated or dies, who will take over one of the world’s most isolated and unpredictable regimes, now armed with nuclear weapons? And what will happen to a nation that has long looked on Kim as a godlike figure?

South Korean lawmakers told reporters on Wednesday after a briefing by the National Intelligence Service that Kim suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in mid-August and underwent surgery, but has recovered enough to speak and walk.

Kim Sung Ho, the South’s spy chief, told the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee that this was not the first time that Kim had been operated on for a circulation problem. There was no sign of unrest in the North, the lawmakers were told.

A spokeswoman for the National Intelligence Service said in an interview later Wednesday, “We have intelligence reports that after intensive treatments, his condition has considerably improved.” She spoke on condition of anonymity, in keeping with agency policy.

In Pyongyang on Wednesday, the Japanese news agency Kyodo quoted North Korea’s No. 2 leader, Kim Yong Nam, as saying that there was “no problem” with Kim Jong Il.

“We see such reports as not only worthless, but rather as a conspiracy plot,” another senior North Korean official, Song Il Ho, told Kyodo.

Kim, 66, was conspicuously absent from a parade on Tuesday to mark the North’s 60th anniversary.

“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said to an outbreak of laughter, shouts and raucous applause from his audience, clearly drawing a connection to Palin’s joke. “It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still going to stink after eight years.”

Considering the false outrage directed at a bemusing joke and old antiquated idiom, a nod to Palin’s badly delivered antiquated joke of aw-shucks folksiness, and a reference to John McCain (and POLICIES) as a pig, not Sarah Palin (he is the one at the top of the ticket, you understand; and it has been culturally agreed on that Ms. Palin is attractive) — I am reminded of that line John McCain used in his sedated nominating speech as Code Pink protesters were being carted away:

“Don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static.”

But, alas, we all are.  Obama delivered a speech on education, one of those five pointers which unveil, frankly not so much a Grand Vision for America but a Vision nonetheless.  Meanwhile, Sarah Palin delivered a whopper of a statement regarding the Fannie Mae and Bernie Mac (er… I mean, Freddie Mac) bailout, which shows the disarming cluelessness on what it was that just happened.  The problem is this fact will pass into the ether for “Joe Six-Pack” and — what’s the female equivalent of “Joe Six Pack” — as opposed to watching these theatricl aspects of this political race… and planning to get Palin’s haircut.

The “Truthiness” is in danger of falling right in place for the narrative, past the Truth.  McCain has called Obama out for earmarks, as an offense against Obama’s charge against Palin’s — she’s from goddamned Alaska, people! — Pork Barrel attachments, as mayor of Wasilla and as Governor of Alaska.  The issue is this the premise of the Palin candidacy — except it is the lie which is coating some basic Cultural Identity Politics of “Moose-hunter and Mother.”  McCain demands Obama to remove that speck from his eye before McCain will remove that log out of his eye.

That’s a play off a biblical reference.

Meantime I hear Obama state “They must think the American people are stupid” and “The American people are not that stupid.”  The ghost of Adlai Stevenson, and “Let’s talk sense to the American People” hangs in the air right about now.  Not to get into the arena of “Theater Review” too much, and Obama does need to follow a sort of guided instinct at this point — he is picking up on the Art of Sarcasm, but there may just be not quite enough declarative sentences.

As a matter of further controversy in some feigned outrage; Dear RNC:  I think that Tom Toles, partisan to Obama’s direction, doesn’t much mind that Obama stole his line.  I further think that Obama’s citation on the Keith Olbermann shows just how clunky it is to note the Toles cartoon, hence my advice to Obama is to keep using that line and to go ahead and leave out the reference to Toles.  All of which misses the basic truth of that line.

Surfing about, running down the blog-o-roll, there is this ad blip from MSNBC which has a blue image of McCain (is he still running?) faced up against Obama, promoting debate coverage.  It’s a mass ad buy which attaches itself to blogs by key-words and topic, hence it follows it will be there under dailykos.  The joke is that it was attached to this story.  I suppose these things are inevitable.

Meanwhile, at the Washington Monthly, something called “The John McCain Compliance Fund” has a large ad, and here I’ll go ahead and link to an item of interest (soon to be useless because the ads will donate out) to see the set of ads on the sidebar:  elecotral horse-race website — check, Polar Bears “Shame On Big Oil” fund — check, and… John McCain “Compliance Fund”.  Notwhithstanding the attempt at cross-over appeal McCain seems to be going for in advertising in the quite polarized environment of political blogs, the phrasology seems like a joke.  I gather its odd name fits into the genre of “Contractual Obligation” — surely skirts about McCain / Feingold, but we may be better off there to refer to the “Compliance Fund”.  McCain is Complying to something, even if the name demands of us to Comply to McCain.

We have arrived at the first point in this presidential election, since Obama became the presumptive nominee, where if someone were to suggest we hold the election right now, I wouldn’t sign off.  Which is to say that John McCain has the edge right now — I won’t suggest that ten percent which is on the edge of the polls, but the three or four points … five? … sounds about right.  It’s the post-convention bounce, a strangle on the current media narrative — and a dejavu of past election seasons which have lead Obama partisans to a higher fret-level than they’ve had since going into the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.  It will either pass or it won’t pass.

I have come to a decision.  I am going to completely revamp my sidebar over there for the duration of this presidential campaign.  The three categories, a mass of anti-McCain materials, a mass of anti-Palin material, and a mass of Obama material.  At the moment the Palin section is more fun — we’ve had a compressed time-period to shift through her problems — and the Obama section is a bit unclear — I know a couple items I would toss up — the Jeremiah Speech, troubling politically perhaps, but it was the best and most thoughtful speech he’s given and I’m not always up to dissecting the voting populace’s opinion.  “Fight the Smears dot com”, clearly.  I’ll look around and find what I want, and be honest with myself.

Yes, yes, I am sure the McCain / Palin campaign is shaking in its boots at the news that the Skull/Bones blog is engaging in a sidebar of Democratic Party Hackdom.  Yes, yes, I am sure I will be able to persuade the multiple leaders of neo-nazi sects who have commented on this blog.  (Sigh.  I think that is one of the ways my blog is different from your blog.)  And the other six people who read this blog that generally agree with me will be oh so affected.  And there’s nothing more readable and exciting than stilted earnestness and that strident voice which is taking over here.

I don’t think I will be able to get down to thiss mini-project until Wednesday and Friday.  I state an avoidance over “Trooper-Gate” which, politically, has no legs over a two month period — easy to suggest Clinton’s “Trooper-Gate” and allege tossing up of mud and seeing if it sticks.  What I have in mind on the outset is:  Palin wearing the “Nowhere” t-shirt in advocating for the “Bridge to Nowhere”.  Related is the hypocritical anti-pork crusade of a mayor whose Alaska small town job was to slice into the federal budget, and whose state is the number one state for federal largesse.  This is sub-category number one for her.  Sub-category number two goes along the line of the video of Karl Rove’s comments on Tim Kaine, and her scuttled away from the media — replete with the McCain super-charge against the Media, and my resume alignment comparison with Obama.  Sub-category number three:  the Creationist, her pastors (not as racially loaded as Obama’s), and her Alaska Independence Party speach.  Notably absent from all of this — well, Levi Johnston is the sorriest man on the planet right now as he prepares for his shot-gun wedding.

McCain, from the top, I have two photographs which are automatics.  You know the two:  Hugging W, eating birthday cake during Katrina.  “That’s not change you can believe in.”  I also need to dredge up that Tennessee (or may have been a neighboring state) Straw-poll from 2006 where Bill Frist was casting about for votes, stacking the decks in his backyard, which McCain blunted by urging everyone to vote for Good Ol’ George Bush.  This is the clear thrust number one of this vaguely propagandaistic area.  The RNC Convention was surreal, a call to storm Washington, and I don’t know how many “in” party presidential candidates have ever been intellectually honest in promising a switch over from the previous president of the same party — I think 1896 may have been the last time that claim could have been made.  Beyond this, to tie in the Plutocracy: Phil Gramm’s “Nation of whiners”, McCain’s definition of rich.  Wander a bit into foreign policy:  “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran.”

I suppose I could expediate this process by asking for a link and an image, but I’ll get around to it.

I had a meeting with Godot yesterday.  He never showed up.  This is the second time Godot blew me off.  I am trying to figure out whether I should give Godot a third chance to meet — kind of important, but if a no-show I will just wash my hand of the whole affair and move on.  It’s a dilemma.  I think I’ll pray to God for some guidance, and see what God indicates I should do.

Again I reiterate: if Barack Obama were in a presidential contest with John McCain, sans any additional connector, Obama would win.  We now have various political chattering class members who have said the same thing in explaining why the Sarah Palin choice was a necessary risk.  (And, any rate, it is not as if a Tim Pawlenty offers a whole giant grasp of policy mechinitions.)  The added bizarre item is that Barack Obama would crush candidate Sarah Palin in a presidential contest.  I do not even think this is worth arguring.  But somehow John McCain / Sarah Palin has given John McCain’s campaign a new lease on life — McCain lives to fight another day… which may or may not be when Sarah Palin debates Joseph Biden, though here — to the extent that in a presidential contest everyone ends up becoming oddly enough a part of the campaign — one has to maintain Palin to the highest of standards with which to meet.  (Frankly she should really not be allowed to be plopped back to Alaska so as to be coached on what her views on foreign affairs are, and to squelch remaining Alaskan affairs, without a political price.)

So it is that Obama gets to contest a McCain and a Palin, constantly measured against them.  So we get to argure against Sarah Palin’s assertion of “experience”.  I frankly wish our Democratic presidential candidate had a bit more seasoning, but nothing is perfect here.  Palin chimed in with this memorable line.:

“A small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

In a previous epoch any Republican partisan would have balked at the experience of a “small time mayor” — cue Karl Rove.  But, here again I reiterate a more proper line of comparing the careers of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

Barack Obama’s editor of the Harvard Law Review versus Sarah Palin’s Miss Wasilla Pageant victory
Barack Obama’s Civil Rights Attorney career versus Sarah Palin’s Sports Anchor stint
Barack Obama’s “Community Organizing” versus Sarah Palin’s PTA
Barack Obama’s Illinois State Senate tenure versus Sarah Palin’s Wasilla Mayorship
Barack Obama’s US Senate seat from Illinois versus Sarah Palin’s Alaska Governorship

I tend to think this is a more proper guideline.  There are a few items floating in both of their resumes that need to be plugged.  Plucked directly from wikipedia, which by necessity is going to tend toward the bland and is unable to state forthrightly various controversies which now swirl around her: 

Palin chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, while also serving as Ethics Supervisor of the commission.   Obama:  taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years

Obama also wrote one memoir (I don’t think his second book — campaign directed material, sort of similar in purpose to the “Sarah” biography — really should count as “writing”) — not the “two memoirs” mocked by Ms. Palin.

This lining up is meant to, I suppose be-little Palin a tad (Sports Anchor verus Editor of Harvard Law Review), but also basically to realign Palin’s implication of “Community Organizer”.  Which is sort of like being a member of the PTA, except with different racial overtones to be exploited.  From this alignment we can appreciate what they did or did not do in each part of the career.  For instance, I have seen some “Libertarian Cases for Palin”, which strikes me as a bit of a joke — for one thing, Palin’s not the presidential candidate, for another thing [I’ll go ahead and squirt past some comments on “Libertarianism” for the moment] — for a Wasilla mayorship which plucked as much federal expenditures as it could and for an Alaska which is takes more federal expenditures from the budget than any other state.  We sort of need to get the careers aligned to get at it.

As for Obama’s “Community Organizing”, I need to re-read the Weekly Standard’s hit-piece about that tenure from a few months’ back.  It was a critical piece, but a critical piece which lead me to a higher opinion of Obama, because their ideological complaints misfired.  For instance, the article suggested a bit of Obama campaign padding in stating that he “stood up to” developers in a contentious fight to get rid of Asbestos in some low income housing.  The Weekly Standard suggested that they were more than acceptible to the complaint, and quite willingly followed Obama’s request to remove it.  Which, if true, actually fits right into Obama’s Kumbaya rhetoric — the Asbestos was removed, the quality of life for the poor residents of that housing development moderately rose — and Obama brought it to fruition.  By comparison, he worked with Lugar in his US Senate career to deal with the problem of loose nukes, which was a bill that received — as Obama’s critics point out — either unanimous or near unanimous support.  Both matters seem to bring us to a more fruitful position, ?no?   The article went on to comment that Obama really didn’t accomplish the task of getting people out of the place, which was a matter that stymied me when I read it — unless the writer and editor of the Weekly Standard had some Utopian Vision which is at odds with the very definition of “Conservative” — and, which frankly I think what is called Liberal in American politics has (largely for the good, really) abandoned somewhere in the haze of the late 1960s or 1970s.  But their vision of that “Community Organizing” hints at a sinister “pimp daddy” to some poor folk — Asbestos or no Asbestos, Obama would then grind them into a Political Machine, Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed style.

U!S!A!  U!S!A!  U!S!A!

The least anticipated presidential nomination speech concludes, overshadowed by the curiosity of the vice-presidential speech, and it did indeed live up to its anti-climactic promise.  All the sort of chatter of John McCain’s luckluster speech has seemed to bandy about the realm of the Code Pink disruptors, or over to the weird “Walter Reed Middle School” fracus, but one thing popped out at me as rather surreal.  Skip to 8:46 and watch the conclusion of John McCain’s speech.  John McCain entreats the crowd to various causes and “Fight with Me” “Stand Up!”  and on and on.  Simply put: Why?  It is a stylistic decision to get bum-rumped by crowd noise, but it’s a stylistic decision that doesn’t really make any sense to me.  Though, some items of the speech really did miss any mark — wherein John McCain entreated the American public to greater community service, such as feeding stray puppies and “teaching illiterate adults to read”.  I cannot quite tell if that was a slam against Obama’s “Community Organizing” by way of suggesting personal initiative instead of their vision of petitioners for bigger Gummint — ie: “Organize Yourselves!.

Let it be, I suppose.  U!S!A!  U!S!A!

Sarah Palin has now been flown right back to Alaska, where she will reportedly be placed into deep freeze for much of the remainder of the campaign.  I do not think such a feat is possible.  The good news is that Barack Obama would defeat Sarah Palin in a presidential contest, just as he would defeat John McCain.  The Organized Chaos Theory for Sarah Palin is that she brings a sustained deep commitment from narrow targets, some of the narrow targets out in the Michigan and Ohio hintherlands, while John McCain will have to garner an, albeit tepid, broad support of the public at large — POW, “Mavrick“, “Country First” safe and sound choice.  Palin made her splash, and the negativities have to be safe-guarded while the positives have to be amplified.  My gut tells me that this is a tight-rope walk which is going to end badly for McCain — I gather the “tepid” McCain has to be whetted to some feel of excitement and the excitement of Palin has to be damped down and grounded — the narrow audience expanded– but who knows?  The “Composite View of What Voters take from Personalities” may yet yield to Dull / Excite over Excite / Dull.  Wait a week to see what the numbers show, and then just let this thing drift to the “debates”.  The good thing about the conventions being pushed back to around Labor Day is that, for the most part, the General Election has all around been truncated to a more proper shortened length.

The first thing I saw from the RNC Convention yesterday was a Black Railroad Operator from Texas, railing against “Identity Politics“, which is the big boogey-boo of black Republicans.  This was a bit fascinating, as the whole Republican Convention has devolved into this great celebration of Identity Politics — Rural Americana, or a peculiar vision thereof.  Mike Huckabee let everyone know that the first time he used soap was when he entered college — where, as we’ve learned earlier he cooked squirrels in popcorn poppers.  That was a lesson to attack the image of the “Country Club Republican”.  I doubt many Republicans of any income bracket can identify with not having soap, but this certainly showed the Liberal Eastern Elites.  As did the story about those cruel soldiers taking school-children’s desks away to prove them a lesson, which begged the question — why wasn’t that teacher reprimended for wasting tax dollars?

Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani paraded against the North-Eastern Elites — the former governor of Massachusetts and the former mayor of New York City, who failed to take this line of attack when they were running for office in those places.  They shouted promises to Take America Back (from eight years of a Republican administration, and a Supreme Court Romney managed to claim as “liberal”?), and Giuliani managed a few plugs for 9/11, and reminded us all that “We are all Georgians” (frankly, no.).  I guess we can say that the energy level had picked up from Tuesday — and that day’s awe-inspiring Fred Thompson and Joseph Lieberman speeches and George H W Bush Tribute video.

Earlier in the day, Peggy Noonan had referenced, thinking she was off mic, the Sarah Palin selection as “political bullshit”, a conversation I’ve seen bandied about with unconvincing apologias.  It will be interesting to see, when the politics of the moment passes, how many “professional Republicans” privately hold that opinion.  We are sludging through this debris — cue Karl Rove‘s slam of Obama’s potential selection of Tim Kaine  (they know a few things in the 105th largest city in America that those elitists in the 104 larger cities don’t know, I tell you…)– and note to the Dems: slice these two items together NOW and relase as an ad, at the very least stuck on campaign website and on youtube, to be disseminated and ad naseum discussed by the media.  I note that the National Review found the same NY Times editorial regarding Ferraro as I did — which I only obliquely referenced but provided my answer (there are more experienced women in politics in 2008 than there was in 1984) — though I can also add that the editorial would have been a response to opinions expressed by such sources as the National Review… these things will boomerange on everyone.

As for Sarah Palin’s speech… it was whatever the Hell it was.  The basic outline of the speech was already written for “Unnamed Vice-Presidential candidate”, and I will say that she fit in the biographical spots herself, and probably sharpened some of the specific jabs at Obama.  What had been a good Obama Convention poll bounce which blurred into a Palin poll ker-plunk has been stalled for the moment — which is the way this is supposed to work.  Mentioning the “Hockey Mom” and “PTA” experience, I had to wonder, though:  Do the people want that?  (I have a vague image of that country song and movie as roughly where this arena of “PTA Politics” heads us into.)  I suppose if you want to play the home game, you can categorically edge the “PTA” and compare that part of her career with Obama’s “Community Organizing” (the mayorship then gets compared with the tenure in the Illinois state Senate, and you move on to Senate versus Governor).  The attacks on “Community Organizing”, complete with a sort of “Rural versus Urban” theme gives us a bit of a racial subtext that is more than a little disconcerting.  Will she find her way onto Meet the Press, never mind the McCain attack on the “Liberal Media” as a reason she won’t get her fair shake so stuff it — and is it just as well for the Obama Campaign if not?  Some message trampling has occured here – “Harry Reid — leader of the ‘Do Nothing Senate’ — said ‘I can’t stand John McCain” — a partisan attack which folds away what made McCain a popular politician this past decade, and which also, incidentally, sheds away a large part of a recent Charles Krauthammer editorial.  A typical Palin fan these days, I guess, is writing letters to the editor such as:

Liberals are really running scared when you publish two critical letters for every supportive letter.  Any woman who can govern the [geographically] largest state in the Union, raise five kids, and keep a real he-man husband happy (???) has to something special.

In the end, the campaign will wind its way to the end, and Sarah Palin will be an automatic top tier Republican candidate for 2012 — though, I don’t know if that is “hers to lose”.   Obama and Joseph Biden have a candidate to defeat, named John McCain, and another candidate to deflate, name of Sarah Palin — they exist, and they need to be tactically defeated.  I think, at the end of the day, Sarah Palin is not going to pass the smell test for the American people, but that’s a matter that simply put cannot be taken for granted, and there will be ample opportunity to press it into a further attack on the main man: John McCain.  But overall I must say that there is nothing like a Republican Convention to convince me that I am a Democrat, just as there is nothing like Rush Limbaugh to convince me that Hillary Clinton is a’okay.

I suppose it should be noted that Lyndon Johnson did much the same to his college’s student body government, turning a rather apolitical small governing body into a highly partisan affair (and crushing enemies and creating factional disputes for their own sake) — a sign of ambitions outreaching the actual office, used for the sake of staking out higher ground where these tactics will come in handy, and a sign of a thirst for blood and gamesmanship for its own sake.  But this is a rather depressing indictment on the “Culture Warrior” Mayor of Wasilla,  a veerer of some misguided national politics writ small.

But in the first major race of her career — the 1996 campaign for mayor of her hometown, Wasilla — Palin was a far more conventional politician. In fact, according to some who were involved in that fight, Palin was a highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.  […]

Four years later, she took on her former workout buddy in a race that quickly became contentious. In Stein’s view, Palin’s main transgression was injecting big-time politics into a small-town local race. “It was always a nonpartisan job,” he says. “But with her, the state GOP came in and started affecting the race.” While Palin often describes that race as having been a fight against the old boys’ club, Stein says she made sure the campaign hinged on issues like gun owners’ rights and her opposition to abortion (Stein is pro-choice). “It got to the extent that — I don’t remember who it was now — but some national antiabortion outfit sent little pink cards to voters in Wasilla endorsing her,” he says.

Vicki Naegele was the managing editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman at the time. “[Stein] figured he was just going to run your average, friendly small-town race,” she recalls, “but it turned into something much different than that.” Naegele held the same conservative Christian beliefs as Palin but didn’t think they had any place in local politics.

“I just thought, That’s ridiculous, she should concentrate on roads, not abortion,” says Naegele.

The echoes are alive and kicking at this week’s Republican National Convention, which has veered sharply right and is tonally a “Take Down the Media” and “Rally Around Palin” affair, skipping toward Fred Thompson’s comments and I see myself a little sickened.  The Republicans have staked their ground — the curious relation with John McCain over the past decade has been called off, from their end, and I start to gather that this response over news interjections into various fracuses over Palin (assembled legitimate matters included) becomes a stake to “Rally Around the Flag”, but also a sort of insulating factor.

In the meantime, this bottom lines a few things:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

Oh.  So, she’s one of THOSE Small-town mayors, a particular type of noxious breed.  It is curious to compare the way the “Nanny State” imposes itself in small towns versus big cities.  Here we get these weird Stalinist advertisements in the newspaper proclaiming the joys of the coming Smoke-Bar Ban.  There, it’s an item of vindictiveness against the head Librarian over a dust-off over, like, Catcher in the Rye — leading through into a dust-off over the Rap and the Heavy Metal.  Or they   I think a bit of digging is in order to find out which books Mayor Sarah Palin wanted to ban.  Unfortunately the time-line procures the most politically potent and damaging possibility — ie, Harry Potter — what with all its wizardy and devil-worshipping, and it’ll probably be rather obscure and not terribly notable items.

The problem is always that if you give a little man a little power, they will think they are powerful.