We do not hear your insights often enough! I still vividly remember that breakfast with you and Doc. I hope we hear more from you in the future.

Polls since then suggest otherwise. I’m be glad to be proved wrong on that one.

As for journalists losing their balls, what’s your evidence for that? Was it Gwen Ifill’s and Katie Couric’s gentleness? I dunno.

Anyway, one month to go. I find it hard to believe that Palin will grow much substance between now and the election.

That said, I do want to see her at a press conference. If the McCain campaign had balls (or was just crazy), they’d put her in one. But they won’t, because they know she’ll be standing on a trap door.

Being able to see Russia from Alaska, then, means you have an understanding of foreign policy; living in an Arctic state means that you have an understanding of climate change. In Mr. McCain’s case, it means, as he wrote last month, understanding technology policy because he flew airplanes in Vietnam and being concerned about the oceans’ health because he served in the Navy.

The impression fits with the overall theme that Ms. Palin and Senator John McCain have been trying to advance: that expertise is overrated, homespun sincerity is better than sophistication, conviction is more important than analysis.

It just can’t be… Unless substance has been devalued to such an extent that it urgently needs an intellectual bailout…

Voters judging Ms. Palin’s performance should focus on the goofy governing philosophy that is symbolized by her speech style, not the red herrings of accent or dialect.

Do we want a folksy America? With a populist Administration?
In modern society, fractured as it is into myriad interest groups and microgroups, any attempt to define the interests of the “average person” will be so general as to be useless.

Do we really want to be governed by folks who believe “Joe Sixpack” Adam & “Hockey Mom” Eve ate dinosaur steacks for breakfast 6,000 years ago?
Has the Earth turned flat again, or what?

So I’m asking: Have the journalists of America lost their balls?
They might want to eat them with salt and pepper one day.

Re McCain, I have a hunch this is his problem: When he confused “tactical” and “strategic” in the debate, lots of folks gave him the benefit of the doubt because that is one differentiation every military officer knows. But now I think he really does not know the difference.

Everything he has done in this campaign since he sewed up the nomination has been “tactical” in nature – reactive in design, on-the-ground and in combat perspective, short-term goals, working off lessons-learned about the “enemy.” He has not been strategic.

Obama has always been strategic.

One huge lesson that was learned out of Vietnam was that LBJ and McNamara and their minions got into the weeds in prosecuting the war. No one stayed up at the strategic level. Those lessons – the need to do the planning at a strategic level and leave the tactical to the actual combat leaders – was never put to better use that in the first Gulf War. But then Cheney and Rumsfeld forgot those lessons and operated on a tactical level in planning and executing the Iraq War and many have paid the price. Now Gates understands, and so does Patraeus.

And so does Obama. True leaders understand this difference. McCain never was a leader in the well-honed military sense. He went from playboy plebe to pilot to POW to politician. He loves being part of a team, but he can’t resist being the bad boy on the team. Only now he calls it being a maverick (just curious: did this nickname precede the release of Top Gun or follow it?).

Anyway, everything he’s done and continues to do in this campaign reflects a tactical mindset. And tactics may win battles, but strategy wins wars.

i couldn’t help thinking of the end of the movie Billy Madison, when the debate moderator says to Adam Sandler, “Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

I do consider McCain/Palin a Bad Thing.

I was just calling a debate, and a campaign, as I saw it. Not as I’d like it to go.

I want McCain/Palin to lose. Big time. I want the whole country to repudiate them. But that would be asking too much. Losing is enough.

Up until he named Palin, I thought McCain wasn’t the worst candidate. A few months back I said I didn’t think the sky would fall if Obama wasn’t elected, but I didn’t expect the ground to rise either. Meaning, anything would be better than Bush.

Now McCain/Palin looks worse than Bush to me, for several reasons… 1) McCain has shown remarkable lack of leadership, as well as coherency, in his campaign, especially since taking on Palin. (Remember that bullshit about suspending his campaign to go back to Washington and fix things with the bailout bill? He went back, attended a meeting with Bush, Obama and other heavies, saying nothing for the whole meeting, and then being utterly blah and noncommittal in the debate the next night. Obama was noncommittal too, but at least his gears were engaged with the process. McCain was barely present and unaccounted for.) 2) The guy is a warmonger who is still trying to best his dad by outranking him. (My humble opinion, fwiw.) 3) Picking Palin was a mistake of the first water. She is unfit in the extreme to serve as the country’s chief executive — a duty she is more likely to perform than any VP in history. That she “didn’t blink” (her words) when McCain called on her to be his Veep candidate says worlds about her lack of judgement as well. The correct response was, ” Sorry, Senator, but I’m still a rookie governor with one stamp on my new passport, and I’m just not ready. Call me in four years.” But she didn’t, and here we are.

What’s sad about McCain is that he would have stood a much better chance of winning by taking the high road, and being the guy folks liked when he rode the Straight Talk Express and slept in cheap motels. The guy we’re seeing now looks like a tool of consultants who’s doing “what it takes to win.” Meanwhile, Obama is kicking his ass at the grass roots level, with a volunteer organization that’s a model of efficiency and scope. Not to mention technological chops. Dig this.

That help?