Danny Doom’s Booze Cabinet

I did not watch the debate, I was busy drowning in depression as the Cubs fell to the brink. Unbelievable. They hardly resemble the team that won all year, the team with the best record in the National League. The pitchers can’t pitch and the fielders can’t field and the hitters can’t hit. It’s just a flat-out bummer. There is no curse, there is only 100 years of expectations, and everyone cracks under it. They’ll never win it, will they?

If the expectations were high in Wrigley, they couldn’t be lower for Sarah! last night. That’s when the Republicans operate best, when people expect garbage. Hey, that wasn’t total shit! Alright! Go, Sarah!

I’ll take the Trib’s word for it when they say that “she did not provide more confidence that she would be ready to step into the most demanding job in the world at a moment’s notice.” That’s good enough for the Party of Low Expectations, I suspect, but not for the rest of us.

Photo taken in Fontana, WI.

The great David Letterman, last night. This is must-see video. Then again, so is this: contest winner Sarah Palin with Katie Couric. Unbelievable.

I think people are starting to realize that that voice would be annoying as hell for four years, to say nothing of her policies. I’m talking about that chickadee, Palin, of course. McCain’s no prize with the voice either, but whatever. But with the country in financial collapse, what we need is a smooth, calming voice to sail us through the waters. So there’s one more for Obama.

Something to realize: Obama the “celebrity” has been riding this wave for a good four years since the 2004 DNC. In other words, he’s no flash in the pan; he is the candidate, the one that beat Hillary Clinton. It has taken Palin about two weeks to peak and fade. She can’t and will not last because she is not even riding her own wave; she is following a script (you may remember, Obama wrote his own–twice in book form).

Palin, not even the candidate, but the vice-presidential gimmick, is so much a set-piece that she has been shielded from the public since her one-night-stand at the RNC and only allowed out for carefully plotted “interviews”–one with Sean Hannity! She repeats the same lines and phrases over and over while stalling for time by calling the interviewer by his first name again and again; this is obvious stuff, Charlie!

It’s funny to hear that audiences are leaving after she speaks because McCain is such a bore. Sad, but funny. Celebrity goes at the top of the ticket, guys. But even that will not last, there’s just not enough there. Talk about an empty skirt.

Are you tired of hearing the collective right-wing defend Sarah Palin’s blanking on the Bush Doctrine question? Me too. Everyone knows she had no idea what he was talking about–her look was priceless–and everyone knows exactly what he (Gibson) was talking about in referring to the BD: preemptive war.

Really? That’s what he meant? I had no idea. See, I’ve been sucking helium out of balloons for eight years while peeing on myself.

George Will today went on ABC News’ Sunday Show and defended Sarah Palin by claiming that even he, Will, didn’t know what this bizarre, confusing thing called “the Bush doctrine” is — that’s the same George Will who, in 2003, wrote an Op-Ed entitled “The Bush Doctrine at Risk” in which he understood the term perfectly well and defined it exactly how Gibson did.

- Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

There’s stupid and then there’s faux stupid. This is just fuckin’ stupid.

Twenty questions for Sarah Palin. Lots of good ones in there. I’d like to know McCain’s answers on many of these as well. We know that this one would give him problems: “What’s the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

I would like to know more about Palin’s book-banning skills and how the Iraq War is “God’s will.” Those answers would be interesting. Hell, any kind of information about her would be nice. Fave lipstick color, child-rearing tips, foreign policy, whatever. She is, after all, running for second in command.

It appears that Sarah Palin doesn’t want to give any interviews. I can see why. She seems to have little knowledge of the issues and what the office of VP entails, and those investigations are just getting warmed up. Lots of questions to be answered. Problem is, “the Base” is used to accepting their candidates with blind faith, and are notoriously against any kind of “questioning” of their kind. To paraphrase Chris Rock, they “love not to know.”* Truth is like kryptonite to the Base!

(I do see that they’ve lost that nutjob Charles Krauthammer. Ouch. That guy usually eats whatever shit the GOP feeds him.)

You know what will suck though, is if they get elected–McCain and Palin–you know that the same dumbasses that took eight years to realize how bad Bush was are going to be just as slow with these two. And we’ll have to sit and complain about it until they finally realize they were wrong, like they all were about Bush. And yet it won’t teach them anything. ‘Cause they love not to know.

No, no way. Not this year. It’s not going to happen.

* Reference is at the 3:00 mark of this hilarious and NSFW video by Chris Rock.

That’s why it falls by the wayside at the RNC. No wonder they liked her speech so much–it was full of lies, exaggerations and smug sarcasm. And not just her speech, but Romney’s, Huckabee’s and others were full of shit. For example:

At her first press conference, why not ask her why she said that Obama has never passed a single reform, when he passed the 2007 Ethics Reform, described by many as the most sweeping package of its kind since Watergate. Of course, she doesn’t know. She was given this speech. But she should be asked to respond to the question of why she said something patently untrue to the entire country.

Palin lied about her opposition to the “Bridge to Nowhere,” about Obama’s tax plan, about the gas pipeline, about earmarks…Republicans really eat this shit up! Mike Huckabee stated that Palin “got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States.” That one, as the Tribune notes, is “a whopper”:

Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor’s election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.

In the real world,the Bush administration keeps following Obama’s lead as far as foreign policy goes, this time in Pakistan. As Sullivan points out:

It’s also a policy – like the withdrawal timetable and like talking to Iran – in which Barack Obama was ahead of the Bush administration. If his judgment is so faulty, why do the wiser heads in the Bush administration keep following it?

Has McCain or his smug running mate come up with anything of substance, or is it all going be whining about media and sarcastic attacks? Talk about a vapid campaign.

Just got a spam email that made me laugh out loud:

Palin Already in Trouble: Can’t Recall How Many Igloos She Owns

The rest of the story–the real part–is equally hilarious. And cynical. And hypocritical. But we’ll have time for that later. For now, it’s just funny.

McCain is picking Sarah Palin? On the count of three, conservatives everywhere, repeat after me: “Experience? When did we ever say anything about experience?”