Welcome to the Official Beginning of the Race for the Presidency: on your marks, . . .

Let's throw out the first officially false rumor of the Presidential Campaign Season, which traditionally begins (you thought it had begun already? HAH! That was just the exhibition season [O.K., O.K., two years is a long exhibition season, but it's over so put all that complaining aside for all the fresh Presidential campaign complaining to come]) on the Labor Day weekend before the election in November. Mere weeks to go before the voters choose a new President or the Supreme Court choses one for them.

I want to be the one to spread the baseless rumor that Dianne Feinstein was on the top of John McCain's short list for Vice President for weeks. She "broke her ankle" and couldn't attend the Democratic Convention, but that was a ruse, according to this nonce, just a ploy to get away and give her people more time to negotiate with McCain's team over what exactly the role of vice president is in the post-Cheney era.

McCain/Feinstein! It would have been the Unity ticket for the ages! The comity of it! Democrat and Republican coming together for the good of the country, surrounded by CEO's singing Kumbaya all hand-in-hand with Beltway pundits and cable news anchors! Charley Rose and Joe Leiberman and Jack Welch publicly kissing each other's ass, as ever! Broderella ascending in a puffy cloud of hosannahs into the heavens! Unity!

But no, some sticking point in the protracted negotiation bogged things down, it says here. How many troops can the Vice President deploy of her own free will in the post-Cheney era, anyhow? Isn't the vice presidency now, Byzantinely, after Cheney, the place where the Grand Vizier sets up shop, the Vice President now the one who runs things for the acknowledged figurehead of a leader?

Of course the canny Feinstein wanted to see how much of that role might still apply post-Cheney. How much of a deputy and how much of an executive substitute would she be? What exactly was she being offered?

Naturally a transcript of the Feinstein/McCain team hashing out these questions doesn't survive, but it is rumored that John McCain took Ambien three nights in a row during this period before announcing ferociously early this past Thursday morning, "Aw, fuck, it, I'm going with Palin! PAAAA-LIN! PAAAAA-LIN!!! HAAAHAAAAHAAA!" to a startled housekeeper.

The negotiations with Feinstein dithered to a stop, and Palin, no more bothered than the average American by thoughts of what it is a vice president is supposed to be, accepted McCain's sudden offer immediately.

It says here.

Happily, No!

So the smart move here would be to largely ignore her and focus the attention on McCain.

— Brad at Sadly, No

Happily, no.

The smart move for the Obama campaign won't be to ignore Palin at all, but to let it be Joe Biden's ongoing role to savage John McCain, and Hillary Clinton's ongoing role to savage Sarah Palin: Joe ignores her, goes after McCain, Hillary does a hit and run campaign of ads and personal appearances attacking Palin's politics, one glaring example at a time. Sarah Palin argues with Hillary, John McCain argues with Joe Biden, Obama takes the ball and heads for the basket untouched.

You don't rule the rhetoric of a campaign by ignoring what's served up by your opponent. You rule the rhetoric by dominating the conversation at every turn, e.g. turning what is utterly ridiculous in your opponent immediately into a lot of utter ridicule: the idea that Sarah Palin is experienced in foriegn affairs because, you know, look how close Alaska is to Russia, deserves the thousand flowers of ridicule thrown its way.

Hillary Clinton has every reason to be personally insulted when Sarah Palin baldly claims to be just the woman to continue the Hillary's historic campaign. Senator Clinton plainly owns a deeply held vision of social justice for women utterly opposed by everything Sarah Palin stands for. She can be an invaluable voice for the Obama campain if she's let loose on Palin.

I'm hoping the Obama campaign doesn't treat her the way the Gore campaign treated her husband during the 2000 campaign, but instead gives her the oportunity to represent. The Republicans need to be given the bum's rush, and if it takes all the leading lights of the Democratic Party to do the job, so be it.

"All I can say is, I am blessed to have the opportunity to continue to be part of a country where you can succeed and do well."

 


Here John McCain gives due credit to his wife Cindy's father in a general sort of way, without actually naming the fellow, who, after coming back from WWII, amassed a huge personal fortune in Arizona. He's the one, Cindy McCain's dad, who actually achieved the Republican wet dream of a successful business John McCain now has the good fortune to be attached to. So when McCain says he's blessed here, he's acknowledging his own success at advantageously positioning himself among the luxuries permitted by the achievements of another fellow, which is good Republican work in any age.

You can succeed and do well. And a Republican can take grateful advantage, like a remora. Way of the world, my friends. Ask John McCain.

The Art of the Backwoods Margarita

 

Bicycle Blender from Eric Maas on Vimeo.

Dimensions, eh?

Dimensions is a brilliant basic primer on the elements of topology with a nerd factor of about infinity plus 2.

The site features a nine-part video presentation, with inspired CAD visualizations throughout, here, and supplementary written commentary for each part begining here. This is one of the best web presentations of seriously sciencey geekery I've ever encountered.

[…via Metafilter]

Idol

Is it Pandering If She's Only A Trophy Wife?

Indeed, McCain felt so comfortable at the event that he even volunteered his wife for the rally’s traditional beauty pageant, an infamously debauched event that’s been known to feature topless women.

“I encouraged Cindy to compete,” McCain said to cheers. “I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.”

— As quoted by CNN

Offering up your wife's services to sweeten some deal is a perogative of naked patriarchy that is perhaps less common in the modern age than in the past.

The gesture resurfaced at the annual Harley get together in Sturges, South Dakota, where McCain had gone to plump up his mojo. In a field of however many motorcyclists, the guy who flew jets in war holds the trump card. However chancey the lives of motorcyclists, however "outlaw," those lives can't match the life of a guy who bombed people from a jet in war and even crashed a few times, too. Even the toughest Harley types whose legitimacy derives from having done a respectable amount of time have nothing on John McCain.

I think Hunter Thompson described the practice of sharing out the women among Hells Angels in his book. No one at Sturgis is unaware of the tradition. All the show us your boobs/Miss Buffalo Chip stuff functions as a ritualization of that paleopatriarchical practice which McCain nicely recalls with his remark.

Oliver Stone's Head A-Splode!!

Four well-placed and separate sources told ABCNEWS that initial tests detected bentonite, though the White House initially said the chemical was not found.

The first battery of tests, conducted at Ft. Detrick, Md., and elsewhere, discovered the anthrax spores were treated with the substance, which keeps the tiny particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together making it more likely that they could be inhaled.

The inhaled form on anthrax is far more deadly than the skin form.

As far as is known, only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons, but officials caution that the presence of the chemical alone does not constitute firm evidence of Iraqi involvement.
[…]
The official said the Ft. Detrick findings represented an "opinionated analysis," that three other labs are conducting tests, and that one of those labs had contradicted the bentonite finding. But, the official added, "tests continue."

—ABC News, October 29, 2001.

Intriguingly, the Headline for the above story on the ABC News website reads, "Troubling Anthrax Additive Found; Atta Met Iraqi," with the sub-head, "Tests find laced anthrax, Atta met Iraqi."

Everyone now knows the ballocks in the repeated claim that Atta met Iraqi. There's no further room for argument on that. Atta did not meet Iraqi, though it was convenient to say so for many highly placed [cough Vice President] administration officials talking on and off the record in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Even when confronted with contradictory evidence, the Vice President repeated the claim publicly again and again.

Privately he and his minions provided unsourced comments linking Atta with the anthrax based on the suspect report from Fort Detrick claiming to have found a uniquely Iraqi chemical signature on the anthrax used in those shocking terrorist mailings that began one week after 9/11.

The meeting, along with Iraq's stockpiles of biological weapons, have led some to question whether Atta and Hussein were not somehow behind the anthrax attacks in the United States.

Yep. A suggested connection sourced to "some" between "the meeting" [no qualifier there, no "purported," no "hypothetical," no "unsubstantiated" -p.r.] in Prague connecting Al Qaeda with Iraq, and the anthrax attacks as a second wave of terror from the same source. The same "some" who peddled the Atta met Iraqi balderdash were promoting the "opinionated analysis" from Ft. Detrick with all the CSI-like sciencey stuff in it to show that Iraqis had to have made the anthrax. That too was false, though equally convenient.

Fort Detrick is the home of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Bruce E. Ivins worked, Bruce E. Ivins who couldn't account for his lab being contaminated with anthrax numerous times over a five month period beginning in late 2001 and ending in April 2002, but also where the FBI sent one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes to be investigated. Was it Ivins whose analysis of this envelope so clearly and conveniently for the Vice President's purposes pointed to the Iraqis? Yes. Yes, it was his work.

Bruce E. Ivins is said to have committed suicide Tuesday, ingesting a whole bunch of Tylenol with codeine just as Federal authorities got around to informing him that they were finally ready to press charges against him after all these years.