Results tagged “Joe Biden” from Friendly Fire

Call me a pragmatic centrist. Since Barack Obama appears to be one, too, he gets my vote. Cool and deliberative beats hair-trigger and hot.

Democrat Obama has positioned himself as a quasi-liberal appealing to the center. At the same time, Republican John McCain has been running away from the center-right and pandering to a conservative base that's never been too comfortable with him.

Obama wants the U.S. out of Iraq. McCain steeps all of his Iraq War talk in a frothy mug of "honor."

McCain doesn't want to raise my taxes. Obama wants to lower them. McCain calls this "class warfare," but isn't his promise to lower taxes even more for the wealthy an attack on the rest of us? (Hint: it is.)

Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden is a mess. Obama should've tapped Hillary. But Biden's nothing compared to the GOP's Sarah Palin. If anything scares me, it's the prospect of McCain dying in office.

I learned a valuable lesson from last night's debate. I may only criticize one woman at a time. When I go for two, my wife's defenses kick in and I could get kicked out of the room.

I was fine while ranting at Sarah Palin's non-answers and evasions. It was definitely working for me to work her over for her style of country cuteness that would make Dan Rather blush like Texas steroid-crazed armadillo having been caught in coitus with a randy jackrabbit.

However, when I offered a nuanced critique of Gwen Ifll's, I thought, awful performance, I got the hate stare and the suggestion that I take it outside--which I took to mean that I could go outside all by my lonesome.

Sarah Palin exceeded her low expectations by not having her head rotate 360 degrees while puking Anderson's Split Peas Soup and speaking in tongues. She was coherent, if off the point of the questions, and spoke her set-pieces well. She was just cuter than a rutting moose cavorting over the once frozen now soggy tundra. (See what happens when Dan Rather goes to Alaska!)

All the Republican criticism of Gwen Ifill before the debate worked. She failed to follow up either Sarah's or Joe's evasions. The Republican operatives had gone after Gwen for writing a book about this new era in American politics for Blacks. They acted surprised that she had been chosen as moderator. The operative word here is "acted." Her book was announced in July and publicized widely. They knew. This, in sports, is called, "working the refs." You argue calls not to get them changed but to get a favorable ruling in the future. They did not expect her to drop out; they expected her to go soft. She did.

Sarah Palin's jaw-dropping assertion that there was room in our "flexible Constitution" for, well, flexibility and an expanded role for the VP didn't get picked up or followed up. It was not Iffle's job to prosecute Palin or fact check every assertion, but this was way too passive a performance.

I thought Palin was pallid, Ifill was awful and Biden just bidin' his time. Sounds like bad Sondheim and made for bad debate.

The whole evening just made me feel sadder than prairie dog on a flooded bayou with a crazed crock on the prowl. Still, all's well that ends well. I did get to sleep indoors.

It was Sarah Palin's debate to lose, and by not melting down, by expressing pride in her middle-class origins and flying the McCain flag, she did what she's there to do: energize the base.

By showing America that she could prep for this debate and hold her own on the stage with foreign policy expert Joe Biden, by not overselling herself (and a big part of that was talking about her tenure as a governor and mayor), she at least showed that she's a quick study, able to learn and wouldn't be as much of a horror as you'd think, were she actually called upon to serve as president.

How many more examples like this do we need to prove that the MSM has a diabolically deceptive agenda?

Thank heaven that the truth came out. Now we can get back to bailouts and presidential debates.

Regarding the latter issue, here's the advice I'd give Joe Biden: Respect Sarah Palin, right to the point of trying to win her over to your side. Criticize John McCain's policies and flip-flops about "the sound economy," as if to say, "C'mon, Sarah, I know that you're way too savvy to be associated with his approach; let's find a better way to do things."

That will both disarm her, at a personal level, and force her to defend McCain in a way that will expose her lack of command of McCain's actual policies.