“A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention…” noting that Republican VP nominee Sarah “…”added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn’t already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America’s name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right.”

“The semiotics are pure Palin: a sturdy body, clothes that are clinging yet boxy and a voice that could peel the plastic seal off your new microwave.”

“…red states vote Republican on social issues to give themselves the only self-esteem available to their broken, economically abused existence.”

“We share a 1,500-mile border with a frontier state full of drunks and crazy people, of the blight that cheap-built structures bring to a glorious landscape. … Alaska is our redneck cousin, our Yukon Territory forms a blessed buffer zone, and thank God he never visits. Alaska is the end of the line.”

And, et cetera. It is easy to dismiss Ms. Palin as not up to the job of Vice President without stooping to a level that diminishes the impact of the argument and anything that gives Fox News an opportunity to cry “foul” is a disservice to the real debate. Ms. Mallick provides a great example of smugness gone awry.

We leave it to our intrepid Canadian correspondents Bob and Doug MacKenzie to determine if Ms. Mallick is really Canadian?

“Take Sarah Palin…… please.”
Henny Youngman (paraphrased)

On a fairly regular basis the American press loses its collective mind over some nonsense. The current nonsense is named Sarah Palin and it is time to put it where it belongs - in the comics page or the news of the absurd section. From the moment she was put on the GOP ticket it was obvious that she lacked any semblance of the intelligence, background and skill set needed to be Vice President, the proverbial heartbeat from the Presidency. Nothing that has happened since her nomination acceptance speech has changed that reality and yet we are now being pummeled with all kinds of analysis about whether Palin cleared a hurdle in the debate – a debate in which she distinguished herself by not answering the questions asked of her, by mimicking Senator McCain’s vacuous sarcasm, by making countless factual errors (lies?), by re-enacting her days as beauty queen contestant and by playing to whoever the hell is Joe Six-pack. She is Tracy Flick, the Reese Witherspoon character in “Election”.

I could go on, but it would be counter to my point. We have seen and heard more than enough of Palin –put us out of our misery; take her away. Please.

Sarah Palin has decided - or been ordered –to learn something about the world and who better to teach her than Henry Kissinger. He has been a lead player in almost every major American debacle since he leeched onto Richard Nixon in 1968.The record is one of stunning mistakes, arrogant denials and a supine press licking his backside.

So, Sarah Palin, hockey Mom, nutty evangelical, and would be Vice President went back to school today with a private tutor with the following qualifications:

- In 1970 Kissinger organized the assassination of Chilean General Rene Schneider to facilitate the removal (and death) of Chilean President Salvador Allende because apparently President Nixon did not want Allende to be president of Chile;

- Over 20,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam while Kissinger waited for a “decent interval” before calling it quits AFTER he had declared a “secret peace plan\” during the 1968 election campaign;

- Ordered secret and illegal bombing on Laos and Cambodia in 1969 for nor good purpose. The bombing led to an estimated 600,000 civilian deaths;

- In 1974 Kissinger worked with Turkey to invade Cyprus and assassinate Cypriot President Archbishop Makarios.

- Kissinger’s support of Chilean government terrorist organizations led to the assassination in Washington DC of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt in 1976;

- The Indonesian government launched its bloody invasion of Portuguese East Timor in December 1975 with the concurrence of President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It led to over 100,000 civilian deaths.

The list could go on, but what is truly amazing is that this tired, self-promoting criminal continues to be treated seriously and respectfully by the press. If you want a reason for the world’s distrust of America you could look no further than Henry Kissinger. And he is the man chosen to instruct the naïve, silly, empty vessel Sarah Palin. You could not make this up.

There is a lot going wrong with the McCain campaign with a chief economist for the campaign commenting that neither Palin nor McCain are competent enough to be a CEO of a major corporation and another one suggesting that computerphobic McCain invented the Blackberry, but when it comes to managing the press, they have learned a lot from McCain’s newly admitted mentor, George W. Bush.

Much of the “working press” really doesn’t work all that hard, finding it much easier to write about the horse race than any of the difficult and complex issues that they seem to understand no better than Palin understands them. So the focus remains on an issue like whether Palin will drain women voters from Obama – rather than on whether her views on religion, women and sex might actually be those of a conservative right wing extremist. Or they focus on her experience as mayor of a real but very small town and ignore her ignorance of the real very large world. When chastised for being too tough toward poor little Palin many back off and write about shooting moose and her eyeglasses, leather boots and manly hubby.  And when the good ones dig around and learn the truth about Palin they are characterized as being ungracious, unfair, or even worse – “liberal”.

There are many examples of this kind of stuff and it will get worse. The so-called Republican “base” screams at the media whenever they ask a tough question or suggest that Sarah Palin might be in over her head or that McCain might be a tad too old for the job. But they are just fine with the lies and fabrications thrown at the opponents. These are our religious Christian voters???

In case anyone actually believed that the media is “liberal” witness the move at MSNBC to remove Keith Olbermann and Chris Mathews from leadership positions in their campaign coverage in response to anger from the right over their strong liberal views on issues and candidates. In fact, in the great wasteland that is cable TV, they provided a healthy antidote to CNN’s tedious, pompous Wolf Blitzer and Fox News’ virulent right-wing analysis led by the likes of Karl Rove.  At least they remain on air however and available to those in need of relief. And Maureen Dowd is regaining her mojo and there will be reporters actually committing journalism out there. You just need to search them out and that takes work and time and a willingness and interest to do so. We can hope that enough voters will make that effort.

In other news, Governor Palin has anointed Katie Couric to be interviewer number two as she moves toward becoming a heartbeat away from the presidency, following Palin’s new best friend “Charlie” Gibson. That the press would allow themselves to be treated this way is a sad commentary on a media that once included the likes of Edward R. Murrow. They have redefined “groveling”.

None of this is funny. When Palin is measured against challenges like ending the Iraq War, dealing with Iran, working toward peace in the Middle East, addressing Russian petropolitics in the Caucuses and Central Asia, developing an effective relationship with an emerging government in Pakistan, and repairing America’s reputation in the world, she becomes the punchline in a bad joke. If the quality of a candidate’s judgment is a key factor in considering competence, McCain just gave the game away.

Game over.

As it turns out Senator Clinton made a gracious exit speech and President Clinton gave a gracious speech in support of the Democratic ticket. Anyone who was led by the press to believe they would behave badly allowed themselves to be duped by Journalism for Dummies.

McCain has in recent weeks blamed Obama for the price of oil, and snidely talks about Obama’s relative youth – an issue one would think McCain might wish to avoid. He (and most of the press) touts his “experience” in foreign affairs and the press allows him to invent a non-existent Iraq-Pakistan border and discover in 2008 the country Czechoslovakia – a country that has not existed since 1992. But in the end it is his unattractive persona that turns McCain into one of the least attractive of American types: the smug, manipulating, nasty know-it-all with no real substance – only the greed to be president.

In their anger the McCain campaign’s operatives sarcastically refer to Obama as “The One”. Were I in Obama’s campaign I would have to refer to McCain as “The Zero”. It is a perfect reflection of his level of intelligence, honesty and grace. That the press is still sucking up to him is to their shame.

“[McCain] hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron. I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

Retired General Wesley Clark set off a brief firestorm over the weekend with the above quote and Senator McCain and the press immediately went nuts. Now, it is easy to understand that McCain would be a little upset since having been shot down and suffered imprisonment seems to be one of his most salient features, but what the hell is wrong with the press?

One can parse Clark’s quote a thousand times and still not come to the conclusion that he was saying anything other than what he said – that “…getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is [not] a qualification to become president.” But the print and TV press went bozo over it, implying that to have said that was to criticize McCain’s service to the country, thereby implying that getting in a plane getting shot down actually IS a presidential qualification.

Having gone through a long, tedious primary season we now look forward to the familiar process of the press avoiding analysis of issues and focusing on the “horse race” via the meaningless minutia that the press deems worthy of blowing up into something superficially serious.

It will most likely be ugly, nasty, and stupid. And come next January we will have a new president who will most likely have been elected without benefit of a smart, sophisticated, analytical press.

She suggests that we are getting a kind of “Cliffs Notes of the news”, and that the press’s group decision to ignore serious candidates like Senators Biden, Dodd and Brownback simply eliminated them from serious consideration leaving the press to its search for various personality cults. As she says:

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. …

…Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

The next time the NY Times is seeking a regular columnist they could do a lot worse than recruiting Ms. Edwards.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. - Graham Greene

Watching the first segment of House of Cards, a 1990 BBC series, recently I began to think that I had seen it already, but with an American cast. In the British version Ian Richardson plays Francis Urquhart (“F.U.” in the headlines) a tough, cynically self-serving Member of Parliament bent on gathering as much personal power as possible regardless of the cost to other politicians or his country.

I was particularly struck with the portrayal of a young, ambitious reporter who unwittingly becomes one of F.U.’s tools in destroying his political enemies. Urquhart simply provides her with “off-the-record” information that she then uses to beat up on whomever is next on Urquhart’s list. It is all easy work for her and effective politics for Urquhart.

And a lesson for all journalists covering today’s political campaigns in America: do what it takes to get “access” to the players, jump on anything smacking of scandal, pump it up and by furthering the interests of your “player”, enhance your own career. House of Cards has become a playbook for many of today’s American politicians and their friends in the press but it is a helluva lot more entertaining as fiction.