Why? The “birther” construct, that the President of the US is not native-born, has never been about Barack Obama’s country of birth. It’s been about finding a way to de-legitimize the Commander in Chief.

After all, 25% of Republicans believe that Obama may be the Antichrist. No birth certificate’s going to clear that up, long form or otherwise!

We know from survey after survey that Republicans are more instinctually authoritarian than the public as a whole. Republicans tend to be more supportive of torture, tend to believe that daddy knows best, that sort of thing. They’re also patriotic folks who, in their minds, should always respect the Commander-in-Chief.

So what happens when there’s a Commander in Chief they disagree with? Cognitive dissonance occurs: How to support him and at the same time oppose him? It’s treason to go against the president! Well, the easiest way to resolve this is to find a reason that he can’t legitimately be the president. Then opposing him is no longer treason, it’s patriotism!

The same thing happened to Bill Clinton back in the 1990s. Remember how Republican conspiracists convinced themselves that Clinton had murdered Vince Foster? Same idea: de-legitimize the man first, and it makes it easier to hate him.

This has all happened before, folks, and it will all happen again.

1. In general, I thought the speech was solid — rhetorically, not a masterpiece, but it accomplished what it needed to.  I was most impressed by the President’s solid instinct to generally avoid the rhetorical cliches that too frequently pepper our political discourse; early in the address, I thought to myself “he’s giving someone else’s speech”, but then he moved past it.  Good job.
2. I was disappointed by the lack of focus on infrastructure investment.  $8bb for trains in Florida and California is great, but that will about pay for the environmental studies, and not much else.
3. Likewise, I was disappointed by the promise to cut spending starting in 2011 (with the exception of defense spending, of course — I mean, how could we POSSIBLY feel safe with fewer F-22s?).  I’ll do Paul Krugman’s work for him and say again that SPENDING CUTS IN A RECESSION ARE THE WRONG ANSWER!!!  [There, I used 3 "!"s, so you know I mean it.]
4. Last, I though the “guilt-trip-them-into-submission” approach to dealing with health care and the loss of the Senate supermajority was novel, but, yeah, when pigs fly. it’s sad how deeply cynical the GOP has become, but there it is.

As a special bonus, I’d like to offer a shiny new Sacajawea dollar to anyone who cares to produce a MST3K-style voiceover to Bob McDonnell’s GOP response.  I pretty much tuned this out after the “Sportscenter” reference.  Matski’s official fiance didn’t appreciate me, in my best North Carolina accent, trying my own soundtrack, so I need some help.   Here’s the line I started with: “He watches Sportscenter too! He must be a good man jus’ like me!” Really, Republicans?  Really?  America desperately needs a functioning opposition party that, you know, like, has ideas and stuff.  If you must have a sports reference, the GOPs current approach is something like “let’s show up at the field and just not play – that way, it won’t really be a forfeit, but we can’t lose the game either!”

So, all in all, a good speech, although I’m concerned at some of the specifics.  Probably most of them are throwaways anyway, so I won’t worry about it too much.

These people scare me in the way a single rat scares me – there’s always more than one.  And aren’t these the same wingnuts who thought they saw black helicopters over America c. 1994?

Seriously … what in particular creates the kind of low-grade schizophrenia that seems to afflict so many on the right?

*Yeah, I know. We’ll also be asking one another “What was retirement again?”

Can you imagine what this would be like if breaking a filibuster still required 67 votes? Jiminy Christmas!

That’s right, folks. Instant service. 100% beef.

I could go on, but I got drunk and need to go to bed.

[Had Kerry won], we would not have had eight years of experimenting with the extreme ideology that the Bush administration has inflicted on the United States of America. And, it is this experiment that has provided cold hard empirical evidence that the blind obeisance to free unregulated markets that is the hallmark of contemporary conservatism, coupled with the unilateral, muscular, “shoot first and ask questions afterwards” foreign policy that is at the core of neoconservatism, is as bankrupt a governing paradigm as the centrally planned economy of socialism.

It’s 8 years of Bush that makes Obama possible. We needed to see Katrina, the financial meltdown, and all the rest.

Methinks the person who monitors this is going to be rather busy.

The Republican National Committee appears to have spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.

The miracle quote:

Spokeswoman Maria Comella declined to answer specific questions about the expenditures, including whether it was necessary to spend that much and whether it amounted to one early investment in Palin or if shopping for the vice presidential nominee was ongoing.

McCain’s campaign has enough experience lying that you’d think that one of McCain’s spokespeople would be able to figure out that spending $150k to clothe a candidate looks really bad and say “yes, that’s over now.”

In a diatribe against the GOP’s increasingly militant anti-intellectualism, David Brooks throws Sarah Palin under the bus.

… over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare …

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

Brooks continues:

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

It’s hard to really capture the spirit of Brooks’ piece in a few quotes, but I read it as a damning indictment of the hard right turn the GOP has driven into, and real fear that they may take the country off the cliff along with them.

Class warfare — especially right-wing class warfare with a strong anti-intellectual bent — is one of the most dangerous social phenomena of the 20th century.  Maybe Brooks has finally figured out that when Jesusland’s own foot soldiers come with pitchforks and torches to burn Manhattan, he’ll be pretty hard for them to find and pull from danger among a crowd of East Coast elitists.

Think about that for a minute. Instead of deciding to regulate banks, McCain devoted himself to regulating himself. In John McCain’s mind, it wasn’t the banks that were central to the Keating scandal, it was John McCain.

I’m pretty sure that’s what Jon Alter is getting at here.

Gutter John actually wins a point for owning foreign vehicles, but loses 12 points for owning 13 damn cars in the first damn place. You’d think that someone whose wife asserts that the only reasonable way to get around Arizona the use of a private plane could get by with, say, 7 personal vehicles.

But then, I suppose that each house needs to have a car located there to keep the garages from feeling that sad, cold, emptiness.