McCain picks Sarah Palin - interesting but very risky. Conservatives are gonna love her: pro-life, long time member of NRA, as a school girl used to go out moose hunting with her father, son in the military etc etc. Also has good reformer credentials, reform and cleaning up government basically forming the backbone of her brief career - this obviously counters nicely Obama's claim to doing things a new way, especially since Obama has virtually no achievements in reforming anything - Palin at least has done something relevant there. Also obviously appeals to wounded Hillary supporters and, possibly just as important, draws attention to the way Obama snubbed Hillary - the MSM is essentially turning a blind eye to that snub so if this brings attention to it that's a plus.

The quite apparent huge downside is the issue of 'ready to lead' - her resume is thiner than Obama's when it comes to the big questions and since that is where you want to attack Obama picking her creates a disconnect with the message. She does have chief executive experience, which is good - but Alaska? That could be a very hard sell. My guess is it will all depend on what she's like on the stump and how she comes across on TV - if she's engaging, appealing, and appears at least that she's not in over her head - well, who knows? Real gamble on McCain's part.

Certainly does divert attention from Obama's big speech - but, nice as that is, will quite obviously be a bad pick if that's all it does. She's gonna need to perform, to sell a message, to evince an attitude and a point of view that resonates.

Then again, no one votes for the Vice President.

[sidebar: Obama camp saying this takes experience off the table as an issue - ah, sorry, but that contradicts the point of his own VP pick which was that experience matters - interesting to see how that plays out]

[so, just watched her acceptance speech - not bad, definitely something there to work with. She exudes a down to earth, confident, can do attitude. I think I'm somewhat impressed]

In the "if you don't know what you're talking about, shut up" way of things I must point out that access to the Black Sea by military vessels is restricted by convention and large vessels are a complete no no and so my whole send in an aircraft carrier viz Georgia was rather foolish [foolish one assumes for many reasons]. True, Turkey, which controls the Bosporus, could have ok'd such a breach of the rules - but not bloody likely and so my whole glorious plan was nothing but nonsense.

Not that it was meant seriously - well, it was meant seriously but only in a theoretical way. Certainly, with China just recently condemning the action and Russia's stock market down 5-10% since the action the benefits accruing to Russia from the misadventure are seeming a bit dubious. Still, NATO has been exposed [yet again] as weak and it's implied promises to the aspiring democracies of the former Soviet Union somewhat empty - and such a result may have been Putin's main objective in the first place. And Russian nationalism has been stoked, whetted if you will, by this aggressive policy, which both serves Putin's autocratic ambitions well and degrades the West's interests further. The whole point of my contention for calling Putin's bluff with a strong and immediate show of force was to forestall such a thing, believing it a dynamic which could lead to escalation down the road. With a weak NATO America looks isolated and therefore vulnerable - the Chinese choosing to play nice counters that a bit - but still, vulnerability tends to invite potentially dangerous ambitions against it.

"... well, you can call me racist - hell, you're an Obama supporter so you're gonna label me racist eventually no matter what - but regardless, you don't think it's odd that he's referred to constantly as an African American when in fact he's half white and it's the white half of his parentage that played the dominant role in his upbringing? Isn't that in a way kind of racist, when you're in effect giving him credit for being black because he's actually white? Strikes me as odd, but maybe that's just a reflection of my abysmal lack of sophistication in these matters..."

Well - seems no one agrees with my belief we we should go to war with Russia over Georgia - didn't actually say go to war with 'em, more just move an aircraft carrier into the Black sea, make some threats, issue ultimatums, sound like you're willing to be fair and accommodating, within the bounds of reason, but do so with a squadron of F18 Super Hornets at your back - that sort of thing. Since it happened, there's been slew of theories and explanations re who's to blame? who was provoked? who was where and did what to whom? did the US drop the ball? is Europe weak and hopelessly compromised? is it legitimate push back by Putin? or Russian nationalism with its delusions of grandeur raising its ugly head? So on, so forth. The beauty of my plan - war - was that it clarified everything in one fell swoop [most fell, I imagine]: Putin was making a statement but at the heart of that statement was a bluff - risk of a wider war - that he knew would deter timorous Europeans and leave the US somewhat isolated and vulnerable and therefore lead to a weak NATO response which would conveniently have the effect of making the message he was sending, to Ukraine et al, that much more daunting. By the US immediately calling the bluff you'd get two things: force the Euros to be proactive, to get in line - you up Putin's ante to them, and since they can't very well side with Putin they're forced into a proper supporting role; secondly, you expose audacity of Putin's bluff, based as it is on a false strength - his forces in Georgia are mere show and would be routed by the States in a matter of days, leaving him humilated and his power gone if he didn't back down.

Of course humiliation, if he didn't back down, can lead to some awful scenarios - but then that's why they call it gambling - and I'm not pretending it wouldn't be risky. But what do you have now having failed to call Putin's bluff? The only alternative for the States to immediate, strong actions was to play the waiting game and hope to undermine Putin's strategy in the long term - the problem with that, which my solution nicely obviated, is that you need the Europeans support to make that work and they are already starting to go soft about making Russia pay for the aggression - my solution essentially agrees with Putin: you can't trust Europe. This was the whole basis to Putin's bluff - and the States got played badly it seems.

My solution risked a military confrontation - but isn't it possible to argue that failure to take that risk has made confrontation a greater likelihood? Certainly Russia is now emboldened and we are left with the weak hand of hoping Putin's intentions are not as treacherous as they appear.

[yes, it's clear now Europe has no stomach for confronting Russia having just released a timid-may-be-too-kind-a-word rebuke. Is this the beginning of the end of NATO? And is maybe that a good thing? It's obviously what Putin wants - although, if one reasons that the States can't be without a strong alliance of some sort, of democracies etc, and therefore in lieu of a NATO would have to forge something new and no doubt more vigorous, then what Putin really wants is an enfeebled NATO - I don't think the States can let him have that]

[is Georgia really worth this? Is this a 'pick your battles wisely' situation? That's the key question. One could draw several feasible and widely divergent scenarios out of what has happened. Hmmn. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all?]

"... Russia provoked? Wha' d'ya mean provoked? Excuse the no doubt crude analogy, but you lock a goat in a pen with a hungry bear and that goat's gonna get eaten: the fact that at some point prior to being eaten the goat may lunge threateningly at the bear thus provoking an attack that is otherwise inevitable is quite obviously beside the point. Now, you may want to argue that the goat's fate is none of our business or that we shouldn't have put the goat in the pen in the first place but, to step outside this increasingly silly sounding analogy, that would be to argue that having won the cold war we should now concede defeat..."

"... I noticed how many women want to write books explaining the psychology of the teenage male to what I guess they see as their beleaguered female cohorts burdened with teenage sons and realized such amounted to a preemptive attack on maleness in general... explication here acting as a form of castration..."

What I notice concerning liberal response to Georgian crisis, what becomes clear to me in the way they leap to the contention that Putin was provoked into an invasion by Western [ie Bush] aggression as concerns Kosovo and NATO expansionism etc - what one realises is that they would see the electing of Obama as a way of apologising to the world for all the bad things America has done over the last few years. Sounds like a juvenile absurdity, I know, but you boil down their response to the crisis and what I find are hurt liberal sensibilities looking for a cathartic purge of angst - in short, if Obama were president the world would apparently all of a sudden become much more reasonable. Some of this has to do with Obama being somewhat black and therefore well suited to their 'one world' utopianism [I tend to think racism stigmata less a factor in this regard, but could be wrong]; but much of it also has to do with the way Obama speaks their language, that is, softly reasonable, benignly scorning harsh judgments with faux complexities or supposed mystical interpretations of the world, high-minded and flushed by an idealism ultimately vague and self-servingly inclusive - as long of course as you buy in , rather petulant if you don't - something like a middling Parisian intellectual from the 50's after having sipped a bit too much white wine at a young communists soirée [reaching there a bit, no?]

ah - see McCain taking my advice of turning Obama's celebrity and inclinations towards the grandiose into manifestations of a character flaw. It's the only way to get at a slick performer such as Obama - change the game. Also helps that it's, as far as I'm concerned, a charge that's true

Related, in classic Obama fashion, in response to above, see his minions are floating meme that calling their master arrogant is a polite way of calling him an uppity negro - in other words: he can't possibly have any charcter flaws because to suggest he has character flaws is to be a racist. They used this strategy against Hillary and, because of the partisan nature of the primaries, she couldn't effectively fight back agaiinst it. One always thought though that in the general election, with McCain obviously unconstrained by left wing inhibitions, that such a tactic would not only be of questionable value but might actually work to the opposite intended effect. That seems to have happened as McCain pushed back hard against the suggestion of racism and Obama camp came off looking weak.

"... the buzz words, the bylines employed by you new agey, post nation state types, all this world community crap and let's talk to each other crap and communication helps us understand each other crap, all this brave new world blubbering that makes you think that Obama's opened some magical gate of wisdom by promising to talk to our enemies - well, sounds like empty bombast to me, specious, an obtuse mistaking of the gesture for the deed, a pandering to mere sentiment, a... an unseemly grostesquerie of the real world. I mean, hell, what is talk? Are you people looking for wisdom or consolation? My teenage daughters talk constantly and although when I perchance have the misfortune to overhear these conversations they do prove somewhat edifying in an ironical way, believe me, the great soul of the world is decidedly not being laid bare..."