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Brian Williams, NBC's talking head extraordinaire, is probably a decent guy, a guy with whom you could sit down and have a beer. [More on the alcohol subject at the end, I promise.] But that doesn't excuse something he said last night on Jay Leno's show.
And, by those definitions, the turkeys were flying fast and thick last week. First up was the decision to let Senator Joe Lieberman (CT - Ego Party) remain as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the Senate (see definition (a), above). Only 13 Democratic senators voted against Joe, who blackmailed the party by saying if they didn't give him his chairmanship back he would not only bolt to the Republican Party but also vote against Democratic proposals every chance he got. Way to demean your vote, Joe! Nothing like selling your vote in order to prop up your own ego!
Bush's meeting is going to last six hours. And nobody expects it to come up with anything even close to the same magnitude of what happened in Bretton Woods. Nobody sane, that is. So please, media types, don't call it what it's not. Let's have some truth in advertising here. Call it "Desperate Bush Lame-Duck Photo-Op With World Leaders Who Would Really Rather Be Talking To Obama," if you have to slap a label on it. Because that's a lot closer to what it's going to be.
Of course, the big question on everyone's mind right now is: What is going on up in Minnesota? Al Franken is tantalizingly close to taking a lead in his Senate race, but very few details are available in the media (with the exception of this report from the Huffington Post) to let us know exactly what is going on. So I went to the source, and contacted the Franken campaign for some details.
But strategically, it started falling apart almost immediately. After marveling at the crowd size for a few days, something became painfully obvious -- Palin was merely repeating her convention speech over and over again, with very few changes. Sure, it had been a great speech (if you're a Republican, that is) at the convention, but after a week or so it was wearing a little thin. And if John McCain had shut the door on the media regarding his interviews; when it came to keeping Palin away from the media, he not only shut the door, he barred it, locked the keep, lowered the portcullis, raised the drawbridge, released the moat monster, and started boiling oil on the parapets.
And now we find ourselves a few weeks out from Election Day, and things are looking pretty good for Democrats everywhere. It's been an exhausting campaign, and I don't think anyone can argue that the Grateful Dead lyric I used as this week's title is inaccurate. It has been a long and strange journey indeed.
Things are getting pretty nasty out on the McCain campaign trail, it seems. Not much talk of "reaching across the aisle" these days. Now, while anyone with a halfway-decent brain saw this coming, this obviously doesn't include most of the mainstream media. Of course the end of the campaign was going to be nasty. Of course McCain and his minions were going to throw everything they could at Obama. Barack Obama himself knew this was coming. Democrats should have known it was coming. It's the old story of the scorpion and the frog -- McCain is getting nasty because he's a Republican candidate for president. "I'm a Republican, it's my nature," in other words.
Now, I refuse to get too wrapped up in the question of who "won" the debate. In general, unless one candidate obviously self-destructs, this question is answered among most Americans quite subjectively and quite personally. I thought, much as I did with the first presidential debate, that last night was largely a draw. Neither candidate completely fell on their face, both candidates spoke fairly well, and neither one completely outshone the other.
OK, enough navel-gazing. What a week it was, eh? John McCain is showing what has been described as his "Ready, Fire, Aim" approach to running things, and even Republicans are shaking their heads in confusion over McCain's "I won't debate!... Well, OK, maybe I will..." grandstanding this week. His non-suspension suspension of his campaign added to this feeling of watching a slow-motion train wreck happen. All this actually helped McCain in one way -- because if there hadn't been such a circus to watch then Sarah Palin's disastrous interview with Katie Couric would have gotten a lot more attention. Again, even conservatives are recoiling in horror from how unprepared this woman is for the job she's running for. But it was buried under the bailout plan news, which had to have helped McCain in some small way.
Back in Volume 36 of this Friday Talking Points column, I pointed out what seemed to me to be an obvious observation -- that the media was going a lot lighter on John McCain than they were on Barack Obama. This earned me a fair amount of ridicule at the time (and also some support, I should say). Now, however, I can definitively say that this situation has been rectified. Whether it was McCain's campaign cutting off virtually all access to McCain (and literally any access to Palin), whether it was McCain's mudslinging and lies in his ads, or perhaps whether it was McCain manipulating the media after his running mate choice, and then savagely attacking them -- for whatever reason, the mainstream media are now closely examining everything McCain says.