I hadn’t thought about Palin’s choice as it effected the left, but I think you are right. A problem with left-wingers is that, unlike authoritarians, they do not follow leaders. The members of the left have to be driven like cattle towards their positions. Palin was a great cattle prod.

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Finally, I am wondering about the timing of all the current economic meltdowns. How did they happen to come about just now? The Bush regime has always shown a masterful ability to stuff problems under the bed until after the elections. That they have been unable to do so a month before the election I find truly terrifying.

The current economic crisis did not happen to come about just now. It happened several years ago as the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan started kicking up the interest rate right after Bush was reelected in 2004.

Check the table of the Federal Funds Rate. Greenspan lowered the interest rate from 6.5% in December 2000 where he had increased it to elect Bush down to 1.75% in November 2004 to reelect Bush. He also encouraged the housing bubble for the same reason.

After the Presidential election in 2004 Greenspan then started kicking up the interest rate to repair the damage he had caused, but the housing bubble he had created was too severe to repair. By the time he had gotten interest rates back up to 5.25% in June of 2006 it was already killing the housing bubble he had created. The resulting foreclosures set off the credit crisis.

Because of the legal requirements of default-to-foreclosure it takes a year to eighteen months for the real estate market to react to serious problems, and they only occur when a great deal more mortgages than usual go into default. Greenspan probably thought the problems would be over well before 2008. No one thought the problems would take the entire credit system down.

The Federal Reserve (Bernanke) and Secretary of the Treasury Paulson have done everything possible to extend recognition of the crisis to after the Presidential election. It just wasn’t possible. Bush/Cheney and Greenspan had screwed things up too badly and too seriously.

So what is the trigger word that commit one to a drink?

Do you really think McCain had any clue last Summer that he would choose Palin?

I don’t. From what I have read, that was a last minute gut-level impulse decision to try to change the nature of the overall game that he was already losing.

In football you don’t pull a Hail Mary pass unless you are losing and have no alternative.

I’m not sure that we can blame McCain for being a shallow self serving fraud of a man in this case. He may be all that, but he has taken on a job that is impossible to perform – win the White House for a Republican in 2008. It is McCain’s only chance ever to attempt to win the White House. He can’t possibly do it without breaking all the rules.

Since McCain’s entire life has consisted of seeing how many rules he can break and still survive, the Republicans appear to have chosen the perfect man to run for President this year. And John is giving it his all. He will sacrifice everything he is or has to win this year.

I’d say that he knows better than we do that he is a shallow self serving fraud of a man. But he has converted that plus a family naval tradition into public respect, a lovely wife, wealth, and a long-term Senatorship. That’s a life the rest of us might consider being quite successful. He’s willing to sacrifice the respect for the long-shot chance at winning the Presidency.

Is that an unreasonable tradeoff? He is a gambler, after all.

Even then, McCain can’t run as a Republican. He has to create a new party – the party of the maverick Republican. To do that, he has to bury his connection to the Republican party of George Bush. That’s possible because of the conservative attitude that conservatism is perfect and if a so-called conservative leader fails it is because he is not conservative enough.

To make that work McCain has to 1. obliterate all connections to Bush, 2. promise to be a real conservative, and 3. destroy Obama as a credible alternative. Everything McCain has done fits into one of those three categories.

Since conservatives generally do not mentally translate what they know from one category into another category (see Bob Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians), each of those three categories can be worked on separately. But there is no way McCain could possibly have run a campaign on the high road and had any chance to win.

One thing I do not see is any consideration of McCain’s impulsivity and unwillingness to conform to expectations. When he hits a road block he has had a clear M.O. this year of trying to think outside the box and surprise everyone. Choice of Palin, cancellation of the first day of the convention, suspension of the campaign and return to Washington – any time he could claim that outside forces were so powerful that the planned operations should be canceled or suspended he has taken that option.

That is clearly a long term M.O. for McCain, but I’d suspect that he is aware that his campaign is losing and he feels that he has to change the overall dynamic somehow. So he is looking for game-changers. But he is also a poor manager. He can’t coordinate his game-changing efforts with the rest of his campaign. That’s because he believes in the myth of the leader. He can’t take advice. His decisions have to be his own, and he can’t objectively deal with input from subordinates. This is my explanation for his handling of the Palin choice. It was a very bad one, but I am reasonably sure that he felt nothing else that was on the horizon was a sufficiently large game changer for him to try.

If I taught a graduate Journalism class I’d love to assign a team to each of the several hypotheses that this article offers. But I’d need to take into account McCain’s impulsivity some way.

I hyphenated that because I agree with those who think McCain would not choose to allow Palin the carte blanche that Bush-the-Cuckold has allowed Cheney; for starters, he’s a misogynist, he doesn’t like her, and he has a greater sense of his own confidence, however misplaced, than George. But I think his anger, the string of age- and stress-related maladies that would likely plague him, would lead him down so many dark passages that the energetic and retribution-seeking Palin wouldn’t hesitate (or blink) before making everyone acknowledge, “Who’s Your Momma, Now, Boy?”

But to Gellman. I think he performs a valuable service, a rarity among his TradMed colleagues. His Angler attempts to describe the world according to Dick Cheney. Constrained by training, publishers and the laws of defamation, he gives us the provable. He’s made a good stab at mapmaking, but he is forced to omit the elevation changes, the one-way and side roads, the bridges, canals, underpasses and utility lines that his sources have airbrushed away and which would have enabled us to navigate strange territory. He is convinced, however, that his map grid is real, not a construct, and that the sea monsters beyond his map’s edges are not.

In the world of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, war and politics, oil and arms are indistinguishable. By leaving out the clearly marked probable and inferable, Mr. Gellman omits the educated guesses that lead talented admirals in pitched battles to victory at the expense of those less able to envision what lies just beyond the horizon. In Cheney’s world, James Ellroy characters condemn their opponents to Kafka’s nightmares. But Mr. Gellman gives us Sam Spade sanitized by Joe Breen: Joel Cairo isn’t a murderous thief who happens to be gay; he’s a hapless rogue in love with gardenias and his umbrella handle. George Bush is really in charge and Dick Cheney is convinced that he’s serving our best interests, not those of his profiteering partners, by pursuing war, war, war instead of Churchill’s jaw, jaw, jaw.

I don’t buy it. I may not be able to prove where Hannibal Lecter shopped for the fixin’s in his venison stew, but if I’m invited to sample it at the good doctor’s home, I know two things: I will sit with my back to the wall, nearest the exit, and bring a colleague and a packed lunch. If asked to explore the kitchen, we’ll discover an urgent need to return phone calls at the office. Mr. Gellman has given us a good start, but the last word on Mr. Cheney remains to be written

However, note that Hurricane Ike seems to have put huge pressures on the oil and gas infrastructure around LA, and that’s had other ramifications. More here if you are interested: http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/

I never dreamed that I’d see what I’m looking at these days.

that would be a brutal illustration of their lies