Geoff Arnold's Blog

In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens considers the present financial crisis, and in particular the abdication of responsibility by those involved:

Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? Has anybody even offered to resign? Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”? Have you even heard the question being posed? O.K., then, has anybody been fired? Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist? Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative” like a virus into the system? To ask the question is to answer it.

The McCain campaign really has been predictable. Predictably negative. Predictably cynical. In fact, back in June Obama predicted exactly what they would do. Check this out:

On reflection, I think perhaps that Obama did get a few of his predictions wrong. Not the what, but the how. Did anyone really believe that McCain would stoop to mob incitement? See John Scalzi’s “Your Rallies Are Beginning to Look Like Lynch Mobs”. Or from the Inverse Square Blog:

The grotesque sight of major party candidates standing mute and in apparent agreement as their supportors call for the murder of their opponent is not supposed to be part of the American political process.
It is now.

(And I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s read Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent” novels….)
UPDATE: Well, better late than never. According to Time, McCain…

… just snatched the microphone out the hands of a woman who began her question with, “I’m scared of Barack Obama… he’s an Arab terrorist…”
“No, no ma’am,” he interrupted. “He’s a decent family man with whom I happen to have some disagreements.”

Perhaps he should tell his Veep candidate….

There’s a devastating bio of John McCain in the latest Rolling Stone. The guy comes across as a total narcissist and a thoroughly unprincipled jerk. And his colleagues apparently agree.

Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. “Wait a second here,” Cornyn said. “I’ve been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You’re out of line.” McCain exploded: “Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room.” The incident foreshadowed McCain’s 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly “suspended” his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.

At least three of McCain’s GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain’s “temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.” Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn’t “want this guy anywhere near a trigger.” And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that “the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded.”

Read the whole thing – one piece of outrageous nepotism after another, his less than honorable military service, the Keating Five, the carefully calculated “maverick” moves designed purely to attract attention, the pure egotism and lack of any moral center. The man is a monster.

Larison on Palin’s debate performance:

She cannot be blamed for not knowing that civilian casualties from NATO airstrikes have been a major political problem in the Afghan war or that this reliance on air power stems directly from our lack of ground forces in the country, because I’m sure her handlers were never going to brief her on the existence of civilian casualties in a war zone.  For the Scheunemanns and Bieguns of the world, these casualties either don’t exist or are irrelevant.  Regardless, her clear lack of knowledge about a critical detail concerning one of the two combat theaters where American soldiers are fighting today would, were she not a Republican, be considered among conservatives automatically disqualifying and a cause for ridicule from now until eternity.  Obviously, had Biden made an error of this magnitude he would be attacked as unfit – and rightly so.  It can be no less disqualifying with Palin.