Pretty devastating RNC ad.

Hat tip to DR.

Stephen Green reported live, drunkblogging last night, the first presidential debate:

7:03PM Wow. Obama looks mad, now that the subject is the ill effects of the law bearing his name.

I mean, I CAN BURN YOUR SOUL WITH MY EYEBALLS.

7:04PM From the peanut gallery: “You can stay on your parents’ Medicare.”

7:23PM It’s been more of the same while our servers struggled to handle the load. And that is: Obama, peevish, scripted. Romney, relaxed, and owning the stage like one of the “big, swinging dicks” from Wall Street, which Obama both despises and relies upon.

And that’s the trick tonight, isn’t it? Obama has always relied on the big money men in private, while disparaging them in public. But what happens when he comes up against one of them in the most public way possible?

Now we know the answer, and it ain’t pretty.

The president appeared small and petulant and reactive. Romney looked presidential and secure and proactive. There was only one president on the stage tonight, and he doesn’t (yet) hold the office.

Rick Wilson quotes some hometown advice.

My high school debate coach was a diminutive, brilliant woman named Susan. All of 5-foot nothing, she had enormous glasses, a high, raucous South Carolina accent and a mind like Google for obscure facts. Once, during a break in a debate competition where I’d blown an argument, she said something totally incongruous that snapped me out of a growing funk.

She cocked a finger and beckoned me to lean down. She whispered, “Stop thinking about making points. You know the arguments. You just go in there and knock his pecker in the dirt.” …

Romney should walk on to the stage in Denver knowing he’s arguing against a man who is held aloft on a creaky, tottering artifice of broken jobs promises, failed policies and a promised age of social and economic miracles that never came. President Participation Trophy isn’t the giant, transformative figure of 2008: he’s got a record now, and it’s ugly.

Read the whole thing.

Charles Lipson, Peter B. Ritzma Professor in Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago

My Yale classmate Charlie Lipson has some good advice for Mitt Romney in tonight’s debate.

Take advantage of the fact that Obama’s debating skills will be rusty. “Even the best athletes, if they take off for awhile, become a little rusty. He does sometimes make mistakes when he’s not reading from the teleprompter, and he has a notoriously thin skin, which could allow some of the less appealing parts of his personality to come across. The big advantage to Romney is that the news media is so openly opposed to him and spins everything that the real advantage is that the debate is actually watched by people, so it’s less mediated. A lot of times peoples’ attitudes toward the debate don’t form for a day or two. So the chance of NBC and CBS and the New York Times to spin the debate afterwards and make it kind of appear to be a foregone conclusion about what happened is not entirely missing.”

+ “Raise the issue of the deficit, but the key for Romney is to somehow connect the deficit to concrete and real problems that America is facing today—and will be facing unless it is solved. The tradition, until a couple of years ago, until the Tea Party, was that the deficit was politically irrelevant—at least electorally irrelevant—and I think that the Romney campaign has not really done an effective job of showing how the deficit problems are harming ordinary Americans. President Obama’s statement the other day that he’s responsible for only 10 percent of the increased deficit during his time in office is deeply disingenuous. If Romney is unable to attack that effectively, he’s missed a grand opportunity.”

+ Lay out just how sick the economy is, despite an uptick in consumer confidence. “Normally at this point you get what’s called a V-shaped recovery, so you get four percent annual growth. The fact that we’re getting 1.5, plus or minus, it shows that something is deeply wrong.” [I mention to Lipson that I’m told that President Obama believes the economy is going to come “roaring” back and that what keeps him up at night is the prospect of Mitt Romney taking credit for Obama’s policies.] Lipson says: “He should sleep easier. At four years after the crisis, we’re still in absolute economic stagnation. We’re not producing enough jobs each month to meet the number of new entrants into the work place, and so real unemployment is actually rising. Yes, the economy could come back, but it’s not going to come roaring back. There are no external engines in the world economy that can help pull America up. China is growing far slower than it was growing a couple of years ago, and Europe even slower than America, and many of the key economies in Europe have slipped into a double-dip recession. I think there are very serious crises ahead.”

+ “Point to the fact that the big programs that Obama has launched, the stimulus and health care and Dodd Frank didn’t create jobs and added huge amounts of regulatory burden and uncertainty to the economy. He’s got to tie this slow growth to Obama’s policies. If he can’t do that he won’t win the debate.”

Good advice.

5:08 video

Fellow Pennsylvanian Joe Veoni reports:

The big news in Clearfield was the Elk that took a plunge off the bridge.

This ~ 1,000 lb. bull elk jumped off of the Clearfield Bypass bridge near the mall this afternoon. Numerous crews including the Game Commission were called in to retrieve the bull from the water. It is unknown what caused him to jump. He died on impact.

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Pennsylvania’s elk descend from a herd of elk presented as a gift from President Theodore Roosevelt to PA Governor Gifford Pinchot.

Peter Kirsanow has some fun placing the Obama approach to foreign policy in a historical perspective.

Cambridge, Mass. — Celebrated historian Bertram Oxley has uncovered a memorandum from former Japanese Emperor Hirohito to Admiral Yamamoto dated December 6, 1941, showing that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was motivated by an offensive film made by Charlie Chaplin ridiculing Japanese cuisine.

“Contrary to historical accounts over the last seventy years,” Professor Oxley said in an interview today with the BBC, “What appeared to be a meticulously planned surprise attack was actually a spontaneous demonstration by moderate sushi connoisseurs in the Imperial Navy in response to a hateful and offensive movie. Thereafter, extremist elements within the Japanese military co-opted the spontaneous attack, transforming it into the overseas contingency operation sometimes referred to as ‘World War II.’”

The discovery has created a sensation in scholarly circles. “This is a remarkable find,” declared Reginald Smythe, chairman of the Progressive Historians Assocation and former Obama State Department official. “Had President Roosevelt condemned this movie — instead of uttering that infernal ‘Day of Infamy’ provocation — the war could have been avoided and millions of lives would have been saved.”

Reached at his home in Houston, former President George H. W. Bush, an aviator in the Pacific during the war, expressed skepticism. “It’s simply inconceivable that the Japanese First Air Fleet, with six aircraft carriers, could have staged a spur of the moment attack on an island thousands of nautical miles from the Japanese homeland with such stealth and precision.” Most experts dismissed Mr. Bush’s remarks, however, since it’s widely understood that World War II was primarily his son’s fault.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, asked this afternoon about the memo’s discovery stated, “Of course, hindsight’s 20-20. But one can only wonder how much pain and suffering could have been averted had FDR simply apologized to Hirohito at the outset.”

Bret Stephens, in today’s Wall Street Journal, notes that the famous 3 a.m. telephone call scenario that appeared in the most famous ad of the 2008 presidential campaign actually recently occurred.

The hour is 5 p.m., Sept. 11, Washington time, and the scene is an Oval Office meeting among President Obama, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi has been under assault for roughly 90 minutes. Some 30 U.S. citizens are at mortal risk. The whereabouts of Ambassador Stevens are unknown.

What is uppermost on the minds of the president and his advisers? The safety of Americans, no doubt. So what are they prepared to do about it? Here is The Wall Street Journal’s account of the meeting:

“There was no serious consideration at that hour of intervention with military force, officials said. Doing so without Libya’s permission could represent a violation of sovereignty and inflame the situation, they said. Instead, the State Department reached out to the Libyan government to get reinforcements to the scene.”

So it did. Yet the attack was far from over. After leaving the principal U.S. compound, the Americans retreated to a second, supposedly secret facility, which soon came under deadly mortar fire. Time to call in the troops?

“Some officials said the U.S. could also have sent aircraft to the scene as a ‘show of force’ to scare off the attackers,” the Journal reported, noting that there’s a U.S. air base just 450 miles away in Sicily. “State Department officials dismissed the suggestions as unrealistic. ‘They would not have gotten there in two hours, four hours or six hours.'”

The U.S. security detail only left Washington at 8 a.m. on Sept. 12, more than 10 hours after the attacks began. A commercial jet liner can fly from D.C. to Benghazi in about the same time. …

Let’s review:

The U.S. ignores warnings of a parlous security situation in Benghazi. Nothing happens because nobody is really paying attention, especially in an election year, and because Libya is supposed to be a foreign-policy success. When something does happen, the administration’s concerns for the safety of Americans are subordinated to considerations of Libyan “sovereignty” and the need for “permission.” After the attack the administration blames a video, perhaps because it would be politically inconvenient to note that al Qaeda is far from defeated, and that we are no more popular under Mr. Obama than we were under George W. Bush. Denouncing the video also appeals to the administration’s reflexive habits of blaming America first. Once that story falls apart, it’s time to blame the intel munchkins and move on.

It was five in the afternoon when Mr. Obama took his 3 a.m. call. He still flubbed it.

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Former Special Forces officers mock the presidential leadership style in this cartoon.

Hat tip to Theo.