Philip Terzian, in the Weekly Standard, waxes ironical on the dawning of the Chosen One’s Brave New America.

You may have noticed that some presidential Transitions are more equal than others.

Here is my theory: When a Democrat is succeeded by a Republican in the White House, it is seen as a civic regression, the triumph of dirty politics over clean statesmanship (see Willie Horton, the October Surprise, Lee Atwater, etc.). But when a Democrat replaces a Republican, it’s a national rebirth, a celebration of renewal and the natural order of things.

An expatriate Briton, now deceased, liked to tell the story of dining one evening in early 1969, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s first inaugural, at the Rive Gauche, a fashionable Georgetown restaurant favored by Jackie Kennedy and friends, long since gone. As their meal progressed, he and his companion observed that the place was swiftly filling up with people they didn’t know, or even recognize, total strangers. And then it hit them: The Republicans had arrived!

Of course, this mixture of alarm and condescension–Tip O’Neill to Ronald Reagan: “You’re in the big leagues now” (1981)–is very different from the tone currently surrounding Barack Obama, or the arrival of Bill Clinton–“Bill and Al’s Excellent Adventure,” the Washington Post (1992)–a decade-and-a-half ago. Certainly as far as the media are concerned, a Democrat-to-Republican Transition is an ominous thing, as the black clouds and killer insects descend on the nation’s capital; a Republican-to-Democrat Transition, by contrast, is a tribute to life, an Ode to Joy on the Mighty Wurlitzer of political Washington.

Catherine Vogt

John Kass, at the Chicago Tribune, has a little story of a middle school student’s experiment which tells us a lot about life in America today. Catherine Vogt’s Oak Park, Illinois could just as easily have been any other fashionable upper middle class community from coast to coast.

Just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

“McCain Girl.”

“I was just really curious how they’d react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters,” Catherine told us. “I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be.”

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain’s name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

“People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn’t be wearing it,” Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

“One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed,” Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

“In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain,” Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college. …

One student suggested that she be put up on a cross for her political beliefs.

“He said, ‘You should be crucifixed.’ It was kind of funny because, I was like, don’t you mean ‘crucified?’ ” Catherine said.

Other entries in her notebook involved suggestions by classmates that she be “burned with her shirt on” for “being a filthy-rich Republican.”

Some said that because she supported McCain, by extension she supported a plan by deranged skinheads to kill Obama before the election.

Back in the days of Dwight Eisenhower, we had Me-Too Republicans who were simply too timid to challenge a conventional liberal orthodoxy for fear of being labeled radical. Tony Blankley finds today a new form of Me-Too Republican motivated by snobbery and misplaced loyalty to the community of fashion.

Sam Schulman, in the Weekly Standard, contemplates the crucial role of class solidarity in this year’s election, concluding that Sarah Palin (the Admirable Crichton of 2008), not Bill Ayers, is the real revolutionary.

A must read.

Mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated–but why? He hasn’t, like Chuck Colson, repented, or paid his debt to society by serving a prison term. He doesn’t even enjoy the prestige of a Clinton presidential pardon. Susan Rosenberg, a fellow Weatherman for whom Mrs. Ayers did go to jail rather than implicate in the execution murders of several cops, enjoys that distinction. What makes the Ayerses respectable is purely a matter of upper-middle-class solidarity. You can see the ranks close around them in the texture of Richard Stern’s elegant prose. Stern, a novelist and a long-serving University of Chicago English professor, reassures us:

I’ve been to three or four small dinner parties with Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, once hailed as the Weather-men’s Dolores Ibárruri (“La Pasionaria”), a fiery, beautiful muse. .  .  . Dohrn is still attractive, while Ayers maintains an adolescent fizzle in his sexagenarian bones.

Carefully, Stern engages with the glamorous couple on equal terms, before judging them:

At dinner, thirty-eight years later, Ayers and Dohrn did not seem to hold [my criticism of the 1970 University of Chicago student uprising] against me, and I didn’t hold their fiery and criminally violent behavior against them. As in Chekhov’s wonderful story “Old Age,” time had planed down the sharp edges and brought one-time antagonists into each others’ arms.

As the Ayerses’ social equal, Stern can estimate them fairly.

As far as I know, Ayers and Dohrn are loyal to the selves which led both of them to jail (though not for long), but they were busy doing other things, useful things, Ayers as educator, Dohrn as a legal counselor. They’d raised the child of a Weatherman who’d been jailed, they were taking care of Bernardine’s ill mother, they were doing many things educated community activists were doing.

What the Ayerses now teach, think, and do hardly matters as long as they observe good form, the form of “educated community activists.” Stern wants us to hear a mellow Chekhovian tone in their lives (and his prose). Perhaps, but in his moral reasoning I hear Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, in The Importance of Being Earnest, observing that the Ayerses “have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.”

Read the whole thing.

Biden: “I don’t have any Joe the Plumbers in my neighborhood that make $250,000 a year and are worried.”

1:12 video

Of course he doesn’t. How many plumbers (even those grossing $250K per annum) could possibly afford to live in Delaware’s Chateau Country like Joe Biden?

Delaware Online:

First elected to the Senate 36 years ago, (Biden) lives off Barley Mill Road in Greenville — northern Delaware’s priciest area — on a four-acre lakefront estate in a 7,000-square-foot custom home. Biden also owns a smaller carriage house on his property, where his widowed mother lives.

Local real estate agents said the Biden property is worth at least $2.5 million.

The People’s Cube documents the reaction of Manhattan Upper West Siders to the passage of a McCain Campaign march through a local street fair.

The number of middle fingers in a “progressive” crowd is directly proportional to the number of PhD degrees in the ten block radius.

5:00 video

via Rusty Shackleford.

Larisa Alexandrovna, at HuffPO, demonstrates that her political assimilation as a recent immigrant has been less than successful. Remedial work in both Civics and American History is in order.

Alexandrovna obviously never learned to understand the Electoral College system, and she is clearly unaware that the election of 2000 was the fourth in which the candidate with the larger number of popular votes was nonetheless defeated. If George W. Bush, as Alexandrovna alleges is “a man the citizens overwhelmingly rejected” on the basis of a .5% popular vote margin in his opponent’s favor, what would be her position on Bill Clinton who assumed the presidency despite a 4% larger margin of voters rejecting him than supporting him?

Huffington Post accepts opinion pieces from the oddest sources.

Here is a recent Russian Jewish immigrant, with a literary background, who has apparently sought asylum not in the normal America most of us inhabit, but in the deepest depths of the paranoid fever swamps of the left, who is now setting up shop to tell the rest of us Americans that we must make haste to impeach the current president (in the 5 remaining weeks before the next election) or there is no alternative to violent Revolution.

As I see it now, we have but two options and I have long alluded to hoping against hope that one of these options would not be the only one left to a peaceful people. The first and frankly most preferable option is for Congress to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against the members of this latest Business Plot.

No time needs to be wasted on hearings as we already now have in writing, formally as presented to Congress, the intentions of this administration to nullify Congressional powers permanently, to alter Judicial powers permanently, and to openly steal public funds using as blackmail the total collapse of the US economy if these powers are not handed over. You do see how this is blackmail, do you not? You do see how this is a manufactured crisis precisely designed to be used as blackmail, do you not?

The other option, the one I have long prayed we would never need to even consider, is a total revolution. But, If Congress won’t act in its own self-defense, in the defense of democracy, in defense of us – the people who have elected them to protect us from this very danger – then what is left for us to do? I don’t want to see it come down to this, but I fear that it will. Put your party politics aside right now. We are in a crisis so dangerous that should these people succeed in their coup, your party affiliation will no longer matter, your American flag will be a nice collectible item of something that once was, and your version of God will be worshiped in secrecy because your freedoms will be owned by the few.

Possibly this young lady may have insights on the work of stylistic geniuses like “Vladamir Nabkov” which are worthy of attention. She obviously is fundamentally incapable of approaching US political issues at any level more sophisticated than the repetition of leftie slogans and irrational raving.

Worse, she hasn’t even got the minimum intellectual integrity required to take political positions.

When she posted her bizarre “summons to the barricades” yesterday in response to the prospective federal bailout, she provoked a little feedback from elements of the right Blogosphere.

Jeff Goldstein identifies the young lady’s political perspective, accurately, as antidemocratic progressivism.

What the progressives want is a type of non-filial aristocracy — an aristocracy of region and school and manner and argot. Once established, this ruling class will act in the interests of all — at least, in the interests of all as those interests are defined by that ruling elite.

Voting, democracy… messy encumberances that keep those fit to lead from leading, all because too many US citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interests. As decided upon by those who would rather the rubes not vote at all if they aren’t going to vote the “right” way. Hence the outrage when certain “types” wander off the liberal plantation.

This is the face of progressive fascism. Which for all its high-sounding political importance is, at heart, nothing more than temper tantrums being thrown by those who aren’t quite as clever as they’ve always been taught to believe.

Sad, really. But then, such is the burden of being an elite in this country. STOP HATING US BECAUSE WE’RE BETTER THAN YOU!

Further negative commentary was provided by Confederate Yankee, MacRanger, and others.

How did she respond to criticism? With the radical left’s customary defenses of insults, sneers, and foul language, and, ridiculously enough, with disingenuous “Who, me? I didn’t say any such thing!” protestations.

We need advice on politics from her?

Bradley Burston, winner of the the Eliav-Sartawi award for Middle East journalism

Bradley Burston, award-winning member of the chin-stroking International liberal commentariat, provides a very striking illustration of the truth of the old rustic apothegm in his What is truly frightening about Sarah Palin editorial.

It was in the taxicab this morning that it finally struck me about Sarah Palin.

I get it. I get that millions of Americans have a crying need for someone to stand up and say the things that Sarah Palin has been telling them.

I get that many, many Americans are fed up with big government and shame in patriotism and energy dependence and media condescension. I recognize that there are many on the right who are galvanized by a woman addressing the nation in condemnation of gun control and abortions. It’s clear that many in the heartland and even on the Blue State coasts have been waiting years to hear someone take a take-no-prisoners verbal lash to Beltway waste and liberal political correctness and, by implication, to cultural pluralism and tree hugging and the very mention of the word Washington.

But it wasn’t until I got into the taxicab this morning, that I realized what the American voter truly faces this November.

The radio was playing a clip from her ABC News interview, the one in which she was asked about the Bush Doctrine.

The problem was not that she was unacquainted with the doctrine. Millions of Americans are unacquainted with it.

The problem is that Sarah Palin was also asking those millions of Americans to put her first in line for the most important position in humankind. …

Asked during the interview if she had the ability and the experience to serve as president of the United States, she replied without hesitation, without reservation, without contemplation – and without knowing, on a profound level, what that would, in fact, entail. “I’m ready.”

Here is the answer that is truly frightening. It lets us know that the nation may be in danger of electing another leader bearing the most profound of George Bush’s shortcomings: blindness to one’s own shortcomings.

Blindness, that is, to the breadth and depth and height and shape of what one does not know. Say what you will about Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary knew an unknown unknown when he saw one. Sarah Palin, for whom appearance is understandably significant, has one in her mirror.

But what about Bradley Buston’s blindness to his own shortcomings: his unjustified certitude, his complacency, his arrogance, and his misinformedness?

First of all, George W. Bush never identified any proposition as the “Bush Doctrine.”

That there is a Bush Doctrine at all is a pure journalistic invention, and wide-spread disagreement exists as to which of several formulations represents the alleged Bush Doctrine. Even how many alternative Bush Doctrines have been referred to is uncertain.

Charles Krauthammer, who claims to have been the first to use the phrase, identifies four versions of the Bush Doctrine.

Michael Abramowitz, in the Washington Post, quotes Paul D. Feaver, a member of the National Security Council, as having identified seven versions. Wikipedia used to agree, stating, as of September 13th:

The Bush Doctrine is a journalistic term used to describe some foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush, enunciated in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Scholars identify seven different “Bush Doctrines.”

But this inconvenient portion of the discussion has been edited away and the entry locked to prohibit further alterations. The old text is presently visible in Google.

This little case of journalistic malpractice could serve beautifully as a metonymy for the numberless cases of factual error, false interpretation, and complete misstatement served up by the establishment journalistic community as Truth and Wisdom during the Bush Administration’s years in office.

David Walker reports on how the Atlantic made a big mistake by hiring “a hardcore democrat” professional celebrity photographer to do the portrait shot of John McCain for their October issue cover.

Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.

After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.

The Atlantic didn’t select the diabolical looking McCain for its cover. Greenberg is hoping to license that image to some other magazine (she negotiated a two-week embargo with The Atlantic so she could re-license images from the shoot before the election).

Warned that the image is just the kind of thing that will stir up the anti-media vitriol in the conservative blogosphere, Greenberg said, “Good. I want to stir stuff up, but not to the point where I get audited if he becomes president.”

That said, she goes on to explain that she’s thought about replacing McCain’s mouth with bloody shark teeth and displaying the image on a billboard with the message that the candidate is a bloodthirsty war monger.

Given her strong feelings about John McCain, we asked whether she had any reservations about taking the assignment in the first place.

“I didn’t,” she says. “It’s definitely exciting to shoot someone who is in the limelight like that. I am a pretty hard core Democrat. Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me.”

Walker thinks that Greenberg “delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic,” but just look at it.

The photo was taken at an angle ideal for highlighting the candidate’s jowls, sagging neck, and lighted so as to capture every line and blemish in his face. His face is surreally reflective and its overall color is kind of a metallic bronze, except where some nasty emphatic pink makes his nose look runny and his mouth obscene. I doubt McCain’s motor vehicle picture is any more unflattering.

One of the less loveable features of the American left is the way its members are so little inhibited by good manners, professionalism, or ordinary decency from injecting their own vicious, self-righteous, and santimonious partisan perspective into anything opportunity places within their reach. These kinds of cheap shots are a key reason the culture wars are bitter as they are.

Another class act from Huffington Post: the screenwriter of the preachy agitprop box-office bomb North Country*, Michael Seiztman heard Sarah Palin in her ABC interview choose the George W. Bush-preferred pronunciation of nuclear, and proceeded to go ballistic on all you Americans who fail to measure up to his personal standards of pronunciation, deportment, and political correctness.

*Budget $30,000,000 — Gross revenue $23,624,242

Repent immediately, or else!

I realized three things tonight. For one, if you are a McCain/Palin/Bush voter, you and I do not have a difference of opinion. We have a difference in brain power. Two, she really is as ignorant as I feared. And, three, she really is kinda hot. Basically, I want to have sex with her on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads aloud from the Constitution. (My wife is cool with this if I promise to “first wipe off Palin’s tranny makeup.” I married well.)

Now, I want to be clear and speak directly to those of you who LOVED that Palin interview. You’re an idiot. I mean that. This is not one of those cases where we’re going to agree to disagree. This isn’t one of those situations where we debate it passionately and then walk away thinking that the other guy is wrong but argued well. I’m not going to think of you as a thoughtful but misguided person with different ideas who still really cares about the country and the world. No, sorry, not this time. This time, if you watched those interview excerpts and weren’t scared out of your freakin’ mind, then you’re mentally ill, mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed. What you are NOT is responsible, informed, curious, thoughtful, mature, educated, empathetic, or remotely serious. I mean it.

But I like to think that anyone can change.

Stop voting for people you want to have a beer with. Stop voting for folksy. Stop voting for people who remind you of your neighbor. Stop voting for the ideologically intransigent, the staggeringly ignorant, and the blazingly incompetent.

Vote for someone smarter than you. Vote for someone who inspires you. Vote for someone who has not only traveled the world but who has also shown a deep understanding and compassion for it. The stakes are real and they’re terrifyingly high. This election matters. It matters. It really matters. Let me say that one more time. This. Really. Matters.

Face it, Seitzman, George W. Bush graduated from three better schools than you did.

We live in a tragic age, in which control of far too great a portion of the arts is in the hands of witless vulgarians, like Seitzman, who respond to the quirks of fate allowing pseudo-intellectual clods like themselves too near the center of the stage with complacent self-infatuation and Neronian fantasies of the exercise of political power.

I’ve rarely seen a blog post which demonstrated, so definitively, its author’s complete lack of the supposed superiority which forms the entire basis of his diatribe.

Pat Buchanan talks a little about class warfare.

If one would wish to see the famous liberal double standard on naked display, consider.

Palin’s daughter was fair game for a media that refused to look into reports that John Edwards, a Democratic candidate for president, was conducting an illicit affair with a woman said to be carrying his child and cheating on his faithful wife Elizabeth, who has incurable cancer. That was not a legitimate story, but Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is?

Why did the selection of Palin cause a suspension of all standards and a near riot among a media that has been so in the tank for Barack even “Saturday Night Live” has satirized the infatuation?

Because she is one of us — and he is one of them.

Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law. She is public schools and Idaho State. Barack was a Saul Alinsky social worker who rustled up food stamps. Sarah kills her own food.

Michelle has a $300,000-a-year sinecure doing PR for a Chicago hospital. Todd Palin is a union steelworker who augments his income working vacations on the North Slope. Sarah has always been proud to be an American. Michelle was never proud of America — until Barack started winning.

Barack has zero experience as an executive. Sarah ran her own fishing fleet, was mayor for six years and runs the largest state in the union. She belongs to a mainstream Christian church. Barack was, for 15 years, a parishioner at Trinity United and had his daughters baptized by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons are saturated in black-power, anti-white racism and anti-Americanism.

Sarah is a rebel. Obama has been a go-along, get-along cog in the Daley machine. She is Middle America. Barack, behind closed doors in San Francisco, mocked Middle Americans as folks left behind by the global economy who cling bitterly to their Bibles, bigotries and guns.

Barack, says the National Journal, has the most left-wing voting record in the Senate, besting Socialist Bernie Sanders. Palin’s stances read as though they were lifted from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 “no pale pastels” platform. And this is what this media firestorm is all about.

Clive Crook explains that rejection of American values and contempt for ordinary Americans really does place candidates representing America’s urban elites at a serious disadvantage in national elections.

He doesn’t exhaustively address the subject, but he’s certainly identified a major part of the left’s problem.

This article is not the first to note the cultural contradiction in American liberalism, but just now the point bears restating. The election may turn on it.

Democrats speak up for the less prosperous; they have well-intentioned policies to help them; they are disturbed by inequality, and want to do something about it. Their concern is real and admirable. The trouble is, they lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt.

Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes – or so many liberals are driven to conclude. Either that or bigots, clinging to guns, God and white supremacy; or else pathetic dupes, ever at the disposal of Republican strategists. If they only had the brains to vote in their interests, Democrats think, the party would never be out of power. But again and again, the Republicans tell their lies, and those stupid damned voters buy it.

It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.

Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.

Because it was so unexpected, Sarah Palin’s nomination for the vice-presidency jolted these attitudes to the surface. Ms Palin is a small-town American. It is said that she has only recently acquired a passport. Her husband is a fisherman and production worker. She represents a great slice of the country that the Democrats say they care about – yet her selection induced an apoplectic fit.

For days, the derision poured down from Democratic party talking heads and much of the media too. The idea that “this woman” might be vice-president or even president was literally incomprehensible. The popular liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose act is an endless sneer at the Republican party, noted that John McCain’s case for the presidency was that only he was capable of standing between the US and its enemies, but that should he die he had chosen “this stewardess” to take over. This joke was not – or not only – a complaint about lack of experience. It was also an expression of class disgust. I give Mr Maher credit for daring to say what many Democrats would only insinuate.

Little was known about Ms Palin, but it sufficed for her nomination to be regarded as a kind of insult. Even after her triumph at the Republican convention in St Paul last week, the put-downs continued. Yes, the delivery was all right, but the speech was written by somebody else – as though that is unusual, as though the speechwriter is not the junior partner in the preparation of a speech, and as though just anybody could have raised the roof with that text. Voters in small towns and suburbs, forever mocked and condescended to by metropolitan liberals, are attuned to this disdain. Every four years, many take their revenge. …

If only the Democrats could contain their sense of entitlement to govern in a rational world, and their consequent distaste for wide swathes of the US electorate, they might gain the unshakeable grip on power they feel they deserve. Winning elections would certainly be easier – and Republicans would have to address themselves more seriously to economic insecurity. But the fathomless cultural complacency of the metropolitan liberal rules this out.

The attitude that expressed itself in response to the Palin nomination is the best weapon in the Republican armoury. Rely on the Democrats to keep it primed. You just have to laugh.

The Palin nomination could still misfire for Mr McCain, but the liberal reaction has made it a huge success so far. To avoid endlessly repeating this mistake, Democrats need to learn some respect.

It will be hard. They will have to develop some regard for the values that the middle of the country expresses when it votes Republican. Religion. Unembarrassed flag-waving patriotism. Freedom to succeed or fail through one’s own efforts. Refusal to be pitied, bossed around or talked down to. And all those other laughable redneck notions that made the United States what it is.