Decline and faceplant

Watching the ongoing train wreck that is the Sarah Palin candidacy, I have to wonder: Has any other VP nominee gone from Muskie to Quayle in such a short period of time?

Paul Newman

I'm pretty sure the only Paul Newman film I saw in a theatre was Nobody's Fool, and my attention was not entirely on the movie, as I was also trying to figure out if I was on a date. (I wasn't.) Even in my distracted condition, though, I recognized the sheer casual magnitude of Newman's talent. Later I enjoyed his performance in The Sting, and pointing out to comic geeks that he was Gil Kane's original "model" for Green Lantern.

Roger Ebert has a nice appreciation, and reposted an interview with Newman promoting Nobody's Fool. And now I'm going to do update my Netflix queue.

Time horizons

Roughly put, a time horizon is how far ahead one is planning: Next year, next quarter, next month. An important part of growing up is learning to think in terms of longer time horizons: You can't control what happens this week, but you can make long-term plans that will endure whatever roadblocks flare up. You can also avoid making short-term plans that will hurt you later: If I eat a third helping of dessert, it will taste good now but I'll feel sick later. If I buy that expensive thing I don't need, I'll enjoy playing with it but I won't be able to pay the rent. That sort of thing.

Looking at the McCain campaign, I'm pretty sure we've got a potential president whose time horizon goes to lunchtime tomorrow, tops. It's clear McCain had no endgame for his phony campaign suspension, he simply wanted to grab a bunch of headlines that afternoon. Same thing applies to Sarah Palin: No need to vet her record, the important thing is to pick somebody dramatic! And then that dramatic pick can't match wits with Katie Couric. But, hey, who can think as far ahead as three weeks from the announcement?

Palin the polar bear?

WaPo's Ruth Marcus on the under-noticed Sarah Palin-Sean Hannity interview:

The way she answers questions brings to mind -- I have Alaska on the brain, admittedly -- the image of a polar bear, jumping from rhetorical ice floe to ice floe, drifting some but eventually managing to get safely to dry land. No flubs, but you get the sense that she could plunge into the icy water at any moment. Palin has an odd tendency to use the same word twice in a sentence, as in, “The people of American realize that inherently all political power is inherent in the people,” or, about John McCain, “He can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.” Or, combining word repetition with another Palin verbal tic, word dropping, this about the economic meltdown: “Well, you know, first Fannie and Freddie, different because quasi-government agencies there where government had to step in because the adverse impact all across our nation, especially with homeowners, is just too impacting.”

Too impacting? Are Fannie and Freddie wisdom teeth?

All-Star Superman

The genius of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's masterful Superman epic is that they've taken the archetypal Superman -- the one who doesn't appear so much in comics and movies and cartoons as he does in your head when you're a kid absorbing all these things -- and made him the center of the story. This is a series that celebrates and ennobles every Superman story you've ever loved by distilling the purest essence of the character into four colors and twelve issues; it defines every character so perfectly and precisely that you wonder if there's anything left to say about them -- and then you remember the surprises each character has for us throughout the series. This, after all, is a book that, in its final issue, gives Steve Lombard, the Daily Planet sportswriter who makes a hobby out of bedeviling Clark Kent, a redemptive moment. He learns better and he changes and he tries to make amends. That's not just a grace note, it's an encapsulation of the theme of the book and meaning of the character: We can be better than we are, if we only try. And Superman can help us do it.

Palin thoughts, serious and otherwise

In no real order:

• As the father of a daughter, I applaud any breaking of the glass ceilings in our society. I am glad that a mediocre female politician has been given the same opportunity that a mediocre male politician would have had in the past.
  
• Palin is not really supposed to appeal to disaffected Clinton supporters or women; she's intended to appeal to the hardcore theocratic right-wing faction of the Republican party. These are the folks who have always been suspicious of or hostile to McCain, and he'd be certain to lose if they stayed home in appreciable numbers on November 4. The question now is whether Palin, who among other things is a creationist, tried to ban books as mayor, is lying about her opposition to the "Bridge to Nowhere" (she was for it before it was convenient for her to be against it), abused her office seeking payback against an estranged relative, and more, is sufficiently nutty as to alienate voters in the middle of the political spectrum.
  
• I suspect she is; in 2004, rallying the base was enough for Bush to eke out a narrow win over Kerry, but that base -- and Republican identification among the electorate -- is much smaller now than it was four years ago.
  
• As Lance notes, it is a mistake to assume Palin is a lightweight. On the other hand, I cannot listen to her without recalling Stuart's mom offering Beavis and Butt-head breakfast burritos.
  
• Imagine for a second that the Obamas had a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter. Now imagine the right-wing freakout over it. Go ahead. Get back to me when you stop screaming for it to stop.
  
• I really figured that Tagg was going to be the weirdest candidate's child's name in 2008.