Meanwhile on the road to serfdom

NRO:

It's Cost of Government Day! This year, Americans needed to work fully 231 days to pay for the total cost of government — from January 1st to today. You've been working for the government all year.

Uh-oh

Often during the last election, I visited NRO's Corner—that bastion of neocon and other rightist nuttery. This was back when we were all scared about the prospect of trigger-happy Johnny boy and his pet MILF pulling an upset and heeding their advice for another disastrous four years.

I haven't read the Corner much since after the election, as their atrociously poor RSS feed mangled everything into an unformatted single-paragraph word soup that really wasn't worth dealing with.

But today they switched to a new well-formated version (link here).

Given this improvement, I'm about to undergo the dangerous experiment of placing them back in my reader's "Must Read" tag.

This could be rough.

Please be on the lookout for any outbreak of symptoms—including, but not limited to, posts on unconditional support for Israel, why we need to bomb Iran, an introduction to the new "Axis of Stealth Evil" which includes France, Sweden, and the Netherlands—or just generic diatribes about how Obama is simultaneously a dyed-in-the-wool Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist, and national socialist who hates Catholic children but poses as a mainstream, center-left politician.

I might need you to stage an intervention...

Quote of the day

The Club for Shrinkage

"My initial reaction on hearing the news was that after generating a bunch of Democratic House seats, the Club for Growth has now produced its first Democratic senator."

—Ramesh Ponnuru

Markets in everything

Not satisfied with the commercialization of a different politician from the state, an Illinois furniture store goes further:

Wool, meet eyes

Jonah Goldberg splutters:

let’s not forget Biden, whose gaffes are the unavoidable byproduct of his limitless gasbaggery. Biden could shout on Meet the Press, “Get these squirrels off of me!” and the collective response would be, “There goes Joe again.” But if Palin flubs the name of the deputy agriculture minister of Kyrgyzstan, the media will blow their whistles saying she’s unprepared for the job.

When you give 80 interviews to your opponent's 2 and in general make yourself much more available to the press, you're not in the same ballpark. Have Palin give something like 78 interviews to catch up, then we can compare meters on gaffes and media bias.

I assume 80 is a high estimate and that they weren't all serious interviews. But it's still a very large ratio and this doesn't even account for Biden's frequent non-interview conversations with press.

Myself, I don't think Sean Hannity infomercials count for much:



It's more like 80 to 1.

Biden enjoying himself

The Post:

While Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. John McCain are avoiding interviews with the press corps that follows them and Biden's running mate Sen. Barack Obama projects such an aura of cool liberal columnists are begging him to get more animated, the Delaware senator is at times gleefully expansive

Biden seems to enjoy having journalists following him around, if only to have more people listen to his running commentary on whatever springs to his mind. A CBS reporter following Biden around estimated Biden has done 80 interviews since he was named vice president, compared to two by Palin.

Places like NRO's Corner are having some fun with Biden's loquaciousness.

Of course it's easy to get caught up in this kind of stuff when you're doing 40 times as many press appearances as your opponent, but part of it is just Biden being Biden. I don't know how it will play out in terms of voters' perception of him, but I suspect most of it is low profile enough to not matter in the large scheme of things. Given Palin's spectacle, the debate is what will matter most, and no one knows how that's going to go.

That aside, I think Biden's forthrightness is refreshing. It's not like he'll make these kind of gaffes when dealing with foreign leaders, as he has tons of foreign policy experience. He would never have been able to win a primary and make it to the top of a ticket on his own steam, but as a veep he's quite entertaining, and -- I think -- interesting.

In many ways he's the polar opposite of Cheney, which if you ask me is just what the doctor ordered.

UPDATE, Sullivan:

Biden has outdone himself. First he repudiates Obama's ad calling McCain computer illiterate, then he misstates Obama's position on coal, and lastly he badly garbles his Depression era history. Well: at least he's talking in public. And where the hell are his medical records? C'mon!