Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that.

-- RICHARD COHEN

Now that the government is running the biggest insurance company in the world, shouldn't we elect a president who is qualified to run a large company?

-- ATRIOS

The Wall Street meltdown has provided Barack Obama with perhaps his best opportunity to extricate himself from the sludge poured so copiously by his opponents. This is serious stuff, unlike the various pig/lipstick/Britney/Paris/Palin sideshows, and, quite frankly, if Obama can't turn this economic crisis to his political advantage, he doesn't deserve to win. Indeed (and here I am updating one of my old lines), if the Democrats can't win a presidential election in this climate, they should simply go out of business, just like Lehman Brothers, and take up residence in the history wing of the Smithsonian Museum, sharing a display window with the Whigs.

-- DICK POLMAN

Choosing a Republican to clean up this mess is like asking an iceberg to save the Titanic.

-- HILLARY CLINTON

[The election of an African-American president] would be electrifying, but at the same time [I have to] make a judgment here on which would be best for America. I have been watching both individuals, I know them both extremely well, and I have not decided who I am going to vote for. And I’m interested to see what the debates are going to be like because we have to get off of this "lipstick on a pig" stuff and get into issues.

-- COLIN POWELL

With Palin, I initially assumed the McCain campaign would stick with its time-tested class-warfare approach: Dismissing all criticism of her as the result of snotty elitists scorning her small-town cultural conservatism. And they have done plenty of that. But they've now also turned into a bunch of whinging feminists. Honestly, it's getting so you can't figure out which victim card the GOP will play next.

-- MICHELLE COTTLE

Did you get that? Governor Sarah Palin was so resolutely apathetic to dealing with a sex crime problem even she agreed was epidemic that her Public Safety Commissioner made a trip to Washington on his own to try to secure funds to combat it. And instead of praising his initiative or thanking him for his service, she shitcanned him—because she didn't want that money, and because it might have damaged her relationship with the corrupt Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, whom Palin had previously publicly criticized because she's all mavericky and shit.

-- MELISSA McEWAN

Palin's latest explanation for why she fired Walt Monegan is that he had gone over her head in seeking federal money for an initiative to combat sexual assault crimes, before she had approved the program.

But it now appears that the program in question is one that most elected officials would be wary of admitting they hadn't strongly backed. According to Peggy Brown, who heads the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, Monegan wanted to use the federal money to hire retired troopers and law enforcement officials, and assign them to investigate the most egregious cases of sexual assault -- including those against children.

In other words, if Palin's new story is true, she fired Monegan for being too aggressive in going after child molesters.

-- ZACHARY ROTH

Palin has all but killed the McCain candidacy. And her real advantage was novelty. Once people realize she has no record of even interest in foreign policy and is a serial liar, her unfavorables will continue to rise.

-- ANDREW SULLIVAN

Please bring a moose to me, over by me, and down that moose will go, and, if I had a kid, I would take a picture of me showing my kid that dead moose, going, like, Uh, sweetie, no, he is not resting, he is dead, due to I shot him, and now I am going to eat him, and so are you, oh yes you are, which is responsible, as God put this moose here for us to shoot and eat and take a photo of, although I did not, at that time, know why God did, but in years to come, God’s will was revealed, which is: Hey, that is a cool photo for hunters about to vote to see, plus what an honor for that moose, to be on the Internet.

How does the moose feel about it? Who knows? Probably not great. But do you know what the difference is between a dead moose with lipstick on and a dead moose without lipstick?

Lipstick.

Think about it.

Moose are, truth be told, Élites. They are big and fast and sort of rule the forest. Sarah took that one down a notch. Who’s Élite now, Bullwinkle?

Not Sarah.

She’s just Regular as heck.

-- GEORGE SAUNDERS

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate