Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

[Sarah] Palin's hotness is not erotic but, in McLuhanese, an aggressive style that works on the listener to get a pre-determined reaction that leaves no room for ambivalence or ambiguity, eliciting primal responses such as "Kill him" to her attacks on Barack Obama.

Little wonder that conservative David Brooks calls her "a cancer on the Republican Party" out of a populist tradition with prejudices that "scorn ideas entirely."

Michelle Obama, on the other hand, is the essence of cool, shrugging off McCain's calling her husband "that one" as part of the political game and just smiling when Jon Stewart tried to get a rise out of her about Palin.

Cool media and personalities, McLuhan asserted, are inclusive, inviting watchers into their world instead of manipulating them to their own purposes. If the Obamas get to the White House, they could turn out to be the coolest couple since JFK and Jackie.

-- ROBERT STEIN

[Joe] Lieberman is afraid that as President Barack Obama won't bomb Iran. He wants the United States to have a president that other countries fear.

-- THE NIGHTOWL

When will the class war ever finally drown out the culture war, if not in 2008? Under Republican rule in Washington, wages have stayed flat while income inequality has increased; the numbers of uninsured have soared; unemployment recently passed six per cent, its highest level since the early nineteen-nineties; gas and heating-oil prices have doubled, while basic food prices have gone up by fifty per cent; and the country’s financial system has come closer to collapse than at any moment since 1929. More profoundly, Republican dogma no longer offers convincing solutions, and in some cases it doesn’t even acknowledge the problems.

-- GEORGE PACKER

Obama is someone who impresses me as having no real ideology save that which can get him elected. . . .

This is not a man with a radical ideology. It is a man with no ideology at all, no set beliefs in anything save his own supreme abilities. It is this more than anything else that will cause him to fail if he is elected president. When the political winds are blowing the strongest, he will have no set of beliefs he can cling to in order to ride out the storm. His efforts to "reform" Washington will come a cropper because of this and in the end, his empty rhetoric will be all that is remembered of him.

-- RICK MORAN

When Cindy McCain is your attack dog, you're in trouble.

-- TA-NEHISI COATES

Like others, I'm troubled by Ayers. If he were indeed a close friend of Obama, it would be a deal breaker. I couldn't cast my presidential vote for a man who befriended a bomber. It's bad enough for Obama to sit passively through the ravings of a guy like Rev. Wright. But to befriend – or even associate with for the purpose of political advancement – a man who actually attacked the country is entirely another.

But if the facts suggest that Ayers is on the periphery of Obama's public life, it raises a different question: Should candidates be held accountable for the conduct of their acquaintances?

Because if we begin to judge people’s character based on those in their orbit with whom they have no real relationship, I may as well surrender my pen.

While no one in any circle of my life has bombed a building in the U.S., there are some real characters – a few have done time, some have probably cheated on their wives, one I suspect of tax fraud and quite a number are in the DUI club. Should my acquaintances hinder my ability to be a journalist?

There's even a guy I know who is 50ish and still smokes pot. A better concert companion you will not find.

I have a distant relative who relishes paying the IRS far less than his fair share of taxes.

I remember when a onetime neighbor attempted to off herself. And another who, unfortunately, was successful.

Some guys I went to high school with ran a big bookmaking ring. One former public servant writes to me from prison and I write back.

-- MICHAEL SMERCONISH