St. Joe's up by ten points in the latest poll, with a comfortable lead among independents, with just over five weeks out. Entrenched incumbents that scare off challengers from the other party can look at Lieberman's post-primary success as a template; if you get beat in the primary, just take a mulligan. Lamont is becoming more and more like the empty suit we all feared.

UPDATE: Lieberman's still a jackass.

Socialism of Shlemiels: Switch the ethnic group here to "Jew", and you have something that might have amused Julius Streicher.

22+ SEATS: It's a long way to November 7, but this looks awfully good for the Democrats.

As if there were any doubt as to what our national sport is, last night's Atlanta-New Orleans game drew the highest ratings for any programming ever on ESPN, and was the most watched show of the evening, network or cable.

On the new TV season: Can I remind people that the first episode of a new TV series typically sucks, no matter how good the show eventually becomes. Both The Office and The Sopranos sucked right out of the gate; the latter show didn't pick up speed until the second episode, and the former took almost a full season before it started to jell. All in the Family, Cheers, and Seinfeld didn't have particularly dazzling debuts, and if Friends was an instant classic right out of the gate, history doesn't record that. Always look at the cast and the concept, give it a few episodes, and don't whine if it isn't Emmy-quality from day one.

The single most idiotic line ever to appear on the Op-Ed pages of the L.A. Times:

My beat is human psychology and the nature of reality and fiction. It's in those realms that at least one key difference between Reagan and Clinton can be found — a difference that sits at the heart of our current divisions.

Reagan was a man who believed in truth. Not your truth or my truth but "the truth," the one that is out there whether you happen to believe in it or not.

"I never thought of myself as a great man," he said, "just a man committed to great ideas." Those ideas — our founders' ideas — were great because they recognized a central truth: the good of individual liberty. And they guaranteed human beings those rights endowed in them by the "big truth" — their creator.

Clinton, on the other hand, is a narcissist who finds it difficult to grasp in any real sense that there is a place where his "inner man" ends and the rest of the world begins. Clinton's stock phrase, "I feel your pain," is really the insistence of a man who does not truly feel anyone else's pain, does not truly understand that there are other inner realities as urgent as his own.

This, from a column this morning by a novelist named Andrew Klavan, who seems to have the same high regard for the Big Dog that Hugh Chavez has for the current incumbent. That Ronald Reagan was a "great" President, or even the "greatest President of the last half of the 20th Century," is an argument for historians. He certainly wasn't the "greatest" President if you were an African-American, or if you lived below the poverty line, but I will admit he accomplished many things that, in retrospect, benefited the country, including his sharp repudiation of neoconservatism at the end of his second term, which in turn led to accomodation with Gorbachev and a relatively bloodless victory in the Cold War.

But to claim that ol' Dutch had some special loyalty to "the truth" is almost psychotic. There has probably never been a President, present company included, who had less interest in what the facts were in any given situation than Ronald Wilson Reagan. Whether it was fictitious "welfare queens" (a racist lie that helped discredit conservative efforts at welfare reform for a generation), or denials that his administration was selling arms to the mullahs in Iran as his principal hostage negotiation strategy, to his frequent juxtoposition of movie plots with reality, Reagan was a man who debased the truth at will.

I would even go so far as to argue that the reason President Clinton was able to ride out the Lewinsky scandal was that the bar for honesty had been set so low by his predecessor. What Clinton's adversaries forgot, but his supporters vividly remembered, was that the public eventually made their peace with Reagan's frequent lies, seeing that trait as an eccentricity gifted upon successful politicians rather than a character flaw. If you could forgive a President for not being honest about sending graft and kickbacks from Iran to the Contras, then what's the big deal about lying about a consensual affair? Reagan's most important legacy may well be the moral relativism that he legitimized in our political system, an attitude towards "the truth" to which both parties have made their accomodation.

The Jesse Ventura of Texas? Try the George Allen....

Atrios is right:

When George Allen told Mike Stark that he'd never used the word "nigger" the absurdity of the claim was obvious. Of course that word had passed his lips at some point in his life. I imagine there are few Americans who haven't used the word in some fashion at some time. For the record I have. I just typed it a few seconds ago. I'm reasonably sure that I've never used it as a direct racial epithet, though I can't be sure I've never used the word in ways my older more enlightened self wouldn't consider to be inappropriate.

Though his denial was absurd that doesn't mean he'd ever used it in a fashion such that he should be harshly judged now. And, frankly, I'd even forgive "stupid awful shit he did as a college student" if there was reason to believe he'd evolved since then.

The Salon article is here, btw.

Apparently Mel Gibson's upcoming film is potentially of Oscar caliber, or so sayeth the New York Times. I guess that means it's long, boring, middlebrow and pretentious.

Lipscombing: I have corrected my post, below, on Max Blumenthal's article on the Washington Times, to note the bogus Pulitzer claim made by his main source, George Archibald.

[UPDATE (9/28)]: According to Mr. Archibald, the Pulitzer "nomination" was actually submitted by his employer, the Washington Times. As I've noted before, it's not a real nomination, any more than an Academy member nominating a buddy is a true "Oscar nomination", but it does add context, both to the claim and to Archibald's perceived importance with his former employer.

[UPDATE (9/29)]: Now Archibald's bio at HuffPost is stating that he "went on to win four Pulitzer Prize nominations from Times editors." I'm not a professional journalist, so what I want to know from those of you who are is whether this sort of thing, which looks like resume padding to the layman, is actually considered to be an honor within your ranks. Do writers at the same newspaper compete with each other for the coveted honor of being nominated by their employer?

Europe 18 1/2, U.S. 9 1/2: Another lame effort by American athletes, matching the worst-ever performance from two years ago. Gagger Vance went 0-4-1 for the weekend, solidifying his well-earned rep as sports' greatest choke artist. Why the hell is Vaughn Taylor on our team? Oh, yeah, Team U.S.A. also lost its Davis Cup match, to Russia !!

Europe 10, U.S. 6: Tiger Woods wins at the Ryder Cup !! Praise Jesus, it's a miracle !!

Well, actually, at 2-2 this weekend, it's his best-ever start in this tournament, justifying U.S. coach Tom Lehman's gutsy decision to roll the dice and play Woods in the afternoon session. The Americans continued their crap play in Ireland, and Europe only needs four points out of twelve matches tomorrow to retain the Ryder Cup. Mickelson lost; in fact, "Mickelson lost" may be the most banal statement since "Bush lied."

Bin-Laden Dead Very Sick Again.

He's back !!!

Europe 7 1/2, U.S. 4 1/2: Tiger Woods moved within three losses of the alltime career Ryder Cup record of Raymond Floyd, in leading his American compatriots to another morning loss. Only the team of Scott Verplank and Zach Johnson (who?) saved the U.S. from complete embarassment, while Sergio Garcia, otherwise known for his inability to win in the clutch at stateside majors, is now an amazing 13-3-2 in Ryder Cup play. Of course, Gagger Vance lost again; together, Woods and Mickelson are the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of international match play.

Did you know I have the power to make something cooler just by observing it? It's true....

Here's something to think about the next time you read an article about civil rights or immigration policy in the Washington Times. Concerning editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden and managing editor Francis Coombs:

But even as it has enjoyed cozy relations with Washington politicos, from its earliest days the Times has been a hothouse for hard-line racialists and neo-Confederates. Pruden, who started at the paper in 1982, was their wizard. His father, the Rev. Wesley Pruden Sr., was a Baptist minister who served as chaplain to the Capital Citizens Council in Little Rock, Arkansas, the leading segregationist group in town. When President Dwight Eisenhower sent Army troops to protect nine black teenagers integrating Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, Pruden Sr. reportedly told an assembled mob, "That's what we've got to fight! Niggers, Communists and cops!"

In 1993 Pruden gave an interview to the now-defunct neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, which routinely published proslavery apologias and attacks on Abraham Lincoln. Pruden boasted, "Every year I make sure that we have a story in the paper about any observance of Robert E. Lee's birthday.... And the fact that it falls around Martin Luther King's birthday."

"Makes it all the better," interjected a Partisan editor.

"I make sure we have a story. Oh, yes," said Pruden.

(snip)

When Coombs joined the Times in 1988, he became a charter member of Pruden's neo-Confederate cabal. Reared by a military family in rural Virginia, Coombs attended a private high school and William and Mary College, where he was known as a hard partyer with a vast collection of rock-and-roll records. After graduating Coombs cut his teeth at several Virginia papers and the States News Service. He pursued journalism as an extension of his family's military tradition. His motto, which he would recite time and again in the Times newsroom: "Journalism is war."

In his 1993 Southern Partisan interview, Pruden proudly recounted Coombs's speech that year at the Capitol hailing Confederate President Jefferson Davis. "I read the speech and it was quite good," Pruden told the Partisan. "I was originally asked to speak, but I was going to be out of town and Fran filled in for me. He was telling me what a thrilling thing it was to stand there and sing 'Dixie' in the statuary hall of the U.S. Capitol. I would have liked to have been there just for that."

While Coombs sympathized with Pruden's Lost Cause nostalgia, his politics were even harsher. "The thing about Wes is, he has other vices," said a Times senior staffer. "He loves a good meal, loves to have his ego stroked, he loves women, the social scene. As for bashing blacks and Hispanics, he shares Fran's views, but he has other preoccupations. Fran is the really hard-core ideological white supremacist."

Coombs believes immigration is "the number-one issue in America today," and he has played an instrumental role in pressing far-right positions into the mainstream. In a move that many sources considered emblematic, on August 22 Coombs splashed a favorable review of Pat Buchanan's book State of Emergency across the paper's front page. Buchanan's book is a diatribe calling for an immediate moratorium on all immigration, to stave off the demise of Western civilization. "There were a lot of other things going on [in the news] that day," a Times senior staffer said. "Any other paper would have reserved that for the book review section, but Coombs had to have Buchanan on the front page." Coombs, the staffer continued, "will literally stand there and scan websites and look for anything that's anti-Hispanic, that's immigrant-bashing, and he will order the editors to go with it." According to Archibald, in 2001 Pruden issued a memo instructing reporters to stop using the term "illegal immigrant" and instead use "illegal alien"--a lead the rest of the conservative media soon followed.

From an excellent piece by Max Blumenthal in the Nation...[UPDATE (9/24): One of the main sources for this article is a writer named George Archibald, who is described as having been "nominated" for four Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure at the Washington Times. In fact, no one by that name has ever been a nominated finalist, and the Times has only one nomination to its credit in its history, a 2003 nomination for photojournalism.]

Fanshen: The more one reads of other lefty bloggers concerning l'affaire Nyhan, the more I can see how comfortable many of us would have been participating in one of those Maoist circlejerks during the Cultural Revolution. Apparently, one of the crosses we must bear in the political wilderness is our obligation to denounce any self-criticism, unless the criticism is that we aren't revolutionary enough.

As usual, Andrew Sullivan is eloquent on the Torture Agreement:

The trouble is: Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Addington are not gentlemen. If we have learned anything these past few years, it is that they are not to be trusted on the torture question, that they have lied repeatedly and knowingly and insistently, that their use of the English language is designed to obfuscate and obscure the reality they are advancing, and the constitutional freedoms they are bent on dismantling. In so far as this bill grants this president discretion in enforcing Geneva, it means that the standards of Geneva will not apply under this president - although they might under a more civilized and competent one.

I should add that it is essential to the integrity of language and law that the word torture not be defined out of existence. Waterboarding, hypothermia, long-time-standing, and various forms of stress positions are torture, have always been torture and always will be torture. What we must do is what Orwell demanded: speak plain English before it evaporates from our discourse, refuse to acquiesce to the corruption of language and decency. In that respect, the press must continue to ask both McCain and all administration representatives whether passing this bill means that waterboarding, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, long-time-standing or stress positions are now illegal and unavailable to the CIA. They must not be allowed to get away with the answer that they will not mention specific techniques. The specifics are everything. And we must not be snowed by abuse of English into saying something is true when it isn't. Until they are completely forthcoming on these critical details, this bill should not be passed. Moreover, something this complex and this grave should not be rushed into law with round-the-clock haste. We need this to be debated and deliberated slowly. Which means leaving it to the next session of Congress.

Amen.

I think one of the things that is proving so uncomfortable about President Chavez' literal demonization of President Bush is that we Americans are finally seeing the rhetorical excesses of our own leaders from the opposite side. Hugo Chavez is most definitely a buffoon, but was his speech at the U.N. really any different from what we have come to expect hearing out of the mouth of George Bush? [link via Altercation]