Sure, we could blame it on a malfunctioning database, but who are we kidding: It’s you, taking your vengeance on our groundbreaking series of posts, “Sarah Palin: Get Over Yourselves, She Can’t Be That Bad.” You’re dumbstruck by our sudden advocacy of plucky personality politics, and rather than comment, you’re acting like a sulky bunch of goth kids.

Well, fine. Until you grow up enough to treat us with some level of respect and deference, we’ll just leave the comments broken, and you can spend the day with the whiners at Kos and TPM. Then you’ll come back on your knees, begging us to fix the comments, and maybe we will if your anguish pleases us.

And maybe we will anyway. Soon as we figure out how.

Fannie and Freddie? So last week. Yesterday it was Lehman Brothers going down, Merrill Lynch being sucked up by Bank of America, and AIG holding a $40 billion gun to the head of the Fed.

That would be AIG, “the nation’s largest insurer”, collapsing by Wednesday if its credit rating slips a notch this morning.

And all because you — yes, you — took out an exploding mortgage to pay for your exploding credit-card debt to cover your exploding student loans to get into a good college so you could enjoy financial freedom for the rest of your life.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

A Chaotic Sunday Opens Wall Street’s Week [WSJ]

One of the tricks to surviving the next couple of months is to not pay attention.

And by that we mean: Don’t twitch like a goddam exposed nerve at every development.

To put it politely.

We sat out Lipstickgate, for example, because Kindie Porn already established that John McCain was willing to lose his integrity to win an election. No point tossing our soda over subsequent installments. (Unless they’re really good, of course. But Kindie Porn sets a high standard in low politics.)

It’s a matter of finding the signal in the noise, the leading indicators of where things are going. Some days there’s so much static, you might as well be listening to Al Smith battle Herbert Hoover on the wireless. Other days you might notice that Geezer doesn’t draw adoring crowds without Talibunny to display like a motocross queen, and file that for future reference. Three strikes is a trend.

What you don’t do is worry about the latest poll revealing that Demographic A supports Candidate B because of Issue C. Demographics don’t vote. States do. (The exception: Throughout the spring, folks under 50 were very likely to be Obama voters. The vote was split by generation, not gender. We’re keeping an eye on that.)

You also write off what cannot be changed, and see what remains. You know Charlie Gibson is going to be lobbing snowballs, so move on to something else — unless Talibunny fields them with a blowtorch. You know the media’s going to roll over and play dead (exceptions always welcome), so start considering whether anyone outside the chattersphere is paying attention.

We remain confident, but the election was never a given. The disconnect between John McCain’s reputation and John McCain’s actions — “I’m John McCain, and I approved this latest abomination of a commercial” — has yet to settle in. But it’s being noted, and not just by Obama partisans. We know what an electoral tipping point feels like (“There you go again!”), and we haven’t felt it yet.

The moment we do, we’ll order that steerage ticket for the Ark.

Back in our distant childhood, Joe McCarthy was even more distant, someone you would see, if at all, in a scratchy kinescope clip. He was as quaint as a war movie, as irrelevant as the Andrews Sisters.

We knew about “McCarthyism” long before we knew about McCarthy. The word, if not the man, was relevant in the political climate of our youth. It was used with derision. It was something to avoid. It was the L Word of its day.

Joe came to mind as we were contemplating Barry’s response to McCain’s Rovian attack ads. It seems a tepid response at first, not at all what’s required. It’s not angry.

I don’t care what they say about me, but I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and swift-boat politics. Enough is enough.

Well, fine, we were thinking, but civility doesn’t win elections. Get out the rhetorical bat, whack some rhetorical kneecaps. Politics is bloodsport, violence punctuated by consultant meetings. Man up.

But then we remembered the line that finally broke Bomber Joe’s winning streak:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

And just like that — in that very moment — it was over. Joseph Welch slayed the dragon.

It’s a risky strategy in the hothouse timeframe of a fall presidential campaign, but hey, it’s risky running as a black man in These United States. We want to see more, we want to see it expressed with more conviction. But the more egregious McCain’s attacks get — and they will, Rovians can’t help themselves — the more righteous civility just might carry the day.

Obama On Lipstick Controversy: Attacks Media, Says “Enough Is Enough” [TPM]

No, we’re not talking about the idiots cheering on a teleprompter jockey because they’ve suddenly become fans of Lifetime biopics. We’re talking about the people who fear those idiots.

We’re talking about, as a Kos commenter aptly described it, Palin Panic Anxiety.

Word to the wise: Take a long, slow, deep breath. Repeat all week, if necessary.

And now, let’s address the facts:

• McCain chose Palin to appease the fundamentalist power brokers in his party. The gambit worked, and she is more popular than he is among the idiiot faithful. If anything, the power brokers are now warning Geezer not to distance himself from her divisive religious views.
• The idiot faithful are beyond redemption. Write them off. Now. They are not susceptible to reality, and they never were. They will swallow the spin as given, and even fill in their own spin when guidance from McCain’s Rovian puppetmasters is not available. For further details, consult the evolution of Greek mythology.
• We’re still riding a very big wave from a very big performance. It’s going to continue cresting this week, and it might even last into the next. It’s going to consume all attention from the media, and from supporters and opponents. That is the nature of these things, and there is no point wasting energy on resisting. Ride it out.

Meanwhile, the prosecution’s case grows day by day, as Chainsaw’s series of posts amply demonstrate. These things will gain no traction right now, but they are on the record, and will start seeping into general consciousness once the initial novelty and enthusiasm wanes. Americans get bored very quickly, and once they’ve had their fill of Maverick Hockey Mom, they’ll need some fresh news to keep them interested.

That’s when we’ll start hearing The Rest of the Story, and that’s when doubt will begin to disturb the Fabled Undecided, those who are enjoying the show right now but aren’t committed to the plot. Think Heroes and Lost, initially wildly popular but stumbling after their first seasons. In presidential politics, the second season comes very quickly.

We felt a disturbance in the Force upon the release of the latest polls Monday, but before everyone rushes off to their favorite Tatooine dive bar to drink themselves into oblivion while the world blows up, a note of caution:

National polls don’t mean shit.

Sure, they’re amusing, and fun to chatter about when we’re not trash-talking Talibunny, but after our civics lesson in 2000 — Al Gore won the popular vote, in case you haven’t heard — we should be well aware of the Dead Hands of the Founders upon our electoral system.

The action is in the states, and state polls are the only polls that matter. Our Telestrator seems to be broken, but if you imagine us doing a Minority Report on the map, you’ll see that the vase looks just like a face.

Hold on, wrong map.

Okay. The two joints we follow both show Obama with commanding leads in the electoral-vote count — especially in sure-thing states — and this hasn’t changed all summer. Because they both average polls over the past week, they won’t really show the effect of Moose & Squirrelcheeks for a few more days, but if all Talibunny does is make red states redder, we’re not worried.

But we will have that drink. Who needs an excuse?

Electoral Vote.com • Pollster.com

Q. Are you a liberal partisan hate rag?

A. No. We hate all idiots equally.

Q. Why are you using a derogatory term against women?

A. You mean “cunt” and “trollop”? You must have us confused with Maverick McCain.

Oh, pussy. Right. Actually, “you’re a pussy” is a common expression accusing someone of lacking courage, especially in an athletic context such as hockey games. But if you’d like, John McCain is a dick. Fair’s fair.

Q. I get it. People think differently than you so they aren’t thinking for themselves.

A. No, people reading from someone else’s canned scripts aren’t thinking for themselves. People who think differently from us are merely wrong.

Q. This is liberalism to its core: I’m smarter than you are and I’m going to yell and rant till you agree with me.

A. We are, we will, but we don’t expect you to agree with us. To quote Lex Luthor, “My genius is no match for your ignorance.”

Q. She ain’t gonna find an unbiased network except for Fox.

A. If the survival of the human race were dependent upon your acuity, we’d be worried. Which, come to think of it, we are.

Q. She has a major in journalism and a minor in political science. She was also an on-air sports reporter, so I think she knows how to handle the media and their pettiness.

A. It’s not Chris Matthews we’re worried about, it’s Vladmir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hu Jintao, Kim Jong-il, and whoever has the launch codes in Pakistan, for starters. If Sarah Palin is too chickenshit to chat up even Katie Couric, we fear for the Republic when John McCain is taken out in a tragic motocross accident next year.

Q. Perhaps, and I’m really going out on a limb here, she’s spending some precious time with her family before she hits the road. You know, with that baby with Downs and with her pregnant daughter.

A. Or maybe, just maybe, John McCain selected a manifestly unprepared governor of Alaska with no known interest in national or international issues as his running mate to appease the Fundamentalist power brokers in his party and skim off a few Hillary voters in the bargain, handed her a prewritten and hastily revised speech to deliver at his convention, sent her on the road with a teleprompter to make sure she sticks to the script, and is taking pains that she avoid any extemporaneous contact with a microphone for fear she says something that reveals how little she knows or how divisive her views on social issues are.

But that’s just us spitballing.

Q. Palin has agreed to an interview with Charlie Gibson of ABC. What do you have to say about that, smartass?

A. We welcome the opportunity to drop “pussy” and switch over to the more delightful “Talibunny.”

Can Sarah Palin think for herself? [Debate Policy]