I haven't seen today's News Hour,  (Friday's episode won't air here in Australia until Monday), but I have read Brook's column today in the Times, which, as Stern suggests, constitutes a new high-water mark in low bar-setting.  I don't have anything to say for or about Shields, but I gave up on Brooks long ago.  He alternates between trying in vain to piece together the shards of his shattered conservative movement and assigning blame for the breakage.  He has no internal consistency.  A week ago he said in clear, unambiguous language that Palin is unqualified.  This week she's a hero because she managed to speak in complete sentences.  Brooks is a ghost, to be ignored.

Whoa...

Brutal.  But I couldn't have said it better myself.

I watched Brooks and Shields on PBS last night, and while my immediate reaction was not the same as Richard Stern's, I'm coming around to his view.

I would defend them only to this extent:

1 - The McCain campaign should send a box of chocolates, flowers and a big check to Katie Couric.  She is the best thing to ever happen to Sarah Palin.  The bar was not set low--there was no bar at all.  The left was expecting, and the right fearing, 90 minutes of Miss Teen South Carolina (YouTube it if you don't get the reference).  They didn't get that, so the left is disappointed and the right is ecstatic.  I would have hoped that Brooks and Shields could have seen beyond that, however.  (I note with interest that Chris Matthews, whom I've never credited with much intelligence, seems to have gotten it much better than either Brooks or Shields.)  Under any other circumstances, Palin would have been universally judged a complete flop.

2 - Of course I can't prove it, but if the format of last night's debate had been the one used in the first Obama-McCain debate, I strongly believe that Palin would have been toast.  Five minute segments?  Please, that's not a debate, it's Jeopardy.  Just one opportunity for Ifill or Biden to ask her, "How do you reconcile 'get government out of the way' with 'we need more regulation'?" or "How can you say 'we need to rebuild our infrastructure' and then say 'we need to cut taxes'?"  She would have flopped like a fish out of water.

As old Richard Hoftsteder noted years ago, there has always been a rich vein anti intellectualism in the American polity but the reaction of the right - and doofusses like Shields and Brooks - suggest that there is now a rich vein of A - intellectualism.

Palin's contributions to the debate barely rose to the level of coherence. She never really gave a thoughtful answer that addressed the question on anything other than a facile manner. She was the ultimate frappacino politiician.

Now Biden clearly won the debate and the polls show this. But it seems that Palin supporters just didn't like those details, those facts, that knowledge of the world and its intracacies and mechanisms that Biden possessed and showed last night. Hell, just wink and try to bring a little long lost blood to the shriveled members of right wing male Johns, and there you go, you're qualified for the presidency.

Thank God that Obama and Biden are on track to win this election. I truly fear that the Old Republic could not survive another 8 years of GOP governance, especially with McCain and Palin at the helm. As I have watched the two debates so far, I told my boys that poor Jeb Bush would have crushed and incinerated McCain and Palin. I believe that in 2012, Jeb will run and his primary opposition will be this nitwit from Alaska.

This from Sam Stein reporting on a Fox interview with SP:

"The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," [Palin] said. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too...

"In those Katie Couric interviews, I did feel that there were lot of things that she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, what the values are represented in our ticket. I wanted to talk about Barack Obama increasing taxes, which would lead to killing jobs. I wanted to talk about his proposal to increase government spending by another trillion dollars."

This is seriously scary stuff. Ms. Palin should be the one who decides what the American people need to hear. Anyone who asks her questions outside the sphere of setups to let her slam people she doesn't like, is ipso facto offensive. Add in the "flexibility" of the Constitution as read by Palin via Cheney.

Josef Goebbels would be proud.

Here's the Stein piece: www.huffingtonpost.com/.../palin-on-fox-news-couric_n_131655.html

This from Sam Stein reporting on a Fox interview with SP:

"The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," [Palin] said. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too...

"In those Katie Couric interviews, I did feel that there were lot of things that she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, what the values are represented in our ticket. I wanted to talk about Barack Obama increasing taxes, which would lead to killing jobs. I wanted to talk about his proposal to increase government spending by another trillion dollars."

This is seriously scary stuff. Ms. Palin should be the one who decides what the American people need to hear. Anyone who asks her questions outside the sphere of setups to let her slam people she doesn't like, is ipso facto offensive. Add in the "flexibility" of the Constitution as read by Palin via Cheney.

Josef Goebbels would be proud.

Here's the Stein piece: www.huffingtonpost.com/.../palin-on-fox-news-couric_n_131655.html

Testify, brother Stern, testify!

Wow.  Awesome.  I love the word "ooze"; I also love the word putrefaction, which Stern does not use but is eminently applicable.  Very Burkean; very à propos.

Cookie, forget about the wit; she's just a nit, and a lousy one at that.

I alternated btwn PBS and ABC -- it felt like 2 different universes.  Brooks and Shields thought Palin did just fine -- while ABC had on a Brazile/Dowd/Clarke triumvirate who, much to Gibson's consternation, all -- ALL -- declared Sarah Palin the night's big loser.

Go Mr. Stern go, a most satisfying enviseration of a mean, ignorant idiot who deserves every syllable and more.  

Please keep it coming, let's fight proud idiocy and arrogance this level with our heads held high.

Stern, amen, and thank you.

After Ifill, Brooks, and, yes, Shields, to whom I turned after Brooks seeking reason, but failed to find it, this has been a dark week for Jim Lehrer.

Ouch!  I love it.

There's irony, of course, in PBS's ad for its own coverage of the presidential election:  "We don't tell you what to think; just what you need to know  to make an informed decision."  PBS can be as self reverential as the other networks, I guess.  Shields strikes me as an artifact of some earlier era.  And not a terribly smart or witty one.  And Brooks proves himself fatally shallow when, from week to week in both his column and appearances, he's all over the field.  The guy I like (who I haven't seen in a long time)                                              is Tom Oliphant.

Mr. Stern,

Excellent. Perfect.

Stern should get a life. Only in his dreams can he play in the same league of realistic political analysis with Brooks and Shields.

Anyone who doesn't understand Palin's appeal and probably overall-positive effect on McCain's deeply troubled campaign gets automatic membership in the Pauline Cael "...but everyone I know voted for McGovern..." club.

I think you oughtta give this one up, RP.  The question as to whether Palin is helping (or hurting) the McCain campaign more or less than another of his potential VP choices could have done cannot be answered.  Five weeks out, it looks as if McCain is more than likely doomed, and this would probably be the case no matter who he tapped for his running mate.  Still, I just can't see how Palin is doing anything positive to help McCain with undecided voters. And she's certainly doing not a goddamn thing to help the man at the top of her ticket listen to his better angels.

What would the past month have looked like had McCain followed his instincts and brought Lieberman along?  Probably his poll numbers wouldn't be much different than they are right now, and there'd be big worries about his being abandoned by the Republican base.  At the same time though, I have a hunch that with Joe at his side, McCain himself would be running a better, truer, funnier campaign. In nominating Palin, McCain has committed himself to false consciousness.  Whether he knew it before the pick--my guess is that he did not--McCain knows now that for all her folksy appeal, his running mate is, to understate the problem, out of her depth.  The requirement to finesse this reality is wearing on McCain and it shows.

Thanks Mr. Stern. I watched as much of the debate as I could stand. The objective, non-partisan truth is that Palin did not utter one thought that she generated in her own head. When she occasionally tried to actually answer a question, the answer showed that she really didn't understand the question or the issues the question was trying to address. I thought this would be the focus of the post-debate commentary (I too was watching PBS) and was shocked (yes, I mean actually shocked, not Capt. Renaud "shocked") that Shields and even Brooks gave her a pass. Yes, the bar was low (though it shouldn't have been), but she failed to clear it. So, instead of grading on substance, they graded her on likeability and appeal to the common person (a common person that Brooks and Shields and Palin's other defenders must think is a superficial moron).

It's an overworked cliche these days, but there is no there there. There's no there within 4000 miles of there. You could look for it with the world's most powerful microscope and not find it. The LHC is looking for the incredibly small particles - you can bet that it won't find any "there" in Palin, even if it's successful in finding the Higgs.

What's sad is that so many commentators, even some from the left, seem to accept the proposition that what this country needs is a common person plucked from relative obscurity to hold a very important office (and be next in line for the world's most important office) rather than all those accomplished people who usually get picked - that you can watch a vice-presidential debate with the sound off and decide who'll be a heartbeat from the Presidency. (Personally, I thought Biden beat Palin even with the sound off - I've done enough public speaking to recognize someone who's way out of his/her depth, and even with the sound down, Palin was flailing.)

Even so, I think the great unwashed of Brooks' imagination are not as numerous as he hopes. In a relatively short time after the election we'll forget about Palin, except as a source of jokes. Let's hope that we also forget the ridiculous notion that stupidity is a qualification for high office.

More or less what Powell said. Shields and Brooks are solid professionals, whether or not you agree with either of them. They're a little dull (well, a lot dull) but together give some of the most valuable commentary on the inside game of politics. Brooks of late has been idiosyncratic (read, weird) in writing (so what, who cares?) but Lehrer and Shields temper his enthusiasms so he presents better.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention Palin's performance in the debate. I thought she was impressive, within her limits, which I admit are very narrow. If you'd backed off some from an acutely partisan perspective, it's easy to see that she was far from an abject failure.  "Outperform" was my conclusion.

Palin has abruptly turned back to her stock incoherence and inanity since the debate. Obviously she was very well prepared.

I take your point tomeg, but my question would be if my visceral dislike of her faux-folksy preaching shtick, her mask of inane cheeriness, her clueless constitutional fantasies, and the sense of her emotional emptiness allied to a narcissistic egoism, all add up to an acutely partisan perspective, or simply to a human perspective.  I don't have to cast off my partisan perspective -- which I admit to -- to see certain basic qualities or lack of them in a person.

To put it another way, I don't have to shuck off my liberal-left views to say that Michael Moore is a manipulative knucklehead who fudges facts to make political points that collapse under their own melodramatic distortions.  Therefore, I ask, why shouldn't a conservative or a Republican, if he or she is honest and observant, be able admit that Palin is a high-functioning moron who has as yet given no sign that she's capable of independent thought?

"...high-functioning moron..." is far too strong, irony. She's in many respects quite charming, and her selection has had the immediate positive effect of energizing the Republican base, which was McCain's Job One if he is to have any chance at all of election.

On the other hand, thoughtful conservatives such as Will, Krauthammer, and yes, Brooks, have been quite clear on the point that she's not up to the job and, moreover, that her selection is revelatory of McCain's characteristic and distinctly unpresidential impulsiveness.

Actually, George Will has been tougher, or at least more effectively tough, on McCain than anyone I've seen among the Democrats.  

I'd say perception of charm is a somewhat subjective experience, RP -- but it does seem to me that intelligent conservatives are in a kind of thrall to the myopic populism of the anti-thinking constituency of the party, much as Democrats used to be in thrall to the hypersensitive minority-rights PC camp (which I think has faded a lot).

I don't know irony. Will, Krauthammer, and Brooks clearly aren't "in thrall". They've been devastating on McCain's selection of Palin, among other things.

It looks to me as if the wheels are coming off the Straight Talk Express.