THIS MODERN WORLD

So apparently McCain was challenged yesterday by the Des Moines Register editorial board about all the lying his campaign has done. And he angrily responded:

I have always had 100 percent, absolute truth and that’s been my life of putting my country first. And I’ll match that record against anyone’s. And I’m proud of it. And an assertion that I’ve ever done otherwise, I take strong exception to.

Here’s how Jonathan Karp, the editor of McCain’s five books, describes the origins of McCain’s emphasis on honesty:

“My father was the most honest man I know,” he writes in “Why Courage Matters.” In “Character Is Destiny,” he recalls a moment when his mother, while playing cards with his father, teasingly accused him of cheating: “He shot up from the table, in great distress, and begged her never, ever to doubt or even pretend to doubt his honesty…He simply couldn’t bear the idea of being deceitful or being accused, wrongly, of deceiving anyone.”

Yes…such behavior fairly screams, “This is a human being you can trust about anything.”

I’m sure you’ll also be shocked to hear McCain’s father was an alcoholic.

MORE HONESTY FROM THE MOST HONEST MAN I KNOW: All of McCain’s books are credited as “by John McCain with Mark Salter,” but are actually written by Salter. According to Salter, some of the feelings he attributes to McCain are “my surmise.”

In which the governor can’t think of the name of a newspaper:

Couric: And when it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?

Palin: I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

Couric: What, specifically?

Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.

Couric: Can you name a few?

Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, “Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?” Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

In which the governor not at all heavy-handedly gives us an advance look at her campaign’s probable post-debate spin:

Couric: You have a 72-year-old running mate – is that kind of a risky thing to say, insinuating that Joe Biden’s been around a while?

Palin: Oh no, it’s nothing negative at all. He’s got a lot of experience and just stating the fact there, that we’ve been hearing his speeches for all these years. So he’s got a tremendous amount of experience and, you know, I’m the new energy, the new face, the new ideas and he’s got the experience.

More horrors.

Update: the horrifying video …

This is Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois state representative, speaking in the legislature on January 11, 1837. He’s referring to a dispute between private shareholders of the Illinois State Bank:

It is an old maxim and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people’s money being used to pay the fiddler…all this to settle a question in which the people have no interest, and about which they care nothing. These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.

Lincoln’s speech was given just as one of the greatest speculative bubbles in US history was bursting. This was followed by the Panic of 1837, which led to a six-year contraction described by Milton Friedman as “the only depression on record comparable in severity and scope to the Great Depression.”

Nir Rosen has a new article out about Lebanon’s (latest) descent into chaos, as usual aided and abetted by the US:

Omar and his friends followed the fatwas of scholars associated with al Qa’eda.

Omar’s sitting room was a shrine to jihad: he had a large collection of ammunition shells and grenades on display in a cabinet and framed pictures of the September 11 attacks – the Twin Towers aflame and a smouldering Pentagon – greeted visitors near the doorway. When his little boy wandered in, Omar asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and the child, grinning, said “a mujahid!”…

I visited often in the spring and summer. Omar was never without his 9mm Glock pistol; it was always in his hand, his lap, or next to him on the table. The gun was another symbol of the spread of the Iraq war – like many Glocks I had seen in Lebanon, it had been smuggled into the country after being issued by the Americans to the Iraqi security forces.

The rest.

Twenty-five years ago this weekend, people all over the world woke up and went about their lives, unaware that human civilization had just been saved from nuclear armageddon by Stanislav Petrov.