The New York magazine has a long excerpt from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s book Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime on the inner workings of John Edwards second attempt to run for president.  See link.

Nobody connected with the campaign comes out looking good.  John Edwards comes off as a narcissistic ego maniac (the ego-monster in the title of the article).  The sainted Elizabeth Edwards comes off as nasty, delusional and unbalanced.  Others have excoriated the staff of the Edwards for not getting it through to the candidate, on how the Rielle Hunter affair would be an albatross that would destroy an Edwards led ticket in the fall.  While the staff presents its side of the story in the article with generous amounts of back biting against the Edwardses, they still do not account for this signal failing.

John Edwards’ political career was truly meteoric.  Within a span of 10 years he blazed to the Vice Presidential nomination and burnt out into well deserved political oblivion.   The emergence of Barack Obama cut off his political positioning as the anti-Hillary candidate.  The Hunter affair was the coup de grace.

On a personal note, I was never a supporter.  Edwards talked a good populist game (which does not endear a candidate to me to begin with) but it was hard not to question the judgment of a candidate who spent a mere 6 years in public office and then apologized for having voted the wrong way (as far as the Democratic base was concerned) on almost every major issue put to vote in his one-term Senate career (bankruptcy reform, the Patriot Act, the Iraq war, assorted free trade agreements, banking reform etc).  Freed of the requirements of running for office in North Carolina he seemed to slither into the populist cloak too easily.

The Democrats lucked out in not having a candidate who would have scuppered a sure thing in the Presidential election.  Assuming he still felt the need to make such an irresponsible Vice Presidential choice, the country also experienced a fortuitous escape from a Vice President Sarah Palin.

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John McCain’s campaign manager comes out swinging on Sarah Palin’s issues with the truth.  This Sunday’s 60 Minutes could be entertaining.  Also read about previously disclosed emails regarding the Alaska Independence Party.  Alaska blog Mudflats has a great read of just how Palin could make stuff up with a straight face.  See link.

For the last 15 years or so the mainstream media has generally been awful in calling out politicians on their bullshit, acting as stenographers reporting stuff verbatim.  Fox News (when they are not making stuff up) is an extreme example of this when it comes to the Republican Party.

With the media not doing their job emboldened politicians up the ante. This was evident the last couple of weeks when Republicans (including Mr. 9/11 himself) started peddling the fiction that no domestic terror attacks occurred George Bush.  At least this time the media did step up.  See link.

Andrew Sullivan has compiled a fairly thorough list of Palin’s odd and often easily disprovable lies since she hit the national stage.  It is hard not to lose respect for John McCain for trying to position a truth averse clueless neophyte a 71 year old cancer survivor’s heartbeat away from the presidency.

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Link to the strip below is here.

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau January 1, 2010

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I have tried to stay away from the Sarah Palin media extravaganza, but the Jon Stewart clip below was too good to pass up.  Conservatives often try excusing Palin for the often excessive cult of personality around Barack Obama.  A few obvious differences should come up right away apart from basic intellectual attainments.  One politician has actually thought about the issues and when challenged on a hostile forum like Bill O’ Reilly can defend them  The other delivers garbled sound bites and complains about mean Katie Couric.  Then there is the weird resignation half way into her term, not for a transition to higher office or because of a prison conviction

After death panels, Sarah Palin has moved on to the currency.  This time the target is the now abandoned move of the phrase “In God We Trust” to the edge of new dollar coins.  Left out in the speech was the fact that this change was approved by the Republican controlled Congress in 2005, signed by President Bush into law and has already been reversed in 2007.  Also unadressed is the fact that the phrase has not been present on American coins for a large part of the nation’s history and did not become mandatory until 1955.  Luminaries like Teddy Roosevelt opposed the inclusion of the phrase as a cheap political stunt.  Yet another item overlooked in the search for the latest controversy to fire up the base is the benign artistic rationale for the change, to allow more dramatic artwork similar to earlier American coinage.  But why let facts come in the way of a good conspiracy theory.