Swopa

I suppose timing has a lot to do with it. With the Thanksgiving holiday closing in, and recognizing that they were not in a supermarket freezer or otherwise dinner-table bound, a bunch of gobblers (in suspiciously human form) decided this week was an excellent moment to show off what turkeys they are.

As you’ve perhaps already heard, Cain today chose to tackle head-on the questions raised by his obvious brain freeze when asked about Libya earlier this week (see the video above: “OK… Libya… President Obama… supported the uprising, correct?”). Unfortunately, the results suggest that Cain’s damage-control strategies haven’t improved since the previous weeks’ allegations of sexual harassment.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly betting on the Cardinals to win the World Series when they were still 5 games short of a playoff spot in mid-September, I’ll admit that. But still, you can see in this week’s news stories what I meant three weeks ago when I told you Herman Cain’s rivals for the GOP presidential nomination were due to turn up the heat against him. And to boot, I wasn’t far off the mark with my lame joke educated guess that the insinuations against him would be sexual in nature.

With Halloween coming up on Monday, there’s going to be a lot of grown-ups attending masquerade parties this weekend. Which, unfortunately, has meant a lot of long, last-minute lines in crowded costume stores — including the one in Washington, D.C., where all the Republican presidential candidates went shopping earlier this week.

Like a lot of you, I felt an odd combination of déjà vu and whiplash earlier today at the revival of President Obama’s 2008 election rhetoric about “ending the war” in announcing the formal withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. And similarly, I’m aware of the widely noted doubts about whether this really is [...]

So, let’s see… where did I leave off when I last posted here, two weeks ago? Oh, yeah, something about how the short-lived front-runner status of GOP presidential wannabes like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry demonstrated that “there’s something inherent about Republican party politics that makes being new and untested a plus and sustained public exposure a problem.”

The way the Republican Party keeps shuffling through front-runners for its 2012 presidential nomination, you almost start to wonder if these folks aren’t firm advocates of recycling after all.

Disposability is certainly something they have down pat.

Whatever else it may be remembered for, last week will likely be noted in political circles as proof that populism, rather than patriotism, is the last refuge of… well, of “compromise”-loving Democrats whose poll numbers have taken a recent beating.

In recent years, as the mendacity and greed of the wealthiest, most powerful elements of our society have become ever more thinly veiled — and ever more unchecked — it’s become more common for people to express offhand, “We’re heading for another Gilded Age“… another era, like the late 19th century, when vast riches were concentrated in the hands of a lucky few who flaunted it brazenly.

So far, that hasn’t become literally true (yet) in the United States, but elsewhere, a tipping point might have been reached.

Leaving aside the specifics of what he said — or what he didn’t say yet, but hinted at — the largest political benefit of President Obama’s address to Congress (and the nation) last night may have been how he said it.