Ever since last Thursday's vice-presidential debate many bloggers have gotten a kick out of this graph from NRO writer Rich Lowry:
I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.So far, the laughter over the "little starbursts" hasn't quite died down yet, but John Rogers over at Kung Fu Monkey actually manages to find something far more amusing in the Lowry graph: "Modern American Conservatives have sunk to the intellectual and emotional level of the guy who thinks the stripper really likes him" (his italics). When you have to whore yourself out the way Gov. Palin has you begin to wonder if this is all an enormous joke; that when you metaphorically pull the lever on election day balloons and confetti will magically appear in the sky along with the voice of Walter Cronkite saying, "Fooled You!" It all seems just that absurd when you look even in the general area of the McCain campaign these days. What scares me though is that it isn't a joke. This is for real my friends. When you have the family where the word 'maverick' was derived complaining about the McCain campaign's use of the term, you know something is rotten in the land. I'm not all that thrilled for the wild ride we're about to experience for the next few years, no matter who wins the presidency.
