what republican obliteration looks like

 

can you even name someone from the other side anymore?

Before praising Obama for his moderation, wait a few days

The difficulty in praising Obama's decisions is that when they're good it's usually just because he hasn't got around to changing them yet. Take, for example, this comment by David Brooks:

He’s done some big things right — hiring people like Dennis Ross and Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. He’s also done some less obvious things right. For example, the other day, I read that he rehired Mark Dybul as his Global AIDS Coordinator.
Dybul is one of those heroes one meets too rarely in government. He worked as an AIDS doctor in San Francisco in the 1980s and when the worst effects of the plague migrated to Africa, he did too. Then George W. Bush hired him to run the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program before promoting him to Global AIDS Coordinator.
It must have sometimes been difficult for a gay man to work in the Bush administration, but Dybul handled it all with exceptional grace and super-human competence. I traveled through Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique with him once and was incredibly impressed.
My point is that there must be many people in the Democratic orbit who would like the job Dybul holds. There are no political rewards for rehiring someone from a past administration. But Obama bypassed them for the sake of the program. It was a pure merit choice, and typical of a lot of the moves he has made.

This lasted for a few days. Then Obama heard from those "people in the Democratic orbit." Or, Another example:

In the current issue of Time, Joe Klein writes a paean to President Obama, saying in part:

[Obama] could have planted solar panels and a wind turbine on the White House roof or blasted the Bush Administration as he signed an Executive Order banning torture or lacerated the bankers who got us into the economic mess. But that's not his style, apparently. He has reversed the tactical, win-the-news-cycle sensibility of recent presidencies. During his first week in office, at least, he opted for strategy and substance over showbiz.

What unfortunate timing. In today's New York Times we read this:

President Obama branded Wall Street bankers "shameful" on Thursday . . . It was a pointed - if calculated - flash of anger from the president, who frequently railed against excesses in executive compensation on the campaign trails. Mr. Obama was reacting to a report by the New York State comptroller that found financial executives had received an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for 2008. "That is the height of irresponsibility," Mr. Obama said. It is shameful."

For good measure, Vice President Biden added, "I'd like to throw these guys in the brig."

Of course, Joe Klein is such an idiot that his list of things of things proving Obama's greatness will probably take a little longer for Obama to reverse himself. So celebrate Obama's substance in that he hasn't turned the White House into a wind turbine. In fact, on this issue, Obama has reached the pinnacle of substance over style: hypocrisy.

What a moderate, substance-over-style guy Obama is. Also, Joe Klein is such an intellectual force. Maybe when Obama is done not putting solar panels on the roof, he can award Joe Klein something. That would show what a great man Obama is.

Who should replace Bill Kristol?

asks Poliltico.
Answer: it depends. If the nytimes is looking for someone (like Kristol) who won't be threatening to lefties, Peggy Noonan is a good idea. If on the other hand, they want someone who writes good columns, Ross is obvious choice, or Lowry. David Frum, Christopher Caldwell also good, plus they both hate Palin. If they're looking for neocon like Kristol more than "full spectrum" conservative, Max Boot, or Seth Lipsky.
my hunch is it might be Douthat who wrote a secret essay for them here

Did Rachel Appear in Gaza?

David Hazony - 01.25.2009 - 1:37 PM

For weeks now, we have been hearing rumors about a mysterious woman who appeared before Israeli troops in the thick of the Gaza battles. Not just any woman, mind you, but the biblical Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob, matriarch of Israel. (My nine-year-old daughter gave me an excellent speech about the pluses and minuses of believing these rumors.) Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliyahu, announced that he himself had sent her. And now another former chief rabbi and Shas spiritual leader, Ovadiah Yosef, has confirmed these reports.

This is the point where I’m supposed to say how ridiculous it is. A hoax, or a superstition, or something. But I’m not gonna’ do it.

I don’t care if you call the appearance of Rachel a metaphor or a miracle. There is a point in rabbinic discourse where miracles and metaphors all mingle together, where the word “literally” loses its meaning, making room for midrash — the art of saying something illiteral and literary. To say that Rachel was with our soldiers, that our matriarch was protecting her boys, is a deeper statement than anything that can be made by a professional reporter with a camera.

Let’s give the religious spinmasters the benefit of the doubt. Of course she wasn’t there. But, of course, she was.

After a dissapointing showing for McCain among Jewish voters:

The question now is whether Republicans have any hope of winning the Jewish vote at any point in the future. The answer is: Perhaps. In a generation. If certain demographic trends hold firm. In November, the Orthodox Union compiled a list of precincts “with high-concentrations of Orthodox Jewish voters,” from which it was clear that the Orthodox tend to vote Republican in much higher numbers than the Jewish community overall. Indeed, it is even possible that the Orthodox constitute a majority of the Jews who vote Republican. Given that the Orthodox are younger than the Jewish average, and are proportionally growing much faster, over time one might expect the share of Jews who vote Republican to increase.

On a related note, what do you make of this?

i pledge

if you haven't seen the latest obama vid, in which hollywood exceeds itself, you should at least watch part & skip to the end. then read the transcript
MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge

again, i urge you to read the transcript.

Gnostic Immanentist Eschatology and the Divinization of Man

Now to get back to the Gnostics:

The attempt at immanentizing the meaning of existence is fundamentally an attempt at bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip than the cognitio fidei, the cognition of faith, will afford; and Gnostic experiences offer this firmer grip in so far as they are an expansion of the soul to the point where God is drawn into the existence of man. This expansion will engage the various human faculties; and, hence, it is possible to distinguish a range of Gnostic varieties according to the faculty which predominates in the operation of getting this grip on God. Gnosis may be primarily intellectual and assume the form of speculative penetration of the mystery of creation and existence, as, for instance, in the contemplative Gnosis of Hegel or Schelling. Or it may be primarily emotional and assume the form of an indwelling of divine substance in the human soul, as, for instance, in paracletic sectarian leaders. Or it may be primarily volitional and assume the form of activist redemption of man and society, as in the instance of revolutionary activists like Comte, Marx, or Hitler. These Gnostic experiences, in the amplitude of their variety, are the core of the re-divinization of society, for the men who fall into these experiences divinize themselves by substituting more massive modes of participation in divinity for faith in the Christian sense.

A clear understanding of these experiences as the active core of imanentist eschatology is necessary, because otherwise the inner logic of the Western political development from medieval immanentism through humanism, enlightenment, progressivism, liberalism, positivism, into Marxism will be obscured. The intellectual symbols developed by the various types of immanentists will frequently be in conflict with one another, and the various types of Gnostics will oppose one another. One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism. It will not be superfluous, therefore, to recall the principle that the substance of history is to be found on the level of experiences, not on the level of ideas. Secularism could be defined as a radicalization of the earlier forms of paracletic immanentism, because the experiential divinization of man is more radical in the secularist case. Feuerbach and Marx, for instance, interpreted the transcendent God as the projection of what is best in man into a hypostatic beyond; for them the great turning point of history, therefore, would come when man draws his projection back into himself, when he becomes conscious that he himself is God, when as a consequence man is transfigured into superman.

And last, a not wholly unconnected video:

Maybe She Should Campaign for John Kerry's Seat

nytimes:

In a dramatic and confusing turn of events, Caroline Kennedy informed Gov. David A. Paterson on Wednesday that she would withdraw from consideration for the vacant Senate seat in New York, only to hours later signal that she may be interested in the seat after all.

After all, she was in favor of getting the seat before she retracted her opposition to getting it.

Immanentizing the eschaton in context

Providing some context for Voegelin: The two figures he discusses are Augustine and Joachim (of Fiore). Augustine distinguished between the "City of God" and the "City of Man." History progresses towards the eschaton only in the City of God, but not in the City of Man. For Joachim however a transcendental eschaton was not enough. Joachim saw history within the temporal realm as moving toward perfection, and as such, immanentized the eschaton:

The Joachitic eschatology is, by its subject matter, a speculation on the meaning of history. In order to define its special character, it must be set off against the Christian philosophy of history that was traditional at the time, that is, against Augustinian speculation. Into the traditional speculation had entered the Jewish-Christian idea of an end of history in the sense of an intelligible state of perfection. History no longer moved in cycles, as it did with Plato and Aristotle, but acquired direction and destination. Beyond Jewish messianism in the strict sense the specifically Christian conception of history had advanced toward the understanidng of the end as a transcendental fulfilment. In his elaboration of this theoretical insight St. Augustine distinguished between a profane sphere of history which culminates in the appearance of Christ and the establishment of the church. He, furthermore, imbedded sacred history in a transcendental history of the civitas Dei which includes the events in the angelic sphere as well as the transcendental eternal sabbath. Only transcendental history, including the earthly pilgrimage of the church, has direction toward its eschatological fulfilment. Profane history, on the other hand has no such direction; it is a waiting for the end; its present mode of being is that of a saeculum sensescens, of an age that grows old.
By the time of Joachim, Western civilization was growing strongly; and an age that began to feel its muscles would not easily bear the Augustinian defeatism with regard to the mundane sphere of existence. The Joachitic speculation was an attempt to endow the immanent course of history with a meaning that was not provided in the Augustinian conception. And for this purpose Joachim used what he had at hand, that is, the meaning of transcendental history. In this first Western attempt at an immanentization of meaning the connection with Christianity was not lost. The new age of Joachim would bring an increase of fulfilment within history, but the increase would not be due to an immanent eruption; it would come through a new transcendental irruption of the spirit. The idea of a radically immanent fulfilment grew rathre slowly, in a long process that roughly may be called "from humanism to enlightenment"; only in the eighteenh century, with the idea of progress, had the increase of meaning in history become a completely intramundane phenomenon, without transcendental irruptions. This second phase of immaentization shall be called "secularization."
From the Joachitic immanentization a theoretical problem arises which occurs neither in classic antiquty nor in orthodox Christianity, that is, the problem of an eidos of history. In Hellenic speculation, to be sure, we also have a problem of essence in politics; the polis has an eidos both for Plato and for Aristotle. But the acualization of thsi essence is governed by the rhythm of growth and decay, and the rhythmical embodiment and disembodiment of essence in political reality is the mystery of existence; it is not an additional eidos. The soteriological truth of Christianity, then, breaks with the rhythm of existence; beyond temporal successes and reverses lies the supernatural destiny of man, the perfection through grace in the beyond. Man and mankind now have fulfilment, but it lies beyond nature. Again there is no eidos of history, becuase the eschatological supernature is not a nature in the philosophical, immanent sense. The problem of an eidos in history, therefore, arises only when Christian transcendental fulfilment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy. Things are not things, nor do they have essences, by arbitrary declaration. The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future. The meaning of history, thus, is an illusion; and this illusionary eidos is created by treating a symbol of faith as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience.

Now you are probably wondering, "But what does all this have to do with the Gnostics?" To be continued...

About that Juicebox Mafia

First of all, we would like to congratulate ourselves on our 300th post (which was last one). Secondly, if you clicked on the link in the last post, and were wondering what the "juicebox mafia" was, wonder no longer. At least that's one suggestion.
For alternative explanations, see here.

Best Post of Day

here

Vacation and Reality

Ben Smith:

Bill Clinton, notoriously, polled his vacation spots. George Bush's Crawford ranch is part of his carefully manicured image as a Westerner. But it's hard to think of a good political reason to vacation in Hawaii, a blue state that most mainlanders only grudgingly regard as part of the United States, and whose singular, multicultural society, which formed the president-elect, is little known or discussed. (A notable exception: that amazing David Maraniss profile of Obama.)

There is, nonetheless, a political logic to vacationing in Hawaii. Part of Obama's success was always his authenticity. Aside from some wince-inducing bowling and sipping of beer, he rarely attempted to be somebody he wasn't. He didn't hoist a shotgun or pretend to be a hunter; on the other end of the spectrum, he never pretended to have other politicians' gift for feeling individuals' pain, or cry at town halls. Vacationing in Hawaii, for no reason except the obvious ones, is good politics because that authenticity is, these days, perhaps the most valuable political commodity. It will be interesting to see if Hawaii remains the "Western White House" after he takes office.

So Bill Clinton's vacations showed his authentic phoniness--he just vacationed where he thought the people wanted him to; Bush's showed his phony authenticity--he pretended not to care what eastern elites thought about his vacation spot, but all the time was really calculating to show his base that he didn't care what the eastern elite thought; Obama's show his authentic authenticity because the only calculation which would make him vacation in Hawaii is demonstrating his authenticity, which obviously makes him authentically authentic. Got it?

Real Education Reform

change you can believe won't happen:

The benefits of discarding the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification would be huge for both employers and job applicants. Certifications would tell employers far more about their applicants’ qualifications than a B.A. does, and hundreds of thousands of young people would be able to get what they want from post-secondary education without having to twist themselves into knots to comply with the rituals of getting a bachelor’s degree.
...

Discrediting the bachelor’s degree is within reach because so many employers already sense that it has become education’s Wizard of Oz. All we need is someone willing to yank the curtain aside. Barack Obama is ideally positioned to do it. He just needs to say it over and over: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”

2008, In Short

From George Will's 2008 roundup:

Cuba being politically primitive, Fidel Castro yielded power to his brother. Caroline Kennedy, because she is a president's daughter, sought the gift of the Senate seat from New York that Hillary Clinton got because she married a president, but Andrew Cuomo, son of a New York governor, might get it, because this is a democracy.

Mrs. Palin, I Know Margaret Thatcher

says John O'Sullivan:

Though regularly pronounced sick, dying, dead, cremated and scattered at sea, Mrs. Palin is still amazingly around. She has survived more media assassination attempts than Fidel Castro has survived real ones (Cuban official figure: 638). In her case, one particular method of assassination is especially popular -- namely, the desperate assertion that, in addition to her other handicaps, she is "no Margaret Thatcher."

Very few express this view in a calm or considered manner. Some employ profanity. Most claim to be conservative admirers of Mrs. Thatcher. Others admit they had always disliked the former British prime minister until someone compared her to "Sarracuda" -- at which point they suddenly realized Mrs. Thatcher must have been absolutely brilliant (at least by comparison).

Inevitably, Lloyd Bentsen's famous put-down of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate is resurrected, such as by Paul Waugh (in the London Evening Standard) and Marie Cocco (in the Washington Post): "Newsflash! Governor, You're No Maggie Thatcher," sneered Mr. Waugh. Added Ms. Coco, "now we know Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher -- and no Dan Quayle either!"

Jolly, rib-tickling stuff. But, as it happens, I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common.

You gotta love Dick Cheney

points out Bill Kristol:

[C]onsider this exchange with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”:
WALLACE: Did you really tell Senator Leahy, bleep yourself?
CHENEY: I did.
WALLACE: Any qualms, or second thoughts, or embarrassment?
CHENEY: No, I thought he merited it at the time. (Laughter.) And we’ve since, I think, patched over that wound and we’re civil to one another now.

David Brooks: 

As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.

....

During the presidential race, Barack Obama straddled the two camps. One campaign adviser, John Schnur, represented the reform view in the internal discussions. Another, Linda Darling-Hammond, was more likely to represent the establishment view.The candidates before Obama apparently include: Joel Klein, the highly successful New York chancellor who has, nonetheless, been blackballed by the unions; Arne Duncan, the reforming Chicago head who is less controversial; Darling-Hammond herself; and some former governor to be named later, with Darling-Hammond as the deputy secretary.

I give ten to one odds against him picking someone who will upset the establishment. 

Obama Admits He Was Wrong on Surge?!

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA I'm going to be making announcement tomorrow about the head of our Veterans Administration, General Eric Shinseki, who was a commander and has fought in Vietnam, Bosnia, is somebody who has achieved the highest level of military service. He has agreed that he is willing to be part of this administration because both he and I share a reverence for those who serve. I grew up in Hawaii, as he did. My grandfather is in the Punch Bowl National Cemetery. When I reflect on the sacrifices that have been made by our veterans and, I think about how so many veterans around the country are struggling even more than those who have not served — higher unemployment rates, higher homeless rates, higher substance abuse rates, medical care that is inadequate — it breaks my heart, and I think that General Shinseki is exactly the right person who is going to be able to make sure that we honor our troops when they come home.

BROKAW: He's the man who lost his job in the Bush Administration because he said we will need more troops in Iraq than Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld thought we would need at that time.

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: He was right.

Don't Worry, Not All Liberals Are This Dumb

Political Punch:
As first reported in this morning's Washington Post, Washington State artist Deborah Lawrence -- asked to submit an ornament to hang on the White House Christmas Tree -- designed one that featured the text of a House Resolution to impeach President Bush, along with images of her "hero" Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., a co-sponsor of the bill.
"The ornament is supposed to represent my state," Lawrence told ABC News just now as she walked to the White House. The design also included "messages of peace," and images from the 1999 World Trade Organization protests and the Washington State suffrage movement -- "messages of progressive politics," Lawrence says. "It's all in minute type so that's why I think it got past the first censors," she adds.

But now comes news that the White House is not going to hang the ornament. First Lady Laura Bush's press secretary Sally McDonough told the Post of Lawrence's ornament, "it really is too bad. I haven't seen the ornament, but I would hope that no one would take this as an opportunity to be divisive and partisan. There is a time and place for everything, and I don't think this is either." "So now I don't know if I'm going to be invited," Lawrence says. "I'm disappointed because the act of making the ornament was really just an earnest wish to represent my state, I didn't think it would lead to suppression of freedom of speech. I feel a little weak at the knees that they might not invite me in."

Obama Campaign: We won't raise taxes, we'll just collect the same amount more often

Report: Obama Didn't Have as Many Small Donors as Was Hyped

November 25, 2008 9:26 AM

The Campaign Finance Institute issued a "Reality Check" report that demolishes the myth that President-elect Obama was largely funded by small donors.

In reality, says the non-partisan group, the percentage of small donors who gave to the Obama campaign -- 26 percent -- is roughly the same as the percentage of small donors who contributed to President Bush's reelection in 2004, 25 percent.

....

The Obama team rejects the fundamental hypothesis of the study. If you were a donor who saved up to donate $20 to the campaign every couple months over the course of two years, an aide says, and all of those contributions eventually added up to more than $200, that doesn't mean you’re not a small dollar donor.

A Good Thing About the Election Being Over

is that we can go back to reading Christopher Hitchens again (although you could have read his brother. They're both Jewish, by the way):

The objection I make is therefore twofold. First, the election of Obama is the effect not the cause of the changes. (One of my questioners appeared to think that our president-elect had been responsible for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) Second, a Republican victory would have had absolutely no effect on the legal or political standing of black Americans, which is a matter of our law and our Constitution and cannot be undone by any ephemeral vote or plebiscite.

....

The recognition of these obvious points should also alert us to a related danger, which is the cousinhood of euphoria and hysteria. Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don't think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen by Obama to be on his team?

There is an element of the "wannabe" about all this—something that suggests that, if the clock were to be rolled back, every living white person would now automatically stand with John Brown at Harper's Ferry and with John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. All the evidence we have is to the contrary: Abraham Lincoln ringingly denounced John Brown, and John F. Kennedy (he of the last young and pretty family to occupy the Executive Mansion) was embarrassed and annoyed by the March on Washington. In other words, there is something pain-free and self-congratulatory about the Obama surge.

Obama Demigod Watch

Amongst the AP's (through the Corner) gushing over Barack Obama's literariness, there is this sentence:

Obama's student poetry was even lauded — and compared to the work of Langston Hughes — by the most discerning of critics, Harold Bloom.

Obama's poetry, recorded here, was shown to Bloom by the New Yorker, who recommends Obama not quit his day job:

Harold Bloom, who in fifty-three years of teaching literature at Yale University has had many undergraduate poems pressed hopefully upon him said, when reached by telephone in New Haven last week, that he was not familiar with Obama’s oeuvre. But after studying the poems he said that he was not unimpressed with the young man’s efforts—at least, by the standards established by other would-be bards within the political sphere. “At eighteen, as an undergraduate, he was already a much better poet than our former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who keeps publishing terrible poetry,” Bloom said. (Cohen has published two collections of verse: “Of Sons and Seasons,” in 1978, and “A Baker’s Nickel,” in 1986.) “And then there is Jimmy Carter, who is in my judgment literally the worst poet in the United States.” (Carter’s first volume of poetry, “Always a Reckoning and Other Poems,” which was published in 1994, included a work called “Why We Get Cheaper Tires from Liberia”: “No churches can be built / no privy holes or even graves / dug in the rolling hills / for those milking Firestone’s trees, who die / from mamba and mosquito bites.”) Of the two Obama poems, Bloom said, “Pop” was “not bad—a good enough folk poem with some pathos and humor and affection.” He went on, “It is not wholly unlike Langston Hughes, who tended to imitate Carl Sandburg.” Bloom was fascinated by Obama’s use of an unusual verb, “shink” (“He . . . Stands, shouts, and asks / For a hug, as I shink, my / Arms barely reaching around / His thick, oily neck”), a word that does not appear in any of the dictionaries that Bloom consulted but which is defined in an online slang dictionary as “an evasive sinking maneuver.”

“It undoubtedly was a word that was in common usage, having to do with feeling very strong emotion, in this case a very strong need for comfort,” Bloom said. He takes the subtext of the poem to be Obama’s reckoning with his absent father, for whom his grandfather is, inevitably, an inadequate substitute. “This is, in effect, his own father,” Bloom said. “That’s very touching, and it also shows a kind of humane and sad wit. There’s a mind there.” “Underground,” Bloom said, is the better poem of the two. “It gave me the oddest feeling that he might have been reading the poems of D. H. Lawrence—it reminded me of the poem ‘Snake,’ ” Bloom went on. “I think it is about some sense of chthonic forces, just as Lawrence frequently is—some sense, not wholly articulated, of something below, trying to break through.”Poetry aside, Bloom has formed a good impression of Obama—“Though if Mayor Bloomberg runs, I am voting for him,” he added. In any case, he said, Obama has chosen the right career, at least if it comes to a tossup between politico and poet. “If I had been shown these poems by one of my undergraduates and asked, Shall I go on with it?, I would have rubbed my forehead and said, On the whole, my dear, probably not. Your future is not as a person of letters,” Bloom pronounced. “But they would by no means have seemed to me unworthy of my attention.”

Get your very own 2D Barack Obama while you still can! When we get the 3D version, these coins will be as common as the Carter half dollar.

How Hope Will Destroy Jon Stewart

NY Magazine:

It's no secret that plenty of satirical outlets — Saturday Night Live, the Onion, late-night talk shows — have had trouble finding good Obama jokes. But we're not forecasting their doom. The Daily Show is unique, though, in its audience and in its comedic approach, and we're very worried that an Obama presidency might send Jon Stewart's show speedily on the road to obsolescence.

Why? First of all, in one eventful day, the prototypical Daily Show viewer has been transformed: Once disaffected and angry at Washington's power structure, he's now delighted and hopeful about the new president and all that he symbolizes. And if you're an Obama fan — eager to give Barack the benefit of the doubt, and proud and excited about the change you've helped bring the nation — do you really want Jon Stewart sitting on the sidelines, taking potshots at your hero?

Beyond the problem of audiences souring on Obama jokes is the question of whether Jon Stewart even wants to make Obama jokes. Of course, The Daily Show has found ways to goof on the Obama campaign, but it's no secret that Stewart and his writing staff lean leftward. And The Daily Show differs from nearly all other popular political satire in that the show's strength is in its writers' outrage and anger at the powers that be. Stewart memorably described the show's writing process to Michiko Kakutani as a bunch of "curmudgeons" writing about the things that upset them the most. If President Obama's administration is the love-in that progressives hope it will be, we think it's awfully unlikely Stewart's heart will be in Obama-bashing. The guy teared up at eleven on Election Night! Not that we didn't, but still.

So let's say that Stewart's half-hearted Obama gags just keep on flopping on The Daily Show. ("Your William Ayers joke bombed," a sage Chris Wallace observed on last night's episode.) With Bush and Cheney heading off into the sunset, and Sarah Palin hopping a charter back to Wasilla, who's left to skewer?

Best Election Day Prediction

goes to ....

Mark Steyn

The one prediction I can make with confidence is that we won’t get the result we should get — which is a McGovern-esque candidate going down to a McGovern-sized defeat. Instead, we face three options: an Obama landslide or a narrower Obama win, both of which would be bad for the nation and the world; or a narrow McCain victory, which would be bad for our already diseased politics and seems likely to unhinge even further the Democratic Party base, which isn’t good for civilized political discourse. So I can’t really see any happy endings on Tuesday night. I don’t think it’ll be an Obama landslide, and, if I have to flip between one or other of the 51-49 scenarios, I guess I’m more or less obliged to plump for a narrow McCain-Palin victory. Not a lot of science behind that hunch. Obama will do worse than polls suggest in the Appalachians and rust belt, which is just as well, because I’d say either Virginia and/or North Carolina will go blue. Which I guess is my way of saying the Eastern time zone will determine how the night goes, and everything else will be just mopping up. In the Senate, Norm Coleman and Susan Collins will survive in Minnesota and Maine, but not Elizabeth Dole down south. And the Democrats won’t get to 60, but with the Maine ladies and other soft-spined Republicans, who says they’ll need to?