Obligatory Vice-Presidential Debate Thread

You know who I miss? Lloyd Bentsen. And Admiral Stockdale. Those guys were great.

Congratulations are due to governor Sarah Palin for recovering her poise — it’s much easier to watch her recite her fake homilies and Republican talking points than it was to watch George W. Bush fumble his way through simple sentences consisting of words of one syllable.

I’ve never actually seen Joe Biden ever do anything before tonight, and I was impressed with him as well — his thinking is both fluid and pointed, and he looks exactly like someone you’d cast in the role of vice-president.

In general, I enjoyed last night’s debate. Knockout blows like the ones delivered by Lloyd Bentsen twenty years ago seem to have been written out of debates these days, so they lack in drama — Obama tends to shy away from appearing too angry about the past eight years of governmental mismanagement, McCain must keep his contempt for his opponent in check or risk appearing to look like a cranky old man, Biden is lucid but polite, Palin (last night, anyway) was polished but insubstantial. (And, for my younger readers, let me add that Lloyd Bentsen, despite mopping the floor with Dan Quayle, then wringing him out and hanging him up to dry, did not, after all, become vice-president.)

So Governor Palin informed us that gay people are so by choice, and that, as a governor, she must tolerate their presence. That’s an honest, if politic, answer from a conservative fundamentalist, and if you feel similarly, go ahead and vote for her. Same with her views on global warming: she’s not here to think about what caused it, she only knows what needs to be done about it, and that seems to involve doing absolutely nothing to stop the exploitation and burning of fossil fuels. Again, well-spoken and lucid, and if you feel similarly, go ahead and vote for her.  She also stated that she thinks that Dick Cheney missed a couple of opportunities to expand the powers of the vice presidency.  Which, you know, good for her, and if you want Sarah Palin to be more powerful than Dick Cheney is, go ahead and vote for her (that is, certainly, the hopes of the Republican base she is meant to energize).  She misidentified our troop leader in Afghanistan as General McClellan, which I think is an honest mistake to make — if you, like McClellan, are an arch-conservative secessionist (to say nothing of the whole slavery thing).