the Couric interview makes SNL

That can't be good for the McCain campaign.

On Saturday, Sarah Palin also became the latest public figure to agree with Obama's position on attacking terrorist camps in Pakistan. Woopsy!

they're surrounded

I wonder, is it a common phenomenon for an embattled minority to start seeing everyone else as part of one monolithic enemy?

I'm increasingly seeing Clinton supporters blaming "Obama" for every bad thing that happens to Hillary or her campaign. Take this dKos diary, for instance. Among the things for which "obama and the democratic party" are to blame are:

being called a blitch

being bullied

having her own party refuse to acknowledge her votes and strong following

having her followers called racists on SNL

having her party's superdelegates do everything in their power to dissway [!] her voters and demand for her to step down even when she is leading in the popular and electoral vote [!]

blaming her for her husband's policies which brought more prosperity and peace to America [translation: Bill's policies were great, and how dare you blame Hillary for them!]

having her legs, hips, and cleavage ridiculed on the polulation's tvs

Apparently, "obama and the democratic party" can now include among their agents and proxies John McCain supporters, Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live, Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan, and Rush Limbaugh.

Seth Myers, quoting Rudy Giuliani as he puts down his cellphone:

"That was my wife reminding me to pick up some milk at the nine-eleven."

Yes, he can be that bad. And you know why he's that bad about constantly tossing 9/11 in there? Because he has no f**king idea what he's talking about on most major issues; for a presidential candidate, his knowledge base on economics, health care, and foreign are at times shockingly shallow. See this, for example, during last night's debate:

As the Republicans' latest presidential debate began in Michigan this afternoon, Chris Matthews asked Rudy Giuliani to explain how private equity firms make "billions of dollars" and whether there's "any downside to this amazing bonanza."
...
Here's the entirety of what Giuliani said as he ran out the clock on Matthews' question:

"Well, I mean the market is a wonderful thing. I mean, the free market is our -- one of our greatest assets. And the leading Democratic candidate once said that the unfettered free market is the most destructive force in modern America. I mean, just get an idea of where the philosophy comes from.

"The free market is the asset that has allowed us to -- the sky's the limit. The reality is that what we have to do is look at the fundamentals. A president can't be an economic forecaster. A president's not going to be any better an economic forecaster than you are a baseball forecaster -- and I'm not a particularly [good] baseball forecaster this afternoon.

"So the reality is, a president has to work on the fundamentals. What are the fundamentals? Keep taxes low. Keep regulations moderate. Keep spending under control. That's an area where we need a lot of help. And make sure you do something about legal reform so that our legal system doesn't -- it's 2.2 percent of our GDP now, is spent on all these frivolous lawsuits. It's double any other industrialized nation. If we don't get control of that, that's another way in which we're going to eat up our future.

"So we got a prospect on the Democratic side of overspending, overtaxing, overregulating, and oversuing, and I think you need a Republican alternative to that, which is an emphasis on the pillars of growth that I mentioned."

What Rudy had nothing to say about, presumably because he knows nothing about them: hedge funds and private equity firms, which was the subject of the question.

And of course, I wonder if anyone ever explained to Rudnine Eleviani that "an unfettered free market" is sort of what you have when you don't "keep regulations moderate."

Seriously, I've watched a fair number of debates in my lifetime, but this answer is one of the silliest, most jingoistic, least informed answers I've ever heard. "The sky's the limit?" What the hell is he even talking about?

what might have been

There's been a growing phenomenon of people looking back on a certain election in a way I've never experienced. Take this, for example, from Richard freakin' Cohen (c/o mcjoan at dKos):

There were so many reasons not to vote for him -- none, in retrospect, much good...

Gore would not have taken the United States to war in Iraq. He would have finished the job in Afghanistan -- it was al-Qaeda and its Taliban enablers who were responsible for the attacks on us on Sept. 11, 2001, not Saddam Hussein, no matter how vile he might have been. Gore would not have dealt with the Iranians and the North Koreans in such a juvenile fashion -- axis of evil, after all -- and all over the world, wherever you and I went, we would not detect such anger toward America. The last time I saw Gore was at a screening of his now-acclaimed movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." I wrote at the time that, on paper at least, he was the near-perfect Democratic presidential candidate -- right on the war, above all. This observation, hardly original with me, is being echoed elsewhere, and it would be impossible for Gore to ignore it. Jimmy Carter said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" that he thought Gore ought to run and had told Gore so insistently. "He almost told me the last time I called, 'Don't call me anymore,' " Carter said. What Gore told me was something similar: "I think there are other ways to serve."

And what about this, from an SNL opener several months ago?

It's weird: in both of these pieces (and countless other references to Al Gore in public and private discourse) there's an underlying sense of sadness, a national understanding that we, enticed by the siren songs of W's faux folksy everymanness and Nader's angry righteousness (or perhaps, self-righteousness), made a horrible mistake in 2000. It's not just that we allowed a vindictive, arrogant man-child to take the presidency (and inexplicably re-elected him with the first honest-to-God majority in 16 years) or that we allowed an election to be essentially subverted. We've seen buyer's remorse of that stripe before. People often joked about how Clinton should've lost, or Bush Sr., or Reagan, but the difference lies in looking at their opposition. In Clinton's lowest moments, people may have wished he'd lost, but there was no widescale gazing sadly at Bush Sr. and wishing he'd won. There were no masses pining for the return of Dukakis, or Mondale, or tellingly, John Kerry, even despite the admirable fight he's been waging in the Senate over a host of issues ever since his loss.

In what has to be a truly scary moment for the current resident and his fixation on his legacy, how "history will judge his presidency," the country is starting to openly wish it had elected Al Gore instead. Perhaps even scarier, above we have Richard Cohen, no flaming lefty, implying that he wishes it had been Al Gore at the helm on 9/11, steering our military policy. My guess is that most voters aren't there yet, but more and more people are coming around every day, and with Gore getting and Oscar and potentially a Nobel peace prize, and with influential media personalities openly pining for his candidacy in 2000 and hoping for the same in 2008, we could someday, perhaps before this administration is even over, see a poll indicating just such a sentiment.