The week American Politics nuked the fridge

1) Is Paris Burning? Totally. McC! You forgot one fundamental point - more people know who she is than know who you are. (Also, [shudder], Paris eclipses three months of Ob campaigning with the simple phrase, "I'm not from the olden days.") Quick McC! Kiss Madonna.

2) Johnny McC and the Shiny Gizmos: From the NYT [8-3-08], Lt. Cmdr. McC refers to wife Cindy as a technological "wizard." "She even does my boarding passes...people can do that now. When we go to the movies, she gets the tickets ahead of time. It's incredible." Next time you're up at Kennebunkport, ask 41 how those bar code scanners work.

3) Counselorrrrr. Come out, come out wherever you are....Somebody tell John Edwards not to drag this one out. You had the affair, the kid is someone else's and maybe some of your friends are paying her way in life. Huh? BTW, you've just been scheduled to speak on the fifth night of the Democratic convention.

4) Psst! Never let them see behind the curtain. Rep. John Shimkus (R., Ill.) introduced a resolution on June 30 recognizing that day as National Corvette Day. According to Parade Magazine [8-3-08], Shimkus said, "It's probably not the best use of our time, but we have to do something. These resolutions make it look like we're working."

5) Bill Clinton to speak in Denver on Night Three: Wanna bet he just gets up there and stares at Jim Clyburn for about ten minutes?

6) Cheney to spreak at the GOP Convention after all: Can you imagine if you're the staffer tasked with writing this one? Probably the toughest speech of the week. What could he possibly have to say that would fit in with the McCain message? Better off reading the stats from the Haliburton annual report.

7) Things we should have known earlier: Cindy Adams [NYP 8-8-08] goes down a long list of Dubya's nicknames for people. According to her, his name for John McCain was "Hogan." You know, because of "Hogan's Heroes." Which in itself explains way too much about the last eight years of our lives.

8) Needed more Tinkering: Freshman Rep. Steve Cohen's Democratic primary victory in Tennessee 9 shows us once again that there are certain images that folks just don't like to see on TV. Case in point, the campaign ad by challenger Nikki Tinker, an attorney (and an Afro-American candidates in this majority-black district), that showed Cohen alongside a man dressed in Klan robes. Despite the Tinker camp's feeble insistence that they were not insinuating anything about Cohen in the spot, they lost. 79% to 19%. Ouch.

9) Most disturbing sentence in a political news story in 2008: Buried in the 15th graph of a Wall Street Journal story by Belkin, Simon and Sataline: "Suggestions that Sen. Obama is the antichrist have been circulating for months in Bible-study meetings in towns like Chillicothe, Ohio, where congregants compare his remarks and his biography with verses from the Bible."

10) Hats off to Bob Novak: Love him or hate him, you must admit that he and Roland Evans created a genre that slowly evolved into today's chattering class. And they spent decades trying to explain Washington to the rest of the country. It'll be a shame if he must go quietly into that good night.