I’ve intentionally restrained myself from posting more about this silliness, but I have to say I don’t really see how this explanation improves the situation:

“Keep in mind, technically, had I meant it this way, [Palin] would be the lipstick. The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig, just following the logic of this illogical situation,” Obama said.

Someone needs to tell the Obama camp just to shrug off these kinds of tempests in a teapot and focus on policies and issues and such.

One of Kerry’s biggest weaknesses in 2004 was his abject failure at controlling the news cycle. Just when the media was beginning to tire of covering the Swift Boat Vets story, the Kerry campaign responded with comically incompetent attempts to manipulate public opinion, like this Byzantine chart, thus pouring new life into coverage of the Swift Boat accusations and terminally distracting his campaign.

Unless Obama wants to repeat Kerry’s performance, he needs to just shut up about these faux-controversies.

When I read Samantha Power’s little interview with The Scotsman, I literally assumed she must’ve been drunk, cursing and speaking in run-on sentences as she was:

“We f***** up in Ohio,” she admitted. “In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win.

“She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything,” Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: “Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

“You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh’. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

Ergh? For someone slated to be high up in the Obama administration, she comes off awfully unstateswomanlike. And for a former Pulitzer prize winning journalist, she doesn’t seem to have internalized enough paranoia about speaking to reporters.

The Clinton camp is predictably enough asking for her resignation. Though from all indications losing Power would be a huge blow for the Obama team, I for one would feel much better if Power was replaced. She’s the biggest reason I don’t feel comfortable with Obama’s foreign policy direction to date.

UPDATE: And there she goes!

Glenn Greenwald unfurls a long screed on media bias and perfidy, citing disapprovingly a section of Maureen Dowd’s column I cited below, which “unintentionally” provides a glimpse into the secret world of supposedly objective journalism:

Dowd is describing here the conversation that took place in her “office”—which happens to be the newsroom of *The New York Times*—between what are undoubtedly very Serious Journalists, including one who covers (said with whispered reverence) “security issues.” And in this one short passage, on vivid, revolting display is every repellent attribute that defines the Standard Modern Political Journalist.

Right. And it defines John Edwards too. And I’ll be perfectly candid: when I heard the news of Hillary’s weeping, I made a joke along the exact same lines. In short, her ploy didn’t work on me, or on most males given the election results slowly being parsed out from New Hampshire—Hillary’s bounce came from vigorous support of older women. That Greenwald finds casual water-cooler sexism repellent and revolting only tells us that Greenwald is more of a feminist than your average male, nothing more.

There’s a further point here worth debating: the particularly American obsession over an impartial press. It’s a debate which goes largely ignored in the rest of the world, where readers recognize that various media outlets represent various interests in their societies. News nevertheless gets reported and people still get their information—democracy functions just fine. The expectations Americans have of their media are wholly puritanical as evidenced by the holy rage of people like Greenwald upon finding evidence that our journalists are biased too.