I feel as if I've deserted you in your Hour of Need. But I'm at the mercy of the red sands trickling through my own hourglass. The mind, it is a wicked thing, attacking you in the middle of the sleepless night, when your defenses are down. But I spotted a Baltimore Oriole yesterday, and saw a bearded birder legendary for his foot patrols the length and width of Cape May Point birding from a motorized wheelchair yesterday, refusing to let whatever had befallen him put him out of commish, birding-wise.

Having adopted a policy of media chastity here in Cape May, averting my eyes from the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times, I became aware of the hiring of Alexei Ratmansky as "artist in residence" at ABT only as a puff of pipe smoke on the horizon, its sonic boom failing to pipeline down the Jersey shore. While the news, I gather, has been greeted on the ballet blogs and boards as an unambiguous coup, the greatest thing since Tarzan met his first vine, critic Robert Johnson has a far more complicated and forboding reaction, which he puts across with knowledge and force.

I particularly like the way he stands up for ABT's blockbuster ballet programming of full-length classic works, which so many critics and balletomanes have denigrated as stodgy and warhorse-y. Johnson:

the greatest progress that ABT has made in the last 16 years -- and it IS progress, most wonderful and meriting exultation -- has come in the revival department. The troupe, which is a repertory company, after all, must bear the weight of its institutional stature. ABT is a world-class company that represents the U.S. at home and abroad, and has the responsibility to act as a major cultural force. It is America's national ballet company, and the keeper of the flame.

McKenzie takes his charge seriously, and despite the challenge of continually raising money from private sources he has made a conscientious and systematic effort to maintain the legacy of classical ballet for all posterity. ABT has supplied elegantly polished restorations of works by Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Michel Fokine and Antony Tudor, painstakingly mounted and often brilliantly danced. Who else will do this, if not ABT?

Just as important have been two outstanding productions of the classics staged by Anna-Marie Holmes -- "Le Corsaire" and "Raymonda" -- which set new standards of excellence for this company. It may seem easy now to scoff at the conservatism of ABT's spring repertory at the Metropolitan Opera House, which consists almost entirely of such evening-length classics. No one should forget, however, that most of these works, which are the backbone of the ballet repertory, have become available to us in living memory.

During most of the 20th century, the only full-length classics that our fledgling Western ballet companies possessed were "The Sleeping Beauty," "Swan Lake" and "Giselle." The rest were locked up behind the Iron Curtain. ABT, founded in 1940, did not acquire "Don Quixote" until 1978 and "La Bayadere" until 1980, thanks to defectors Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova. "Le Corsaire" arrived in 1998, and an authentic and successful "Raymonda" (as opposed to Rudolf Nureyev's 1975 version) did not appear until 2004.

New masterpieces are a prospect devoutly to be wished for, but it would be foolhardy to discount or, God forbid, discard this precious classical repertory, which offers a school and a proving ground for ballerinas. All these 19th- and 20th-century revivals have given ABT a base from which to work. They have conferred an identity on the company and on the art of dance in the way that only living history can, and they have inspired dancers, audiences and even contemporary choreographers with a vision of classicism's multiple, branching possibilities.

He also discusses Ratmansky's limitations and gauche traits as a choreographer, the subject of another essay to spice up your afternoon.

As for politics, it seems to be all Palin and polls, polls and Palin, but as Chris Floyd's Empire Burlesque reminds us, a new gate of hell has just swung open, yet another chapter in the endless endgame.

Greetings from a screened-in front porch in the bird capital of Cape May Point, where it seems to be mockingbird Monday, based on the flashing white patches witnessed this morning. The slow-moving traffic sounds tranquillized against the rising-falling rattle of the cicadas, whose volume levels sometimes reach the overwrought stage only to diminish to the music of a single maraca. Since I am doing my best to detox from information overload and de-stress from too many data points to the brain, I'm restricting my diet of newspapers, cable news shows, and political blogs, noting only that the note of bipartisan outreach in McCain's acceptance speech is belied by the ad spots running on the Philley channels featuring Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Byron Dorman, and other familiar Democratic faces--McCain's senatorial colleagues--as members of a cabal to tax you the innocent American down to the last drop of blood should Obama win the White House. I've seen no comparable anti-McCain/anti-Republican ads, though maybe I've been catching the wrong channels.

It was amusing how color-coordinated last night's episode of Mad Men was, so many notes of orange echoing the solar orange of the Rothko painting that occupied such a prominent, ambiguous place in the show's evolving fascination with itself at the expense of plot, plausibility, characterization, tempo, etc. It was very Thomas Frank Conquest of Cool how the show connected the SDS Port Huron statement to an ad presentation intended to give coffee-drinking hip cachet to a new young bold generation, but the pitch session itself was too limply written and the ad jingle they came up with so lacking in Sixties pop catchiness that it was hard to believe the clients would be persuaded, much less wowed. Intellectually, Mad Men has its concepts and coordinates mapped out, but dramatically there's a hazy circumspection that makes the series seem as if it's perpetually hovering at the periphery of what it really wants to say and do, as if everybody's waiting for a cryptographer to show up to crack the secret code.

Speaking of which, YouTube has an amazing conversation about Lolita between Vladimir Nabokov, literature's supreme cartographer, and critic Lionel Trilling that is one of the great archaeological finds, yet vigorously alive. For me the great surprise is seeing Trilling, not as the modernism-haunted Holy Ghost of later photographs or the neurosis-riddled, moth-eaten bookworm-who-wished-he-was-Hemingway of posthumous memoirs, but as a human-scaled individual with his own slightly deflecting charisma, wielding a cigarette. Trilling fascinates me, even more than Nabokov, whose worldliness and self-assurance ("the Black Swan of Zurich," Gore Vidal called him) strains the vest buttons; Trilling (here relaxed and genial) is an ongoing drama waged very deep within.

Over at The New Criterion, David Yezzi has a moving yet unmawkish tribute to another besieged spirit, the novelist, poet, and critic (his collection The Castle of Indolence, which I brought with me to Cape May, is shamingly smart) Thomas M. Disch, who committed suicide on July 4th of this year and whose brave wit and rangy intelligence will be missed by all who knew him and those who didn't (like me):

Tom’s death closed the book on a particular kind of New York bohemianism that once flourished (in an era of cheaper rents) and is now largely extinct or shunted out of sight. Literary New York is a poorer place, its poets mostly professors desperate for preferment. Few challenge the status quo or generate an incorrect thought. Tom Disch was a true original, like Guy Davenport or … who? There are so few. It’s not that one agrees with everything such writers think and say (they can be, by their very natures, contrary and provocative). Rather, one admires the cast of mind that refuses to mince or recycle prepackaged notions and emotions. Tom Disch’s novels and poems may be applied as touchstones against cant and mealy-mouthed self-deception. Vigilance will be much harder with him gone.

Not only can Sarah Palin field-dress a moose, but she can shave 344 points off the Dow with a single speech.

Well done, Medium Rea!

Sarah Palin: Bad for America, bad for wildlife, bad for your 401K.

In a performance worthy of Patti LuPone ripping the beating heart out of "Rose's Turn," Sarah Palin--holding a rifle aloft in one hand and a hockey stick in the other--electrified the Republican convention last night, galvanizing the base, breathing hot new life into the McCain campaign, and wowing every pundit with a penis in his pants.

At least that's what I gather. I was watching tennis, then caught the replay of Project Runway featuring Diane von Furstenberg, who once had my forearm in a falcon death grip.

But here's what me don't understand. If the Sarah Palin speech was such a triumphant storybook game-changing fortune-reversing event, why, as I glance at the TV screen this afternoon, is the Dow down nearly 250 points [update: 265 points] [update update: CNBC now has a breaking news item on the Dow plunging back into bear territory--nearly 300 points down]?

According the Kudlow Rules, the Dow should have responded to Palin's shot in the arm to the Republican party with an upward spike. Instead, it dove deeper into the valley.

When the Democratic convention opened and the Dow dropped, Larry Kudlow asked, "Are the Denver Dems downing the stock market today? The Dow is off 230 points, starting right from the get-go. So-called market analysts are blaming financials and the credit crunch as they always do."

Inspector Larry had other suspects in mind. The real culprits responsible for the drop were the tax policies and big-gov image of the Obama-Biden-Pelosi triad. "With the Denver Dems strutting their stuff, this could be a bumpy week for stocks."

Well, now the Republicans are strutting their stuff, with Palin their biggest strutter, and guess what?--the market got even bumpier.

Now the so-called market analysts that Kudlow patronizes might attribute today's drop to the jobs report, but if one subscribes to the ideological interpretations of stock moves that Kudlow practices and assumes that the Wall Street averages reflect the direction of political fortunes, then today's drop since the opening means:

The Market either didn't like what Palin had to say, or thinks that despite its rhetorical fireworks it was a political loser.

Because if you believe what Kudlow believes--that the markets want the Republicans to win, and go down with the prospect of Democrats winning--then this week's Dow losing streak signifies a solidifying consensus among portfolio managers and traders that the McCain campaign is riding to defeat, despite Sarah Palin's diamond-tipped-nippled bravura.

If Kudlow were consistent, that's the lesson he would draw, instead of only citing market moves that conform with his pin-striped demagoguery.

What else about last evening's recital of sneer and loathing from Giuliani and Palin and the screw-loose Romney? Well, clearly the Republicans intend to race-bait "community organizing," converting it into a synonym for rabble-rousing, as if H. Rap Brown were still on the loose. Billmon has more, and Al Giordano dubs Palin the anti-Erin Brockovich, whose fake populism with a corporate shellac is about to run smack into the real aroused thing:

I knew something was "off" with the Palin presentation as I watched it last night but was slow to identify the precise moment that she blew it. The mortal error of Palin's speech was the attack on community organizers. Perhaps because I have self-identified as a community organizer for my entire adult life - with the scar tissue upon scar tissue that makes me used to and unconcerned with the typical belittling response from petty bureaucrats, governmental and corporate - I forgot about how the community that is organized takes special offense when some apparatchik goes after their own organizer.

Community organizers like Reginald and Mildred Martin in Houston, Texas were the recipients of Palin's snide attack. The angry reaction of from their son, Roland, who happens to be a CNN commentator, is indicative of something that happened in neighborhoods and farmlands throughout every corner of the country. "She mocked community organizers," an angry Martin told the nation, "the GOP does not give a flip about community organizers. It means they don't care about you... wanna talk about small town values? Don't you dare criticize the people who fight for community people who have community issues."

It takes a real man to admit when he's wrong, and I'm an approximation of a real man.

I confess I didn't think she was up to the challenge, but I underestimated her, she proved herself up to the task, so let me say in all crow-eating humility:

Congratulations, Serena Williams!

Spare us the Darkness at Noon histrionics and stop your sniveling whining.

The party and conservative movement that puked up Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Roger Stone has no right to be retreating to the fainting couch and feigning lividity.

I have never seen, and I admit that I could never have imagined, such shameful, out-of-control, frenzied, angry, condescending, and pathetic journalistic malpractice.

[snip]

The spectacle reveals a deep rot at the heart of the political press, and has been among the most shameful chapters in the history of modern American journalism.

Poor thing, you must have been innocently snowbanked in a coma during the Monica madness, when both Clintons were accused of a baroque variety of crimes and perversions every single night on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, and likewise during the Chandra Levy saga (whose disappearance was tied to Clinton's shirt-tails by the late Barbara Olson, Ann Coulter, Debbie Schussel, and Rush Limbaugh as another damning example of the rapacious appetite of the Clintonesque sexual predator), not to mention the rightwing blog witchhunt of Graeme Foster's family.

What's happened this week is a thin patch on those rabid hostilities, and if the Palin leggo-my-preggo saga has "legs," it's because it's the perfect tabloid story and tabloids aren't stupid--they recognize a gusher when they see it, just as the late-night comics do.

This is what happens when you pull an unknown Northern Exposure Karen Walker out of the rabbit hat for the second most powerful job in the nation. Had Sarah Palin been on the rubber-chicken circuit for years, as Ronald Reagan had, we would have become familiar with her and her family, much as we did with (say) the Romney fraternity over the long course of the primary campaign. But she was sprung on the country out of nowhere, and just about the first thing we learn about this family-values matriarch is that her unwed teenage daughter is pregnant (then we learn that the governor used the line-item veto to slash funds for teenage mothers--what a monster).

Levin claims that the "reigning emotion" in the politicized press has been "anger," but in truth the primary reaction was astonishment, followed by bafflement, followed by the undisguised glee of a gift package being dropped in their laps. It wasn't Campbell Brown's tough questioning of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds that ticked off the McCain camp, it was her laughing at his jejune, dweebish answers--that's what pierces.

If Sarah Palin becomes a national joke, a punchline in no need of a setup, all the huffy umbrage in the world won't be able to shore her up, even if Bristol offers to give birth in a manger.

I ended up watching more of the Republican Convention than I intended because the Roddick-Gonzalez quarterfinal was the usual Roddick thumping match--impressive but not pleasurable to watch in its fitful energy and fidgety mannerisms (all that shirt-tugging). During the breaks I drifted over to the speeches, which were soporific and lacking in preservatives. Fred Thompson never quite got a rhythm going and his retelling of McCain's torture as a captive in Vietnam was vivid and forceful, but it reminded me of the testimonials to Bob Dole's suffering after he came back from war (fellow soldiers cavalierly stubbing out their cigarettes in his cast)--a tribute to character and fortitude, but irrelevant as to why we should elect them president now, forties years later.

Lieberman's speech redefined unctuousness. He lubricated unctuousness with his own personal brand of smiling smarm. As a few bloggers have noted, this was a speech that didn't mention President Bush (neither did Thompson's, I believe) but used President Clinton as an applause line. It wasn't much applause but it was more than he got when he praised McCain for trying to address thorny issues such as global warming, campaign finance, and immigration reform--issues that the Rush Limbaugh fans either consider bogus (global warming) or feel McCain was on the wrong side of (campaign finance, immigration). The reaction in the hall to Lieberman's speech reminded me of the SCTV bit in which Love Boat's Gavin MacLeod (Joe Flaherty) pays tribute to One Day at a Time's Bonnie Franklin as her face is flashed on the big screen:

"I think she's a helluva entertainer, folks--don't you?"

Deathly silence.

Moving right along...

As the camera snapshotted the delegates during the Lieberman speech, it underscored what a tired, old congregation has been gathered, the Republicans never more looking like the Party of the Past, yesterday's news. It's bad enough listening to fake Dixieland, it's worse having to look at it.

As for tonight, it's apparent that Sarah Palin will be given the Star Is Born treatment if she shows gloss, poise, and confidence, and has a few good lines to bat into the upper deck. After Thompson, Lieberman, and, tonight, Giuliani, any sign of animation will be hailed like a revival of Gypsy.

But Palin's speech may not be the national traffic-stopper the political junkies are anticipating because this is a big TV night with a lot of competition: the return of America's Next Top Model, Project Runway, the 2 hour season premiere of Bones, the Williams sisters' match at the US Open, etc. All of these will chip away attention, offering distracting alternatives that the Democratic Convention didn't face.

And then there is the possible distraction that will be dramatically present there in the hall. Byron York reports today at NRO's Corner over concerns regarding the strapping self-described "f-----' redneck" who got the hockey puck into the Bristol's net, if I may misappropriate TBogg's merry construction. What will be his photo-op role tonight? York writes:

On a question that is flying around here in St. Paul: What about the presence of one Levi Johnston, the 18 year-old father of Bristol Palin's unborn child? At the end of this kind of speech, there is usually a lot of applause, music, and the candidate's family up on stage. Johnston is in St. Paul, I am told, but there has been no final decision about what he will do tonight.

"This is not an issue that we're going to act ashamed or scared about," my source told me. "Despite the media coverage of this, voters still have such a great response to [Sarah Palin]. This just makes her more real." So, I asked, does that mean Johnston will be on stage with the Palin family? "At this point we don't know whether he will be up on stage," I was told. "It remains to be seen. There hasn't been a decision made yet."

Perhaps I'm focusing on an irrelevant issue, but the presence, or non-presence, of Johnston on the stage tonight strikes me as important. It's one thing for delegates to be understanding and compassionate about the fix these two teenagers have gotten themselves into. It's another to actually celebrate it. [my italics] And, given what we've learned in the last few days, if Johnston is up on stage with his girlfriend and the Palin family, and Republicans are wildly cheering, it will certainly look like they are celebrating this situation.

This bizarre celebratory note from so many social conservatives and the Christian right is what has Lawrence Auster reeling within the shell casing of his sober demeanor. After dipping into the streaming comments at Lucianne.com regarding the Palin saga, he resurfaces, flabbergasted:

Over and over, there's no disapproval at all of Bristol's pregnancy. To the contrary, there is congratulations! Since when do conservatives issue congratulations on an unwed teen pregnancy! Since when is it good news that a 17 year old high school student will be caring for her new born baby while attending high school? Since when is it good news that she must marry her 18 year old boy friend, two children wholly unprepared for marriage and parenthood? And since when is it good news that the 17 girl who is being forced to get married is already the prime care giver to her five month old special-needs baby brother because their mother is too busy running the state of Alaska and now running for vice president?

Just take that in. Bristol is already the primary caregiver for five-month old Downs' syndrome baby Trig. Defenders of Sarah Palin at VFR have even boasted that this is a good thing, it shows the hearty frontier spirit of the Palin family. Sarah is too busy to care for Trig. She never seems to hold Trig. Bristol holds Trig in all the photos, holds him very tight. And now Bristol, a 17 year old high school pupil whom Sarah relies on to take care of Trig, is herself pregnant and has to take care of her own pregnancy and upcoming child as well as her upcoming marriage to an 18 year old boy. And all this is great! All this shows what great, life-affirming, genuine American-stock folk the Palins are.

It's all good. Why? Because Bristol's baby is not being aborted. The non-abortion turns the unmarried pregnancy and the upcoming teen-age marriage into a blessed event!

Now my interest is theatrically piqued as to how Levi Johnston will be received if his presence is announced in the hall. I trust he wouldn't acknowledge the crowd with an Andy Roddick fist-pump; that would be so wrong, under the circumstances. And while I certainly wouldn't want or expect teenage expectant mother Bristol to be ostracized, the object of stern pointed fingers, a standing O by the Republican faithful would make for a strange spectacle after so many years of jibes at "San Francisco Democrats" and their wanton ways. Perhaps Bill Bennett should simply heave a big sigh and concede that the culture wars are over and his side got reamed.

Updated: Wow. The cable newsers have just shown the McCain and Palin clans posing for a group shot on the tarmac, the wind blowing everyone's bangs astray, with Levi and pregnant Bristol demonstratively holding hands. The McCainiacs apparently have decided to go full metal soap opera. So now the theme of the Republican convention isn't Defeating Obama or Drill, Drill, Drill, it's "Let's Rally 'Round These Two Love-Crazed Kids and Show Them We Care." I'm not sure that's a winning formula for the fall, but the exotic, tribal ways of the Republican base are alien to us ballet-goers, so maybe Bristol's baby bump will translate into a bump in the polls for the Republicans, the path to victory strewn with baby diapers.

It's Viva Viagra! night at the Republican National Convention as Joe Lieberman and Fred Thompson take to the floor to honor the late Porter Wagoner. I'd love to watch and witness democracy unfold but US Open tennis calls, with Roger Federer embroiled in a battle royal as I type.

John Podhoretz, all a-bristle, came up with an idea to bail John McCain out of his Sarah Palin morass. I suspect he fetched it out of a gumball machine, but here goes:

The political task, then, for the McCain ticket is to overwhelm the efforts to portray this as a mess. How? First, by the judicious use of sentiment — the notion that bringing a new child into the world is a gift, especially when the parents are going to marry and raise that child. Second, with really substantive speeches by Palin and McCain — including a major surprise policy announcement of some sort in the McCain speech. Like McCain is now going to support drilling in the Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge.

Seems to be there's been a little bit too much drilling up in Alaska lately, if ya know what I mean.

And, really, can there be anything more crassly cynical and feckless than advocating the spoiling of a nature refuge as a diversionary ploy to get everyone's mind off of the baby on board?

Drilling in ANWR has become the all-purpose Republican demagogue answer. Falling poll numbers? Drill in ANWR. Waxy yellow buildup? Drill in ANWR. Unsightly facial hair? Drill in ANWR. Shitty vice presidential candidate? Drill, drill, drill in ANWR.

I would call it disgusting, but Bill Kristol took all the flavor out of "disgusting" for me, made it old-maidish.

Federer won, a thrilling deuce battle making all the diff.

Say what you will about Al and Peggy Bundy, slovenly occupying the sofa lo those many seasons on Married with Children, but they negligently raised a fine, slutty, airhead, bare-midriff daughter--I speak of course of Christina Applegate's divine Kelly--who managed to make it through her teen years without a baby in tow. Which is more than can be said for the unfortunate daughter of the Republican Party's poster mom for abstinence only.

Jake Tapper asks: "What would the response be if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and his wife Michelle had a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter?"

I can answer that. Mona Charen, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin would sprout bat wings and fangs and start divebombing, Peggy Noonan would issue a pained sigh that would ruffle nun's robes from here to Hoboken, Laura Ingraham and Bill Bennett would engage in a finger-wagging contest to condemn our loose licentious liberal culture, and Jennifer Rubin at Commentary's Contentions would crash into the wall doing cartwheels.

According to Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugs (no link), it's actually Annie Lebowitz's fault that Palin's daughter went astray, something to do with the tarting up of Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair. Conservatives used to make fun of liberals for blaming everything on "society" ("It's society's fault that so many young men turn to crime"), but "the culture" has become their default setting for culpability. Practice what you preach doesn't seem to have occured to them.

A notable exception is Lawrence Auster, a model of political and intellectual consistency who refuses to board the Sarah Palin love train with the NRO crowd and that malleable lump of Jello-O known as the conservative base. Unlike Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, et al, he discerns the larger, more important issue--the arrogant, half-cocked way McCain has stuck the Republican Party with an almost capricious vice presidential selection, a fait accompli:

The issue is whether McCain should have chosen as his vice presidential running mate—and thus required the Republican party to approve that choice—a woman who has all these issues going on in her family. The issue is that McCain chose her and announced her selection, thus getting all the Republicans lined up behind her, with full knowledge that shortly after he announced her selection, there would be the further announcement that her unmarried daughter was pregnant. The McCain campaign itself told Fox News that McCain knew about the situation when he selected her. What kind of conduct is that by the leader of a party? Is this really what we want to be dealing with in the middle of a presidential campaign? Are conservatives now to raise as their co-leader and new icon a career mother whose unmarried pregnant teenage daughter is getting married while the mother is running for vice president? McCain has put the conservative base in a position where it has to bend itself out of shape to maintain its support for the Republican ticket.

He also understands that cultural conservatism is really a single-issue bandwagon:

All that the evangelical and Catholic conservatives care about is opposition to abortion. All that's required for them to be happy is an illegitimate or defective pregnancy, followed by birth. They have no vision of social order, no vision of an overarching good, but have reduced all goods to the good of avoiding abortion. Which means that they embrace every kind of disorder, so long as rejection of abortion is thrown into the mix.

As I've already pointed out, the subject here is not the personal situation of Bristol. The subject is that a woman with Bristol's situation in her family should not be running for vice president. A woman with an illegitimately pregnant 17 year old daughter should have kept it private by not running for vice president. Instead, she brings it before the world, requiring all Republicans and conservatives to approve of the situation in order to maintain their support for her.

The distinction between private and public has completely ended. The public sphere has been completely subsumed by the private sphere. So that if someone's messy private sphere meets the conservatives' requirements and presses their buttons (Palin's daughter's illegitimate pregnancy, followed by marriage and birth), then the conservatives celebrate that person and approve her for the second highest office in the land.

That's why it's futile, showboatty, and disingenuous for Bill Bennett and Bill Kristol to angrily insist (as I saw them do today) that this is a "private" matter that ought to be left private, dammit. We're past that point now. No, I don't want to see Bristol Palin persecuted by the media; leave her personally in peace. But the soap opera of which this story is an unfolding part is symptomatic of so many things (McCain's judgement, Sarah Palin's reproductive stance, the paucity of what we actually know about the governor herself) that it's not going to be stuffed back into Pandora's box no matter how "disgusting" Kristol finds the discussion.

The question is, What else about Sarah Palin don't we know? Has the biggest secret been aired, or are we in for a cascade of revelations worthy of August: Osage County?

....or fuck buddy?

John McCain, using the touchy-feely language usually associated with Match.com ads, described his vice presidential pick Sarah Palin as "a partner and soul mate," though to his credit he neglected to call her the wind beneath his sails and sigh, "She completes me." But it doesn't take a Sherlock to deduce from this video (courtesy of The Jed Report), which shows McCain Freudian-fiddling with his wedding ring as he glances sidelong at his running (soul_mate, that his unconscious longs to sack the Republican Party's earthmother savior in the end zone, if I may borrow a football metaphor in honor of the upcoming NFL season.

This vignette, where the subtext reveals itself through obsessive reviewing as in a De Palma film (with Julie Andrews' cool trill deployed as ironic counterpoint), is worryingly reminiscent of AMC's Mad Men, where alpha male Don Draper, though married to a cool picture-perfect blonde desirous to please him, loosens his tie and undoes his shoe laces for one saucy brunette after another, risking everything for a randy bite of the forbidden apple.

Given Sarah Palin's handiness with a hunting rifle, it would be tragic indeed for her to "mistake" Cindy McCain for a rampaging caribou on the campaign trail--it would give rise to all kinds of suspicions, perhaps plunging even Peggy Noonan into a crisis of faith.