Politico picks the "best quotes" of 2010.

And the definition of "best" seems to be: the speaker was a politico whose own statement defined him/her in a negative way — e.g., "I'm not a witch."

Too bad no one ever comes out with brilliantly wise and witty epigrams anymore.

Politico, Mike Allen, and Jim VandeHei need to "man up," says Sarah Palin.

"They're jokes... they're making stuff up again."

Here's the article that's annoying her: "Next for GOP leaders: Stopping Sarah Palin."

Interviews with advisers to the main 2012 presidential contenders and with other veteran Republican operatives make clear they see themselves on a common, if uncoordinated, mission of halting the momentum and credibility Palin gained with conservative activists by plunging so aggressively into this year’s midterm campaigns....

"There is a determined, focused establishment effort … to find a candidate we can coalesce around who can beat Sarah Palin," said one prominent and longtime Washington Republican. "We believe she could get the nomination, but Barack Obama would crush her."

Christopher Hitchens, meet Ron Johnson.

So Christopher Hitchens is expatiating in Slate about the dearth of decent political candidates in U.S. elections. He talks about talking to his "hosts in Connecticut" and his friends in Washington D.C., where he's lived for 3 decades. And he casts his eyes about to the states of New York and California. Having thus surveyed the American landscape, he opines that the "enthusiastic and intelligent people" are no longer "willing to give up potentially more lucrative careers" because of the risk to "their career and their family life" and "the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college." You just can't get "normal" people to run for office anymore.

What about Ron Johnson? Here's Politico, presenting the GOP Senate candidate in Wisconsin as emblematic of the new sort of politician who has emerged from the Tea Party movement:

Until last fall, Ron Johnson was just an intensely private guy with a good business and a nice house on Lake Winnebago. He kept a stack of Wall Street Journals next to his bed, folded just right so he wouldn't forget to read columnist Dan Henninger on this or Paul Gigot on that. A trim, silver-haired businessman, he was rich but unknown, even in this, his hometown, despite big donations to Lourdes High School and his thriving plastics company here.

Running for office never crossed his mind...

The Tea Party of Oshkosh was pulling together a rally for a fall event, featuring Joe the Plumber, the working man who emerged as a folk hero to small government conservatives in 2008. They needed a businessman to talk about what they saw as the scary, Big Brother approach to ObamaCare - and Johnson was happy to oblige. His daughter Carrie was born with a heart defect and saved by two doctors - a story anyone following this campaign has heard many times in ads and speeches ever since. So, he let loose with an attack on the demonization of doctors and, more broadly, the mortal threat to American exceptionalism.

The new law “will destroy our health care system,” Johnson said in an interview. “I am totally convinced of that.”

In hindsight, Johnson, in that speech, was capturing a major mood change in American politics that swept up not only business owners but also anti-government conservatives and skeptical independents. These groups, by late summer of 2009, had turned against the president and his party – and never returned.

Read the whole thing. You too, Mr. Hitchens.

Oh, it's not as if Hitchens didn't think of the Tea Party. After telling us about his elite circle of people who are so smart and informed but disinclined to enter the political fray, he does acknowledge that there is much more going on these days: his observation "may seem to discount or ignore the apparent flood of new political volunteers who go to make up the Tea Party movement." You can see the gears turning in his brain as he tries to get to the end of this article that began so easily, built on what looks to me like dinner-table conversations with his friends. How to dismiss these pesky teafolk of the flyover realms? Ah! He proclaims:

They come from a long and frankly somewhat boring tradition of anti-incumbency and anti-Washington rhetoric, and they are rather an insult to anyone with anything of a political memory. 

They are an insult. These people aren't worth talking to or about. Why, they aren't even people at all. They are an insult. 

Since when is it truly insurgent to rail against the state of affairs in the nation's capital? How long did it take Gingrich's "rebel" forces in the mid-1990s to become soft-bottomed incumbents in their turn? 

Questions. Questions. Speaking of untoned asses, shouldn't you have to get off yours and go out and talk to Americans in places like Wisconsin? One answer is that Hitchens is gravely ill, but he's still pouring out political commentary, and he's not asking for pity or showing any. He's as imperious as ever, and the respect he deserves for that bravery and effort ought to come in the form of serious engagement with his actual words he is... spewing.

Glenn Greenwald thinks I "thundered."

Hmmm. Here's my post, in writing of course. No audio track from me. If Greenwald heard thunder, does that say more about me or about Greenwald? He writes:

All of this, needless to say, is being depicted from predictable corners as proof that Terrorists do not belong in real courts. National Review's Andy McCarthy complained that "civilian due-process standards are crippling the government’s case" and that "we are intentionally tying our hands behind our backs and running an unnecessarily high risk of acquittal in a case involving a war criminal." Wisconsin Law Professor Ann Althouse thundered: "I want to hear President Obama explain his decision and the judge's decision to the American people." Politico announced that Judge Kaplan's ruling "could deal a major setback to those who favor civilian criminal trials for Guantanamo Bay prisoners, including those suspected in the September 11 attacks." McCarthy lamented: "the slam dunk has become a horse race, one the government could actually lose."

Greenwald must think that there isn't a satisfying explanation for the judge's decision that Obama — an experienced constitutional law teacher — could provide to Americans. Hearing "thunder" in my measured remark happened — it seems to me — because of a background belief that the law is indefensible. It's so interesting to me when someone lets that show. Fascinating!

Ben Smith at Politico stoops to using his blog to promote a "new, progressive group" that's hawking T-shirts and coffee mugs.

So embarrassing. Even if his dearest dream in life is to fuck the Tea Party, wouldn't he want to go about it in a slightly sophisticated way?

"An obscure assistant professor teaching in a middling university writes an opinion piece comparing the Tea Party movement to the John Birch Society..."

"... indeed, even to the Ku Klux Klan — and Politico Arena asks us to take it seriously for comment?!"

Cato via Instapundit. I'd already seen that piece — "Tea party: Dark side of conservatism" —  but I hadn't blogged it because I didn't want to impinge on my good mood to take the trouble to summon up the degree of contempt it would have required. The writer, Charles Postel, an assistant professor of history at San Francisco State University, wields 19th-century history for the purpose of demonstrating that the Tea Party is racist, and says things like "The tea party leaders disavow any racist appeals from their ranks. But historically, whether it was the JBS or Goldwater, the radical right has often had a soft spot for bigots." So, in other words, the Tea Party must be prejudiced about people like this because he's prejudiced about people like that. All purveyed under the banner of academic expertise.

"Look for President Obama to name his Supreme Court pick Monday, and look for it to be Solicitor General Elena Kagan...."

Says Mike Allen at Politico:

The pick isn’t official, but top White House aides will be shocked if it’s otherwise. Kagan’s relative youth (50) is a huge asset for the lifetime post. And President Obama considers her to be a persuasive, fearless advocate who would serve as an intellectual counterweight to Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia, and could lure swing Justice Kennedy into some coalitions. The West Wing may leak the pick to AP’s Ben Feller on the later side Sunday, then confirm it for others for morning editions. For now, aides say POTUS hasn’t decided, to their knowledge.

Well, then, Jeffrey Rosen, lick your wounds, and welcome Justice Kagan!

"White House in P.R. 'panic' over spill."

Says Politico.

They can't pontificate about Bush and Katrina anymore. Wouldn't it be amazing if Obama were to empathize with Bush's predicament? That would change the tenor of political discourse in Washington.

WaPo vindicates Cheney.

Per Politico, WaPo describes "the transformation of [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its 'preeminent source' on al-Qaeda":

This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.

Critics of "harsh interrogation techniques" — they, of course, call it torture — bolster their moral arguments with the pragmatic argument that it doesn't even work. How unusual it is for the media to disillusion us about that and force the moralists to get by on moral ideals alone!

ADDED: Obsidian Wings quotes me and comes up with 4 questions, but the 4 questions have absolutely nothing to do with the point I made. Here are the questions:

(1) Is beating a detainee to death with a metal flashlight torture? Or merely a "harsh interrogation technique"? (2) Is beating detainees with butts of rifles torture? Or merely a "harsh interrogation technique"? (3) Is choking a detainee with your bare hands until he almost passes out torture? Or merely a "harsh interrogation technique"? (4) Is threatening to rape wives and murder children torture? Or merely a "harsh interrogation technique"?

These questions are about the definition of "torture," but my point is that the Washington Post has said that the techniques — whatever you want to call them — were effective, and, if this is true, it means that people who oppose their use are deprived of a pragmatic argument they normally make. I'm not saying anything about the choice of which term ought to be used, but I do observe that it is the usual practice for people try to make arguments by labeling. Saying "torture" to argue against the techniques is like saying "death panels" to alarm people about the experts who, under ObamaCare, will (it seems) decide who will get which medical treatments. I don't approach these issues by asking what does the word "torture" mean, with the assumption that if it is within that definition, then we should never do it. I would look directly at the question what should we do and not do. I'm not going to weight the issue one way or the other by deciding first whether to say "torture." Let's look straight at the issue and not get abstract and linguistic.

"It is because I love Alaska this much... that I feel it is my duty to avoid the unproductive, typical, politics as usual, lame duck session..."

"How does that benefit you? No, with this decision now, I will be able to fight even harder for you, for what is right, for truth. And I have never felt like you need a title to do that."

Here's the transcript — as printed in Huffington Post, missing innumerable commas and periods, because you wouldn't want to interfere with the incoherent-rant feeling HuffPo readers crave when the speaker is dumb, crazy Sarah.

Let's watch the whole thing:





ADDED: The Politico's headline is "Sarah Palin resigns, blasts press, 'starlets.'" Now, here's the text in the speech with the word "starlets":

Let me tell you, Alaskans really need to stick together on this with new leadership in this area especially, encouraging new leadership... got to stiffen your spine to do what's right for Alaska when the pressure mounts, because you're going to see anti-hunting, anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood and here's how they do it. They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets, they use Alaska as a fundraising tool for their anti-second amendment causes. Stand strong, and remind them patriots will protect our guaranteed, individual right to bear arms, and by the way, Hollywood needs to know, we eat, therefore we hunt.

In the effort to make Palin look bad, Politico exposes itself as a poor (or dishonest) reader. Palin doesn't "blast" "starlets" at all. She says that "They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets..." Who are "they"? "Anti-hunting, anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood." She's talking about powerful media elites, not the "delicate, tiny, very talented" young people they use to convey their message.

It's compelling when a beautiful woman (Palin) seems to criticize other beautiful women (the starlets), so it's important to get it straight. Palin is — or at least appears to be — conveying her own message, but the starlets she criticizes are — as she puts it — used by others. Also, the starlets are "delicate" and "tiny," but Palin is... oh, maybe she too is delicate and tiny! But she is minimizing them, both in their individual agency and in their size. Now, there's implicit criticism in there, but she is blasting Hollywood generally, not the starlets. She's needling the starlets a bit.

"For scoops and analysis, it's a war of all-against-all."

Politico explains it all.

Stodgy old TNR whines about how cool Politco is.

That's how I read this. You have to win readers, you losers. Up your game.