And then the thread was hijacked by Benjamin and Shmuel arguing that something was acceptable or not racist if it fell under some undefined level of general harm on average. That was alternately mind-numbing and entertaining.

The Saddleback event was aimed specifically at Evangelicals. Many of the questions were phrased in Evangelical buzzwords. I don’t see how this can have made much of an impression on Catholics. I don’t theink it even made much of an impression on Balck Protestants, because they probbaly didn’t pay much attention to the event. That’s all.

Paging David Lindsay’s nurse: Please bring your patient back to his room. He is overdue for his medication, thank you.

What’s smart about this simple and cheap (short running time) ad is that it connects with the Hillary campaign that will take place at the Dem Convention. Protests are expected. The implication is that Obama hasn’t picked Hillary because Hillary has sussed him out.

Whereas, “Poor Boy” Biden sees a lucrative job as Veep and is willing to forget he said Obama had no experience. “Presidency no place for on-the-job training” he said.

I’d love to see the Republicans running that 3:00am ad with the phone ringing and Obama shouting out “Michelle, will you get that!”

Silly argument, Emmanuel. Having a white ancestor that one hasn’t chosen is not at all the same thing as deliberately adopting a child from a different race.

Ah, I see. Voluntary actions are the criterion now? So voluntarily adopting a child of a (visibly) different race counts as evidence that McCain isn’t a racist? Well, then, voluntarily using crude ethnic slurs against Asians, in public no less, must count as evidence for the prosecution mustn’t it?

This is like Cameran endorsing the BNP, but saying he respects their influence over White people, but doesn’t appreciate their racism.

Wright is a low life race-baiter. His praise of Hammas and adoration of an unabashed antisemitic racist and Islamist will drag Obama down, as will his association with crooks and terrorists. By the end of this campaign, he’d be lucky to get elected to Dog Catcher.

Not obvious why you think that’s the case: Wright didn’t endorse Farrakhan, that I’ve seen; he simply said that Farrakhan had used his influence to do some good. Adoration and endorsement are hardly appropriate descriptions for his attitude. Not, of course, that this has anything to do with Obama himself.

Again, it is really difficult to see where this guilt by association argument is going, and where it would take us if it were applied consistently. Some Catholic clergy have recently behaved very badly, as we all know. But surely nobody is arguing that those Catholics – yes, even Catholics in public positions – who chose to maintain membership of their parishes through the scandals approved of their clergy’s activities?

Randy Scheunemann signed the Project for the New American Century letter to Bill Clinton demanding war against Iraq; that was four years before 9/11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9/11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq, which had undoubtedly had nothing to do with 9/11, and war against which the PNAC, including Scheunemann, had demanded fully four years earlier. He was executive director of the old crook Ahmad Chalabi’s “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq”.

And now, Scheunemann is John McCain’s nominee in waiting to be National Security Adviser. Between January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid him $70,000. During those same 15 months, his Orion Strategies was paid $290,000 by the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili, in return for NATO membership, or at least the guarantee that America would go to war to defend Georgia even if Saakashvili launched some idiotic incursion into Abkhazia or South Ossetia and thus earned himself the wrath of Russia. He nearly succeeded. As National Security Adviser, he would succeed.

Scheunemann’s two-man lobbying firm received $730,000 from Georgia from 2001 onwards. He was also paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same for them. And in their cases, he did succeed. Thanks to Scheunemann, America and Britain are now treaty-bound to intervene militarily in Latvia if Russia goes in to halt some violence against the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians living there. Scheunemann arranged this state of affairs for cold, hard cash.

Treason.

There is simply no other word for it.

Furthermore, McCain is looking at his own Georgia. The rich, white eastern provinces of Bolivia are on the brink of a Rightist secession. These are not people who speak English as their first language, as the South Ossetians speak Russian. Nor are they American citizens, as the South Ossetians are Russian citizens.

But just look at the people to whom John McCain is appealing, as Hillary Clinton did. With Robert Kagan as Secretary of State, not just diplomatic recognition, but military intervention, would be guaranteed. After all, is this not the backyard, the near abroad?

And did you all hear The Westminster Hour? What is becoming of it?This week, we first got some loon from the wholly discredited Adam Smith Institute, given fully a quarter of an hour to bang on about how it was all the fault of the rabid Socialism of George Bush.

And then on came some loon from the wholly discredited Henry Jackson Society (previously assumed to be as defunct as the wholly discredited Euston Manifesto) to demand a war against Russia, as well as the vast transfer of public spending from public services and the relief of poverty to such people’s own thoroughly pecuniary military-industrial interests.

Of course, they can’t both be right, although they can certainly both be wrong, which they are.

But see your license fees being spent.

Oh, don’t worry Gene, I’m not a delicate little flower (like a certain ‘Aid Worker’ who occasionally posts here, for example). You may get carried away with the fairies at the first sign of seemingly superior oratorical excess, but I’m more of the Bertie Wooster school myself.