Fish for Friday

I have some thoughts about [Wednesday evening's] debate that I haven't heard or read yet. Several media observers have said that Obama looked ill-prepared or insufficiently motivated, that he had the look of wanting to be elsewhere. I didn't get those impressions. Rather, I thought he was truly rattled. He had no teleprompter, of course, and his dependence on that device has been widely mentioned ever since he became a national figure.
Romney spoke skeins of smooth, continuous thought, while Obama spoke hesitatingly and without assurance. He clearly had trouble focusing. To make matters worse, Romney did his Etch-a-Sketch trick several times in course of the evening and rattled Obama even more! Obama couldn't strike back because his brain had frozen. He was probably thinking, "You goddam shape-shifter!" but he couldn't vent that and so tightened up even more.
    Now everyone's saying how crucial the next debate is for Obama, and they're right! The burden on him will be exponentially greater. If my first-debate impressions are correct, he could lock up all over again, to the point of total humiliation.
    What Obama needs is not more rehearsal or better coaching. He needs a hypnotist.
    I hope I'm wrong. If not, a catastrophe could lie ahead. [personal communication]

Governor Romney seemed to me to come across as forceful and hard-to-flap, not that President Obama seemed to be trying very hard to flap him. Mr. Obama did remark that Romney seemed to have reclaimed having been the governor of Massachusetts and stopped disavowing it to curry to extremists in his party, but he wasn't aggressive about it.
    PBS's panel, including David Brooks, Gwen Ifill, Judy Woodruff, and Mark Shields, wondered also that Obama never mentioned "the 47%." Almost as though Obama himself were being extra understanding and indulgent? Too nice?
    An editorial in Thursday morning's New York Times said: "But rather than forcefully challenging [Romney's misrepresentations of his platform], Mr. Obama chose to be polite and professorial, as if hoping that strings of details could hold up against blatant nonsense...."
    I don't know whether President Obama had decided not to risk being seen as an uppity black, or he is just "too nice a guy" to confront Romney. [personal communication]

Even NPR seems to be saying Romney more than held his own in the debate, so that sounds like he probably won, if there really is such a thing.
    It would be ironic if Obama, who became a star for his great speech and not for his track record, ultimately lost to someone with even less record who out-talked him.
    We cynics see the ability of empty words to win elections as the main problem with our electoral process. [personal communication]

John Scalzi's thoughts on Mitt Romney when he was asked by a member of an audience, "I know you won’t vote for Romney, but what do you think of him as a person?"

Well, of course, I don’t know him as a person. I know him as a construct of everything I’ve ever read about him, both positive and negative....
    What makes him different is all that money he has, and the fact that his own sphere of struggle has never centered on its lack, or even the possibility of such a thing. This is a thing that is alien to most Americans. Some of us have been poor, some or much of our lives; most of us know someone in our family or circle of friends who has fallen on hard times, often through no fault of their own; most of us know, in a scary way we don’t like to think about, that we’re a couple of lost paychecks away from real trouble. Americans aspire to be rich, but because they’re not, they’re also sensitive to when those with wealth show obvious disconnects from the reality of their lives. Romney, unfortunately for him, presents all sorts of these disconnects in a public fashion.
...
    Romney deserves the blame if he loses, but I don’t think he will deserve all the blame. At the end of it all, Romney is a reasonably decent man who could have been a reasonably decent president if it wasn’t 2012 and he was dealt the set of circumstances that he has been, i.e., a political party of ideologues who prize purity over practicality. It was Romney’s fault for, in my opinion, choosing to embrace their notions of purity over his own notions of practicality. It’s the GOP’s fault for making him have to do so....[personal communication]

Let’s trust everything to the free market [from Yahoo News]:

A retired New Jersey locksmith sold a "firemen's key ring" on eBay to a New York Post reporter...three of them were standard-issue keys given to members of the New York fire department...the set "would allow control of virtually any elevator in the city, could knock out power to municipal buildings, darken city streets, open subway gates and some firehouse doors and provide full access to 1 World Trade Center and other construction sites." [personal communication]

As if the jet skier successfully invading the airport wasn't bad enough, how about this [from Yahoo News]?

At less than six inches and just under 10 ounces, the Ruger .380 is considered by gun owners to be a great little pocket pistol. So small, in fact, that you can sometimes get one onto an airplane....The New York Daily News reports that a woman flew 938 miles from Orlando, Fla., to Newark, N.J., on Thursday with a loaded .380 in her purse....

And this air "security" is costing us how much? And creating how much hassle for fliers? [personal communication]

Eric Hobsbawn (1917-2012)

Eric Hobsbawn, who died on October 1 at age 95, gave us two centuries of European history in a nutshell:

Time and again we shall see moderate middle-class reformers mobilizing the masses against die-hard resistance or counter-revolution. We shall see the masses pushing beyond the moderates’ aims to their own social revolutions, and the moderates in turn splitting into a conservative group henceforth making common cause with the reactionaries, and a left-wing group determined to pursue the rest of the as yet unachieved moderate aims with the help of the masses, even at the risk of losing control over them. And so on through repetitions and variations of the pattern of resistance—mass mobilization—shift to the left—split-among-moderates-and-shift-to-the-right—until either the bulk of the middle-class passed into the henceforth conservative camp, or was defeated by social revolution. In most subsequent bourgeois revolutions the moderate liberals were to pull back, or transfer into the conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed in the nineteenth-century we increasingly find...that they became unwilling to begin revolution at all, for fear of its incalculable consequences, preferring a compromise with king and aristocracy. [personal communication]

Limerick of the week:

After Pam drank a bottle of claret,
She gave passionate kisses to Garret;
    Next she tried a gamay
    And a nice cabernet,
Then she went off to bed with a ferret.