Relatively Speaking

I just had to laugh when I read this bit in Adam Nagourney's Times' piece today about lowering expectations so thoroughly that Palin will look awesome in the debate if she even attains mediocre GOP concerns about Palin's performance in the upcoming debate:

"I think she has pretty thoroughly—and probably irretrievably—proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States," David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush who is now a conservative columnist, said in an interview. "If she doesn't perform well, then people see it.

"And this is a moment of real high anxiety, a little bit like 9/11, when people look to Washington for comfort and leadership and want to know that people in charge know what they are doing."

I love conservatives' capacity for rewriting history. When people "looked to Washington" on 9/11, they didn't get comfort and leadership—they got seven minutes of Bush sitting in a classroom like a frozen git and then flying around the country in Airforce One while Cheney took to an undisclosed location. Bush had no clue what the hell he was doing.

Which makes Frum's analogy accurate in a way he did not intend: Palin may well live up to Bush's performance after 9/11, but that would not be the good thing he suggests by rewriting what the president's performance actually was.

And, by the way, I also love how conservatives screech like rabid banshees as the merest hint of a liberal not treating 9/11 with sacred gravity, but minimizing it to suggest that Republican anxiety about the upcoming vice-presidential debate is "a little bit like 9/11" is just fine and dandy.

lol your relative morality

[Note: Shaker Daughter points out in comments Frum may have been drawing the comparison between how "Americans are feeling now about the economic crisis" and 9/11. In which case, my point still stands—although he's not minimizing it as much, there would be howls of outrage if a Democratic strategist made the same comparison.]