I’ve been reading about Mrs. Palin. My head didn’t explode until I read this:

She’s a hit [Mona Charen]
I’m getting tons of mail like this:

Sarah is real!!! What a fabulous contrast with Obama, who is not real. Sarah is from America. Obama is not.

If it was meant to bait me, well nom nom nom, I am eating the bait. I now officially hate these weasel fucks. And that’s saying something.

For 20 years, I lived in Indiana, where you can’t make a Dan Quayle joke in mixed company, where our right-wing editorial page regularly got complaints that it wasn’t conservative enough, where the same thing was said about Rush Limbaugh, blah blah blah. I developed a mantra, which I’ve discussed here before, but indulge me. I’d say: I have arrived at this point in time on my own path, and so has this person before me. We have reached different conclusions along the way. Ommmm. This kept me from going insane and perhaps even made me a better person. I should have said it out loud more often. Hell, I should have screamed it in a few people’s faces. I certainly feel like doing so now.

That smelly little excrescence above, that’s it in a nutshell. These are the people I want gone. Not just out of the White House, off the national stage. I want them out of the country, put on boats and sent to the southern ocean to circle the pole until they break up in the ice and drown. Mona Charen, daughter of privilege, who went from Livingston, N.J. to Barnard to the White House to the Capital Gang to the Corner, approvingly quoting an anonymous turd-juggler calling Sarah Palin “from America” and Barack Obama not from America. [Enter: Ghost of Ashley Morris] Fuck you, you fucking fucks. [Exit: Ghost] You are un-American. You don’t deserve to live in this country. You are simply too much, dare I say, of an elitist.

Since the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, these people have been the self-appointed arbiters of Who Gets to be American. For nearly 30 years, they’ve sat in their well-paid jobs typing with their soft little hands, making the world safe for themselves. They are liars and hypocrites of the worst sort: Divorce is OK for Peggy Noonan, bad for you. Working mothers named Phyllis Schlafly or Mary Matalin or Mona Charen are good, but your job takes you away from your precious children just so you can be fulfilled, you selfish bitch. Homosexuals who want to live together under a legal contract will destroy marriage, but homosexuals married to opposite-sex partners (Hi, Mrs. Craig!) won’t. Bill “Double-down” Bennett repackages Aesop’s fables as “The Book of Virtues” and gambles his royalty checks in casino VIP rooms, but that’s OK.

I could go on.

Of course it would be Mona Charen who would do this for me. Our paper used to run her column, and I’d read it every so often. Her big issues were communism and culture, and like most columnists, filed dispatches from the home front once in a while. She nearly dislocated her shoulder patting herself on the back for staying home with her children — she’d blushingly describe her child-care arrangements while she penned her deathless prose as “having help” — and occasionally would express her simmering resentment that she’d given up her career (writing speeches for Nancy Reagan: Wikipedia) and its financial rewards for her kids, while others hadn’t. One day she wrote that a family with a $200,000 annual income could hardly be considered affluent. In her, ahem, elite circles, this is certainly true. And yet she claims to be in touch with the “real” America, while everyone with a D after their name isn’t. You couldn’t make this shit up on a head of windowpane, folks. You really couldn’t.

And who wouldn’t be a little resentful? She went to Barnard and George Washington University Law School! All that to write twice a week for Creators Syndicate and be part of the Corner? That’s a waste of a good education. (I keep wondering how long it’ll be before these folks come out against educating girls at all, if they’re just going to stay home with their kids anyway. In this arena, the FLDS folks are bleeding-edgers.)

You know why “the base” loves Palin? It comes up time and again, as it’s about the only really notable thing about her: She had her last baby, even though she knew ahead of time it had Down Syndrome. This is a noble act, to be sure, but I don’t see how it qualifies one for high office. And so much for women being judged as anything other than a collection of female body parts. (The fringiest part of the fringe will wonder, if she’s so pure ‘n’ all, why she even had the test in the first place, opposition to all prenatal testing being a big signifier for these folks.)

But back to the culture warriors. They’ll snicker behind their hands at the funny names black people give their kids but think Track and Trig and Willow are fine names for, er, white children. Palin, from the 49th state, is “from America,” and Obama, from the 50th, isn’t. Palin hunts and fishes in exurban Anchorage — good. Obama works in inner-city Chicago — bad. They’re too self-deluded to see the truth before their eyes, that they’re both “America,” an America that can support and elevate people from such divergent backgrounds, who make such different choices. But they can’t see that, because only people who make choices they approve of get to be Americans.

You might say they don’t matter, these little foot soldiers. Yes, they do. They matter now more than ever, because they’re the amplifiers. They’re the bloggers and other chatterers who pick up the talking points and talk them to death.

Later in the day at the Corner:

Not from America [Mona Charen]

Did not mean to endorse what one letter writer said about Obama not being from America. He obviously is — from the furthest left part. I just loved the guy’s phrase “more precious than pearls is a woman who likes to fish and hunt.” FWIW, I do neither.

Really, Mona? Could’ve fooled me.

By the way, I fish and have no particular problem with hunting, although I’ve never done it. And I’m voting for Obama.

Carny art.

God, I love livestock.

Welllll, just offhand…

The capsule version: He overpromised but — far more important — did not underinspire. The promising will be the GOP talking points for a while, wondering how you can cut taxes while offering trillions in new programs, blah blah blah, but these speeches, the acceptance speech at the end of a convention, aren’t about policy, they’re about spectacle and mood, and it’s hard to find fault with any part of it. (Although some do.) Obama looked smart, confident and optimistic; my heart actually fluttered a bit when he said, “America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.” Exactly right. As much as I despised George Bush eight years ago, if you told me that by 2008 we’d be embroiled in a no-win war, torturing prisoners, practicing extraordinary rendition — I’d never have believed you. Not even George Bush is capable of that, I’d say. No, but the delegator-in-chief found someone who is.

There’s always time to screw this up, but the GOP is going to have to work pretty hard to top this with a guy who can’t read a TelePromTer and the governor of Alaska.

What did you think?

So.

Folks, it looks like I’m onboard for this zombie movie, so expect zombie preoccupation around these parts for a while. I have no idea what I’m going to write. All I know is, we have a great location — an unrenovated spooky mansion in Palmer Woods with, of all things, a third-floor ballroom — and a choreographer, who’s going to give us some fight-scene blocking and maybe some other stuff — as well as much of the old crew from “Gas Man,” including Dan Phillips, our makeup guy, who killed time during slow periods on our last shoot building latex special effects for his bag of tricks:

I guess I’m going to have to get to know a slaughterhouse manager pretty well, too. We need a source of fresh braaaaaaains.

Off to rent “The Evil Dead” and/or attend the Michigan State Fair.

A few years ago, we bought some Auto Bingo cards at Restoration Hardware. (Yes, a supremely yuppie-scummy sort of thing to do. I tell you in my defense: Every time two kids are in my car, they’re playing Auto Bingo. To this day.)

Anyway, one of the squares is for a Corvette. In Fort Wayne, we never saw them. I started making Corvettes a free spot. And then we moved here.

On today’s bike ride, in the first block:

In the second block:

(This would have been a much better picture if my finger hadn’t been over the lens, don’t you think?)

And they were the same model — the supercharged Z6. Another one passed me on the road.

I missed this in yesterday’s papers, until it came up in my evening searches for health-care news: Cisco executive slain in Detroit is remembered as gifted techie, dedicated family man. Well, shit, one thinks. Another black eye for the city. I’m wondering why didn’t I see this in the local dailies, and start to read:

Ben Goldman updated his Facebook page that Monday night, writing that he was having a great time in downtown Detroit … yes, that was Ben, his family said, always able to squeeze joy from everything he did, even a 24-hour business trip to the gritty Midwest metropolis. And then the 42-year-old Los Gatos family man and up-and-coming Silicon Valley executive just disappeared.

Detroit police found his body the next day, Aug. 19. He had been shot to death, left in a vacant lot after apparently spending time at the Penthouse Club. It took them a few days to identify him. He had no wallet, no photographs of his wife and two young daughters, no Cisco ID badge, nothing to connect him to Silicon Valley. Benjamin Goldman, 42, was the victim of an unsolved homicide in a high-crime area known there as 8 Mile.

Eight Mile is, of course, 8 Mile Road, approximately 7.5 miles from tourist-friendly downtown Detroit. The Penthouse Club, as you might imagine, is not a place a nice family man posts to his Facebook page about visiting, although it’s a venue many men might find worthy of squeezing joy from. So to speak. While in no way blaming Goldman for any part of what happened to him, a commenter on the Freep story put it succinctly:

A nice Jewish boy from California running around Eight Mile in a tie looking for a little action. I would rather be in the mountains of Afghanistan. There can’t be any more dangerous place on earth.

Yup. And considering Detroit’s after-dark criminal culture is no secret, even in California, you wonder what might have gone wrong. The Penthouse Club is a brand-name titty bar, and I have to assume it has at least some parking-lot security, although there are plenty of places nearby that don’t. Rest in peace, Ben Goldman. I’ll think of you as I struggle with an issue every urban parent must face: How to teach street smarts.

It’s a balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe that overprotection — of yourself or your kids — isn’t a good idea. When Lenore Skenazy allowed her 9-year-old to make his own way home on the New York City subway system, she was both vilified and praised — the story received national attention — but I was in the latter camp. Learning when to be careful starts with not being afraid all the time, and confidence, the most important invisible armor you carry, comes with accomplishment. Most people on the street, even on 8 Mile Road, aren’t out to kill you, hurt you or even rob you. But some are. Knowing how to tell the difference, and when to be extra-careful, isn’t easy. I go places in Detroit lots of people won’t, and someday I might pay the price for it, but at least no one can say I didn’t drink deeply from the stream along the way. I have the advantage of not having a penis, that unreliable point man that leads so many men to their doom, but I also have an appetite, and I sometimes wonder if I’ll end up dumped in a vacant lot because I went looking for the wrong authentic gumbo or pizza or whatever.

Still. Life is most interesting when you leave the strip-mall districts behind. I try to teach this to my child. Fortunately, she doesn’t have a penis, either.

I heard an interview with David Simon during the publicity tsunami for “The Wire,” and he talked a little bit about safety in the city. “This isn’t Beirut,” he said of Baltimore, by way of explaining his decision to travel even its worst neighborhoods armed only with a notebook. Of course you have to be smart about where you go and when you get out of the car. But you can’t be afraid all the time, either.

You people who live in large urban areas — how do you teach your kids to be smart on the street?

I missed my weights class at the gym for going on three weeks now, so I absolutely must go. To fill the time until my triumphant and sweaty return, a rancid little bonbon for you to sniff and discuss the following: Racism is or is not a factor in this year’s campaign. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…Craig R. Smith:

If Barack Obama is to become our 44th president, it will be heralded as a moment of historic significance unlike any other. However, I think many are missing the real reason why.

It’s because Barack Obama will be our first hip-hop president.

I can only imagine how the world will embrace the leader of the free world when he introduces other foreign leaders with, “give it up for my man Vladimir.” Giving “props” for joining us in a treaty. Or the first lady Michelle talking about “my man” the “daddy of my babies” when referring to the president. That should go over well everywhere from 10 Downing Street right on down to the streets of the Middle East.

Does it get better? Oh yes it does:

I can see it now. Air Force One decked out with “22s” and spinners. Maybe even a set of hydraulics. Watching the hip-hop president in the Oval Office with his baseball cap on backward coping a gansta lean in the big chair. Should be really pimp, don’t you think? Cool man, real cool. Instead of giving away presidential cuff links to guests, as is the custom, he will offer “bling bling.”

It goes on from there. WorldNetDaily, tapping the id once again.

HT: Borden. Back in a few hours.

I was working last night and couldn’t give my full attention to Hillary’s speech, but I had it on in the background, and 30 percent of my attention found it impressive. Anything less than full graciousness would have been …ungracious. So now it’s time for her to exit stage right and the remainder of the convention to go into full attack mode. Eugene Robinson said on MSNBC, “Someone needs to say ‘torture’ from the podium” and oh yes they do. Plus, as The Editors say, “People, these rats ain’t going to fuck themselves.”

I’m generally not a fan of smear politics, but it’s time to win this one, and that Corsi book is sitting on top of the bestseller list like Jabba the Hutt, and so it’s time to take note: They started it.

I like Brad at Sadly No’s idea: A 527 called Values Voters Against McCain, quivering with moral indignation all over the swing states. And screw the evangelicals, who aren’t going to vote for Obama anyway; they’re just flirting with him to make their boyfriend jealous. And this needs to be flapping over the main stage in the Pepsi Center:

The captioned version:

And that would be a good start. As would other strategies.

A little bloggage? Just a little; I’m Costco-bound:

The NYT has been running recipes all summer on its Health pages, and they had me at the risotto with roasted beets and beet greens, which promises a magenta dish, and how often do you get to serve magenta food? But that one will have to be mine alone, as I live among beet haters. (“But the New York Times says they’re the new spinach!” I say. Like they care.) This is what I made for dinner Saturday — Pistou Manchego with Eggs, which is basically zucchini and tomatoes with a few eggs poached on top, plus a fancy name. Easy-peasy, good for yousy. Try it.

Thank God for Jezebel, because where else could we read a headline like this: Tyra Banks: High heels will give you a tighter vagina, better orgasms, I ask you?

Costco-bound. Tell me what you need a lot of, and I’ll pick it up for you.

Like many of you, our house has lost significant value in the last three years — maybe as much as 20 percent. Unlike many of you, we didn’t live through the run-up of the prior years, and may have actually bought at the top of the local market. Which, I regret to say, won’t be bouncing back the way it will in, say, Scottsdale. So, barring a piece of spectacularly good financial luck, we’re stuck here until the police find our mummified corpses at spring thaw at some date in the future.

What do you do with a house that’s not performing like a piggy bank? Pour more money into it, that’s what.

We’re in the first, early, just-looking-thanks stages of a kitchen remodel, the stage where I wonder if this can be done for a four-figure sum, occasionally say so aloud, and watch people laugh in my face. The first Kitchen Guy is coming this morning to give us a look-see, make some suggestions, and laugh in my face. He’s the very high-end guy, and yes, Ikea will be asked to weigh in at some point, too. (From them, I expect merely a discreet giggle.) We went to the high-end guy’s showroom yesterday, and wasn’t that something, touring all those showroom alcoves of dream kitchens, some of which the Shah of Iran would think himself unworthy to occupy. A friend of mine is a caterer, and from her, I’ve learned something important about kitchens: The fancier the kitchen, the less likely it is used by actual human beings. Or, as she puts it:

“The first thing you learn in catering is, if the kitchen is really fabulous, bring your own knives. Because you’ll be lucky to find a paring knife.”

Doesn’t that make you feel good about America? Tens of thousands spent on a room that only requires a fridge, microwave and a telephone for ordering takeout? There was a stove in the showroom, an oh-my-gaw stove, six burners and a grill and two ovens, with an instrument panel worthy of a 757, and all I could think is, “It’ll boil water and twice a year be fired up to reheat the pre-cooked turkey and ham, and someone else will own it and life isn’t fair.”

Nope, it sure ain’t.

So I have to go tidy up a bit. Let’s talk convention. I missed much of last night’s hoo-ha, but I caught the Michelle and Kennedy highlight reels, and thought they did great. How credible is the assassination plot, do you think? I’ll be back after I hand the kitchen guy a tissue to wipe away his tears of helpless laughter.

Lance Mannion says it better than I ever could, so go read him on the subject of Anthony and Elizabeth’s marriage in “For Better or For Worse.” This was once one of my favorite comic strips, and he comes close to capturing my utter disappointment in this awful plot development. Someone said here a while back that Lynn Johnston recently suffered some tawdry personal tragedy — her husband ran off with her younger assistant, or something — and I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t play a huge part in this.

It’s hard to believe, watching an interesting young woman stripped of her career and married off to a dickless bore, that this cartoonist once had the guts to kill a dog in a daily comic strip.

Poor Lizard Breath. Ick.