Fugato

The vice-presidential debate last night seems to be generally regarded as a draw; each held his own pretty well, and it’s not expected to affect the polls much one way or the other.

But of course it’s the mistakes that are most interesting. Edwards made a couple of amusing gaffes, but I think Cheney must have won the whoops award with this one (pointed out by Lessig Blog, thanks):

“Well, the reason they keep mentioning Halliburton is because they’re trying to throw up a smoke screen. They know the charges are false. They know if you go, for example, to factcheck.com, an independent website sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details, with respect to Halliburton.”

(transcript)

First, the independent website is called factcheck.org (and seems to be overloaded at the moment!). That mistake would be no biggie, if it were the only one.

Second, in response to the debate and Cheney’s remark, they put up an article that Cheney probably did not want to point anyone to (e.g. “Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co.” … though Edwards gets slapped a bit as well).

Third, and funniest, factcheck.com redirects to George Soros’ website … which Cheney definitely did not want to point anyone to! Their current front-page headline: “A personal message from George Soros; President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values.”

Whoops-ee.

Like a lot of people, John Perry Barlow does not like Bush much. Calling him “convinced” would be putting it mildly.

But unlike a lot of the partisan election “blogaganda” around, he is pretty frank — and pretty amusing — about his opinions of Kerry in his blog entry Supporting Kerry Anyway… and if you read only the first half, it would be unclear which candidate is being supported. (The second half clears that up definitively.)

For some choice quotes, the pelvic region analogy:

Worse, Kerry’s transparently theatrical efforts to out-macho the Republicans make him seem, as a friend recently put it, all dick and no balls.

and the movie blurb analogy:

For the last month or so, the election seemed reminiscent to me of ads for the film “Alien vs. Predator, ” the tag line of which goes, “Whoever wins, we lose.” (Further, it has seemed right to me that one of these characters is an alien and the other a predator.)

That’s what bugs me too: “we lose.” I wanted (but did not really expect) to see a candidate about whom I could say “Oh yeah, this is the one,” regardless of who the opponent is. Hell, I want that in our own national politics as well (never mind the somewhat-smaller geopolitical impact of the Icelandic leadership). Where are those people? Where is somebody to be excited about voting for? Dripping with integrity, sound judgment, far-sightedness, deep knowledge and understanding of economics and history and current world affairs, respect for personal liberties, and enough charisma to get into office? And preferably mostly unencumbered by any particular type of belief in the paranormal, if that’s not too much to ask? Dammit, find me one o’those!

In the meantime, the question is: which candidate comes closer to that ideal? Barlow’s conclusion is unequivocal, and so is mine.

(Of course, Barlow gets to make one 106-millionth of the decision. I get 570 times that weight in deciding who runs Iceland. I am clearly far superior to Barlow in political influence. Yay me.)