When Barack Obama chose Joe Biden to be his running mate, the least unsurprising thing in the world happened: Republicans went through his record in order to find embarrassing moments, points of conflict with Obama, etc. In other words: opposition research. Now, while I may have disagreed with their characterizations of Biden’s record — I didn’t think they were doing anything extraordinary.

Contrast this with the reactions to progressive opposition research to Sarah Palin and now Paul Ryan. Take Fox News pundit/host Monica Crowley, for example (fun fact: she once accused Obama of lying about being black). She tweets: “Evidence the Left is freaked out re Ryan? Axelrod, DWShultz, Maddow, etc all stumbling & bumbling on the morning shows. Plus, lying.”

I’ve been on the receiving end of similar criticisms from the right since I started writing about the Ryan selection, and it echoes a lot of the same things I heard after Palin’s selection (or as I call it: the greatest days of blogging I’ve ever had). Apparently when the left pulls up information about a Republican candidate — vetting them, if you will — no matter the candidate or the situation, it is a sign that we are supposedly scared of the selection.

Sure, we and all right-minded Americans should be afraid of the visions of America offered by extremists like Ryan and Palin, but as viable political entities there’s no reason to fear them at all. And even if there were, digging into their backgrounds and past statements isn’t evidence of that. It’s evidence of politics at play, nothing more or less.

This bizarre response from the right feels like yet another instance of that movement’s paranoia, insisting despite all evidence that the entire world is always plotting against them. And it gets worse.

Here’s Matthew Continetti of the Free Beacon taking a break from writing Sarah Palin hagiographies to explain how — I kid you not — Barack Obama campaigning is “voter suppression.”

We are therefore witnessing a well-rehearsed and coordinated and almost balletic exercise in voter suppression, as Obama and his helpers spend hundreds of millions of dollars convincing middle America that Romney is a rich elitist who made a fortune in rapacious finance capitalism, and whose concern for the bottom line trumps transparency, compassion, and community.

Here in the real world, this is called “campaigning.” What the Republican party is attempting to do in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania is voter suppression. What their operatives were convicted of in Maryland is voter suppression. What Obama is doing is communicating to the voters about what his opponents plans are for the country.

As someone who repeatedly lamented the impotence of the Democratic Party during the Bush years, it is a marvel to witness the conservative reaction to a Democratic administration that has their act together on many of the basics of politics. Rather than do what the Democrats did under Howard Dean and Barack Obama — get better quickly — Republicans instead have decided that the best thing to do is whine.

Turns out they are the ones who are scared of something.

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So it appears that the Romney campaign briefed multiple news outlets about the behind the scenes of how they hid Paul Ryan’s selection from the media. I’m not saying this isn’t a story, but the way this is being rolled out is pretty ridiculous.

All of these news outlets and several of their writers began tweeting out links to the story at midnight, which would indicate they were all under some kind of embargo. But they’re all basically telling the same story!

I feel like these guys all decided to embrace their inner Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum while writing this fanfic.

It’s also worth noting that with very few variations, this is the version of the story of how Romney selected Ryan that the campaign wants to be told.

AP: “This was the culmination of a methodical, highly secretive process that involved 10 top Romney staffers, a volunteer team of attorneys, a secret secure room in Romney’s Boston headquarters, and reams of paper on a long and then a short list of potential candidates.”

Buzzfeed: “A secure room, a disguise, and an escape.”

The New York Times: “It required painstakingly planned skulduggery, which the campaign outlined in detail, late on Saturday afternoon.”

LA Times: “Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice presidential nominee was the culmination of a cloak-and-dagger tale – Ryan cutting through the woods near his home to avoid a network reporter and wearing a ball cap and sunglasses inside airports to avoid being recognized – that speaks to the secrecy, paranoia and high stakes involved in such a sensitive decision.”

Reuters: “Paul Ryan’s path to becoming Mitt Romney’s Republican vice presidential running mate was steeped in secrecy, from an incognito trip to meet Romney to a furtive walk through the woods near his boyhood Wisconsin home.”

Politico: “The stealthy meeting was the climax of a bruising four-month vetting process that started with 20 candidates and ended with three finalists”

Huffington Post: “That was just the first chapter of a cloak-and-dagger, Hollywood-style operation carried out by Myers and the Romney campaign to offer the job to the 42-year old, and then to announce him to the supporters and the press, all without spoiling the surprise.”

NBC: “Even the rollout was an example of both a flawlessly executed bit of secrecy and stagecraft and improvisation when events did not go as the campaign planned.”

Washington Post: “Ryan’s journey to Norfolk, detailed by Romney adviser Beth Myers, illustrates the elaborate lengths to which the Romney campaign went to keep the vice presidential selection under wraps in the 10 days between when Romney settled on Ryan and when the GOP ticket was revealed.”

ABC: “Clandestine flights. A slight disguise. Long drives to out-of-the-way airports by an aide’s 19-year-old son. An afternoon dash through the wooded ravine behind Paul Ryan’s house in Janesville, Wis.”

Boston Globe: “Ryan was about to receive the news that he would be Mitt Romney’s choice as running mate, but the delivery of that news — and much of Ryan’s movements and conversations in the days that followed — had to be carried out with the calibrated precision and secrecy of a sting operation.”

CBS: “The story could have been ripped straight from the pages of a Cold War-era spy novel: There were sunglasses and baseball caps, decoys and back routes through the woods.”

The Atlantic: “By the time the press found out Paul Ryan would be Romney’s vice presidential nominee, Ryan had already escaped his home in Wisconsin — eluding a media stakeout by sneaking out the back door, traipsing through the woods, and coming out the other side, where a car awaited.”

USA Today: “ The night before Rep. Paul Ryan officially became Mitt Romney’s running mate, his road to the vice presidential nomination went through the woods in the back of his Janesville, Wis., home.”

Wall Street Journal: “Getting to the moment of the surprise announcement was a long and tortured process.”

Yahoo!: “Paul briskly walked through a gully, past the tree where he had built a tree fort as a child, and toward the driveway of his childhood home.”

Time: “Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate was the product of months of meticulous planning marked by locked rooms, deceptive flight patterns and surreptitious forays through the Wisconsin woods.”

Clown media, bro.

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Mitt Romney is afraid of his own party. There’s no other sane reason why Romney would pick the otherwise lackluster Paul Ryan to share the Republican ticket with him. The true leaders of the Republican party – the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh and company – have agitated for the Ryan pick, and like a good boy Romney did as told.

At this late date, when he should be turning the page on the primaries and focusing on the general election, Romney still needs to get conservatives on board with his lackluster campaign. As such, when he should be moving to the center and appealing to mainstream voters, he’s still having trouble convincing the base that he’s one of them (he isn’t, and never will be).

Apparently Romney is already running away from Ryan’s safety-net shredding roadmap. But it’s too late for that anyways. Ryan’s plan is the Romney plan, and his pick of a running mate cements that.

I actually laughed out loud when I heard news of the pick, because it cements just how afraid Romney is of the conservative base. It also shows that he sees the need for decisions that are just slightly below picking Palin to bring his reluctant base on board.

It really is good news for Barack Obama.

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Currently, President Obama is winning in this election. I noticed an outbreak of the doldrums on Thursday among the many conservatives I follow on Twitter. The tipping point seems to have been a couple of major polls showing Obama with a good sized lead, especially the poll from Fox “News” that shows Obama up by 9.

The funniest tooth-gnashing is from top Breitbart conspiracy theorist John Nolte, who has for weeks argued that Romney’s been winning the day-in, day out fight. Now he writes (in between breathless conspiracy theories about the media) that “Not discouraged & haven’t lost faith, but as we enter week SEVEN of Romney on defense, I am worried about a campaign that can’t get footing.”

Nobody loves conservatives losing it like this more than me. This is the third election I’ve blogged through and I’ve seen and felt almost the entire spectrum of emotions you can feel about this process. Trust me, it feels a lot better when the campaign you support is the one that’s on message and run competently.

That said, they shouldn’t panic too much. While I do think that Mitt Romney will, at the end of the day, come up short like John Kerry, I don’t think all is lost. I don’t forsee his vice presidential pick doing much for him, but Romney is highly likely to get some sort of bounce out of the convention. The post-convention time period in 2008 was McCain’s only serious lead when it was just him and Obama, and I remember liberals freaking out about it then. Some even compared Obama to Dukakis.

The election is quite fluid, and I still think it will be close enough to be won by 2-3% of the vote. While I’d like to see Romney buried at the polls like Mondale or Goldwater, it is unlikely.

But when conservatives freak out over the prospect of being beaten by Obama after throwing an entire Ikea full of kitchen sinks at him, I am going to enjoy it.

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If I didn’t want to see the right lose back to back presidential elections for only the second time since I’ve been an adult, I’d feel sorry for them with the situation they’ve backed themselves into. Conservatives — like this Confederate sympathizer — appear to seriously be touting the possible selection of Paul Ryan as some kind of positive sign.

Really.

First things first, the vice presidential pick is unlikely to matter. It won’t help Romney with any needed constituencies or swing states. Even the selection of Marco Rubio (who, if he’s smart, will run away from a vice presidential vetting committee because nothing could hurt his bright future prospects more than to be associated with Mitt Romney) is unlikely to help Romney with Latino voters. Self-deportation and all.

At best, a vice presidential pick will hurt you. The selection of Sarah Palin has had the effect of making Dan Quayle looking practically statesmanlike. Palin and her disastrous roll-out so hurt McCain with swing voters, I doubt we’ll ever see a vice-presidential pick that far outside of the box in our lifetimes.

On the Democratic side, I don’t thin Biden helped or hurt Obama in the long run. The selection of Hillary Clinton would have been a wild card. She is one of the few legitimate superstars in American politics, so her case is something of an outlier. That’s just playing fantasy politics at this point, however.

Okay, so, Paul Ryan.

How does this help? Ryan won’t help Romney in Wisconsin. At best he helps a little bit with the base, nothing more. He doesn’t even really hurt that much, in my opinion. Romney has already endorsed the Ryan plan to effectively gut the social safety net, he’s going to be hit on it whether Ryan is his running mate or not.

I don’t get the media excitement over the “veepstakes,” but I understand any possible excitement over Ryan (or most of the likely candidates) even less.

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I’ve never understood the compulsion by liberals to adhere to some fictional higher standard while losing the fight for political power. In politics, there isn’t even a certificate of participation for coming in second place. You just lose.

This is why, while I often agree with Kevin Drum, this post of his strikes me as so amazingly out of touch with politics as it is practiced in reality. Drum is among those tsk-tsking Sen. Harry Reid for his repetition of allegations about Mitt Romney. Nevermind that Romney could shut Reid and other doubters by simply releasing the same amount of tax returns that every candidate for the last 40+ years has done. Simple!

What’s the gain here? Is there any upside to keeping your nose out of the dirt, as a practical matter in American politics? I would love if our politics was about a set of densely worded highly detailed policy proposals presented side by side to diligent voters, with the policy with the most supporters winning the fight. That isn’t the real world, however.

We’ve recently had Democratic presidential candidates who have refused to go “there” against Republicans, and were applauded by the mainstream press and Republicans for being such swell guys. President Gore and President Kerry had really consequential presidencies, didn’t they?

And gee whillikers, it isn’t as if the right has engaged in a non-stop smear campaign against Barack Obama since he became a national figure, right?

For a lot of Americans, the change in leadership in the country really matters. Mitt Romney as president would be substantially, detrimentally different. The desire to be the good guy won’t change that, it won’t undo the damage that would be done by Republicans run amok — again. I wish some of our liberal friends would understand that.

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50 years ago today Jamaica became an independent nation. Considering the hardships and obstacles it has faced (and continues to), Jamaica is a Caribbean success story. It is a small island with an outsized international influence, from athletics to art — people all over the globe know about the island nation.

And Jamaica’s natural beauty? Legendary.

Dunn’s River Falls, My Favorite Place In Jamaica

Amazingly, Jamaica is just 4,244 square miles and has a population of 2.7 million people.

But in my life, Jamaica looms large. Both of my parents are Jamaican, as are my grandparents and most of my family. I lived there for a little while and my first real education was in Jamaican schools.

I love Jamaica and its people and I’m proud to have it as part of my cultural heritage. Here’s to a long and prosperous future.

“Out of Many, One People.” – Jamaica National Motto

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I finally got around to reading Steve Almond’s essay in The Baffler attacking Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and I understand why everyone got so upset: He’s really amazingly wrong. What Almond wants from Stewart and Colbert is something completely different from the TV programs they produce. He wants The Earnest Show, where everyone is earnest as hell about the corporations man and all the bad stuff they do and stuff. Keeping it on the real!

For many reasons, this is a bad idea. Most importantly for the world of entertainment — the world The Daily Show and Colbert Report inhabit — it is a boring prospect. There is this prevailing attitude among the hardest of the hardcore, on both the left and right, that what the public needs to finally come on board is a good old intellectual sledgehammer to the head. The thought process behind this poorly conceived notion is that the corporate media, always looking out for its own special interests, is silencing this really Important Voice Outside The Consensus. For these kinds of folks the reason their heroes like Chomsky or Ron Paul are effectively cut off from the mainstream is some kind of vast conspiracy.

In reality it is because these people and the way they communicate their ideas (speaking broadly) is ratings poison. Nobody wants to watch it. There is a program out there that is sort of the ideal of this model. It’s called Democracy Now. Nobody watches it. It isn’t because some nefarious executive decided that it should be frozen out of the mainstream, it’s just because nobody wants their news/information presented that way. If people wanted dry, information heavy news presentations from committed ideologues, C-SPAN would be a ratings juggernaut. It isn’t!

This isn’t to say hard, important news can’t be done in a compelling fashion. Tune in to PBS’ Frontline some time. They get the job done. As does 60 Minutes, who’s ratings often reaffirm my belief in mankind.

By comparison, Stewart and Colbert have been effective not because they exist on a “plantation” as the author derisively describes it, but because they are not programs designed to dictate the principles of the hard left. They are, in fact, comedic entertainment programs. Both shows work because they live by the principle of comedy first, ideological point second. If you reverse the scenario you get horrible things like Fox News’ Half Hour News Hour which lasted about thirty seconds because even a conservative can smell a bad comedy headed his way.

It is why I have often defended The Daily Show against liberals who get their noses bent out of shape if Jon Stewart makes a joke at the expense of someone on the left. He’s running a comedy show, not the Democratic National Committee. His show is more honest when, if given low-hanging fruit from the left, he’s got an obligation as a comedian to swing for it.

If you look at the two most successful liberal-leaning news programs of the last decade — MSNBC’s Countdown and The Rachel Maddow Show — they both excelled because they are/aren’t The Dour Newshour. Even when tackling vitally important issues, Rachel Maddow understands that if she doesn’t entertain her audience the information evaporates. It works because it isn’t a boring lecture.

I have often argued that if Fox News discovered that they could sell liberalism they same way they do conservatism — loud and sexy and bite-sized — they’d flip in a minute, especially if it meant making more money.

In my experience, liberals especially, hate to think that news is somehow tainted by entertainment. But if you look at American history, it is when news has some element of the dramatic that social progress tends to happen. Food safety didn’t come about because of a dry government report, but rather was aided by the dramatic work of Upton Sinclair. America didn’t tip in favor of civil rights because of a dry newspaper story about the bus boycott, but rather it was helped along by dramatic — nearly cinematic — imagery of southern police brutality to black citizens. We’ve always needed the lure of entertainment to spur us into action on the news. This idea that some “objective” report in the New York Times will be a catalyst for change is a fool-headed notion of a stereotypical eggheaded academic who doesn’t inhabit the real world.

The author really goes off the rails when he insists that Stewart and Colbert (to a lesser extent) helped to dissuade those against the Iraq War. In fact, I would cite Stewart, along with Olbermann, for being key media voices as the rest of the press went along with the war drums. Stewart’s “Mess-O-Potamia” was out there ridiculing the warmongers at the same time the media was still overly impressed by some school we had built overseas, never mind the missing WMD and the carnage. Stewart helped to cement the image of the war party and their media enablers as ludicrous bunglers who should never be entrusted with our national security.

The author further undermines his central thesis by citing South Park as somehow being better at standing up to the imagined corporate overlord and being more real, man. Yet that show regularly espouses the idea that both sides of the political spectrum are equally absurd. I love their work, but at best South Park seems to espouse a sort of libertarian nihilism about everything. It’s funny as hell but I wouldn’t count it as upsetting the apple cart of conventional wisdom.

He attacks the Rally To Preserve Sanity for not getting people to do, well, something man. But does anyone seriously think the rally would have attracted that many people (including myself) if it were just some liberals getting liberals together to vote for liberals? I don’t think so. Stewart and Colbert work because they aren’t simply spokesmen for the Democratic Party or even liberalism in general. If somebody wants a stale party line they can simply turn on Sean Hannity.

The two examples the author gives as alternatives to Stewart/Colbert are Bill Hicks and Bill Maher. Now, while I may agree with both of those guys on a pretty regular basis (Hicks more than Maher, but whatever), it’s a perfect example of ineffectiveness on parade. Stewart turned The Daily Show from a more standard issue news as comedy show into one with an ideology, which spun off into The Colbert Report. Both of these shows have an impact on the American political dialogue far outstripping their actual cable news audiences. Their riffs emanate out on to the web and into our lives.

By contrast, Hicks and Maher speak to the choir. Sure, that choir will be enraptured and vigorously nod their heads in agreement (something Maher used to disdain), but it won’t go anywhere. It won’t have any resonance. Bill Hicks made some great insights, but he had to die too young for them to escape past a relatively small audience who agreed with him anyways.

So I guess the argument is, as always, purity over effectiveness. I believe in political actions that don’t just stimulate the people I already agree with. I don’t see a lot of utility in simply appealing to an “amen” chorus and excoriating people outside of the inner circle for their supposed failure to “get it.”

Instead I think that the path to progress comes from a mainstream approach, focused on entertaining people with the hope that they could learn something or change their minds in the process. I don’t care if the vehicle for doing so isn’t 100% pure. If it works, if it is effective, it is a far better investment than simply being earnest for the sake of being earnest.

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Even within the context of modern politics, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is extraordinarily dishonest. The Obama campaign is suing the state of Ohio in order to get the same rules that give an enhanced deadline to members of the military extended to more people.

It is an expansion of voting, not a restriction.

Yet the lying Romney campaign is claiming that Obama is attempting to restrict the military vote. Even the conservatives at HotAir admit that this is a bunch of hogwash.

I no longer believe our compromised media can muster the cojones to call out this blatant dishonesty for what it is. But I think Romney’s lies are becoming a lot like the boy who cried wolf. Not even the wimps in the press corps are going to continue believing their increasingly dishonest claims.

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Rush Limbaugh has uncovered Barack Obama’s diabolical plan to beat Mitt Romney and win the presidential election. In his national broadcast today, Limbaugh revealed — my God — Obama’s plan to uncover things about his opponent. And release them. Openly!

Listen to the audio here.

We must prevent this politician from doing what politicians have always done since the invention of politics. He’s also black.

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