Toga! Toga! Toga!

Pundits are having quite a lot of fun with the fake Greek temple, known variously as the Temple of Obama or the Barackopolis, being erected in the Mile High Stadium.

The McCain campaign even has some helpful fashion tips.

At the Temple of Obama, reporters are expected to observe a level of decency and decorum demanded by the import of the moment and the presence of The One. No "Animal House" behavior permitted. Specifically, no "Toga" chants.

Watch Here For Examples Of Inappropriate Conduct

Dr. Krauthammer, who ought to be able to spot the signs, asks

Has He Lost His Mind?

We wait with bated breath.

Video: The Obamanable Snowjob

"The life of Barack Obama is ominously hidden from the public.

"This is why we felt compelled to make this film.

"Charged with the task of filling the cavernous gaps between the known facts, we have created a document that is, frankly, as accurate a representation as anything presented by the Obama campaign."

Enjoy. But before you click, please note the warning.

These videos contain extremely forward-thinking language. Send your children (if any) to play in the street or something before watching.

At The People's Cube.

Novak's Back!

"Robert D. Novak, who recently announced his retirement due to serious health problems, has decided to write occasional columns."

It's here.

An election without Novak would be a seriously under-reported election.

Mile-High Anxiety

Maureen Dowd:

I've been to a lot of conventions, and there's always something gratifyingly weird that happens.

Dan Quayle acting like a Dancing Hamster. Teresa Heinz Kerry reprising Blanche DuBois. Dick Morris getting nabbed triangulating between a hooker and toes.

But this Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling fairy-dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult with Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru.

"What is that feeling in the air?" I asked him.

"Submerged hate," he promptly replied.

If you'd rather not read the NY Times her column also runs in the International Herald Tribune.

A Brief History of Bush's Time

By Randall Hoven in American Thinker.

The current narrative of the Bush Presidency is that it is a failure (believed by 107 of 109 historians surveyed) and that George W. Bush is the worst President in history (believed by 61% of those surveyed historians). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "The president already has the mark of the American people -- he's the worst president we ever had."

That's one narrative. I have another....

As Lucianne says, print this out and save it.

Grin and Bare It

Simon Heffer of the Telegraph (London):

Mrs Obama, eloquent, charismatic, articulate, glamorous, felt obliged to make a speech outlining, among other things, the all-American nature of her parents and brother.

No detail of her father's suffering from multiple sclerosis was too intimate, no reference to her humble upbringing too cloying, to be shared with the American people. Mrs Obama has long since chucked in her job as a stratospherically highly paid lawyer to serve the public in more humble capacities: as she did not hesitate to tell us.

It was a pungent reminder of the differences that remain between our two cultures: any politician, or politician's spouse, who tried to push such a line in Britain would be laughed out of public life. Here, things are different...

Here we just groan and turn off the TV.

Explaining Bill Ayers

Michael Barone explains Chicago politics, where "genealogy so important," and follows the various nespotic family trees.

Which leads us back to Barack Obama, who is now a U.S. senator and will shortly become the Democratic nominee for an office that even Chicago regards as more important than mayor. And the question presents itself: How did this outsider from Hawaii and Columbia and Harvard become somebody somebody sent? His wife, Michelle Robinson Obama, had some connections: Her father was a Democratic precinct committeeman; she baby-sat for Jesse Jackson's children; and she worked as a staffer for the current Mayor Daley. Obama made connections on the all-black South Side by joining the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church. But was Obama's critical connection to le tout Chicago William Ayers?

Close Encounter?

The Wall Street Journal:

This will be the first open-air acceptance speech for a presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy spoke in the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1960.

It's a gamble in part because of the weather. For now, the forecast looks good: Thursday should be sunny and in the 80s.

"Things can change," said meteorologist Eric Thaler of the National Weather Service. Denver skies, especially in late summer, are notoriously unpredictable. This weekend, five tornados hit surrounding suburbs. Four years ago, the temperature here dipped to 42 degrees on Aug. 28, the date of the speech. That date also has seen gusts of winds as strong as 53 miles per hour, thunderstorms, a lightning strike and hail three-quarters of an inch in diameter.

In 1875, a cloud of locusts descended, so thick that they darkened the sun and so hungry that they destroyed every garden in Denver.

Area Forecast Discussion here.
Less technical Zone Forecast here.

Pumas on the Prowl

Rebecca Traister interviews a few Hillary supporters.

Also leaving the rally were Cynthia Novacek, a 54-year-old from Minnesota, and Mit Mar, a 57-year-old from Sugarland, Texas. "We're all shouted out," said Novacek. Asked what their goal for the week was, Novacek replied, "I want to make it an open convention, where delegates make their voices heard." Barack Obama, she said, "was greased through by the media. They loved him. Everything bad about him, they didn't want to focus on: Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright..."

"You mean Reverend Wrong," Mar interrupted. "Look, I know about the race card. I know about race. I'm African-American. And it was Obama who played the race card, and it's going to come back and bite Obama in the butt."

We'll see on Wednesday. It's not over 'till the fat lady sings.

To-Do List Author Done

The guy who wrote 100 Things to Do Before You Die—is dead.

Freeman died Aug. 17 after falling and hitting his head at his home in Venice, said his father, Roy.

They didn't say the accident happened in the bathtub, but they might as well have.

Biden, Dowd, Kennedy—and Lord

Jeffrey Lord recalls listening to Biden in 1987.

I was stunned. Why? Because I realized as I watched Biden that I was getting to the end of his sentences before he was. Up from the mists of my teenage years, every sound, every memory of those Bobby Kennedy speeches came rushing out in a torrent. Most startling of all, it was very, very clear that Joe Biden was leaving the impression with these on-fire California Democrats that every last word he was uttering was -- Joe Biden's. Of Bobby Kennedy there was not a word. I was witnessing out and out plagiarism....

I picked up the phone and did what Robert Redford did in that old Three Days of the Condor movie. When all is lost, spill your guts to the New York Times. In my case, I went to then-reporter (and now NYT columnist) Maureen Dowd. We'd never met. She drove Reaganites crazy. But she had been covering Biden, and I liked her writing.

In A Nutshell

We'll be hearing more about Obama's radical background over the next two months.

Meanwhile, sit back and enjoy the show in Denver. And the unraveling, each evening, of the day's carefully scripted narrative.

Barack's Buddy Ayers

This is what I've been trying to tell you.

Credit the American Issues Project.

I hope this ad airs in all fifty states. TV time is expensive, however, so perhaps we'll have to rely on You Tube. And maybe, just maybe, Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw, or Bob Schieffer will ask him about it in the fall.

George Recites The Party Line

The Times of London sent a reporter to Nairobi to teach George Obama the party line.

"Life in Huruma is good. In other places you must lock yourself in to keep yourself safe," he told The Times. "Here I am surrounded by friends and family and feel safe and secure."

That's odd. Yesterday he told the Telegraph

"Huruma is a tough place, last January during the elections there was rioting and six people were hacked to death. The police don't even arrest you they just shoot you.

"I have seen two of my friends killed. I have scars from defending myself with my fists. I am good with my fists."

All lies, he says.

"They say I live on a dollar a month, but this is all lies by people who don't want my brother to win." He said that he was supported by his mother, Jael, who now lives in the US, and by a cousin in Huruma.

But yesterday it was reported that

...he was no longer in contact with his mother and said: "I have had to learn to live and take what I need."

My theory, of course, is that some of da boys from Chicago got to him. He'll be quiet now.

What They Got

Victor Davis Hanson is warming up his pen.

The Democrats wanted a cigar-chomping populist who could portray the Republicans as elitists who stomped on the Joe little-guy. Once again they got a flashier version of a John Edwards-John Kerry-Al Gore preachy liberal, who whines about the price of arugula and thinks stepping off a jet in shades and polo shirts is an Esquire photo-op.

Usually the stuff on his blog is just a first draft of the finished article, which then appears a few days later. I look forward to this one.

Election Projection

The daily electoral vote count, here.

Thier Opinion About Everything

Daniel Henninger has some thoughts about Saddleback.

How has it come to pass that presidential candidates must talk about such things?

Can one imagine Dwight Eisenhower, FDR or JFK being asked to define marriage? Abe Lincoln or George Washington could have handled Jesus, but stem cells? Would we have had better presidents back then if we made them talk about their greatest moral failure?

Maybe not. One guesses Jimmy Carter would have aced the Saddleback quiz. Harry Truman probably would have said it's none of your ---- business.

I'm sure he would have.

I'm glad I didn't have to watch it. Reading about it was enough.

That's Bad Enough

The Wall Street Journal:

As the 110th Congress continues its August recess, the big legislative news is that it has passed fewer laws than any Congress in the last two decades. An outfit known as Taxpayers for Common Sense reports that the fighting 110th has passed a mere 294 laws, while nonetheless finding time to consider 1,932 resolutions favoring such causes as National Watermelon Month. This is apparently supposed to be a matter of public consternation because Congress should be accomplishing more.

Sorry, but that's the best thing we've heard about this Congress. What a relief to discover the destruction could have been so much worse. With rare exceptions -- free-trade deals, money for the troops -- we wish the Members would spend every minute of every day passing resolutions. They'd have less time to do tangible harm.

Even we -- fated by bad career advice to write about this stuff -- haven't the foggiest idea what is in most of those 294 laws. The mayhem we know about is bad enough....

Overrated Obama

McCain (the other McCain, that is)) on why Obama is overrated.

After a poor performance in an April 15 debate with Clinton in Philadelphia, Obama declined all further debates. His subsequent defeat in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, along with lopsided losses in Kentucky and West Virginia, showed Obama's weak support among white working-class voters.

When the Clinton campaign tried to point this out, however, they were met with accusations of racism. Hillary supporter Paul Begala was skewered when, in May, he declared that Democrats "cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans."

Despite these omens and warnings, many in the media have seemed shocked to discover the weaknesses Obama displayed in the primaries being replicated in the general election campaign.

Gallup shows John McCain with a 22-point advantage among white male voters, and the only educational subgroup of whites in which Obama leads is those with postgraduate degrees. Gallup even shows the Republican candidate supported by 14 percent of white Democrats.

The Least Of My Brothers

Barack Obama to Rick Warren, August 16, 2008.

I think America's greatest moral failure in my lifetime has been that we still don't abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me, and that notion of — that basic principle applies to poverty. It applies to racism and sexism. It applies to, you know, not having — not thinking about providing ladders of opportunity for people to get into the middle class. There's a pervasive sense, I think, that this country, as wealthy and powerful as we are, still don't spend enough time thinking about the least of us.

America's greatest moral failure? Psychologists might call that 'projecting'.

Life Imitates The Onion

Only it isn't funny; it's sad.

The Onion, August 13th: Obama's Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign

Barack Obama's once-commanding lead in the polls slipped to two points Monday, continuing a month-long slide that many credit to the recent appearance of the Democratic candidate's heretofore unknown half-brother, Cooter Obama.

Long kept a family secret, the overalls-clad, straw-chewing Kentuckian first entered the public spotlight in July...

Followed by the usual stupidity. It was mildly amusing. And then

The Telegraph, August 20th: Barack Obama's 'lost' brother found in Kenya

Mr [George Hussein Onyango] Obama, 26, the youngest of the presidential candidate's half-brothers, spoke for the first time about his life, which could not be more different than that of the Democratic contender.

"No-one knows who I am," he told the magazine, before claiming: "I live here on less than a dollar a month."...

"I have seen two of my friends killed. I have scars from defending myself with my fists. I am good with my fists."

A human-interest story. If you're interested. If you're human.