Obviously I am not posting everything good being written about the nonsense that seems at the moment to be engulfing Barack Obama like a tide of nonsense. But I'm posting this, by Timothy Noah, about Peggy Noonan, because in a voice that is the very soul of reasonableness it breaks the nonsense down into little atoms and asks, What the fuck is up with this crap?

Footloose: more relevant than ever! Apparently you can get arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial.

This country is nuts: Until recently, governors of Wisconsin could use their veto power to strike individual words from legislation, allowing them to create entirely new meanings. "Like when Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, scratched out some 700 words from a section of the 2005 budget bill, leaving behind just 20 words that, when stitched back together, moved $427 million from the transportation fund to education." (It gets nuttier: until 1990, they could cross out letters to make new words.)

The A.P. reports on Ty Alper's lethal-injection study: "Nearly all lethal injection executions have occurred in states where veterinarians are not allowed to use the same method to euthanize animals."

Hillary Clinton, today: "We need a president who is ready on day one to be Commander-in-Chief of our economy."

Does anyone else think it's weird to refer to the U.S. economy as a command structure with a single executive at the top? We need a president who will be a capable manager of the federal government in its role as largest economic actor, certainly. Obviously it's less punchy when you put it like that. But isn't Clinton's formulation both a distortion of reality and creepily militaristic?

Jim Henley reports from a parallel universe:

So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War when it had a chance of doing good that I have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation’s elite media venues - collecting, I am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. Everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about Iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now.

Stanley Fish on what's wrong with the campaign:

This denouncing and renouncing game is simply not serious. It is a media-staged theater, produced not in response to genuine concerns – no one thinks that Obama is unpatriotic or that Clinton is a racist or that McCain is a right-wing bigot – but in response to the needs of a news cycle. First you do the outrage (did you see what X said?), then you put the question to the candidate (do you hereby denounce and renounce?), then you have a debate on the answer (Did he go far enough? Has she shut her husband up?), and then you do endless polls that quickly become the basis of a new round.

Meanwhile, the things the candidates themselves are saying about really important matters – war, the economy, health care, the environment – are put on the back-burner until the side show is over, though the odds are that a new one will start up immediately.

Anne Applebaum: "Tibet is to China what Algeria once was to France, what India once was to imperial Britain, what Poland was to czarist Russia: the most unreliable, the most intransigent, and at the same time the most symbolically significant province of the empire."

Hendrik Hertzberg on how Obama should have responded to the Samantha Power "monstergate" flap:

Before people judge her I suggest they take a look at her book ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide. It deserved the prizes it won—the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy. You can’t read her firsthand reports on the horrors in Darfur without realizing that this is a woman of great moral and physical courage. She may be quick to anger, but here’s a news flash: nobody’s perfect. Samantha’s skills and expertise are a potentially valuable resource not just for this campaign but for our country. I’m not about to cast her into the outer darkness because of a single naïve and stupid instance of bad judgment.

Yglesias:

Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and a brilliant and original thinker and advocate for the intelligent deployment of American power in order to build a more just and humane world. But she's supporting Barack Obama, she made a gaffe, she promptly and rightly apologized, and then she resigned. And now this afternoon, the Clinton campaign has continued to push out Power-bashing material in order to prove, I guess, that there's nothing and nobody they won't try to destroy if they think that will provide them with some slender additional shot at getting themselves and their clique back in power.

I'm sure I'm not the first to make this point, but: Both of the campaign advisors who have caused trouble for Obama lately, Austan Goolsbee and Samantha Power, are young academics rather than seasoned political pros. I think it's great that Obama is bringing in new thinking on economics and foreign policy, and Goolsbee and Power are two of the smartest people alive. But can you imagine Robert Rubin or Madeleine Albright getting into one of these distracting messes?

Fun fact I learned from Goolsbee's Wikipedia page: he and Slate's Dahlia Lithwick were debate partners at Yale, and were national runners-up in 1990.

James Fallows, who I think of as a pretty cool customer, is clearly furious at Hillary Clinton.

Today's best point about the fact that this primary campaign is going to go on forever comes from Matthew Yglesias:

Yesterday Josh Marshall had a complaint: "Let's note that Sen. McCain has decided to hang tough with his embrace of anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Pastor John Hagee. And the major papers and cable news outlets have decided to give him a pass."

I've been Hagee-bashing since before it was cool, so this pisses me off, too. But realistically it's not the press and the cable networks that gave McCain a pass, it was Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They gave him a pass because, of course, they were arguing with each other. For a little while during the Wisconsin-Texas interregnum, Obama did pivot in the direction of McCain and it gave Clinton the opportunity to smack him over the head with a frying pan. I assume neither campaign is going to make that mistake again until this thing is actually wrapped up. But that means that there'll be nobody effectively pressing the media with anti-McCain talking points. It also means that Clinton will continue re-enforcing whatever good lines of attack McCain comes up with against Obama, and if McCain starts delivering good anti-Clinton lines, Obama will probably start re-enforcing those, too.

In fact, of course, the primary campaign is not endless; it just feels that way.

TNR's Noam Scheiber, citing former Texas congressman Martin Frost, makes two points that suggest Texas is looking better for Obama than polls suggest. The first is this:

1.) Don't overlook early voting, which has been significant here. (More than one million people voted early in Texas, versus only 800,000 who voted here overall in 2004.) Unlike the February 5 states, the demographics of early voting seem to favor Obama. That means a chunk of his now-vanished lead in the polls has been locked in.

The same argument was made about Clinton before some of the earlier primaries, and it's based on a misunderstanding of how polls work. Pollsters take account of early voting by asking, "Who are you planning to vote for on Tuesday or, if you've already voted, who did you vote for?" So early voting doesn't change the math, and the later polls are more reliable predictors than earlier ones.

Scheiber's second point is a bit more cheering.

William F. Buckley Jr., 1925-2008

More strange new respect for Bill Buckley, this time from James Kirchick at the Plank. Kirchick cites Buckley's famous riposte to Gore Vidal -- "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered” -- in order, rather oddly, to praise Buckley for refraining from personal insults except in that one uncharacteristic instance.

I leave it to the reader to measure the distance between "you queer ... I'll sock you in your goddam face" and the remark I quoted yesterday: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"

I'm sure Buckley was nice to black people too, even as he wrote things like this, in 1957:

The central question that emerges ... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

Buckley later said he regretted opposing civil rights legislation, and supported the establishment of a national holiday on the birthday of Martin Luther King. He changed his mind, in other words, after the battle had been fought, with him on the wrong side, just in time to be in the right on a matter of pure symbolism. He was by all accounts a charming and generous man, and he propagated a worldview that consisted largely of sympathy for the overdog. He was certainly more amusing and less odious than Sean Hannity or Dick Cheney, but that's a judgment that leaves a lot of room for odium. Now he's dead, and his decency and fairness are gone with him. What survives is the movement he built, which reflects not his personal manner but the actions he took and the positions he chose, and which stands athwart America, shouting Fuck you, you queers and blacks and poors! in language that Buckley used only in occasional slips but that expresses his meaning more than adequately.

Various liberals (Hendrik Hertzberg, Joe Klein, James K. Galbraith) have nice things to say about the late William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was evidently generous, eloquent, cultivated, intellectually honest, and ecumenical in his friendships. In that spirit, let's take a moment to recall Buckley's comments on antiwar demonstrators in 1965: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"

Hertzberg writes that "he could not have been happy with the vulgarity of the movement he did so much to spawn." Maybe so. Perhaps Buckley disliked hearing Ann Coulter call John Edwards a faggot. But one suspects he opposed the syntax more than the sentiment.

Obvs I'm in a full-on swoon over Obama, and I'm sorry to inflict that on you, the loyal readers of RoBros. But take a look at this speech he gave to a bunch of Cleveland Jews on Saturday, and the Q&A that followed. Is it not a model of direct, reasonable, adult discourse? Is this not the sound of a man who thinks of his listeners as thoughtful, mature humans, rather than as some constituency to be assuaged? Is it not incredibly weird to hear this kind of talk coming from someone who is at this moment the front-running candidate for president of the United States?

Interesting poll numbers from the NYT. Apparently Bill Clinton's little meltdown around the South Carolina primary did some real damage:

According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, only 22 percent of respondents said they were more likely to vote for Mrs. Clinton because of him, while an equal number said they were less likely to support her because of him. In December, 44 percent said they were more likely to vote for her because of him, while only 7 percent said they were less likely.

From the Politico: "The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved."