Great Debates at the NRO

Why you all in my ear
Talkin' all lotta **** I ain't tryna hear
--Luda

I am getting some super intense deja vu looking at the Corner at the NRO. Remember 9 years ago when George Bush first became a serious candidate for the white house?

I do.

It sounded a little like this:

[R]eal people don't define "experience" as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong.

Bush was supposed to be the anti-intellectual, the real man of vision who didn't need to make high fallutin' arguments or construct a sentence because he was from Texas, where real humans are handmade by God somewhere behind the ranch house.

I like Texas. I like Texans. I don't like arguments about how tough and real someone is because they are from Texas (or Alaska) by a guy who lives in New England. (Full disclosure: I like Steyn, and even won his letter of week at his website once upon a time).

Robert Downey Jr. plays a confused but talented actor in black face in Tropic Thunder. He is an Australian, playing a Vietnam War hero, disguised and "acting" as a black man, or as Downey says "I know exactly who I am: I'm a dude, playing a dude, disguised as another dude!"

Downey is essentially the GOP in other words. On the surface, they want to appeal to the angry, everyday man, worrying about food on the table and the whole BS archetypical American Rove wants to find in a focus group. Deep down, at their core, they are backed by a what Paul Simon would call "a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires". They made a decision under Rove (and after the oh-so-haughty Snr. Bush lost the 92 election partly because of his elitism) to dumb down the candidates to appeal to fear and anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism. It worked, but the wool can only be pulled over the eyes for so long.

How long were we going to allow Mr. I-can't-name-how-many-houses-I-have to pull the anti-elite card over Mr. Single-mom-raised-me-in-South-Chicago?

Anyways, it's not all bad at the NRO. David Frum has apparently come to his senses, slowly, after being a rabid Neocon for so long:

But question: If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?

Good question, right?

Here's Steyn, on the same topic of Palin:

I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.

Uh-huh.