[Martina]

The usually entertaining Maureen Dowd on the VP Debate. The parts I especially liked from her commentary:

An Irish Catholic Wake-Up
By MAUREEN DOWD

NOW you know what Thanksgiving with my family is like.

A donnybrook with Irish Catholic uncles and nephews interrupting one another, mocking one another, arguing over one another, bombastically denouncing every political opinion except their own as malarkey.

The loser of the vice-presidential debate was, of course, Barack Obama. In contrast to the pair on the undercard slugging it out, the president’s limp performance the other night was even more inexplicable and inexcusable. The president was no doubt warned not to sigh, but his entire demeanor was a sigh.

The fact that one diffident debate by the president could throw his whole race into crisis shows that nobody madly loves Obama anymore. With his aloof presidency, he shook off the deep attachments from 2008, and now his support lacks intensity.

Even if he comes out in the town-hall debate on Tuesday with Ben Affleck charm, he has a Mitt Romney problem. Will it be the real Obama or will he just be doing what the media suggest and the base demands?
. . .

If Obama needed Biden on the ticket to add a little humanity, Romney needed Ryan as “a modular conviction unit,” as one Obama adviser joked. Romney, a say-anything salesman used to buying whatever he wants, hired his ideology.

Ryan is a true believer, and that’s a little awkward now that Romney is making strides by showing that he truly believes nothing — running away from, rather than toward, the hard-right stances that won him the nomination.

“Convictions aren’t helpful at the moment,” said David Axelrod, the Obama strategist. “The game right now is to try to obfuscate. Romney’s audacity in the debate was in hiding their plans. And Ryan actually believes this stuff. He argued for a Social Security privatization plan so radical that even the Bush administration called it irresponsible.”

The 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman kept gulping water, and once, when Biden nailed Ryan for twice soliciting the very stimulus money he condemns, he may have actually gulped. Unlike Palin, who also had to cram before her debate, Ryan did not need to memorize chunks. He actually tried to learn about all the parts of the world he had never followed closely. On Afghanistan, he spouted so many obscure geographical references, from Zabul to Kunar to the treacherous eastern provinces, he sounded like Google maps.

. . . . .
(I knew Raddatz would be tough because I once saw her dress down a male clerk at a Marriott hotel in Saudi Arabia who told her that women were not allowed to use the gym.)

. . . . .
Biden also boxed Ryan into looking as though he wants to send more American troops to Afghanistan and to intervene in Syria, which isn’t so appealing to war-weary America.

Ronald Reagan knew how to bluster for peace. Neocons do not. When they run the show, threatening a war is followed by going to war and that is followed by bollixing up the war and that is followed by our troops’ dying at war and money-pit nation-building to end the war, and that is followed by economic disaster for America.

Amped to make up for all of Obama’s missed shots, Biden went on a one-minute scream-of-consciousness about the 47 percent cited by Romney as moochers, the 30 percent cited by Ryan as takers, Scranton, his parents, the Buffett rule, Social Security, veterans, the 47 percent again, Grover Norquist, the middle class, a fair shot, Wall Street vs. Main street, and $500 billion in additional tax cuts for 120,000 wealthy families. Practically in one breath. Whew.

Biden’s weakest moment was on Libya, where he stumbled as he claimed that the White House didn’t know about requests for more security for diplomats there. It is likely true that such an appeal never made it through the Foggy Bottom bureaucracy to the West Wing. But the vice president should have been prepared to answer questions about a blunder that has scuffed the administration’s national security luster.

. . . . .

Mittens has been doing better with women since the first debate. Raddatz didn’t dwell on women’s issues, which denied Biden a chance to home in on Ryan’s chillingly retro positions.

Ryan, who has long opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest, said, “The policy of a Romney administration will be to oppose abortion with the exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.”

When Raddatz asked Ryan if those who believe abortion should remain legal should be worried if the Republican team wins, Ryan basically said yes.

“We don’t think that unelected judges should make this decision,” he said, though he and other Republicans for decades have pined for a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade. He added, “People, through their elected representatives and reaching a consensus in society through the democratic process, should make this determination.”

Biden, for once, wasn’t smiling.