Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Sunday post-snow funnies.

WaPo:

By delivering a paid keynote address at a convention other politicians had avoided because of allegations of profiteering, Palin displayed one of the traits that has electrified her anti-establishment followers: a talent for persistently and defiantly flouting the conventional rules of politics.

Palin swooped into Opryland to address tea party activists at a coming-of-age moment for their movement. Tea parties began with town hall rage and street protests last year, and now the activists are trying, through their first working convention, to become more "mature" and channel their grass-roots efforts to political gains.

Not that it can't be done, but the incoherent message has to attract more than the thirty percent of nutters who think Obama's not a citizen and Palin is qualified for higher office. "Oh, my!' the media said breathlessly. "Sarah Palin was cheered wildly by 600 people as nutty as she is at a conference marred by diviseness and controversy!!" This means... what, exactly?

Yet the movement shuns any semblance of political elitism. And although many activists here embrace Palin as a spokeswoman, they are deeply divided over whether they want her as their leader -- or whether they want any leader at all.

Elitist? Nah. I suppose they all have tv studios in their living rooms. That's not elitist, it's simply practical politics, like getting paid six figures for the speech.

There have always been nutters, con men and demagogues. But a credulous media is the more dangerous risk to democracy.

Kevin Huffman:

On Sunday, as I hunker down with family and friends for the Super Bowl, I can rest easy knowing that CBS is working hard to defend my heterosexual sensitivities. On the surface, heterosexuality doesn't seem like a particularly distinctive trait or one in need of broad institutional protections, but many seem to believe that we heterosexuals are delicate souls.

The media, the government, the military -- all are ready to head off potential sightings of gay people.

In the case of the Super Bowl, CBS has refused to broadcast an ad by the gay dating Web site ManCrunch.

Frank Rich:

A funny thing happened after Adm. Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military: A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark.

Maureen Dowd: Speaking of elitists:

"I either run or try to play basketball every day," he said. "I have severe athlete’s foot — feet. I get a foot scrub out of respect for my wife because getting into bed with what I have when I take my socks off isn’t respectful to anybody."...

As the former Tennessee congressman and Merrill Lynch rainmaker told The Times’s Michael Barbaro in an interview about his flirtation with a Senate run, he gets pedicures and has breakfast at the Regency on Park Avenue (where Rielle Hunter famously picked up John Edwards by calling him "so hot"). He often gets chauffeured by MSNBC to his gigs on "Morning Joe" and has flown to the boroughs in a helicopter.

Uh-huh. Harold Ford, the People's Choice.

Jacob Weisberg:

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Oy. Blaming the people is for losers. Blame the leaders and communicators, not the people, unless you want to give up on democracy altogether.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

Okay, okay, you have a point. But why is that different than it's been for 200 plus years?