And that, of course, was precisely what Slow Joe was trying to accomplish.  After Red Barry sleepwalked through last week's contest, to the outraged chagrin of the zombie lynch mob Donk base, they wanted Biden (and Radditz) to bend Paul Ryan over the table and gang anal rape him.  They wanted to see Ryan's entrails ripped out and force-fed to him.  And (figuratively speaking) Biden (and Raddatz) did.

In other words, Biden's strategy was ***entirely defensive***.  Remember what I said a year ago: With no record or positive domestic accomplishments to defend, and Libyagate having negated their "We got bin Laden!" touchdown dancing, all Team Messiah can do is wage the dirtiest, nastiest, most disgustingly despicably negative campaign in American political history.  When The One didn't shove an IED into Mitt's magic underwear, the MSNBC crowd wasn't going to settle for anything less than [ahem] blood on the walls.  Biden really had no choice.

 Meanwhile, Chairman Ryan managed to assert his points through the tangle of Rogaine's (and Radditz's) incessant interruptions and boorish grandstanding, and look ten times more presidential than that senile old lush.  And the likeability numbers (which is the only measure that matters in these encounters) amply reflected it.  So for both man and clown, it was "mission accomplished".

The reason it works is simple: it raises doubts about "the other guy".  Take Bill Clinton's Mediscare fusillade in 1996.  Its point wasn't to actually make voters believe that Bob Dole was the devil incarnate, come to abolish Medicare, take away Granny's Alpo, a flame-thrower to her snow bank, and drag her off to hell.  The point was to make people hesitant to give New Gingrich and the GOP Congress cart blanche to *maybe*, *possibly* "cut" Medicare.  For low-information voters, such doubts are all you need to plant in their sterile minds.  That wasn't the only reason that Dole lost - there were a panoply of them - but this was near or at the top of the list.

Red Barry has been trying to do this to Mitt Romney - or "kill" him, in Obamunists' "civil" parlance - but it hasn't worked.  Why?  Because what they consider to be epithetical - "Rich," "Businessman," etc. - isn't axiomatically negative outside the extreme Left.  Actually, to most Americans, having a successful CEO with what even Sick Willie called a "sterling business record" in the White House sounds pretty darned good compared to the SCOMF "occupying" it now.

That's what makes what Jim Geraghty called O's "unholy trinity" of Kinsleyan gaffes the other side of that same coin.  Rather than "vet" Romney as the mustachioed plutocrat from "Monopoly," what The One has actually done is vet himself as he never was four years ago.  Coming on top of his disastrous record of over three years of (in reality) double-digit unemployment, de facto permanent depression, cosmic debt, all of it shoved down the collective throat of the public against its will - or what I like to call "governance by the double-extended-middle finger" - paired with all the bullshit pie-in-the-sky promises he made, it's the final nails in his electoral coffin.

There's only three months and change until Election Day.  Far from it being just too late to turn around, the economy is actually deteriorating, and at an accelerated pace.  Now he's given us a tripartite window into his Marxist-Alinskyist soul.  And his forfeiture of credibility long ago caused the public to tune him out, depriving him of his erstwhile greatest strength: his supposed oratorical eloquence, and thus any chance to repair this critical self-inflicted damage.  Not eve TOTUS can save the Obamidency now.

This election is over.  The only remaining questions are by how much Governor Romney will win, and will the Li'l ex-president go willingly.

Quietly won't be an option.

Yeah, it's shameless, yeah, it's despicable.  But I'm growing more and more convinced that they don't even realize their motivations for doing so anymore.  The press is so submerged in the Obamunist kool-aid, so lost in the lunatic haze of their rancid, extremist, hate-mongering faux-religion, that they unconsciously take it as a given that any atrocity like this just HAS to be the result of "right-wing extremism".  It isn't that they *want* to opportunistically smear and scapegoat their political opponents - they just do it because they can't conceive of the need to consider any other conclusion.

Early twenty-first century liberals have completely lost the ability to think.

Hence, the irony of James Holmes' (*not* the 52-year-old Tea Partier who now has to fear for his and his family's safety after ABCCCP publicly defamed him) impression of Heath Ledger's Joker from "The Dark Knight".  I was watching TDK last night and was reminded of the pseudo-philosophical underpinnings of Ledger's character's anarchic insanity.  Particularly his murderous pitting of two boatloads of people - one of upstanding citizen commuters, the other a prison barge - against each other.  Why did he do it?  As a psychological experiment.  The Joker believed that everybody in Gotham - EVERYBODY - was as depraved and nihilistic as he was, and it was simply self-serving conceit for non-criminals to claim otherwise.  Thus, his self-perceived purpose and mission: to sew chaos and destruction in order to rip away that civilized facade and force the city's people to confront and acknowledge what, in his view, they really were.  Indeed, he saw it as a public service, and himself as the only honest man in town.

I can see Heath Ledger's Joker pulling what his real-life imitator did yesterday for much the same purpose.  And unlike in the movie, where the commuters and convicts *don't* turn on each other, he'd have proven his point in spades.

Barack Obama appears close in this race when he should be thirty points behind for one over-arching reason: because he's black.

His is the Affirmative Action presidency.

But it only appears that way.

When the votes get tallied on Election Day, the Li'l President will lose by approximately the same margin he won in 2008 - mid single-digits (52-48, 53-47).  The 1980 dynamic is at work in this cycle even more than it was thirty-two years ago.  Just as Jimmy Carter appeared to be neck and neck with Ronald Reagan but seemed to collapse in the campaign's final days, so it will be this November.  Because in reality, neither Mr. Peanut then, nor Red Barry now, was really ever all that close.  It's simply that there were voters who were leaning against the incumbent who didn't want to admit it.  How much moreso today, when we're under the thumb of not just a stuttering clusterbleep of a miserable failure, but one with delusions of Castroite godhood as well?

Here's the real food for thought: Will The One accept the voters' verdict and relinquish power, no matter how badly he loses?  Given his growing string of unconstitutional power grabs and usurpations, I have serious and mounting concerns about even bigger constitutional crises to come.

You say that Michelle Bachmann was a "favorite of conservatives" during the GOP primaries.  But that's obviously *not* the case, or she would have emerged from that moronic morass as the "not-Romney" alternative.  From where this conservative sat, Bachmann came off as an anarchistic bomb-thrower who spent all her time attacking every viable not-Romney alternative that could have given the lie to his "inevitability" (i.e. Governors Pawlenty and Perry) rather than Governor Romney himself.  Since she had zero chance at the nomination and was manifestly unqualified for it to begin with, she had no valid or legitimate purpose being in the primaries at all.  In point of fact, her purpose seemed to be to thwart conservatives and ensure Governor Romney's triumph.

In the process, she made an ass of herself and did much do damage the Tea Party's image.  She basically "Qualye-ized" herself and saved the Obamedia the trouble of having to do it for them.  And now they have a ready target to point to whenever they want to discredit a valid conservative point - like the Muslim Brotherhood connection with Huma Abedin.  Or do you think it's any coincidence that of the six GOP representatives' signatures on that letter to the intelligence community, it's only Bachmann's that the press latched onto?

Here's a little piece of advice both you and the entire Tea Party movement would do well to heed: Stop putting individual conservatives ("favorites") ahead of the conservative cause itself, and stop sniping at nominal allies until they become irredeemable foes.  In times like these, conservatism - and the U.S. Constitution - need all the friends they can get.

Ernest Borgnine pilots Airwolf to the Great Beyond; the Regime has already ground out 13,000 pages of O-Care regulations (entire forests hardest hit); the House's O-Care repeal vote becomes even more bipartisan, bitches!; another California city bites the fiscal dust in the Broke State's headlong plunge towards economic suicide; and pretty much everything else Doug Gibbs and JASmius won't be able to get to in today's forty-five second Constitution Radio segment.

Live at high noon!

The first hint of the personal attacks that will inevitably feature in the presidential campaign came Friday when President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney lashed out at each other Romney's history with his private equity company Bain Capital.

Obama called on Romney to come clean on the exact date he left the company, while Romney fired back calling on the president to apologize after one of his aides suggested Romney might have broken the law.

Romney immediately went on the offensive, granting five-minute interviews to CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News and CNN.

"He sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team," Romney told ABC.

On CBS, he said of Obama, "This is reckless and absurd on his part, and it's something that's beneath his dignity. I hope he recognizes that even fellow Democrats have said that."

On CNN he said the Obama campaign's tactics were "disgusting and demeaning," adding "Is this the level that the Obama campaign is willing to stoop to? Is this up to the standards expected of the presidency of the United States?"

And on Fox News he said, "This is showing a pattern. You just had bad news on the economic front with now 41 straight months with unemployment above 8%. And what does the president do? He says he is going to raise taxes on people, he's trying to gut welfare reform as we know it, and he launches attacks of this nature. It's beneath the dignity of his office."

Only his Fox News comments came close to the reply Governor Romney ought to be deigning to counter-salvo at The One.  But even there the taken-aback outrage is less than impressive.

Of course Red Barry is going to wage the dirtiest, nastiest, filthiest, most disgustingly, despicably negative campaign in American political history against the man who has, in his twisted mind, the blasphemous gall to challenge him for his throne.  It's not like this kind of thing was difficult to predict; O can't run on his record, because it's a disaster; he can't run on any popular accomplishments, because they're the source of the disaster; his supposed greatest strength - his speechifying - has been neutralized by his failure to deliver on any his pie-in-the-sky promises, which destroyed his credibility and led most of the American people to tune him out a long, long time ago.  And the only asset he allegedly had left - his phantom "likability" - is being sacrificed to this all-out effort to "kill Romney".

It's a desperate onslaught borne of pathetic weakness and naked fear, waged by a small, stupendously vain and venal man who's never faced adversity in his entire overprivileged, perfurmed-prince, Manchurian Candidated, Affirmative Actioned life and has no idea how to cope with it, no means of understanding what he'd have had to do to avert it, and no willingness to accept what he'd have to have done - Clintonoid triangulation - if he ever had grasped the way out.

This is what Governer Romney ought to recognize.  Hell, the WaPo does, and Obama surrogate and ex-Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell wouldn't touch it:

Perhaps this is why Mitt launched his indignancy counter-offensive - to keep alive the latest brand-eroding Obama propaganda backfire.  T'would be more reassuring than the alternative of his being taken by surprise by the Chicago Cherubim's refusal to play nice.

I've never really understood this business of demanding an apology from an enemy anyway.  You're never going to get what you seek, and even if you did, of what worth would it be?  Especially in a context with stakes of this magnitude?

For the proper retort, Governor Romney need look no further than President Reagan's famous quip to Jimmy Carter at their one and only 1980 debate:

A smile, a bemused shake of the head, a hearty "There you go again.".- and a vigilant consideration of the source.  It projects a lot more confidence than expecting dignity from a megalamaniac to whom such things are entirely [*ahem*] foreign.