Saturday, October 11, 2008

Amphibian DNA

This, from Nathan Thornburgh at Time, is pretty similar to my take away from this whole Troopergate thing. Two word synopsis: Amateur Hour.

Money quote:

"[T]he Branchflower report still makes for good reading, if only because it convincingly answers a question nobody had even thought to ask: Is the Palin administration shockingly amateurish? Yes, it is. Disturbingly so. The 263 pages of the report show a coordinated application of pressure on Monegan so transparent and ham-handed that it was almost certain to end in public embarrassment for the governor."

Putting aside for a moment the very real and serious questions this raises (or, rather answers) with regard to the nature of Sarah Palin's respect for ethics and honesty, it also displays a simple incompetence from an administrative perspective that seems to have been, to this point, somewhat overlooked.

The Democratic line for so long has been that John McCain was a third Bush term, that he was McSame as Bush and so on. Like he was, let's say, a clone of Bush made from the blood harvested from a prehistoric mosquito perfectly preserved in amber.

The only problem with cloning somebody using blood harvested from a mosquito frozen in amber is that you're going to have to overcome some degradation in the genetic code. In layman's terms, there are going to be some holes that need filling. This probably accounts for why a hypothetical McCain presidency has never really felt to me like a third term of George W. Bush. The code was simply incomplete, and if you're looking to patch some holes in an oil/baseball man's genetic code, where is a good place to start? That's right: A hockey mom from Alaska!

The rest is hardly Nucular Physics; it's basically cloning 101. Further explained here.

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