As I mentioned last night, I was phone banking for Obama, so I didn’t get to watch Katie interview the Sarahnator until around midnight.

My first response:  she has the same strained look on her face that Bush did Wednesday night.  She knows she’s in trouble and doesn’t know what to do about it.  It’s not pretty to watch.  Nor is it humorous.

The total meltdown is the Russia-Alaska-Canada answer.  “They are in the state I am the executive of”?  “If Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go”?  Huh?  She just completely falls apart and keeps digging deeper and deeper and deeper.

The rest isn’t much better.  In fact, it’s shocking.  How is handing over decisionmaking on foreign policy to a foreign country okay?  How is it in any way not ten times worse than Obama saying he’d meet with world leaders without preconditions?  Imagine if she had said that we should never question Poland and do whatever they say.  Wouldn’t people think she was mad?

I know that we constantly complain about politicians who speak in sound bites, who never go off message, who avoid questions or answer the question they wanted to answer instead of the one asked.  I know that we keep saying we want someone genuine and real.  I’m all for that too.  But genuine and real doesn’t mean clueless.  She was completely out of her depth — and Couric wasn’t even that hard on her.

I haven’t been a fan of Palin since was nominated and especially since she went after Obama so viciously at the convention.  And at times, I’ve succumbed to the temptation to mock her or her views on certain issues.  But this is deadly serious now.  She is not prepared to lead, nor is she able to learn in the time frame left before the election.

The tragedy here is, ideology aside, Sarah Palin could have, with more time, evolved into a more capable and astute politician.  I’m not saying that I wanted that to happen.  But I do think that it’s not unlike a ballclub that brings up a rookie too soon and shatters his confidence.  McCain has destroyed her, as surely as if he had dropped her off a cliff.  Despite her devoted following, she will never be regarded as credible again — even if they win.

We can’t let that happen.  I can’t put it anymore strongly than this:  McCain-Palin must be defeated if the United States is ever to recover from the mess we’re in.  They would not just be as disastrous as Bush, they would be worse.

Those are words that I never thought I would have to say.

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Back when I was in graduate school, Chernobyl happened.  Being graduate students, we responded to this tragedy in the only way we knew how:  we threw a party.  We covered the walls with aluminum foil, replaced all the light bulbs with flashing red lights, and renamed the keg the cooling tower.  We had so many people there, that the floor almost collapsed and the heat generated by the foiled-up walls caused the air conditioning unit for the entire building to fail.

That was the last time I remember connecting nuclear power to dancing.  Until now.  If you’ve been watching the conventions, you’ve seen this commercial:

You may not have noticed it, given the awesome animation and Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown” playing in the background, but if you pause at 0:09, you’ll notice a couple of words down in the lower right hand corner:

YELLOW CAKE

So that’s where Saddam put it!  Canada!

And what is up with this ad?  Funkytown?  The happy shiny strip mining?  And the apparent argument that we should have nukes so that people can play Dance Dance Revolution in Shanghai?

So the ad is at least two years old.  The first version was in French.

You wouldn’t know it from the commercial, but after a check of The Googles, I found out that Areva is “a French public multinational industrial conglomerate that is mainly known for nuclear power.”

Oh.

Did I mention that the company also manages those yellow cake mines in Niger?  More happy shiny strip mining!

That means Areva played a role, albeit indirectly, in the whole Valerie Plame scandal.  And the Iraq war.  And, of course, the lies of the Bush Administration to justify both the war and the Plame leak.

Now that’s some serious funk.

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No agony but lots and lots of ecstasy:

Canada is one of the top three world suppliers of the psychedelic drug ecstasy, and a significant supplier of marijuana to the United States, the government admitted on Friday.

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Jim Hoagland wants to “blow up” the G-8 and replace it with a G-3:

Predictable suggestions that this body be expanded to a G-13 or a G-20 go in the absolute wrong direction. More expansion will destroy any opportunity for informal, effective consultation by world leaders. They will be talking for the press releases, not for each other. Such proposals should be put forward only as cover for a more sensible proposition: The United States, the European Union and Japan should quietly form a G-3 that would operate in the shadows of the much larger talk shop.

Oh boy would that be a good idea incredibly stupid thing to do:  alienate everybody except Japan, the one country without the capacity to help us militarily.

The French, Brits, and Germans would be angry because their three votes would be reduced to one, not to mention the fact that the EU would be represented by whichever country happens to hold the Presidency  (right now, that would be France, but come January it would be the Czech Republic, whose economy currently ranks somewhere between 31st and 40th largest, depending on your source).

The Russians, who already disdain us (as we do them), would get even madder.

The Chinese, Spanish, Brazilians, Indians, and Koreans would have brand new reasons to be annoyed with the arrogance of our foreign policy.

The Canadians and Italians would be upset at being kicked out of the one club where they are somewhat relevant.  And of course, we would look like the big bully once again.

I’m no fan of the G-8.  I think it’s the wrong grouping for the wrong reasons.  I agree with Hoagland that it’s not a very useful construct.  Every two years these (mostly) guys get together and set out an ambitious agenda on a given problem or set of problems, which they then trumpet as a breakthrough.  Two years ago, it was Africa, debt, and development (thanks largely to Bono and Blair).  This time, it’s (again) climate change and the rapid rise in commodity prices.  But if the past is prologue, they’ll negotiate until the last minute, issue a communique, and then… go home.  Little else ever comes of these “breakthroughs.”  And that doesn’t even get to the fact that the host country has to establish a miniature police state to make the event happen.

Part of the problem, as Hoagland notes, is that the G-8 really doesn’t have a clear definition of membership.  That is in part a consequence of the dumb decision to admit Russia in the post-Cold-War-end-of-history euphoria of the 1990s (I would not be the first to call this one of Clinton’s dumber ideas).  But it also is a product of the fact that the G-8 (with that one exception) has remained a static body while the world has changed.

So what is the G-8?  To put it in Jim Collins’ Good to Great terms, what is its hedgehog concept?  Is it a gathering of the world’s largest economies?  If so, what’s Russia doing there?  Is it the world’s largest democratic economies?  Again, Russia disproves that.  Furthermore, Spain (which by some (but not all) accounts has surpassed Canada in terms of nominal GDP), India, and Korea have just as much right to a place at the table as the Canadians.

I also have a hard time understanding why China is excluded when Russia remains at the table.  It’s either the world’s biggest economies or it’s the world’s biggest democratic economies.  Right now it’s a ridiculous hybrid.

Instead of maintaining the status quo or arbitrarily growing the club to include/exclude certain countries, why not draw a line that gives countries aspiring to membership a clearly delineated criteria for membership?  From now on, The G-xx will include

1. only those economies whose annual GDP is equal to US$1 million or greater;
2. only those democratic economies whose annual GDP is equal to US$1 million or greater; or
3. some other equally arbitrary criteria that is clear to outsiders.

Doing this might create incentives for economic growth and perhaps even democratic governance.

Of course, the problem is deciding whose standard to use.  If we were to use the first criteria listed above, would the membership be ten (using World Bank numbers) or twelve (using those of the IMF)?  That explains one of the real reasons the group hasn’t changed:  everyone is terrified of making somebody else angry.

I recognize none of what I’m proposing is new:  as Hoagland notes, there are numerous proposals to expand the group to a G-13 and even a G-20.  But instead of coming up with a bad idea to fill a column, let’s acknowledge the truth of the matter:  the time has come to revise G-8’s mission statement or abolish it altogether.

Of course, the chances of this happening are almost infinitesimal — if it takes these guys months to negotiate a statement on debt relief, imagine how long this project would take?

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