Roger Codger

Lotta folks have already pointed out how ol' McCrankypants gets these days when the milk of magnesia runs out, or he makes a boom-boom and Cindy's not around with a fresh set. But the line that got my attention was this:

I can only imagine what Saddam Hussein would be doing with the wealth he would acquire with oil at $110 and $120 a barrel.

The thing is, I honestly don't know if that's just the usual red meat for the rubes, or if he actually thinks that oil would have skyrocketed as it has without parking a quarter-million troops in the Straits of Hormuz, unleashing sectarian hell in the only secular country in the region, and trying to goad Iran into a pretext for another misbegotten war.

I'm pretty sure that most every first-year macro student understands the concept of "risk premium", which makes it all the more perplexing that either McCain doesn't, or that he's counting on no one else to know what it means. As usual, probably a bit of both. Even when he's not grumping through the rest of the interview excerpt, he's so predictably on-message you wonder what the point of the exercise was in the first place, other than journamalists getting to say they interviewed John McCain.

The interview responses and his recent attitude toward the media in general, like today's Palin pick, seem to be his way of tacitly conceding the whole thing. The cookie-cutter Mad-lib answers to essentially every question, regardless of topic, convey that if he even has advisers, either they're out of ideas as well or just suck to begin with.

Kinda like the Republican Party itself. If I were Schwarzenegger I'd come down with the flu or something, anything to get out of being caught giving a pep talk to the losers milling around the Larry Craig Memorial TearoomXcel Energy Center.

[Update: Heh-indeedy. Looks like Ahnult decided to take my advice, and has ceded his Monday night speaking role to -- wait for it -- Ol' Fred Thompson. Schwarzenegger says that his cancellation was forced on him because of the continuing deadlock in the California budget process, otherwise known as "August". What difference he's supposed to make by staying in Sacramento on, you know, Labor Day, he doesn't mention. Maybe he'll spend the entire day crank-calling Fabian Nuñez and Don Perata.

Or maybe, as I sagely prognosticated, he realizes that there's no political upside for him appearing in the same room with these chowder-heads. Hell, they probably even buy his dog-ate-my-homework excuse.]