Count me among those unconvinced that Barack Obama, offering the truism of lipstick on a pig, disparaged Sarah Palin.

But also count me among those who believe the Democratic nominee is a man of words only so long as they're not coming out of his mouth while he thinks of what to say. If George W. Bush mangles delivery when under pressure, Barack Obama mangles concepts themselves.

Were the United States guaranteed a McCain presidency, I would look forward to debates in which the senator from Arizona flattens the one from Illinois. But since there is a chance that a callow, flighty man could be the leader of the free world, there's reason to worry.

All that aside, this could be political payday for the GOP.

Just how inevitable is an executive to be made of the Democratic Party's ought-to-be nominee? This man is elecutionarily gifted, handsome; one who is quite literally the new face of America. There's innervation in his speeches not seen since the end of the last decade, and it shows. The grassroots should, by fall, grant him apotheosis.

His challenger is a national fixture more in the strict sense of age than venerability; more recognizable as a greying statesman than the crippled, forebearing hero. He has two salient political attributes. One, rapprochement at best with his own party. Two, staunch affiliation with an unpopular president whom the public sees as persisting in a military campaign for a country whose name has descended, in the vernacular, to a four-letter word.

Twenty years ago, a stuffy, New England governor tried to deny the White House to a sedate vice president whose boss was ending a presidential term with record popularity. In July polls, the governor maintained leads of up to twenty points.

And by how many points does the first man average over the second man, this July? Five.

From approximately 12:50 PM Eastern, Wednesday:

RUSH: Michael in North Olmsted, Ohio. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush.

RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: I am a longtime registered Republican. Every time I've had the chance to pick up a Republican ballot, I have. So if anybody's looking at voter rolls, they're not going to have any question as to who I am.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: But, as far as I'm concerned, the Obama campaign has been courting me and it culminated in an automated phone call two days before the election. The salient phrase was, "It doesn't matter if you're registered with another party or an independent. Pick up a Democratic ballot and vote for change."

RUSH: Absolutely!

CALLER: They were asking me to unfortunately...

RUSH: Amen, bro. I know exactly what you're saying. They can go out and court you, and they can try to convince you to cross over and vote for Obama, and that's not "corrupting the process," and that's not being "ungentlemanly."

CALLER: Well, exactly. Exactly. As far as the broader left is concerned, they have gotten what they wished for if in fact listeners of yours — or other Republicans, or rightists, people who would not have picked up a Democratic ballot — did and knocked it to Hillary.

RUSH: I would even say this. Thanks for the call out there, Michael. I appreciate it. I would even say this to you members of the Drive-By Media and you Democrats, who say that what I did was corrupting the Democrat process because I have no desire for Hillary to win. How do you know that? Maybe I want Hillary to win your nomination, just like you guys wanted McCain to win ours. Maybe I want that. You guys gotta be very, very careful how you approach this, because in the process of coming after me, you are lancing yourselves.

The message from the Obama campaign was left on my answering machine. I gave it an auditory double-take because I couldn't believe the invitation.

Your words moved, your movement affirmed.

May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Though Figure Concord remains active, I am always working over at Game and Player. The editors and our contributors intend good things for the nascent year, and to start off we looked back at the last twelve months. In due attribution, Game and Player has published The Best of 2007 and The 2007 Booby Prizes.

"As a child," writes John Derbyshire in today's National Review, "I was indoctrinated with some basic precepts regarding life among other human beings." One of them? "Don't mock another man's religion." But Derbyshire had been, this week, accused thereof. He was "jolted" and moved to a defense. Whatever my disappointment in his recent divestment from faith, Derbyshire is no active enemy of the churchman.

Even in facetious play as a curmudgeon, Derbyshire has never openly attacked Christianity. He treats the subject gravely. If we are looking for evidence of a contempt for religion, we find it in the writing of Heather Mac Donald and Christopher Hitchens.

Derbyshire bowed out of what appears to be a mischaracterization, by an increasing quarter on the right, of Islam. Refusing to participate cost him professionally. Short story: the New English Review, which he has called "Islamophobic," declined any future contributions from him. He's to be commended. Following guffaws at "the religion of peace" is a specious kind of Kirkpatrick Doctrine, in which American foreign judgment turns on whether something or someone is Muslim or not. It is failure of reason alone, Derbyshire's general opposition one which anyone can share.

A reader, offended in his perception that Derbyshire would "denigrate people who believe in Biblical creation," avowed that "The entire [New Testament's] plan of salvation is founded on creationism." Why drag John into it? Christians have not resolved and will not soon resolve disagreements over whether the Bible's descriptive passages are to be construed literally or phenomenalistically. If Derbyshire's correspondent thinks the rejection of creationism as a salient against him, he should also draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and millions of other believers. Many of the rest of us are satisfied in the conviction that God better demonstrated His power not by transubstantiating here and there, but contriving to make sound and automated that which we precisely comprehend through the sciences. His Gospels read as technical papers, Christ is disparaged.

How can a well-meaning, well-traveled, astute, lapsed Episcopalian vex? By the confluence of inattention and boredom.

What took just two days to resolve was an apparent misfire and relief of command. On Wednesday, the Washington Post interviewed Bill Shaheen, New Hampshire co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, who expressed worry for Barack Obama with 24-carat unction.

"The Republicans," said Shaheen, "are not going to give up without a fight," and if Illinois' junior senator were the Democratic nominee, "one of the things they're certainly going to jump on is his drug use." But hadn't Obama already confessed, way back as a debutant, no less in memoirs sitting on a few million bookshelves? Yes, but forthrightness made Obama a primary source for his own youthful illicitness, Shaheen pointed out, and with such concern for his candidate's opponent, proceeded to give an example of inquiries. "When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?...It's hard to overcome."

Oh, those Republicans. To all but believers in Santa Claus, what Shaheen did is on the order of Cain telling God that brother Abel was actually spared forbearance of a cruel world. The press crowded around Clinton's campaign, which disavowed Shaheen's statements, then turned to Shaheen — who was no longer one of Clinton's staff. At a debate Thursday afternoon, one senator apologized to the other; then the other's campaign later decried a buzzer handshake. If Clinton GHQ did not intend to damage Obama through Shaheen, it was content to do so in preterition: advisor Mark Penn, the same evening, shrugged that "The issue related to cocaine use is not something the campaign is in any way raising," and he is still working.

Barack Obama's mea culpa was frank and descriptive: unprompted, he admitted to substance abuse and noted which drugs he took. That is welcome and disappointing: welcome because most elected officials, including Hillary Clinton and the sitting president, are reticent about their salad days; disappointing because illicit drugs remain formative to the last three generations, unforgettably defined when Clinton White House press secretary Mike McCurry affirmed marijuana use with an indignant "of course."

Mores contra culture invite confusion. Save for the phantasmagoric Ron Paul, no candidate espouses societal or legal approval of the libertine activities in which many of their colleagues, their children or they themselves have yet participated. This debases Barack Obama's redemption, his autobiographical peripety. Character is, in the Clintonian mind, irrelevant to politics. And it can easily be seen as a validation for behavior that, after all, hasn't prevented Obama from accomplishing anything. Obama's assessment, from a Reuters account of the candidate in a high school classroom: "Man, I wasted a lot of time." A student's: "I think everybody deserves to play around a little bit, you know?," which is not good; but also "He got his priorities straight," which is not bad.

Asserted by the National Intelligence Council: Iran a) continues to process uranium to the point of the element's sustaining a fission reaction, b) was essaying to build an atomic bomb before it stopped testing in autumn of 2003, c) has not necessarily abstained from research of a weapon, d) only backed off because of international suspicion, e) may resume (or could have already resumed) military experiments, and f) even if years from the bomb would anyway proceed surreptitiously. Such were the contents of a tiny, declassified portion of a National Intelligence Estimate. Presenters were very confident in some places, but nowhere certain.

The first reaction of anybody's ought to be satisfaction that an Iranian program for nuclear weapons was taken for granted. But Tehran's hircine titular, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, can yet claim truth to Iranian denials — technically, to have said "We do not believe in nuclear weapons" at Columbia University this September would mean that they really don't, going on four years. And laws of political selection, when applied, simplified the report into an exoneration. Despite the meaning of the word "estimate" (a casual or considered judgment made without measuring or testing) or the feasibility of any determination of state secrets within a closed society (think North Korean, Syrian and Pakistani surprises), circumstances of the release have played out detrimentally to the right. Republican primary voters saw every major candidate act as he might under policy duress.

Mitt Romney, on Fox News with Greta van Susteren — one day after the release — interpreted "good news" from an apparent cessation. "What it suggests in the estimate is that the efforts on the part of the US and other nations to impose sanctions for their nuclear ambition has had an impact. And you certainly hope so because you want to make sure that our efforts are able to dissuade a nation from seeking nuclear weaponry."

Mike Huckabee, at roughly the same time as Romney, confessed innocence of the publication to reporter David Paul Kuhn. Questioned further, he was quoted as saying "I've a serious concern if they were to be able to weaponize nuclear material, and I think we all should, mainly because the statements of Ahmadinejad are certainly not conducive to a peaceful purpose for his having it and the fear that he would in fact weaponize it and use it." For all the derision at the Arkansas governor for having not read the report beforehand, Huckabee recognized the findings as tentative. "I don't know where the intelligence is coming from that says they have suspended the program or how credible that is versus the view that they actually are expanding it."

Fred Thompson, in a statement, concentrated on the report's wait-a-second-there qualities. "The NIE confirms that as recently as the fall of 2003, Iran was covertly working to develop nuclear weapons. Perhaps they have since halted their covert nuclear weapons work, but meanwhile they continue to aggressively pursue a uranium enrichment capability, despite the fact that it makes no economic sense as a civilian program."

John McCain, asked by Fox's Chris Wallace specifically about military action: "The military option is always the ultimate last option, but I don't believe that it's, quote, 'off the table.' I would remind you that enrichment is a longer process. Weaponization, which is the other half of the equation, can be done rather rapidly. Iran remains a nation dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel. Iran continues to export the most lethal explosive devices into Iraq, killing Americans."

Rudy Giuliani, pressed as McCain was by MSNBC's Tim Russert, answered (conversational transcript elided), "[Y]ou always leave open the military option in a situation, you've got to interpret that as between high confidence, moderate confidence. I think a fair interpretation is that...right now the short-term issue is not nearly as grave, but they go on to say that the long-term issue is still there, that they can't with any high degree of confidence say that they're not going to move ultimately toward nuclear weapons."

A summary of the test? Romney would appear the most collected, as well as the one of the five most reliant on espionage and diplomatic prevention. Huckabee spoke in generalities, perhaps the least willing to contemplate an intransigent dictatorship. Giuliani didn't contradict his platform but was cautious, and then equivocal when Russert brought up the topical intensity of one of Giuliani's foreign policy advisors, Norman Podhoretz. Thompson was — Thompsonesque, synthesizing prevalent rightist convictions into a sedate, practical message. The frankest candidate — sure of Tehran's regional belligerence, mindful of the Khomeinists' furtive attacks on Americans, rejecting "face-to-face talks" outright — was the purveyor of "straight talk" himself, John McCain.

Susan Goldberg, longtime journalist and editor of the Plain Dealer, today spoke to The City Club of Cleveland. Radio station WCLV broadcast her address, "Reflections for the Future of Newspapers and Cleveland." Few display reporter Helen Thomas' rancor for independent media — Thomas quoted this week as calling amateur journalists "dangerous" — but one does find, pervasive among the press class, an animosity.

Goldberg first acknowledged weblogs only in consideration of them as tangential to her work. While some believe "they are changing the world," she said, as far as a newspaper editor is concerned "they are neither the problem, nor the point." Maladaptation in the information age, Goldberg suggested, causes her industry to slide, and could be remedied by changing the manner in which agencies advertise and solicit — and attract readers. To "learn from silicon valley," as she put it.

Later in her speech, however, Goldberg returned to independents. Bloggers, she charged, are "aggregators...stealing our news." To applause, she posed the city beat as arcana: if the established press didn't report urgent local news, "no one else would, because no one else can." That is ecclesiastical pique at the appeal of lay dilettantes, instructed by the persuasion that anyone who is not a journalist but peddles news wishes he were. In fact a political weblog, the higher its profile, is more likely a side trade of someone educated, specialized and accomplished.

True, bloggers are a collection. But when CBS News, three years ago, tried to pass off Word documents as thirty-year-old incrimination, the aggregators, ex vi termini, aggregated. Experts were consulted and corroborated in such immediate ways not possible ten years before; Dan Rather was reduced to a mutterer. Michael Totten, Michael Yon and other embedding freelancers have submitted more reflective dispatches and photographs from Iraq and the Near East than the most prepotent networks and bureaus. The latter spent the last five years aggregating, indeed: tentative assignments relying on native stringers.

A few moments of clarity came when Goldberg elaborated on statements made in the Plain Dealer. Editors and publishers must "think long and hard about what makes you special in your marketplace." With the customer in mind, "a front page that is made up only of things you can worry about is a failed front page." Yet in her peroration Goldberg reverted to cant. Vindication would come by harnessing the "power of diversity." Technology, professional reevaluation second? She wasn't done. Career journalists "must not tolerate the haters, because they will bring us all down," commence transmission of truth to power.

For now, only moments.

Under a headline in the New York Times, "As Democrats See Security Gains in Iraq, Tone Shifts," the lede observes the Democratic Party "trying to shift the focus to the lack of political progress there, and highlighting more domestic concerns like health care and the economy." Foreign prospects up? Try short-selling back stateside. Two more headlines, in coincidence to both the moment's politics and the 2008 general election, mark points that through triangulation instruct where the electorate might be found in one year.

The second announces a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the Salvation Army. Though philanthropy may be a dialect of love's universal language, the 142-year-old charity — aside from its enumerated Christian doctrine — believes the local needy ought be addressed in more than grunts and gestures. So just as Army soldiers in Kiev speak Ukrainian, the Framingham, Massachusetts detachment enforced a prerequisite competency in English. This it qualified: a pair of employees, limited to Spanish, had to learn the language in one year or look elsewhere. They didn't; were fired, then, in 2005. The EEOC sued.

Such news impresses first on the gut, then the intellect. The two employees were immigrants, and in the restrictionist's book good examples of bad, refusing the common tongue a sine qua non of non-assimilation. For the many more of us unwilling to hold the émigré culpable for what is arguably a dysfunction of the postmodern American establishment, the EEOC looks silly. Foreign nationals inimical to modern culture? No, thank you. Charity denied court-affirmed workplace standard? Now you are in another place entirely. Polls substantiate what high value the country places on the ratification of English.

Headline No. 3 comes from the United Kingdom. Briton Toni Vernelli is a broadly affiliated environmentalist radical. She, if you permit, had herself spayed two years after a terminated pregnancy. Vernelli, known for such aphorisms as the one about serving a family hamburgers — "You might as well give them weed killer" — has not yet burnt down orphanages but was proud of her own vivisection for greater good. "Having children," she declared, "is selfish." There are the childless, and then — Ms. Vernelli. Again, impressions are swift and in the heart. The mot juste for it is: weird.

Each headline, traced outward, could converge next November. The former does so pretty directly, inasmuch as Democratic leadership was vilified by a party caucus for letting a Republican bill amendment, precluding similar actions of the EEOC, remain on a bill. The latter's line isn't too sinuous, either. Among those promoting depopulation is Alan Weisman, whose insistence that solutions to supposed ecological crises shouldn't "depend on our untimely demise" is contravened by the title of his bestselling book (The World Without Us) and proposal (one child per familial unit, of an uncomfortable likeness to China's own order). Notices for book club readings of The World Without Us could, as of last week, be found on the Democratic National Committee's website.

If the electorate is repelled, national moods could resemble those of 1993 and 1994, when a gauche Clinton administration gave the body public something laugh about and vote against. Maybe. James Carville, onetime janissary of said house, is on record drawing parallels of 2007-2008 to 1991-1992. Pollsters confirm that the newspapers and wires can still persuade majorities of their readers to think full employment and accelerative economic growth all for nothing if, say, petroleum doesn't carry the same guarantee as manna gathered between Elim and Sinai. But there is some comfort in speculating that leftists in power are also under a floodlight, and it isn't what we prefer to see. Twelve in and two out is as steady as any drive rightward.