A bunch of catch-up items:

* I’ve got another longish essay on Obama’s vanity. I’ll stop writing these pieces when he stops giving me material.

* Galley Friend Mike Russell has a long, angry, awesome defense of David Foster Wallace.

* President Obama wants to remind Americans that just because they elected him president three years ago, they’re not off the hook for being a bunch of racists yet.

* The history of the Nature Boy’s legal and financial problems is yet another depressing chapter in the story that is professional wrestling. Styling and profiling have their costs.

* That over-under we had going on when Perry would overtake Romney in the RCP average was a sucker’s line. Perry passed Romney on 8/24. The next question is, when does Perry open up a double-digit lead? Before, or after, Ron Paul passes Romney? We’ll have more–lots more–on Mitt Romney . . . coming up next!

Gnarly. Dude.

Continuing the series is Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast:

Bush—and it leaves me speechless that he’s starting to look reasonable by comparison with the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls—was hardly apologetic about his political views. But he and Karl Rove did have the sense to know when they were throwing gasoline on the domestic fire, and they did it in smallish doses. You might be able to Google up the odd careless quote from Bush about something like global warming, but in general, and especially on the occasions when he knew his words were being very closely watched, he steered well clear of extremism.

This comment from Galley Friend B.D. is worth re-posting:

This is hilarious given Tomasky’s past comments:http://goo.gl/Q8ccC

“Haunted by a ruined economy and unfinished wars, President Bush will need more than a memoir to rescue his reputation.” All that he needed, it turned out, was Rick Perry!

On the off chance you missed it, go print out Vic Matus’s magnum opus on vodka.  It’s sensational.

Huntsman has had a pretty disastrous launch to his campaign–staff turnover, muddled messaging, no poll traction. It’s time for him to go to the media, see if he can’t stir the pot and get this thing going. So who does Team Huntsman hand out access to? Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker? Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review? Oh no.

No, no, no. You don’t understand the Huntsman media strategy. They set the candidate down with Jacob Weisberg. For Vogue.

Let’s hope, for his heirs’ sake, that Gov. Huntsman isn’t going to self-finance this disaster.

Yesterday a friend asked me why I was such a Perry fanboy, so I think it’s worth making this caution explicit: I’m not pro-Perry in any meaningful sense. I have no idea if he’d be a good, or even average, president. He probably wouldn’t be my personal preference for the Republican nomination. (I’ll carry a torch for Mitch Daniels until the convention opens in Tampa.) When I say that Perry is very likely to win the nomination and should stand a very good chance (at least even money) of unseating Obama in the general election, I’m not making an argument about moral or intellectual merit.

What I’m trying to do is be as clear-eyed as possible about the politics of the matter. And as a political proposition, I judge Perry to be very, very formidable. (In the same way, I remain convinced that Mitt Romney is a political joke with very little chance of electoral success–and this has nothing to do with whether or not he’s a good guy or would make a good president.)

The fallacy of most political punditry is that people conflate their personal wishes with their analysis. That’s why “analysts” often claim that a given party or candidate would be wildly successful if only they would take positions closer to those which the “analyst” holds themselves.

So when I say that Perry looks like a freight-train, it’s not because I’m a Perry guy and I want him to be president and I think he’ll wind up on Mt. Rushmore. It’s because he’s a disciplined campaigner and a stud politician who knows how to win elections. It’s because he’s positioned to unify the party in ways no other candidate in the race can. It’s because the macro-conditions of the race make Obama extremely vulnerable to any opponent, but particularly to one who can muster the arguments Perry is making. And as evidence that all of this may be true, I’d point to Perry’s launch, which has been the most successful and masterful opening to any presidential campaign I’ve seen, culminating in his jumping +9 points in Rasmussen. As I’ve said before, I believe he’ll overtake Romney in the RCP average in just a few weeks.

Picking up on Norman Podhoretz’s WSJ piece on Obama, Matt Patterson writes an essay titled “Obama: The Affirmative Action President.”

Do you ever get the feeling that he doesn’t know very much?