As pointless as Twitter is for private use, it’s commercial uses are pretty interesting. For instance, if you’re a coffee shop you can push out alerts that you’re having a sale on baked treats at 2:00 pm. Twitter is basically an advertising pipeline that (1) you don’t have to pay for, and (2) your customers ask to be included in. Win-win!

Since presidential campaigns are essentially really big, abstract sales operations, it makes sense that they use Twitter, too. Again, you can see lots of interesting uses: fundraising, alerts on candidate appearances, rapid response.

But it strikes me that having a candidate use Twitter to attack his opponent is–at least at the presidential level–a really, really bad idea.

There’s a story out this morning about Mitt Romney trying to elevate himself (surprise!) by having pizza sent to Obama’s campaign HQ. Yes, Mitt, we get it–you’re such a front-runner that it’s like you’re already going mano-a-mano in the general election and all the other Republican are just minor side-shows. But buried in the story is a nugget that reflects even worse on Tim Pawlenty:

Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty also took a swipe at Obama today with this tweet:  “@barackobama sorry to interrupt the European pub crawl, but what was your Medicare plan?”

Ugh. Presidents–even today in the internet/Facebook/Twitter age–act presidential. You know what presidents don’t do? They don’t attack their rivals with the kind of drive-by snark you see on gossip sites and blogs. I’m all for Tim Pawlenty (or anyone else–even Mitt Romney!) savaging Obama at every opportunity by pointing out the administration’s incoherent foreign policy, the continuing housing disaster, rising inflation, awful unemployment numbers, and total disconnect from America. Pawlenty could have simply Twit-picked these two pictures from Tuesday and asked if the president would come back to look after the people of Joplin:

But the low-rent Twitter flame should be beneath anyone who aspires to the White House.

Michael Graham ends his column with a line that should get marked down and re-used, a lot:

“Barack Obama is the Nixon the left always wanted.”

You can sub a hyphen for the “is” in the bumper-sticker version.

One Obama-affirmative action flare is random. Two is coincidence . . .

Trump paraphrases the complaint, but it’s close enough. As I said before, if this becomes part of the underlying populist critique of Obama, I suspect it’s very bad for him.

If Obama wanted to close off this avenue right away, he could just release his SAT and LSAT scores. As it is, the evidence of his claim to academic brilliance rests almost entirely on having graduated magna from Harvard, which may be slightly less impressive than it sounds.

Amidst all the government shutdown talk last week was a remark from President Obama that deserves a second look. Taking questions from a friendly audience, Obama was asked about gas prices:

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon–(laughter)–you may have a big family, but it’s probably not that big. How many you have? Ten kids, you say? Ten kids? (Laughter.) Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then.”

A lot of people have pointed out that there are no hybrid vans. But the really telling part of this remark is the gas mileage. There are no consumer vehicles in production that get 8 mpg. According to fueleconomy.gov, the worst performing vehicles sold today are the Chevy Suburban 4WD and GMC Yukon 4WD, which get 10 mpg–a full 25 percent more than Obama alleges. How could Obama have possibly known? Well, because fuel economy is in large part dictated by CAFE standards imposed by the organization which Obama is in charge of.

Is it fair to expect Obama to know every little nuance about something as obscure as CAFE standards? Well, yes. After all, he’s the one who told people,

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

The cherry on top, however, is that Obama is just projecting. Because it turns out that there is a car which only gets 8 mpg–the limo for the president of the United States.

Update: In the comments, Steve Sailer leaves this little nugget:

“A Chrysler 300C owned by Obama until 2007 is currently for sale on eBay.  The list price?  Well, it’s a little over the $15,100 Kelley Blue Book says a 2005 300C in good condition should fetch.  About $85,000 over.

“The listing’s starting price sits at $100,000.   As of this morning, there are no bids.

“The seller (eBay username stdrum5) explains, “As stated in the title, this 300c was previously driven by Barack Obama 2004 through 2007.”  The car features a leather interior, a navigation system, a sunroof and, the listing helpfully points out, is still under warranty – you know, in case you total Barack Obama’s old car.

“Obama sold the car, we should point out, shortly after he began to run for President.  It seems that the 300’s 5.7-liter V8 struck some Democratic primary voters as a bit excessive, and dependent on foreign oil.”

The 2005 300C weighed 4066 pounds and got 15 mpg city / 23 highway (and I think that was on the old, exaggerated mpg rating system).

A little housekeeping on unrelated items.

* Remember our question about betting on WrestleMania? Deadspin has the answers in a piece so thorough and well-reported that you’d be surprised to find it even in the sports section of a big-city daily. It’s WSJ levels of good.

* Michael Kinsley has a retroactive quasi-defense of Microsoft. He opens with Microsoft’s history of DC lobbying, painting them as charmingly naive because Bill Gates didn’t think he needed to lobby the government. He writes:

For many years before the lawsuit, Microsoft had virtually no Washington “presence.” It had a large office in the suburbs, mainly concerned with selling software to the government. Bill Gates resisted the notion that a software company needed to hire a lot of lobbyists and lawyers. He didn’t want anything special from the government, except the freedom to build and sell software. If the government would leave him alone, he would leave the government alone.

At first this was regarded (at least in Washington) as naive. Grown-up companies hire lobbyists. What’s this guy’s problem? Then it was regarded as foolish. This was not a game. There were big issues at stake. Next it came to be seen as arrogant: Who the hell does Microsoft think it is? Does it think it’s too good to do what every other company of its size in the world is doing?

Ultimately, there even was a feeling that, in refusing to play the Washington game, Microsoft was being downright unpatriotic. Look, buddy, there is an American way of doing things, and that American way includes hiring lobbyists, paying lawyers vast sums by the hour, throwing lavish parties for politicians, aides, journalists, and so on. So get with the program.

So that’s what Microsoft did. It moved its government affairs office out of distant Chevy Chase, Md., and into the downtown K Street corridor.

Who is it exactly who “had this feeling” that Microsoft was being “unpatriotic” by not playing the lobbying game? Kinsley was closer to the situation than most of us onlookers, but I don’t ever recall hearing anything even remotely like that complaint made, even once–let alone often enough to claim that it represented some form of the conventional wisdom. And Chevy Chase is “distant” from K Street? It might be six miles. It’s not like MSOFT was headquartered in Columbia, MD. Makes you wonder what angle Kinsley is playing this time–is he trying to hit a bank-shot knock against a past employer, or sucking up to a potential new one?

* David “Spengler” Goldman has an interesting piece about the GOP 2012 field. He opens with the following:

Never before in American politics have so few offered so little to so many. I refer to the prospective Republican candidates for next year’s presidential elections, not a single one of whom elicits a response that might be mistaken for enthusiasm from the voters, the pundits, or the party’s elder statesmen.

There are a couple of generic governor types like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota or Mitch Daniels of Indiana, and a long list of has-beens and never was’s. But the Republicans despair of finding the man or woman who can define an alternative to a weak and waffling President Barack Obama.

I’m not sure this is quite right, either. The problem for Republicans–to the extent that it is a “problem,” which I kind of doubt–is that the candidates excite different parts of the base. Have you seen the reaction parts of the base have for Sarah Palin? There’s a segment of the Tea Party that goes nuts for Newt. It would not surprise me if Mike Huckabee was really blowing the skirts up on Christian cultural conservatives. And while Goldman dismisses Mitch Daniels as a “generic governor type,” among DC elites, people are swooning over him like he’s the second-coming of Scoop Jackson.

Now, none of these candidates has wide appeal, yet. But they each have appeal which seems pretty deep, considering that most of them haven’t even declared yet. What’s more, the eventual Republican nominee doesn’t have to worry about exciting the base, because Barack Hussein Obama will do that more effectively than any GOP candidate possibly could.

Finally, the extent to which a Republican will need to make a clear case in 2012 seems unclear. There are a handful of candidates who probably can’t unseat Obama no matter what. But assuming one of them doesn’t take the nomination, how much difference would it make for Candidate X to be running as opposed to Candidate Y if unemployment is 9 percent, gas costs $3.50, the housing sector is still dead, and America is still floundering abroad?

* Last, Galley Friend A.W. sends a link to this epic Susannah Breslin piece on the porn industry. How good is it? So good that you might walk away rethinking the welfare state:

Here, I just give, give, give! And this is a fact!” he shouts, wild-eyed. “We are helping these girls! Anybody that comes into this business, for the most part, is a broken toy.” He leans towards me, earnestly attempting to make himself understood. “We’re giving them a place where they can make money, and get by, so they’re not standing on line in a welfare department. Thank God for people like me!” He bangs the desk.

Without getting into the substance of America’s intervention in Libya, it’s nice to see that certain parts of the left have suddenly discovered that their super-cool rockstar / kindly professor / political messiah is actually a bit of a demagogue with a penchant for building up straw-men and dishonestly framing those who disagree with him. Here’s an exasperated New Yorker item:

Much of the debate in Washington has put forward a false choice when it comes to Libya,” President Obama said Tuesday night. Maybe; but he proceeded to do something like that, too. The false choice, or choices, Obama presented were between doing exactly what he is doing and “never acting on behalf of what’s right,” and between doing what he is doing and deciding to:

” broaden our military mission beyond the task of protecting the Libyan people, and do whatever it takes to bring down Qaddafi and usher in a new government.”

In the first instance, the suggestion that those with doubts about entering this war—without much of a plan, without real consultation with Congress—were arguing against ever doing anything “on behalf of what is right” is, to say the least, overly broad. Does Obama really think that the only morally steady position is one that endorses the current air campaign—that not agreeing with him means turning “a blind eye to atrocities,” and that anything short of close to two hundred cruise missiles “would have been a betrayal of who we are”? (The answer to that question may be “yes.”)

I don’t expect the people at the New Yorker to abandon Obama come election time–at the end of the day, you join the side you’re on. But it wouldn’t be too much to ask that when the time comes for them to do their duty, they be a little less gleeful about it. After all, in 2008 certain people were able to either (1) fool themselves into not seeing what kind of fellow Barack Obama was or (2) pretend that they thought he was something different. In 2012 people on the left will certainly find reasons to vote for Obama, but neither of those earlier poses will be possible.

That’s the great Jim Treacher’s headline, and it seems pretty spot-on. I hardly know what to say, except:

1) Evidently the repeal of DADT wasn’t enough to keep Sullivan bought; the ante to stay in the hand was “gay marriage”;

2) I wonder if Sullivan is headed for Huffington circa 2000 “pox on both their houses” moment. Or if the looming specter of the most dangerous, extremist, right-wing ideologue in the history of America as the Republican nominee will scare him reluctantly back into the fold.*

My guess is that this break-up won’t take and that Sullivan will be back for more. But it’s nice to know we can add him to the list of writers having second thoughts after blithely assuring America that Obama was a super-serious guy and that anyone who thought otherwise was a racist bigot.

* Of course it doesn’t matter who the nominee is. If 2008 taught us anything, it’s that much of the left will render any Republican nominee not simply as a less desirable president than their preferred choice, but as an actual monster.

Joss Whedon has just wrapped up the final issue of his comic book Buffy series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8. It’s been an uneven run, with some brilliant stuff in the beginning, some bad choices and confusing plotting toward the end, and vigorous writing throughout. On the whole, not as tip-top as his Astonishing X-Men run (which might be the best thing he’s ever written), but still entertaining and engaging. Facing the final page of the issue is a little note from Whedon, in which he says the following:

The biggest challenge in Season 8 was that many years ago I wrote a Slayer comic and set it in the far future so that it could never affect Buffy’s life. I was so young. But the challenge of reconciling the optimistic, empowering message of the final episode with the dystopian, Slayerless vision of Fray’s future gave Season 8 a genuine weight. There is never progress without hateful, reactionary blowback. That’s never been more apparent than in today’s political scene in America.

There’s “hateful and reactionary blowback” in America today to President Obama’s “progress”? Are you kidding? If anything, the level of personal, as opposed to ideological, animus toward Obama is much less hateful than it’s been in at least 20 years. Consider the meanest, angriest Tea Partiers we’ve seen over the last two years and think about how they stack up to the “Bush = Hitler” crowd; or the folks who thought Clinton was running drugs out of the Mena airstrip and having aides murdered. If anything, the opposite is true: Obama’s personal approval ratings run far ahead of his job approval ratings. People tend to dislike what he’s doing to America, but they like him just the same.

But the most ridiculous part of this little jab at anyone who dares object to Barack Obama’s administration is the claim that hateful reactionary blowback has never been more apparent than in today’s politics. Never ever? Not after the Emancipation Proclamation? Not with the Civil War? Not during Reconstruction?

It’s always been clear that Whedon has the same politics as people like Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, and that’s just fine. But now it’s clear that he has the same political sophistication. And that’s kind of embarrassing.

Like many middle-class suburbanites, I’ve long enjoyed the Black Eyed Peas because of their authentic urban poetry. So I was sort of sad to see that will.i.am has been assimilated by the Borg. That’s too bad.

Btw: Captain America? Awesome. Fast Five? Awesomest.

Galley Friend Chris Caldwell has an incisive review of David Remnick’s Obama book over at the always excellent Claremont Review of Books. It’s really not to be missed. The thrust of Caldwell’s essay is examining how (and why) Obama self-consciously built a black identity for himself. You will not often see this subject discussed. Samples:

As an American boy growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, Obama was in a confusing position. He looked black, but he didn’t know any blacks. He was descended from slave owners but not from slaves. Most disorientingly, Hawaii—where he was brought up by his white grandparents—lacked even those lingering remnants of racism, the exposure and expunging of which was, by the 1970s, the main preoccupation of the burgeoning establishment that had grown out of the civil rights movement.

In a way that strikes Remnick as both “touching” and “awkward,” Obama began “giving himself instruction on how to be black.” . . .

Obama is, racially speaking, a self-made man. If there were a citizenship examination for blackness, he’d have passed it. Remnick hints that Ann Dunham’s idealization of black people may have rubbed off on Obama, and that it may be responsible for the immodesty that is his besetting flaw. Remnick sees that blackness can, in some circumstances, be deployed to great effect on the political stage—and that the 2008 presidential election was one of those circumstances. . . .

At root, though, Remnick is without a drop of cynicism as to why Obama, as both a youth and a middle-aged man, might consider a confident blackness of a politicized kind to be something worthy of aspiring to. The struggle for racial equality appears in these pages as a moral lodestar, the only real litmus test of contemporary political morality. Mastering the history and rhetoric of civil rights, reading the rest of American history through it, rendering one’s personality acceptable to those who speak in its name—to Remnick, all of this is so self-evidently admirable as to need no explanation.

I won’t tease you with more. Go read the whole thing.

Ezra Klein accuses Obama of playing “bad poker” in his dealings with Republicans. But wait! How could that be? After all, one of the may founding myths about Obama was that he was an amazing poker player back in his Illinois state senator days. He beat up on the lobbyists in his poker game all the time.

Of course, the poker story was right up there with Obama does curls with 70 lb weights! and Obama is so good at basketball that he can play with UNC’s men’s varsity team! in terms of its nonsense quotient. But no one wanted to hear that back in 2008.

Perhaps Klein should have listened to Steve Sailer:

Time Magazine has an article on how . . . Barack Obama played poker every Wednesday night in Springfield with other legislators and lobbyists. Most nights Obama won.

In fact, that would have to be just about my number one tip on how to win at gambling: Be a state legislator and play poker against lobbyists.

Over at the Standard.