Virtues and Vices

      The N-S-G Doctor didn't catch the entire Veep Debate last night, but he did manage to catch a reairing of it on PBS in the wee hours.   So this means there won't be any considered assessment of the debate here, but The Christian Science Monitor has a pretty good one you can read instead.   Short takes?   Edwards didn't do badly, but he was at times too obviously chomping at the bit, and too Bushy in his repetitiveness (and his contrivance to get back to those repeatable sound-bytes).   Cheney looked authoritative, and very much at ease, and he issued a kind of dignity that Edwards did not; he spoke crisply, and his trademark gnarlishness was kept mostly at bay.   (That whopper he told about not having met Edwards before the debate was perhaps the most insidious suggestion from a man famous for insidious suggestions.)   In the end, Edwards looked earnest while he sounded hucksterish (and, alternately, he sometimes looked hucksterish when he sounded earnest), and his defenses of Kerry tended to come across as a little desperately apostolic. Cheney's demeanour will be a model for the President on Friday: stern, unshakable, but not strictly rigid, he was the figure of cranial (but not cerebral or intellectual) intensity, look more than a little like Brain to the President's Pinky.   All in all: Advantage Cheney.

      (Observation: it's probably a good thing they didn't have the Veep Debate in Miami, where they held the debate Thursday past.   Imagine all the "Miami Vice" puns there would have been in the headlines.)

      Post-Post Post:   The chaps at Slate obviously disagree, arguing that Cheney got his ass royally kicked.   I must have missed the stomping....