NBC held a post-debate interview with Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden last night immediately following the debate between Barack Obama and John McCain.

The Republicans countered with....Rudy Giuliani?

Rudy Giuliani is not the Republican Vice Presidential nominee. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is. But where was she? Let's trace it out.

--Palin gives a terrible interview to Charlie Gibson (in response to a question on whether she agrees with the Bush Doctrine, her response: "in what sense?")

--Palin gives a catastrophic interview to Katie Couric (in which she actually tries to assert that her state's proximity to Russia gives her foreign policy experience). The interview is widely panned across the political spectrum.

--McCain attempts to delay or cancel last night's debate while his surrogates suggest that the VP debate next week be replaced by this debate, thus giving Palin more time to prepare (to say nothing of scoring political points with regard to the Wall Street bailout package working its way through Congress).

--Once that sequence of events gets into the public eye, McCain is forced to attend the debate anyway.

--Palin is nowhere to be seen the night of the debate -- nowhere near a live camera -- and the Republican response is given by Rudy Freaking Giuliani.

I doubt very much the McCain campaign will actually replace Sarah Palin on the ticket, despite the fact that her inadequacies as a candidate are now a drag on McCain's numbers in several key states. But it's more of the same -- McCain's only path to victory involves hiding his record, his campaign, and his allies faults from the American public at all costs.

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Coleman repeats debunked China/Cuba myth

by: Joe Bodell

Sun Jul 06, 2008 at 19:16:19 PM CDT

Courtesy of Talking Points Memo and with a hat-tip to the Big E for taking time out of Independence Day to post on it, here's a shot of Minnesota's Sen. Norm Coleman reciting with slight modifications a myth about the Chinese drilling for oil off our coast:

At the same time, we've got to be producing more...outer continental shelf exploration. The Chinese are able to begin operating nintey miles from our shore by working with the Cubans, American companies need to tap into those resources. I read estimates, estimates of over 80 billion barrels of fuel being available in our reserves in the outer continental shelf...

Now, granted, Sen. Coleman continues on (past the content of the video) to say "it's all hands on deck, renewables..." and that's where it ends. That's a nice, safe, sortakindamoderate position to take -- as long as he's not misleading his constituents in the process.

But mislead he does, and with a thoroughly false myth. New Hampshire's John Sununu (also currently locked in a tough reelection battle) has modified the myth for his own purposes and been caught. Rudy Giuliani repeated it last week on Glenn Beck's show. Vice President Dick Cheney was dinged for passing the myth off as factual just last month, so at least Norm Coleman isn't the highest on the totem pole to do so.

But what is it with Republican elected officials these days repeating repeatedly debunked rumors as fact?

If we were in some kind of time warp to the late 1950s, this might be considered some kind of Red Scare: The Communists are stealing our oil! Instead, it seems like a new market-based approach to political scare tactics: China has long been seen as an ascendant power in world politics and economics, and supposedly shared political ideals between two nominally Communist governments are simply a convenient detail to use when trying to scare voters into thinking that our oil is being stolen out from under the continental shelf.

There was a similar joke put forth a few years back about how the Iraqi people had been unfortunate enough to have their country's borders positioned on top of so much of America's oil supply. But it's probably out of style by now.

The bigger issue here is simple economics.

More after the break

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