“I expected John McCain to be the first person on his campaign to lose patience with the character attack strategy… you can see him doing that.  He did not expect to be ending his campaign in front of audiences where he had to explain – as we just saw him do – that his opponent, the Democratic nominee, is actually a citizen of the United States and not an Arab.  This is not where John McCain wants to be…”

- Lawrence O’Donnell, on MSNBC tonight

For a moment there, I saw a glimpse of the guy who ran for Prez in 2000…

Conservatives are furious.  Here’s a good Politico piece on McCain’s latest plan to bail out homegamblers with our money.  Excerpt:

“Last night, he took that position on the housing issue of buying up everybody’s mortgage,” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said on Fox News. “Conservatives are scratching their heads today and saying, ‘What happened?’”

“What on earth is that about?” Huckabee asked. “Then you got to ask, which houses? The condos in southern Florida, where people bought $500,000 homes as a second home and now can’t pay for them? Are we buying those, too?”

And in perhaps the only time in history I wanted to echo the words of Michelle Malkin:

“Will he propose a similar plan for those who bought mutual funds at or near the market top?”

I thought the idea was to “shore up the base”?  Every true conservative I speak to is beside themselves about McCain – both ideologically and tactically.  Then again, most of them have been pretty dispirited about the last eight years too – imperial adventures, constitutional crimes, and the largest expansion of the US Government in American history.  Not very conservative.

David Brooks had some very wise words about the anti-intellectual vein running through the retail branch of the GOP these days:

“[Buckley] thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.”

If you’ve been following along on FriendFeed, you’ve already seen all this.  Great conversation over there, too (although lively chats tend to die off early because of FriendFeed’s way of expiring threads.)