That's Some Cutting We Can Believe In, My Friends

I'm not equipped for or inclined towards actual Presidential debate analysis -- if only because based on casual poll browsing these affairs don't seem very influential, at least compared to, you know, Dow blow -- but I was watching the latest one and laughed out loud at one exclamation of John McCain's: Rebutting an earlier claim of Barack Obama's that McCain's vague spending-freeze promise is like using a hatchet when you need a scalpel, McCain said something along the lines of, "That's a hatchet, and then I'll get out a scalpel!" And here I believe doctors and woodsmen can reach out across the aisle to each other and agree that such combinations aren't likely to be useful in any case.

Anyway, in an evening largely about rhetoric that was my favorite instance of a metaphor being butchered. Or I guess butchered and then surgically incised. In terms of actual policy I'll just say that the prospect of stable, good-faith, center-left governance has never felt so welcoming before.