Indeed. Perhaps some day the JournoListers Cabalists will open their eyes and look around, stop being totally dependent on warm nourishing bland liquid food provided to them just for opening their mouths and looking cute, and learn to crap out in the yard instead of making a mess for the grownups to clean up.

Speaking of messes, I think the worst thing in the JournoList reaction to the stupid rumors about Trig Palin is Brad DeLong’s repeated suggestion (pages 9 and 10, messages posted on 8/30/08 at 8:12pm and 10:18pm) that Trig might have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome rather than Down’s Syndrome, and that that would shift “the balance of probabilities” to Bristol being his mother. Apparently, he’s quite comfortable making gratuitous accusations of teenage alcoholism against someone who’s never done him any harm. Or perhaps the worst thing is that no one else on JournoList objects to his FAS messages: it’s hard to decide.

The stupidest (though not the worst) thing in the latest e-mails is that more than one of the JournoListers (which ones? who cares? they’re all the same) can’t understand why McGovern had to dump Eagleton as his running mate when it was revealed that he had spent time in mental hospitals and been given electroshock therapy. Let’s see: we have someone with a 30% chance of succeeding to the presidency (14 of 47 VPs so far have done it), who had been hospitalized for mental problems three times and given electroshock treatment twice, all in the previous twelve years, and who would as president have primary access to the means of starting a world-wide nuclear war. What could possibly go wrong? The fact is that a severely depressive or mentally unstable person, an alcoholic, or a drug addict may make a fine senator, but cannot be trusted as president. We need someone who is ready at any time to make sensible, sober, sane decisions, even when awakened by the proverbial 3:00 A.M. telephone call. How could any educated person not know that severe depression disqualifies someone from being president of a nuclear power in the nuclear age?