We're all mad here

Thus said the Cheshire Cat and it seems an appropriate title for an oddly mixed news day that has a certain Through the Looking Glass quality to it. No great obsession is shaking the cycle. Even the release of the Troopergate report feels rather mundane after the long buildup. No one is surprised to hear that Palin unethically abused her power but won't be held legally responsible for it. We've been living with that sort of thing for eight years now. However, Steve Benen manages to find the one notable aspect:

The nation has had 102 major-party tickets covering 51 presidential elections over more than two centuries. And we've never had a ticket in which both candidates on the same ticket were responsible for ethics violations before a national election. McCain/Palin is the first.

And there's more notable quotes to be found if one wanders through the intertubz:

Jon Swift: "So when people like David Brooks and David Gergen act like scared little rabbits over a good old American red-blooded angry mob, I wonder, where have you been all these years? How do you think Nixon, Reagan and Bush got elected?"

From a McCain event in Davenport, Iowa this morning, Pastor Conrad of the Evangelical Free Church: "There are plenty of people around the world who are praying to their god, be they Hindu, Buddah, or Allah, that (McCain’s) opponent wins. I pray that you step forward and honor your own name.”

James Wolcott: "I don't want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling, writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself, so desperate for answers that it looks to Newt Gingrich for visionary guidance, his wisdom and insight providing the perfect cup of hemlock to finish off the conservative movement for good so that it can rot in the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity." [h/t Evelyn W]

TBogg: "Do it for Shakira's ass."

And finally, while Americans watch in horror as their investments disappear, the economy is booming -- in Baghdad. A source of some amusement within the stone age Iraqi stock exchange.

Investor Adel al-Jawahiri: "The American system is all on credit. Here, take a loan, here, take a loan. You can't have a totally free market. You have to have rules. From what I understand of why the credit crisis happened, I can only describe their administration as stupid."

I'd say that sums up the Bush years perfectly. [graphic via]

[cross-posted to The Reaction]

[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]