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THE POLITICS OF ESTHETICS….Ezra Klein is agog at Sarah Palin’s campaign rhetoric:

I can’t remember George W. Bush engaging the culture war with anything even approaching this ferocity in 2004.

McCain and Palin are running on fumes. There’s just nothing left for them to talk about aside from unpatriotic liberals, sneering urbanites, and how the mainstream media hates them. The politics of esthetics is all they have left.

It has truly been a remarkable campaign. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose between John McCain and George Bush as president, I don’t know who I’d pick — and that’s something that would have been inconceivable as recently as a year ago. I wonder if McCain has any idea just how thoroughly he’s going to exit this campaign with his reputation permanently soiled and his life story in tatters?

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

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