Is "horses and bayonets" Obama's new thing — after Big Bird and Binders Full of Women?

Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams says these things aren't working:

Where are those glorious debate memes of times gone by?...

There was Battleship. And there was the night’s biggest winner, Obama’s smooth dis to Romney, “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.” Faster than you could tweet “Oh, snap!,” the inevitable Tumblr was born.

Yet the whole thing felt less fun this time around, and a lot more forced. 

Big Bird and Binders Full of Women were words that came out of Romney's mouth. "Horses and bayonets" was inserted by Obama. It's one thing to have fun with Romneyisms, quite another to accept a faux-Romneyism cooked up by Obama... especially when Obama is making fun of the military and what comes out of his head is an old children's game — suggesting that he thinks this real-life killing and dying is some kind of game — and an image of the historical military — which seems to be about the movies he's watched, not anything that about Romney.

Bob Schieffer was a little doddering, but couldn’t match Jim Lehrer for FAIL worthiness. Josh Romney did not make with the crazy eyes. In short, as we all learned long ago from “Mean Girls,” you can’t make a thing a thing any more than you can plan for spontaneity.

Speaking of movies, I've never seen "Mean Girls." I don't get the reference. I'm not in your "we all." Is it the making a thing a thing thing or the plan for spontaneity thing?

But back to the landscape of Obama's mind — where kids fiddle with plastic Hasbro toys and old war movies play, from which he concocted a Romney gaffe that Romney never gaffed — why is there no picture there of the horse soldiers of the Afghanistan War?

The U.S. special operations teams that led the American invasion in Afghanistan a decade ago did something that no American military had done since the last century: ride horses into combat.

"It was like out of the Old Testament," says Lt. Col. Max Bowers, retired Green Beret, who commanded the three horseback teams.

"You expected Cecil B. DeMille to be filming and Charlton Heston to walk out."

It was like a movie, but it really happened, and those men were heroes. Is it so hard to call them to mind, now — in these days of unmanned drones, who kill when you point at a name on a card, or hover overhead and watch as — it can't be real — our ambassador fights for his life for 7 hours?

"And when Ryan riffed on the handful of jobs he briefly held, his Ayn Randian roots were clear."

Writes Joan Walsh at Salon. Here's what Paul Ryan said that Walsh thinks is "straight out of Rand, and ’50s anti-Communist paranoia":

“When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life... I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself. That’s what we do in this country. That’s the American Dream. That’s freedom, and I’ll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.”

If you believe the individual can think and decide for himself and pursue happiness as he defines it... you're delusional — in Walsh's view. You see what she's saying? She's saying you didn't build that — the very phrase Obama is straining to disown. You didn't build that, you can't build that, and you're psychotic if you imagine that you can. She's deeply into the collectivism the Democrats don't want to openly embrace.

But she doesn't think she's openly embracing it. She thinks Ryan is paranoid to imply that the Democrats favor "the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners." Pressed, she might — I assume — assert that it's fine for individuals to try to come up with their own ideas about what they want to do with their lives and to set out to achieve their goals, but that it's inaccurate to portray this enterprise as solitary and in defiance of the larger efforts of government and society (which they depend on no matter what they do).

But that's not what Walsh says. She's stirring up partisan discord and not inclined to concede that our differences, in the United States, are only a matter of leaning toward individualism or collectivism as we mostly keep to the middle of the road.

"I hope people remember George, and I think they will, for having the determination and the toughness and the persistence..."

"... to be able to see... our country through such a very difficult time after the terrorist attack," said Laura.

"There was never a taint of scandal around his presidency," said Bush the Elder. "And I think we forget the importance of that. But they'll remember him for being a good, honest president that got a lot of things done, but I think the thing I take pride in is integrity."

Video at the link. It's the video that was shown at the GOP convention last night, a convention where the party's last failed candidate spoke at great length. The party's 2 living Presidents appeared only in a charming, modest — overly modest — video. Sad. Almost shameful.

Was the Elder correct? Never a taint of scandal around W's presidency? Here's a Salon article, published in 2005 (before the second term), listing "34 scandals" from the first term — "every one of them worse than Whitewater."

Imagine if Salon were committed to maintaining a single standard for the meaning of "scandal" and had to make an equivalent list for the Obama administration. How many scandals would it list? It too absurd to imagine. Holding Obama to the insane standard that was imposed on Bush?!

Ironically, this is one of the reasons I voted for Obama and I won't apologize for that vote. I anticipated that Obama would have to own many of the policies that Bush — with his "determination and... toughness and... persistence" — followed. The Democratic Party would not be able to continue standing on the sidelines, calling everything outrageous, "a scandal," with the press amplifying each charge. They would do many of the same things and preen about their toughness on terrorism, and the press would boost them along.

And so now we are here in the fall of 2012, and that has been accomplished. Can you imagine where we would be if McCain had been President and the carping on the sidelines had continued all these 4 years? Would McCain even be attempting to get reelected?

"Obama’s race to save the Rust Belt."

A headline at Salon that has us wondering if maybe, just maybe, Obama's race is the cure-all for everything.

"Over at Salon, they’re worried about Obama’s sudden polling crash."

And, "The New York Times caught cocooning in public."