Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, on Debate Double-Talk)

“Both campaigns, in the closing stretch, seem not fully worthy of the moment. We are in crisis—a once-in-a-century event, as we now say. And what we got from the candidates, in this week's presidential debate, was a bunch of gummy meanderings—smooth, rounded sentences so full of focus-grouped inanities that six minutes in viewers entered a kind of trance in which we almost immediately gave up on trying to wrest meaning from what was being said and instead focused on mere impressions.”—Peggy Noonan, “Playing Frisbee on a Precipice,” The Wall Street Journal, October 11-12, 2008, on the refusals to face the new fiscal realities by Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama