The emergency bailout bill has just failed in the House, and your humble Blog Goliard would simply like to say that he has no idea what the heck is going on.

Is this failure good? Is this bad? Will the markets make it through the week okay? Will the banks? Whom will this hurt most at the ballot box in just over a month? Are Senator McCain’s recent attention-grabbing exertions now officially epic fail?

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

What I do know is that:

a) Congress’ approval ratings surely will now fall from the high single digits to the low single digits.

b) Maddeningly, very few people on the ballot anywhere are in a position to take advantage of that. If our political system weren’t so broken, Capitol Hill would be a river of blood on November 4th. (Figuratively!) (Alas!)

c) These are very interesting times. (Has someone in China cursed us all again?)

That is all.

So long as your humble Goliard is offering lines to the McCain camp, he might as well propose a response to the “got to be able to do two things at once” argument. At the debate tonight, Senator McCain might say:

“Yes, it is sometimes necessary to take on more than one problem at a time. But it is even more important that a President be able to prioritize.

“I understand Senator Obama might see this occasion, promising lots of lovely clever talk, to be at least as important as taking action to prevent further financial meltdown. I disagree.

“I think that addressing the crisis deserves all the attention we can give it right now. Its priority is so much higher, that it would have been wiser to postpone this forum, which we could have easily done without hurting anybody.

“But I seem to be the only person on this stage who has his priorities in that order, and so here I am. Make of that what you will.”

Oh that was wonderful.

Make no mistake about last night. It wasn’t just the usual USC egg-laying against inferior opposition.

No…in the first half, at least, the salient fact was that Oregon State was damn good. (In the third quarter, the two teams we expected to see showed up; but it was too late for the Trojans, especially since they couldn’t keep it up in the fourth.) This war was not lost by USC as much as it was won by Oregon State; and it was won in the trenches. (And thank God for that, since the Beaver secondary absolutely needed consistent pressure on the quarterback to survive.)

Which makes it worse for the Trojans.

There’s some comfort in being able to say “yeah, we didn’t show up to play, it was an ugly and weird contest, we’re clearly the better team but we gave the game away”. It leaves open the possibility that, on most Saturdays, you really are the #1 team in the land. You just couldn’t be bothered to act like it this time; but that shouldn’t happen again, and if it doesn’t, you’re still in the BCS hunt.

It’s a different story when you face an opponent who plays far enough out of their minds that they successfully impersonate a top-10 team for the first 30 minutes—and you’re just plain not up to the challenge that represents. It’s not that you get lazy and stupid and make mistakes and let an incompetent team stay in the game…no, you simply get dominated, on both sides of the ball.

Maybe you’re not as good as you, and everybody else, thought. Even on a good day.

Maybe that titanic Clash in the Coliseum wasn’t what we thought it was at the time—on either side of the ball.

Before that game: It’s #1 versus #5 baby! Early contender for game of the year!

After that game: The #1 team truly is awesome! In retrospect, though, it was more like #1 versus #22 out there, wasn’t it?

After last night: No, what that game in L.A. really was, was #14 blowing out an unranked opponent from a mediocre conference. Retrospective yawn.

Note: This issue has been greatly overtaken by events, no longer seeming of much importance amid financial-sector meltdown. But your humble Blog Goliard was happy enough with this stab at speech-writing that he’s proudly featuring it on his blog anyhow.

In a national campaign, a certain amount of uncivil behavior and dirty tricks are inevitable; and in most circumstances, it is wise to avoid dwelling on or complaining about such affronts. And so Senator McCain was right to gracefully shrug off the Code Pink infiltrators who interrupted his convention address; and there was good reason for him to have continued to let the “ground noise” pass up till now.

But there comes a point when an opposing campaign must be called out for its supporters’ thuggish and anti-democratic behavior…especially when it has done more to encourage than discourage such. In this writer’s view, the point came this week, with McCain’s campaign appearances again being cut short due to the candidate being shouted down, and the renewed use of the “Obama Action Wire” to silence critical voices on the airwaves.

For Senator McCain to address this problem will be tricky. For one thing, the specter of McCain-Feingold will loom behind any clarion call of his on behalf of free speech. For another, his surrogates’ recent whining about sexism, real and imagined, already threatens to neutralize his opponent’s weakness in the area of thin-skinned complaining. McCain will need to denounce the trend of hooliganism perpetrated in Obama’s name while strenuously avoiding the appearance of whining about the unfairness and indignity of it all.

The following text is offered to Senator McCain in hopes that it may help him in this difficult but increasingly necessary task.

“My friends, politics is a rough business, and I expect the other side to fight hard. They have every right to, and I respect that. They’re going to take shots at me and at my running mate that I don’t like. But if you’re running for national office, you’ve got to be prepared to take it…from the opposing campaign and from the press.

“When their attacks are unfair, or wrong, or just plain disgusting, we’ll point that out. We’ve been pretty busy pointing it out lately. We’ll criticize and rebut; but what we won’t do is try to prevent Senator Obama and his supporters from speaking their minds.

“Why would we, when the more they talk, the more they help us out?

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