Furthermore, Lionel and Kuby

In the event that they are familiar with the niceties of chess -- an unlikely event -- you would not want the Air America hosts Ron Kuby and Lionel to be your supporters and looking over your shoulder while you are playing your heart out in an all important game to determine the Champion of the Country. Because, as in the Biden situation mentioned in my previous post, if you should play a move that on the surface looks like an obvious mistake, you wouldn't want them to immediately start spouting off for all to hear, especially your opponent, telling how you have just made the losing move and describing just why that is so.

Instead in chess it's axiomatic -- and I would think in other such pursuits as well -- that if you make a move and then realize, too late, that it's a blunder, you don't slap yourself in the forehead or react in any other way to show your dismay. Instead you keep your face and body in a state of absolute composure, and you sit back and act as if everything is still in perfect order and going according to plan. Because, in serious chess as in life, things are not always -- or even usually -- that obvious, and in any case it's up to your opponent to make some counter-moves to show that you've erred. Contrary to popular belief and constant misuse of a word, merely to say that something is or is not so is not a refutation. To refute something is to answer with moves that clearly show the folly of your shot.

And meanwhile several things can happen -- and often do happen -- that allow the supposedly mistaken player to emerge in good shape. The first of course, is that the offending move turns out to be actually a good one, and that becomes clear after a closer look. Another is that, due to one thing or another the opponent might not look too close and so will take the "bad" move for good coin, or he might even see virtues in it that till now weren't apparent to you.

But mainly, if you are kibitzers looking on, like Lionel and Kuby in this case, you keep absolutely quiet and let the situation develope on its own. In the interest of filling out their allotted time on the airwaves, they weren't justified in immediately braying to the world their certainties as to the wrongness of Biden's statement, because by doing so they immediately joined the ranks of the enemy, after they had had us believe that they had every interest in seeing him being vanquished.

In a contest as crucial as the current elections and at such a late stage, what is the point of being so critical of the person or persons you're supposed to be for,, especially as voiced with such venom? Yet Lionel has been guilty of stuff like this before, and in a promo for his program that Air American airs over and over again, in which he proposes that in an election in which everything should be going in Obama's favor, including the low caliber of his opponent, the election is his to lose more than it is McCain's to win.

What does Lionel think he's doing there? Pinning everything on Obama ahead of time, should he lose, and after all his heroic exertions over such a long period? Lionel seems to have forgotten all the vagaries of fortune and the vast catalog of dirty tricks of which Obama's opponents have shown that they're capable in at least the last three Presidential elections, plus the many factors that can serve to sway the American electorate, even within just a single day or two.