Man from Mars Report

(HT to Digby) A real journalist, James Fallows, reports on the reactions of a Man from Mars to watching our pols on TV:

John Edwards: Of the three Democratic responses to the president in this hour on CNN... Edwards was by a mile the most impressive. To apply the Man from Mars perspective: if you'd heard of none of these politicians before, based on this sequence you'd immediately assume that Edwards was the dominant one from either party (including the actual president).

John McCain: He looks like an old man, and a man who has lost and knows it.

Rudy Giuliani: He looks like a man who is crazy.... with his tic of stressing a point by opening his eyes so wide you can see the whites all the way around. He does that a lot, and at first glance it's odd. But beyond that is the eerie sense of how strongly he resembles the earlier, cockier G.W. Bush of two or three years ago. That Bush - the one who ... combined certainty of bearing with sketchiness of factual information. That's just how Giuliani comes across... . Great certainty about "staying on the offense" against terrorism; zero displayed knowledge of what that means or indeed what he was talking about at all.