Clowns To The Left Of Me, Jokers To The Right

I've been noticing a disturbing trend arising on the left, practically ever since Barack Obama received the nomination of the Democratic party:

Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned at signs that Barack Obama's national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on other important foreign policy issues.

The activists are uneasy not only about signs that both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates could be in the Obama Cabinet, but at reports suggesting that several other short-list candidates for top security posts backed the decision to go to war.

"Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning," said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of the 54-chapter Iraq Veterans Against the War.

To quote Captain Jack Sparrow when accused of cheating, "Pirate."

"Politician."

What makes this whinging particularly annoying are a few facts:

1) No one is really giving a good goddamn about the war anymore. It has become so little of an issue that the right wing warhawks, the guys who really want this war, are unilaterally declaring it is over.

Not that it matters much, of course, what a bunch of Cheeto-stained cowards who couldn't get up off their asses and pick up a gun and fight say, but the sentiment is appreciated by those of us who thought long ago the invasion was a horrible idea.

2) It's the economy, stupid.

And I'm not talking about just the stock market tanking or the housing meltdown or the impending depression that's sitting on top of Christmas like a fat bully.

Barack Obama sees what I see, and let me tell you, it's terrifying me.

I see 600 million angry young single Chinese men who don't have brides because of China's ill-conceived (pun intended) population control policies. I see 600 million angry young single Chinese men out of work for long stretches of time.

I see a half-billion starving people on the subcontinent of India and Pakistan, ripe fodder for Al Qaeda.

I see hundreds of millions of starving and angry Africans.

I see interest rates in Argentina of 30-50%.

In short, I see a lot of suffering and a lot of anger. Even change we can believe in only goes so far.

I'm not suggesting. I'm not hinting. I won't be as coy with this as I was with my stagflation predictions: we will be at war within the decade. History insists, and we are doomed to fail if we do not take this lesson to heart.

And since Barack Obama stands a very good chance of being President when that occurs, he needs to have a check on his ego around. He needs people around who are going to stand up and give him prudent counsel when war-like situations arise and help him determine which fights are worth going after and which we can avoid.

No one wants war, except a true warmonger. To call Hillary Clinton or Bob Gates, who has been surprisingly vocal in his assessments of the mess in Iraq, "warmongers" is hardly fair or accurate.

This is the hand we are dealt. The only alternative is to fold, and if we fold on this issue, Democrats may as well fold on everything else, because Republicans will run the show for millennia.

Any Questions?

There. I hope the Obombers choke on their bile and swallow an huge helping of crow...

In a fiery call to arms last night, Hillary Clinton tried to clear up the one thing that hadn't been clear before: Her level of enthusiasm for making Barack Obama president.

In past speeches, she has offered sincere endorsements of Obama, but then gone on to extol the accomplishments of her own campaign. This time, perhaps sensing a greater urgency, she offered repeated appeals on Obama's behalf.

"I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me?" she asked, in what seemed like a question directed at the roughly 30 percent of her supporters who are resisting Obama, according to polls. "Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?"

She linked the historic moment of her campaign, the first by a women to make a serious run at the nomination of a major political party, to the other historic moment that won out, the mealymouthed whining of a bunch of progressives who hate her and, taking great pride in their misogyny, backed a man whose character has shown that he will struggle in the general election, making what should have been a Democratic, any Democrat, coronation into a horse race.

 

She even tore a rhetorical page out of Obama's playbook and took great pains to praise John McCain, just before launching into the most vicious attack on McCain during the convention. Now we know part of the deal struck between the two candidates.

 

Pundits will spin this speech a million different ways, and find nuances in phrasing and applause lines. The simple truth is, Senator Clinton looked her constituency right in the eye and in plain terms told them they need to vote for Obama for President.

 

And that cannot be spun in any other fashion by any rabid nutcase lefty who still believes the Clintons are only out for themselves.

 

Now...let's go kick the wheelchair out from under that old guy from Arizona!

What's Old Is News Again

Who would have thunk that, twenty years later, Eddie Murphy would be as relevant as he was in 1984?:

Plot to Kill Obama: Shoot From High Vantage Point

Denver's U.S. attorney is expected to speak on Tuesday afternoon about the arrests of four people suspected in a possible plot to shoot Barack Obama at his Thursday night acceptance speech in Denver. All are being held on either drug or weapons charges.

One of those suspects spoke exclusively to CBS4 investigative reporter Brian Maass from inside the Denver City Jail late Monday night and said his friends had discussed killing Obama.

"So your friends were saying threatening things about Obama?" Maass asked.

"Yeah," Nathan Johnson replied.

"It sounded like they didn't want him to be president?"

"Yeah," Johnson said.

Maass reported earlier Monday that one of the suspects told authorities they were "going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a ... rifle ... sighted at 750 yards."

Presumably, this could really only happen at Invesco Field during the acceptance speech. Traditionally, the presumptive nominee doesn't even appear near the convention until the night of his actual nomination and then only briefly.

Now, I'm not sure what kind of sniper rifle one might need while, say, hunting squirrels or defending your acre of property from intruders, but it seems to me this is likely overkill as a legitimate weapon under the spirit of the Second Amendment, even if the SCOTUS recently made the ridiculous ruling that the Second Amendment applies to individual gun ownership rights as opposed to membership in a militia.

And yet, this rifle with a range of nearly half a mile and more was available legally to a nutcase. There's something wrong with this nation. Particularly when we can't win all the frikkin' shooting medals at the Olympics!

It's not like the rifle is the only assault Obama has to beware at the convention, either. The PUMAs are out in force, it seems:

As frustrated Democrats converged on Denver yesterday, some began chanting "caucus fraud," while others shouted the word "sweetie," a reference to the time Obama called a female reporter by the same name. One Clinton supporter who spoke to ABC News said Obama couldn't be trusted. Another said, "He's shifty and untrustworthy." It was assuredly not the kind of message Obama and his diligently image-conscious team were counting on at the Democratic National Convention.

Clinton will have to give a very strong warning in her speech tonight about uniting behind Obama, but even then, there are hurt feelings on all sides, and while this is not a rift that cannot heal, it will take time.

Ironically, the longer the primary season ran and passions grew deeper, the shorter the healing process would be. My guess is sometime in the Spring of 2009, Obama will have to make a very public genuflection towards Hillary's supporters, perhaps by championing a signal piece of legislation.

Assuming he wins, of course. If he doesn't, then the Democratic party will destroy itself from within, backbiting and fingerpointing.

See, when Kerry lost the 2004 election, you could very easily finger the culprit: the candidate himself. That's not going to be quite so easy this time. Obama is not running against a failed incumbent, but a fairly well-liked and respected Senator. Obombers will blame Clinton, foolishly, for his loss, for dragging the campaign out, for exposing Obama's flaws.

And Clintonistas will merely point out that, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen and let the woman finish cooking. Should Obama lose, he and the people who supported him so vociferously calling for Hillary's ouster from the campaign, will be made to pay heavy prices.

Harry Reid might find himself out of the job as Senate Majority Leader (indeed, it won't surprise me to find out part of Hillary's deal with Obama involves Reid's ouster), replaced by Hillary Clinton.

Of course, this entire scenario goes by the board if Obama wins, and the best way for Obama to win is for Hillary to forcefully make the case that her delegates should not only vote for Obama (maybe on the second ballot), but then shift their support fully to him.

Right now, Hillary supporters have gone to Obama by about 70-30. By making the case for an Obama presidency, Clinton will have tilted that further, and make the issue non-existent except in the darker deeper recesses of the paranoid fringe.

She should do it, too, and I expect she will. If her eight years as senator have taught her anything, there are some forces even a Clinton cannot hold back.

(much love to Memeorandum for the hat tip)

Strategic Commands

Thank God for the New York Times' The Caucus blogs, which sum up about three articles I was going to cite today:

Though his fund-raising lagged somewhat in May according to the most recent financial disclosures, Senator Barack Obama is planning an extensive advertising effort for the general election, including television spots in states that are known to be Republican strongholds.

The Times’s Jim Rutenberg and Christopher Drew report today on the Obama team’s “multifaceted television campaign”:
Future commercials could run on big national showcases like the Olympics in August and smaller cable networks like MTV and Black Entertainment Television that appeal to specific demographic and interest groups.

He is also dispatching paid staff members to all states, an unusual move by the standards of modern presidential campaigns where the fight is often contained to contested territories.

The Associated Press reports on how Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s donors could fatten Mr. Obama’s campaign war chest while he helps pay off some of her campaign’s sizable debt.

I stated during the week my support of Obama's repudiation of his former position regarding campaign finance reform, which was clearly a pandering gesture while he was running in seventh place and desperate for attention. Among the reasons I mentioned was John Kerry's "Swiftboating" in the 2004 election by an "independent" 527 group.

Kerry was in between the primary season and the general election, which could not officially kick off until George W. Bush was officially renominated. The 527 ads were run in this period when, because the campaign had not officially kicked off, Kerry could not use the public funding he had agreed to abide by, and had run out of primary funds.

He was forced to rely on ad hoc fund raising efforts by groups like MoveOn.org to combat the ads. Well, guess what? Progressives, it seems, are notoriously bad about funding things like this.

Obama appears to be positioning himself to battle in all 50 states against McCain, forcing McCain to spend money and effort in traditionally Republican states like Kansas and Virginia. Menwhile, there's a very good possibility that McCain could upset Obama's bid for big-ticket states like California, Florida, Ohio, Texas and even New York and Pennsylvania. The ability of one or the other strategy to work will determine the outcome of the November election, despite early indications that Obama is winning walking away now (51%-39%, according to recent polls).

The key demographic is the group that Hillary Clinton re-energized during the primary season, the working class vote, the so-called Hillary Democrats (nee Reagan). If McCain can hold his base and attract anywhere north of 1/3 of Hillary Democrats and Obama runs into trouble with his base because of whatever moves to the middle he is forced to make to shore up his support with HillDems, McCain could steal the election (allusion intended).

On the flip side, McCain will have troubling shoring up his base if he, too, has to repudiate the policies of the past seven years too fervently, which is why he's changed positions on drilling in ANWR among other things. Lose the conservatives and McCain can phone in the votes he'll receive after that.

Even if Obama loses the race this time, he would likely shore up Democratic votes in states that are usually dominated by Republicans, and perhaps swipe a few more Congressional seats. In 2012, he would be positioned to run again against a President McCain.

Assuming he got past the fact that Hillary Clinton would probably have much more support should Obama fail.

Thank You, Senator

Dear Hillary,

I am sad to hear of the suspension of your campaign. I think you could and would make a fine candidate for President, a formidable challenge to the right wing of this nation.

Right now, our nation is engaged in a great struggle over its soul. The failed policies of the Republicans still have inertia, because it's far easier to deal with the devil you know than the one you don't. We as progressives owe a duty to our forebears and must continue this fight. Unification is a bad idea right now, I think.

So much has been made by the nattering class about how you extended this race unnecessarily. I disagree. You fought for what you believed in, not what someone positioned you to believe in as a state legislator, and not for some doe-eyed rhetoric you copied off a cereal box during Black History Month.

By extending this race, you may have brought out somethings about the presumptive nominee that he would have preferred to keep under wraps, but here's the thing: by bringing them out now, you made his supporters fight that much harder, take that much more on in their support and while that may have blinded them to reality, it will serve them well come November. At least they will be in fighting shape for the inevitable October Surprises.

Too, by forcing Senator Obama to talk about specifics, you've shown he might actually have given some thought to the problems facing America. This is comforting, for while we may disagree with someone, we can respect that he's not flipping off the work. We need only look to President Bush to understand how dangerous that can be.

The most important outcome of your candidacy, perhaps it will be your Pyrrhic victory, is the acknowledgment, finally, that even the Democratic and Progressive movements are not fully free of misogyny. Just the comments at this blog alone demonstrate the hatred white men have towards you, but the Tennesee Guerilla Women can cite chapter and verse the hate spewed by the Obombersand their media co-horts.

Perhaps it's not race that needs a dialogue, but how fully half the population can be so denied of their legitimacy by the other half.

When those two numbnuts in New Hampshire (I think) held up an "Iron My Shirt" sign, people laughed.

Imagine if that sign had said "Pick My Cotton" at an Obama rally?

There, right there, is why you lost, Mrs. Clinton. Despite your overwhelming qualifications for the Presidency, despite your dynamic and well-thought-out agenda for your administration, despite every piece of evidence that says Senator Obama will be a disaster in the White House, if not just the campaign trail, you were the butt of savage sexist jokes.

He was not the subject of savage racist jokes, at least none that were accepted in the mainstream media. Even his pitiful speech on race, which so many have touted as a watershed in American politics, ultimately did nothing to advance the cause of equality, because the Senator did not even repudiate those on his side of the colour line who spew hatred towards America. And white women, so amply demonstrated by the Rev. Pfleger.

Or, if you believe Larry Johnson, his own wife!

I am sad to see you leave the race, and acknowledge your grace in doing so. I have said and have committed to support the Democratic nominee, and so I will pick up my cudgel and look out McCain supporters! Some beatings are about to commence!

But you, Senator, you shudda be da contender...

Good Luck With That, Chief!

The key issues of this Fall's campaign will largely center on the shepherding that George W. Bush has done, or more correctly, not done, these past seven years.

Too bad for John McCain, of course. Still he'll try:

When President Bush ventured here for a private fundraiser with John McCain on Tuesday night, his first real campaign appearance with the presumptive GOP nominee, the event was closed to the news media and their only joint public appearance was a photo op on the airport tarmac that lasted less than a minute.

The same ground rules will cover Bush's trip to Utah on Wednesday, where he will appear with former presidential candidate Mitt Romney to woo big-money Republican donors to McCain's cause.

The fleeting public appearances of an unpopular president on behalf of the potential heir to the leadership of the Republican Party underscore the delicate balance for McCain, who is trying to appeal to a restless GOP base that continues to embrace the president while reaching out to moderates and independents who want to move beyond the Bush administration. For now, the senator from Arizona remains locked in a tight race for the White House -- evidence that Americans see him as a brand apart from the GOP.

Democrats are not big on the "re-branding stuff," in other words, and so will have much work to do to make John McCain seem like the second coming of Dumbya.

Bush has one and only one major asset to lend the GOP and John McCain: his Rolodex. Here is a man who last night raised $3 million for the campaign. That's staggering when you realize that Obama has to work hard to pull in a million a day. Too, campaign finance rules have been loosened a little in that the party can now spend more money touting the Presidential candidate than ever before.

Despite the tumbling poll numbers for Bush and the Republicans in general, John McCain remains competitive against either of the Democratic candidates, with Clinton holding a slightly better advantage overall. Bush and his party hover somewhere in the low 30s. McCain consistently pulls in the mid-40s.

That's a testament to two things: First, his ability to appear on programs like The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live and not look lost in the camera, and second, his maverick image still sticks around, despite this photo:

Staggeringly, Obama is running a full ten points behind the Democratic Party in terms of his poll numbers. This is likely a testament to the fact that his candidacy represents a distinct disconnect between the kind of candidate the Democrats have actively sought over the past two elections cycles and Obama's more liberal policies and voting records (as well as the personal predicaments he has put himself in).

In short, it's going to take Obama a lot of effort to define himself for the general election, precious resources that could be used to combat McCain's image, and define McCain ahead of his campaign. It's clear that his image and Bush's image are not the same. That's going to be a very tough sell.

"In Convention"al Wisdom

Curious thing about this story: Why didn't Obama win this state?

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton arranged to meet with uncommitted superdelegates on Wednesday following her lopsided win in the West Virginia primary, as her supporters argued that her appeal to some traditional Democratic voting blocks may change some opinions despite the continued long odds that she can secure her party’s nomination.

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, said “superdelegates have to have second thoughts” after West Virginia, speaking in an interview Wednesday morning on CNN.

Conventional wisdom said that Hillary Clinton should have mopped the floor with Obama and given the nature of the electorate in West Virginia, I concur. She should also wipe the floors of Kentucky with Obama.

But....

Conventional wisdom, for some reason, begs the most obvious question: Why?

Obama has the nomination all but sewed up, according to every single pundit who can't see past the hors d'oeurve table at Obama headquarters.

Obama has an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates and a slim lead in superdelegates.

It's all over but the shouting, I mean. Right?

Except here's Obama losing by 40 points! to Hillary Clinton, a woman whom everyone is saying is done for, finished, finito, kaput.

If it's really all over, why didn't West Virginia send a message to Clinton: "Get out."

If it's really all over, why didn't Obama use that as a theme to put up even a modest campaign in West Virginia, one that he could claim was "healing the wounds" he has helped create in the Democratic party? After all, wouldn't beating Senator Clinton in a state that was, to quote Bill Richardson, "tailor-made" for her be a sign to her that even her supporters thought she was done? Enough?

Was West Virginia not "good enough" for this effort, Senator Obama?

Aren't the "typical white voters" you poo-poo worth the effort to persuade to your coalition? Or have Reverend Wright's words sunk deeply into your mind and worse, your heart, Senator?

The overriding issue here is, if this election is over, then why isn't it over? Why hasn't Obama dealt the Clinton campaign the humiliating defeat that should have been dealt by now to a campaign struggling to stay afloat?

Michigan Will Vote

In what is the clearest acknowledgement by Barack Obama of his deep troubles in the general election, the Senator has begun actively campaigning in a state that he has stridently sought to disenfranchise:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will visit Michigan on Wednesday -- his first visit to the state since last July.

The Obama campaign announced today that the Illinois senator will make two stops, in Macomb County and in Grand Rapids. More details on the trip are expected later today.

Obama has refrained from campaigning in Michigan because of a dispute over Michigan's Jan. 15 primary, which violated Democratic Party laws. He also removed his name from the ballot for the primary.

In other words, Obama caved in on his promise because he's about to get a mud hole stomped in his campaign tomorrow in West Virginia and he has to make some inroads in the "bitter white vote".

Obama has also announced campaign swings through Florida.

Now, granted, he's all but sewed up the nomination and really has no choice but to start mending fences, but I wonder how he's going to handle the enormous heat regarding his vehement opposition to seating any delegation to the convention floor in these states?

"Sorry, I don't think we need more bitter white folks in the Democratic party"? "Um, well, you people don't count"? "I wanted to seat you before I didn't want to"?

A preview of the rules fight on the convention floor, headed by Clinton capaign strategist (and the guy who wrote those rules) Harold Ickes was unveiled over the weekend:

The campaign "certainly might" accept a compromise that seats half the states' delegates, based on their disputed January primaries, said Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe. A former chair of the Democratic National Committee, McAuliffe made the case that the DNC should only have penalized the states half their delegations, as Republicans did when Michigan and Florida violated both parties' rules on scheduling primaries.

"The rule is 50 percent," McAuliffe said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Had they done that, we wouldn't be having this discussion."

Another Clinton aide, chief spokesman Howard Wolfson, repeated on Sunday the campaign's new position that clinching the nomination requires 2,209 delegates -- the total including Michigan and Florida. The party and the Obama campaign set the magic number at 2,025, excluding the two disputed states.

A number Obama cannot possibly achieve, even if he wipes up the superdelegate map going forward.

Meaning the vote would go to a second round, and Clinton makes her case in front of the convention about how Obama's early victories needed to be revisited anyway, given the revelations of his blatant elitism and anti-patriotism towards the base of the party that skewed to the right to take back the House and Senate in 2006.

It's a long shot, to be sure, but I'm always reminded of Al Gore in 2000 and how angry all of us got at him for not fighting it until the bitter end, caving in simply because it was "the right thing to do."

He was wrong, and so would Hillary be if she dropped out.

Normally, I Might Agree With Him, But...

From the AP:

Democrat Barack Obama dismissed his rivals' calls for national gas tax holiday as a political ploy that won't help struggling consumers. Hillary Rodham Clinton said his stance shows he's out of touch with the economic realities faced by ordinary citizens.

Clinton and certain Republican presidential nominee John McCain are calling for a holiday on collecting the federal gas tax "to get them through an election," Obama said at a campaign rally before more than 2,000 cheering backers a week before crucial primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. "The easiest thing in the world for a politician to do is tell you exactly what you want to hear."

I could go off in a direction that attacks Obama and point out how ludicrous it is for the "agent of change" who has voted for the Iraq invasion each and every time he's had the chance to vote on it,and "unifier" who has spent all campaign smearing arguably the most qualified candidate for President to talk about pandering, but that's not what I want to focus on.

No. Substance. Normally, I'm all for the gas tax, and indeed, have often thought it should be raised to cover infrastructure repairs and to encourage folks to buy smaller cars.

But here's a gas that impacts directly poorer Americans. Any increase that I've ever proposed has always included measures to try to get a rebate of the increase to those Americans who can afford it the least: the rural working class, who absolutely need their cars and can't afford an immediate purchase to trade up in mileage.

The idea behind progressive taxation is to shift the burden of taxes onto those who can best afford them. Taxes like the gaas tax are regressive: rich people don't drive anymore or less than poor people do.

And it's not like a sin tax, which while regressive, is avoidable with minimal expense to the person it impacts.

Too, Clinton attempts to balance the tax cut with a windfall profits tax, and you'll note the distinct silence from Congress as gas prices have skyrocketed and oil company profits have broken through the ceiling.

And this is the Democratic Congress we're talking about!

Obama is wrong here in that this is not pandering, but a recognition of reality: it's going to be hard enough to get farm workers to their jobs in the field, but this tax suspension will also help keep a lid on food prices, and how is that hurting America?

Once we've gotten past this summer, when sticker shock will have settled in and we can clear-eyed talk about what to do long term, then Senator Obama can introduce legislation to provide both environmental and economic relief to the American people.

In the meantime, he should let the lady speak.

Please Put Your Pennsyls Down

The six week grind is done. Hillary won, fairly convincingly, too: ten point margin of victory, and a net gain (so far) of eight delegates.

The Obombers will spin this to imply that she actually lost, somehow, but the truth is, Obama still had a chance to put her away with a victory, and was unable to seal the deal. He has another chance in Indiana, which was solidly his just a few short weeks ago, but all indications are that it is now a dead heat, something no one would have imagined after his victories in Iowa, Wisconsin and of course, Illinois.

I'd wager if you re-ran Wisconsin at this point in time, he'd probably lose there, now.

Indiana will represent the fifth attempt by the Obama campaign to shut down Hillary Clinton. And it will be the fifth failure to do so, thus seriously damaging his claim to be someone who a) attracts new voters, b) can draw Republicans into his camp, and c) can unite the party behind him in the general election.

Tall orders for any candidate, much less an ethically-challenged man whose success is based on his close ties to the single most corrupt Democratic political machine since Tammany Hall in New York City in the 1800s!

Obama took seven, count 'em, seven of Pennsylvania's 50-odd counties. If I'm the Clinton campaign, I'm asking superdelegates as well as convention rules committees to take a closer look at even states Obama has won hands down for the county breakdown. My sense is, if you broke the entire nation down, county-by-county, Hillary wins the lion's share of the counties across the nation.

The funniest quote of the night? From Barack Obama: "After 14 long months, it's easy to forget what this campaign's about from time to time," Obama told an Evansville, Ind., rally, obliquely conceding that the Pennsylvania race turned nasty.

"It's easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics, the bickering that none of us are entirely immune to, and it trivializes the profound issues: two wars, an economy in recession, a planet in peril, issues that confront our nation. That kind of politics is not why we are here tonight. It's not why I'm here, and it's not why you're here." Uh, OK, soooooooooooooooo, thennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn...why'd you do it?

Why did YOU raise the race card back in South Carolina? Why did YOU call Hillary on her "periodic blow ups"? Why did YOU throw the finger at her, twice, last week?

After claiming to be the uniter, you've proven yourself to be no better than any other politician in America.

This primary season is like a guy in a small-town bar. The bartender's good. He listens to you complain about your job, your home, making ends meet. He's rough around the edges, but that's what small town life, where you have to work hard to make ends meet, can do to a person. But he knows his liquors and can mix a mean Bloody Mary on a Sunday afternoon.

Then a new waitress is hired. College kid, fresh faced. Pretty speaking voice. Flirts well with you.

But hasn't even made a glass of ice water, and you might have to spot her the ice.

But she's got that "new kid" smell about her, and BAM!, you're flirting right back.

Does it surprise you that the bartender gets a bit upset at you? You've stopped tipping him for doing his job and started lavishing your attentions on the kid whose going to be gone after this semester.

America, welcome to Cheers, where nobody knows your name except the barkeep and they only want your money.

Astounding

The major gripe among the blogosphere today: ABC News spent way, way too much time drilling Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama about their stumbles on the campaign trail instead of focusing on policy issues.

Bloggers at the liberal Daily Kos (which has a heavy Obama following) dedicated the most electronic ink against ABC’s Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, the debate moderators.
One of the writers, Hunter, went so far as to say their handling of the debate was “so deeply embarrassing to the nation that it will be pointed to, in future books and documentary works, as a prime example of the collapse of the American media into utter and complete substanceless, into self-celebrated vapidity, and into a now-complete inability or unwillingness to cover the most important affairs of the nation to any but the most shallow of depths.”

Admittedly, I did not watch the debates last night (Go Rangers! Go Mets!), but how many debates have we had on the issues since December of 2007? 20? 30? 300?

Have any of them drawn any type of sharp contrast between the two candidates?

No. So what's the point?

The debate was clearly structured to try to draw some drama out of the proceedings, to put both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the hot seats about something and to let people see how they handle the stresses and strains of the campaign trail.

In that respect, it was a bit of an eye-opener, from nearly all accounts: Hillary Clinton handled herself like a pro, while Barack Obama could barely contain his frustration and contempt.

Guess maybe he knows now why a typical white person in Pennsylvania might cling to his religion and his guns, huh?

The only reasoned critique I've read of the debate comes from Will Bunch:

You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Well, I'm a Pennsylvanian voter, and so are my neighbors and most of my friends and co-workers. You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues -- trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn't enough space -- and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited -- to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans' benefits to improving education. You ignored virtually everything that just happened in what most historians agree is one of the worst presidencies in American history, including the condoning of torture and the trashing of the Constitution, although to be fair you also ignored the policy concerns of people on the right, like immigration issues.

Fair enough.

So let me ask the journalists involved, and the bloggers and even Mr. Bunch: what have you been covering for the past seven months?

How many blogposts, columns, news analyses, prime time segments, have been devoted to any of the issues that Bunch delineates?

Not nearly as many about the debacle in Afghanistan over the past year, I'd wager, as have been written over Obama's "bitter" comment in just these past five days.

Even Bunch, later in his column, points out how many column inches have been devoted to Reverend Wright, and the Bosnia trip and Obama's foot-in-mouth disease...does anyone else wonder how an eloquent man can have so many "misspokes" and "inartful phrasings"? What kind of scam is Obama running on us?... but one wonders why so many column inches haven't been devoted to, say, the PTSD problems of returning Iraqi and Afghani vets?

I picked that topic because, you know, Katrina and I at Simply Left Behind have both been all over it these past four years. I'd bet not many other blogs have been.

It's kind of disingenuous to whine about ABC's debate format when in fact, they are merely responding to the vox populi: all of us, myself included, have harped on these niggling issues at the expense of the larger stories around us.

For myself, I claim a lack of time and an interest in increasing my hit counter.

And so what does that tell you, all of you who are complaining about ABC's dismal performance? People aren't going to read about oil prices. People are going to read about Obama's bigotry and Clinton's prevarications.

End of discussion. Now shut the hell up about it.

It's About Time

ALBUQUERQUE, April 6 -- Mark J. Penn quit Sunday as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief strategist, the second shake-up in her campaign's top ranks since the onetime front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination began trailing Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Good riddance, don't let the door hit you on the way out, blahblahblah...

This moron is nearly singlehandedly responsible for the mess the Clinton campaign finds itself in. As opposed to having comfortably secured the nomination last month with victories in Texas and Ohio, Penn's idiotic "strategy" of banking it all on SooperDooperTuesday, rather than laying the ground troops in in January in states after the big red letter day, Penn's shortsightedness and hubris has put Hillary in the position of really having to bust humps in the last three months of the campaign in order to take the nomination in a subjective and therefore suspect fashion.

Neither candidate can win the delegates out in the field, and right now, while Obama has been seeing some movement towards him in superdelegates, it's clear that the SDs have been holding their fire out of respect for and fear of the Clinton machine.

After all, deals will now have to be made, and the campaign with the most to offer is the campaign that is going to get the lion's share of the SDs. Clinton, should she lose the nomination, will be among the most powerful Senators and will likely extract retribution against those SDs who cross over to Obama (listening, Leahy?)

Obama does not have that kind of stroke in the Senate, and my suspicion is, should he lose the nomination, he'll not seek re-election from Illinois.

Why do I say this? One word: Rolodex.

Sure, Obama is gathering up campaign contributions from first time small donors (altho my sense is that he's getting PAC and special interest money in some form that he's not disclosing because he doesn't have to), but those are not carryover contributions: those folks won't give to the Senate campaigns of a Chuck Schumer or a Diane Feinstein, or Ken Salazar, or...

Clinton's will. And there's the rub. Snub Clinton, you snub the money you need to run for re-election.

Which leads me to one other facet of this story: Tim Russert on The Today Show this morning mentioned that, privately, several large campaign contributors had already warned the Clinton campaign that they would only donate and solicit more donations if they could be assured that the funds would not be used to support Penn or his work.

So basically, this was just the trigger that fired the cocked weapon off. Penn was gone, long before he met with Colombian officials.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, is my thinking, and for you hockey fans out there, Game on!

Wealth And Politics

Yea....so?

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton released tax data Friday showing they earned $109 million over the last eight years, an ascent into the uppermost tier of American taxpayers that seemed unimaginable in 2001, when they left the White House with little money and facing millions in legal bills.

In his book, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, David Rothkopf notes that one of the quickest ways to fabulous wealth is to serve in government, and that Presidents, by dint of their international connections, are poised to become immensely wealthy.

Hey, you didn't really think Obama or McCain, nevermind Clinton, were running because they wanted to do good, did you?

But something odd about the Clinton's wealth should be stressed:

The bulk of their wealth has come from speaking and book-writing, which together account for almost $92 million, including a $15 million advance — larger than previously thought — from Mr. Clinton’s 2004 autobiography, “My Life.” The former president’s vigorous lecture schedule, where his speeches command upwards of $250,000, brought in almost $52 million.

(emphasis added)

Most former government officials sign on with boards of directors of multinational corporations to achieve this kind of wealth. Indeed, it is a testament to President Clinton's popular appeal and his moral fiber that he hadn't accepted the kind of cheap wealth that his predecessor had, and successor likely will.

Like his Vice President Al Gore, Bill Clinton could easily have sat on any number of boards of directors for companies as diverse as Wal-Mart, Citigroup (Robert Rubin, his Treasury Secretary, once served there ex-administration), the Red Cross, and MicroSoft (as a thank you for his help in keeping Bill Gates from off-shoring his entire company).

But he didn't. He decided to try to leverage his popularity and more important, his Rolodex into something positive: The William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, and as its centerpiece, the Clinton Global Initiative, a kind of "Davos That Does" in that Clinton doesn't just ask his participants to indulge in rhetoric, but to make concrete valuable pledges of resources to tackle the world's problems.

Being a rich ex-President is not a sin. Wasting that power and influence is. It's nice to see that the Clintons not only made it, made it big, but didn't forget where they came from or whom to help.

Foreshadowed

Consider this a glimpse of things to come:

Heavy fighting has been raging in Basra as thousands of Iraqi troops battle Shia militias in the southern city.

At least 12 people have died in the operation, which is being overseen in Basra by Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki, a day after he vowed to "re-impose law".

[...]Oil-rich Basra is in the grip of a bitter turf war between armed groups, including the Mehdi Army, say analysts.

The Mehdi Army - which supports radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr - called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience.

Yea. Some "civil disobedience", huh?

Sadr declareda ceasefire last summer, and apparently went into hiding for the past seven months, only to pop up again Tuesday, calling on Iraqis, and particularly Shi'ites, to engage in civil disruptions if American "attacks" did not cease.

These attacks consisted of wide-scale arrests of Iraqis (apparently non-discriminatory) across Iraq in an attempt to round up militia members.

The lone bright spot in this story is that the bulk of the fighting is being done by Iraqis themselves, against other Iraqis. Allied forces are providing support and reconnaissance functions.

The New York Times is reporting that Sadr has attempted to negotiate with American and Iraqi leaders, but that those talks have broken down.

We're in the middle of this mess, and sadly, it looks like McCain's prediction of 100 years (which he will shortly scale back to fifty) of American presence in the country is not too far off the mark. The Koreas have had us for nearly sixty years, and they are not that much closer to resolution of their grievances and disputes.

We will, I think, be forced to leave a military presence, even as a policing presence, in Iraq for some time to come, and it really doesn't matter who was right or who was wrong about the war.

The bus, to borrow a phrase, has been driven into the ditch. This kind of story will be the template for stories to come out of Iraq for the next few generations, I suspect: Iraqi fighting Iraqi, with Americans trying and failing to talk them both down from the ledge. Civil disobedience will take the form of more bullets and less bluster.

To rattle sabers will be taken far more literally. You almost get the sense that Sadr hoped the American troops would be long gone by now, and figured there's no real reason to wait to take over the country, which would be an unacceptable resolution for America, which have pinned its feeble hopes on Maliki's government.

While McCain was wrong about Iran training Al Qaeda fighters, Shi'a warriors are most definitely allied with Iran, much like the Northern Ireland Catholics were allied with American Irish Catholics. That means money, influence, and weapons are at their disposal, possibly ad infinitum.

It would, of course, be a feather in Iran's cap to rule the nation that they once waged a terrible and terrifying war against.

Pundits on the left have, among others, have tried to paint Iraq's relevance to this election cycle, but I think the realpolitik is that all three remaining candidates would probably have to suck it up and accept our presence in Iraq until 2012, at least (something both Clinton and Obama have admitted to in debates).

Iraq will not be an issue in the campaign this year, not even as a retrospective review and mandate of George Bush's failures. The parry to any serious questioning about our involvement in Iraq would be "Yes, but..."

No use crying over spilled milk, I suppose, but you have to sit and wonder what we've lost, how much we've lost, in this foolish aggression of a few unprincipled men.

Indiana Wants Me

With Pennsylvania seemingly stuck solidly in Clinton's column (no real movement in the polls, but it's way too early to add it to her delegate total), the key states remaining in the Democratic primary process are Indiana, North Carolina, and Oregon.

I think Indiana is the most interesting case, and certainly the one "must win" Obama has left on his schedule. He's doing well in North Carolina and should win that with a small delegate plurality in the urban and university counties, with Clinton eating up large parts of the suburban and rural vote. Oregon could be a hotly contested state, as it's sandwiched between California (strongly Clinton, with some Obama strength up north) and Washington (one of the few states that Obama won clearly across the board), but it should ultimately fall to Obama.

I call Indiana a "must win" for Obama, because should he fail to win Indiana, he will have failed to win any Ohio valley state (Kentucky and West Virginia look to be strongly Clinton), and Clinton will have a delegate map that stretches in one continuous line across the heart of America, from sea to shining sea, which will be her motto heading into the superdelegate courtship.

Should Clinton win Indiana, she can make the case that Obama wins in states that aren't going to vote Democratic anyway (deep South and Plains states), while she captured states that are crucial to a Democratic win. You've heard her test this strategy after Ohio, and it's among her strongest cases for the nomination.

Much has been made regarding recent statements from superdelegates about respecting the "will of the people."

Two observations to made here: First, this is one of the clearest examples of what I like to call "Polispeak." You say one thing that can be understood in several ways, and you leave it to the recipient to hear what they want.

Charles Degaulle was a master of this. I suspect Obama might even be better at it, but since he's never had to put his money where his mouth is, we may never know.

The question hangs on the meaning of "the people". Do you count the popular vote? Well, yes, Obama should win, except his totals include large numbers of Republicans and Independents, as well as the lion's share of caucus votes, which are cast over a number of hours, hours that "the people" can't really spare from the business of paying the mortgage. Whittle it down to registered Democrats who voted in primaries...you know, the people who cast one vote each, the American way...and Clinton wins in a walk.

Delegates pledged? True, Obama has a lead here, but not enough to put him over the top. The people have spoken and neither Clinton nor Obama has won enough of their support to engage the nomination on the stump, meaning "the people" don't have a clear preference.

Second, superdelegates were put in place precisely to thwart the will of the people. The perverse logic that might drive many superdelegates (mostly elected Democratic officials) is that, since they represent their "people," as with legislating, they are chooising for the people.

My suspicion is superdelegates are leaning towards Clinton (they prefer insiders) but are looking for a compelling reason to vote for Obama. Indiana might give them that reason.

Your Moment of Zen

Women over thirty five who don't support Hillary Clinton ought to turn in their ovaries.

Men over thirty five who don't support Clinton ought to trade for them.

Welcome To The Big Leagues, Son

I love this paragraph:

But after his defeats this week at the hands of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, there is frustration and anger among his supporters, advisers and contributors about the Clinton campaign’s attacks on him — and still-unresolved tension about how far he can go in striking back without sacrificing his claim to be practicing a new brand of politics.

Hm. All these freshly washed faces attracted to the Obama campaign because, you know, he still has that "new pol" smell about him, which is all that distinguishes him from Clinton or McCain, for that matter.

Ethical questions, close ties to shabby lobbyists, the ability to bald-faced lie to voters while cutting back room deals with the people who his "policies" will affect...as a Clintonista, it's been fun watching Obama peeled back like an onion.

But you know what they say about onions: you keep peeling them and finally you're left with nothing. That, above all else, is probably why Obombers are so angry and frustrated right now with what are very mild hits by the Clinton campaign against their hero.

The Sally Power incident yesterday shows what a deep fracture there is between the Obama public face and what goes on behind the scenes.

“Last Monday, I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign."

That last bit is clearly a lie. She is senior enough in the campaign staff that those sentiments had been reinforced somewhere in the echo chamber that is all campaigns. You are insulated from reality and develop a deeply paranoid sense of both grandeur and suspicion.

That's just the nature of a campaign, like it or not. You're too focused on the work in front of you to take a breath and put things into perspective.

Which is why it's been delicious this week to watch Obombers sweat a little. The assumption that the nomination was there for the taking has been shattered like the illusion it was ever since there was no clear winner on Super Tuesday, and Hillary Clinton has exposed a deep flaw in the nominating process: once you take it off the table and put it into subjective territory, the case for either candidate can be made.

We Clintonistas knew that, which is why when the Obombers were gloating, we merely smiled, and egged them on. Neither Obama nor Clinton will win this on the hustings. It will be up to the superdelegates, and the Clintons have far more to deal to them, because, you see...well, it's like legislation: you don't want to see what goes in it to get it passed.

The end game is starting to take shape here: Obama will end up with about a 100 delegate lead in elected delegates. He might end up with the popular vote (depending on Florida and Michigan, both heavily Clintonian strongholds), but Clinton can point out that more Democrats voted for her, even disallowing Florida and Michigan, therefore she deserves to represent the majority of Democrats.

That, I think, is a very strong argument, and she can back that up by pointing out that in primaries alone, you know, where the people vote, people who vote and then go to their jobs and not the idle rich who can put in two or three hours standing around a school cafeteria, she not only clobbered Obama in the popular vote, but in the delegate count as well.

In other words, we've got a brokered ticket. And then the fun begins at the convention or before.

It Ain't Over...

...'til the pantsuited lady sings...which would be pretty scary, I think!:

“No candidate in recent history — Democratic or Republican — has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary,” Mrs. Clinton, of New York, said at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “We all know that if we want a Democratic president, we need a Democratic nominee who can win Democratic states just like Ohio.”

It doesn't sound like she's even warming up her voice yet.

Interesting possibilities arise out of last night's V,O,T,R primary: Vermont, Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island.

For one thing, Hillary swept all of Ohio except for the isolated counties containing large urban areas like Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton and Cleveland. A startling observation for Obama is that he didn't carry the surrounding suburbs of those cities. That would concern me because he's never had that problem in other big-ticket states. Indeed, in Texas, he carried the suburbs of Dallas, Houston, and Austin. Curiously, he didn't carry San Antonio. We might chalk that up to that city being more conservative than the other three.

Clinton's electoral map is starting to show great strength in the Southwest and Northeast. This is comforting news for her should she continue on to the convention and be within striking distance of Obama at that point: she can make a very strong case that she will win in states that Democrats must win in order to win the elecdtion, where Obama's strengths are in states that normally won't vote Democratic if you held a gun to the voters' heads.

Should a brokered ticket be necessary, meaning Obama and Clinton agree to both appear on the ticket, this might be enough for her to win the top spot.

While Pennsylvania is the next truly key battleground state, should Clinton prevail there, which seems likely now given that nearly all the counties surrounding it have gone into the Clinton column, the next race of interest after that would be Oregon on May 20, which could prove to be the stopper for either Obama or Clinton.

North Carolina on the 6th of May should be an easy Obama victory, but look for Bill Clinton to pull the same moral victory there that he did in Alabama: Obama won that state by 14% points in the popular vote, but the Big Dog's campaigning made the delegate race a 27-25 split.

Apart from Mississippi and Wyoming, there are no more primaries this month. Obama should do well in both of those states, but keep an eye on Wyoming in terms of the Afghanistan oversight issue.

One side note to the Obombers who believe Hillary's done for: we all castigated Al Gore for giving up too easily. Maybe you guys should cut her some slack. She has a point about her candidacy being viable, still.

The "C" Word

It's been a tough week, to say the least. Yesterday, the plastic surgeon removed the pressure bandages and slapped a bandaid on my nose, and described what he will likely have to do on Tuesday after the second tumor is excised from inside my nostril. The doctor asked me to remove my shirt, since he might spill some of my blood on it. I told him no.

Well, the office was cold!

I sort of took this whole thing lightly. I even joked with the plastic surgeon about giving me Heath Ledger's nose since, you know, he wasn't doing anything with it. In my history no one had cancer in my family, and disease was always something you "cured". God knows, I've faced down death before many times.

Cancer doesn't work like that. You can't cure it, you can only stop it from growing and taking you, bit by bit.

When I thought about my stupid little lesion and how friends of mine have battled "real cancers", like breast and ovarian or lung, I guess I assumed a basal cell carcinoma was small potatoes: you know, excise it, it's gone and you make sure you never get anymore. I wasn't afraid. I figured this was a step up from a root canal. I was waiting for the inevitable prostate cancer before I got scared.

Indeed, the surgery has a 99% success rate. I guess I know now what it's like to be in the one percent. This has shook my confidence a lot. I mean, here's the doctor, testing each slice as it comes off my nose, and finally clearing me after the third one. If it wasn't for the plastic surgeon noticing something was wrong, I would have been patched up with a nose full of cancer still.

I consider that to be luck: if the carcinoma had been even a millimeter away from the spot he was looking, he might have missed it too.

Your body is something that gives you diminishing returns as you get older. It becomes more and more useful to you until you reach a point when it starts to eat itself up in order to keep you on your headlong dash in to the brick wall of mortality. You have to work harder and harder to maintain it as you grow older, until finally one day you realize the effort isn't worth it anymore, that you can't work hard enough to stay in the kind of shape you want.

So you ratchet back your expectations, maybe I don't need to benchpress four hundred pounds: three hundred, no, two hundred will do. The stresses of daily living are enough to make the choice of ennui an easy one.

Ennui and hope. To look for the next snake oil, the next "miracle cure," the next fruitless waste of energy, when all this requires is work, and lots of it, and the acknowledgement that one can only do what one can do.

I've reached the age where I can say I have about as many days ahead of me as behind me, and I now head into this fearful autumn with just about all the tools I can muster. I likely won't be able to learn any "new tricks," old dog that I am. Time is neither my ally nor my friend. It is my signpost on a road that we all must travel, and it's telling me to make my mark before I have to.

I guess all this is why I fight so hard to keep my hopes up of a Clinton presidency, despite the fact that I am clearly in a shrinking number. I get the attraction of Barack Obama. Hell, I was Barack Obama...middle class kid growing up on an urban street, surrounded by all kinds of temptations and distractions, yet highly intelligent and skilled. It's precisely for this background I would never contemplate politics as a profession: too many deals done to survive, too many skeletons in my closet.

Good with words, too, which is how I know that words ARE meaningless, until you throw down and show you can back them up. I don't think Obama has done this, and the darling attention he has received doesn't seem to reflect this. He's the star quarterback for the high school football team that hasn't even taken the field to win a game yet. He can bullshit and bluff his way through a campaign alright, but when the chips are down, he's all "Bueller...Bueller...Bueller", or so his legislative record shows.

What's he done? Planted some flowers in a housing project for three years and called that a "career"? Hell, I planted carrots in the city's first urban garden in kindergarten. Elect me for world king!

What has he built? What monuments has he left in his wake? What fight has he fought where he's rolled up his sleeves, and gotten those perfectly manicured fingernails into the dirt?

Where's the blood on his shirt? Because if he thinks he can lead in a bipartisan fight by being cleaner than those he's fighting with, he's got a big big surprise ahead of him. People will test him. And test him. And there will be blood on his shirt, figuratively speaking, until he's shown he has the mettle to fight back harder (something his thin-skinned reactions thus far indicate he does not have) or he throws in the towel.

If he had cancer tomorrow, what would be left of him but a footnote to history of being the first serious minority candidate for President? We've had eight years of a career gross underachiever masquerading as a president. The unfortunate truth is that George Bush aspired to this mostly because it was his last shot at any kind of fame, which I suspect was in his head from the beginning (...with apologies to Stephen Colbert, before anyone accuses me of plagiarism): "Poppy was pres'dient, then so can I." It wasn't from any sense of "I can do this."

If Hillary died tomorrow of cancer, she'd leave behind a wealth of life and lives that she has touched. All her fights, all the dried blood on her blouse, speak of a woman who gets it and gets her hands dirty to fix things.

If my car broke down on the highway, I'd rather see Hillary pull up than Barack. Hillary would hand me a wrench. Barack, a cellphone.

I picture heaven as having a giant poker game, and if Hillary sat down at the table near me, I'd be very wary of her and count my chips. If Barack sat down, I'd be salivating, practically rubbing my hands with glee.

I think running a country in the face of an organized and disloyal opposition is a lot like that card game: you have to have the wherewithal to bluff a few times meaningfully, and every once in a while, take people at face value, all while protecting your cards and chips.

Too, I think Hillary gets that we don't have time to play nice anymore, until the other side gets that "nice" is the only way to play. Already, the Republicans are arming themselves. The Jonah Goldberg book was not the first shot across the bow at revisionist history, but it won't be the last and it may be the most important, despite our mocking of him here on the left. We can't possibly understand what effect this trope is having on the 24 percent who still support Bush and the maybe fifteen percent more that only need a small excuse to return to the fold. That's enough to rebuild a coalition on.

McCain is not out of the race, no matter whom he might face in November. He polls well against both Obama and Clinton, and is within the margin of error of winning against either of them. If you take the "Olbermann numbers" (MOE + Undecided), McCain could conceivably wipe the floor with the Democrats, and he has strength in territory that's normally considered safely blue, like California and the Northeast.

It won't take much to beat either candidate.

While it's true it's harder now to hurt Obama...after all, you cant really shoot down an empty suit that's flitting across the ceiling on a string...it's also pathetically easy should they find even the slightest hint of scandal in his past that they can exploit.

The problem with being an empty suit is, once that suit is torn, you're exposed. Ask Mitt Romney.

Keep in mind that Clinton, Edwards, et al, have kept the gloves on in the primaries. They had to. The Republicans do not, and will not. They play to win and they play hard. The cocaine issue...well, let's put it this way: the sense I get is that Hillary could have gone after that a lot harder, that she had something in the tank to bring out. After all, I can't imagine that people like Al Gore in 1992 didn't know about the Paula Jones case in the primaries, but let the Gennifer Flowers case stand in lieu of it, figuring Americans would get it.

This is what I find so distressing about this election cycle: here, you have arguably the best qualified human being on the planet to be President, someone with blood on her blouse, being short-shrifted by an awful lot of people who are looking to Obama for hope, and not much else, and who knows what kind of backlash there will be once he's had to stand the grueling torture of the methodical 99% effective surgery of a general election campaign.

Imagine the psychology of these young folks if Obama, like McGovern before him, gets tangled up in mental health issues while he's supposed to b focusing on the campaign, as McCain pulls away in the polls. People don't like to be afraid, and if they are afraid, they'll turn to someone who they can be assured will protect them. If the Republicans can successfully paint Obama in this same fashion they painted that other anti-war candidate, it will be decades before Democrats will win the White House again.

Maybe under Chelsea Clinton...

Some Flaws In The Ointment

It concerns me greatly that, while Barack Obama continues to whistle past the graveyard of his own inexperience, his opponents (Senators McCain and Clinton) are scoring deeply disturbing hits at his expense.

First up, Hillary:

At a late-night rally in Burlpe, she noted that Mr. Obama served as chairman of a subcommittee responsible for Europe and NATO and that the United States has had difficulty in getting NATO to help out in Afghanistan. “My opponent, when he talks about his foreign policy experience, he includes his chairmanship of this subcommittee,” she said.
Referring to Tuesday night’s debate, she added: “And what you learned last night is, he’s never held a substantive hearing or meeting to look at what is going on in NATO, to take a hard look at what’s happening in Europe. And in fact, the reason he hasn’t, as he said, is he got the assignment when he started running for president. Well, I don’t think that’s an adequate excuse.”

She's right: it's not. To suggest that his own ambition and Presidential plans supersede any quantitative and substantive discussion of NATO and Europe's role in hunting down what he himself admits is a grave danger to American interests, Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the Taliban support it receives (in Tuesday's debate, he scored a couple of points by noting the debacle in Iraq came at the expense of hunting down Osama Bin Laden at al) is at once foolish and foolhardy. He could have held at least one meeting in the past six months, particularly during lags in the campaign, at which he could have dressed up a pig and put some make up on it and called it a discussion.

He couldn't even do that, tragically. Which brings us to the long distance encounter with John:

During the recent Democratic debate, John M. Broder and Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times write, “Mr. Obama had said in response to a hypothetical question that although he intended to withdraw American forces as rapidly as possible, he reserved the right to send troops back in ‘if Al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq.’ ”

Mr. McCain pounced on the remark. “I have some news,” he said at a town-hall-style meeting in Tyler, Tex. “Al Qaeda is in Iraq. It’s called ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq.’ My friends, if we left, they wouldn’t be establishing a base. They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen.”

His debate answer was flippant and naive, to say the least, and his quick stab at clearing the air was even dumber:

Mr. Obama, campaigning in Columbus, Ohio, responded soon after. “I have some news for John McCain,” Mr. Obama said at a large rally at Ohio State University. “There was no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq.”

True enough, Senator, but guess what?

They Are There Now!

As you so artfully described it on Tuesday night in defending your current votes "yes" on funding the Iraq invasion (I may have been under anesthesia, but damn, even I saw an opening here), "Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out."

You can't have it both ways, Barack: either you go hunt down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan while preventing its expansion in Iraq-- it exists, it is there and while it may be quiet now, it has established territory-- or you admit you have no clue as to how to engage in a comprehensive national security policy that defends our interests while assisting Iraqis in recovering from what everyone except John McCain has called a blunder, yourself included.

And stop your whining about this!