Another masterful performance by the Little Prince from an interview with Politico.com. For one thing, he looks forward to the day when he can sent emails again. The way things are now everything has to be deleted each time Congress sends over another subpoena.

And for another thing, you will be touched in the appropriate place to learn that Bush gave up golf as an expression of solidarity with the Gold Star mothers whose sons he has killed. Sorry the following post is so long, but there are lots of presidential shallows to be plumbed here.

Q: Mr. President, thank you very much for having us into the Roosevelt Room for the first online interview. In the spirit of the Internet, I wonder if we could ask a question from one of our users, Steve Bailey, of New York, who says: With oil at $126 a barrel, pushing up the price of everything — even food — what can your administration do to help people right now?

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate Steven’s concerns. With the price of gasoline going up, it’s like a tax. I wish I could give Steven a quick answer. In other words, it took us a while to get to where we are — very dependent on oil, and in a world in which demand is greater than oil. So my answer to Steven is that the best thing we can do is to increase supply, and to drill for oil and gas in environmentally friendly ways at home, and build more refineries. Steven probably doesn’t know this, but we haven’t built a new refinery since 1976, and if we’re truly interested in relieving the pressure on our consumers, then we ought to have a very active domestic policy now…

Q: Mr. President, the one thing we don’t see in here is a computer, and we know that you went cold turkey off email for security reasons. What are you looking forward to when you finally get your computer back?

THE PRESIDENT: Emailing to my buddies. I can remember as governor I stayed in touch with all kinds of people around the country, firing off emails at all times of the day to stay in touch with my pals. One of the things that I will have ended my public service time with is a group of friends, a lot of friends. And I want to stay in touch with them and there’s no better way to communicate with them than through email…

Q: Mr. President, acknowledging those constraints, you’re an oil man — some people say that climate change, global warming could have been your Nixon-to-China. Do you wish you’d done more?

THE PRESIDENT: I did what I think is necessary to actually work, Michael. I mean, I could have signed a — I could have supported a lousy treaty and everybody would have went, “Oh, man, what a wonderful sounding fellow he is.” But it just wouldn’t have worked. I don’t think you want your President trying to be the cool guy and not end up with policies that actually make a difference…

The biggest issue we face is — it’s bigger than Iraq — it’s this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives. Iraq just happens to be a part of this global war. Iraq is the place where al Qaeda and other extremists have made their stand — and they will be defeated. They’ll be defeated through military action, but they’ll also be defeated as this young democracy takes hold. They can’t stand to live in a free society, that’s why they try to fight free societies…

I feel like — I felt like there were weapons of mass destruction. You know, “mislead” is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional — I don’t think so, I think there was a — not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was.

Q: And so you feel that you didn’t have all the information you should have or the right spin on that information?

THE PRESIDENT: No, no, I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction — as were members of Congress, who voted for the resolution to get rid of Saddam Hussein. And of course, the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes. But intelligence communities all across the world felt the same thing. This was kind of a common assessment.

So “mislead” means, do I think somebody lied to me? No, I don’t. I think it was just, you know, they analyzed the situation and came up with the wrong conclusion.

Q: Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal…

Q: Now, Mr. President, President Carter recently told Charlie Rose the next President could change America’s image in 10 minutes. Here’s what he said: “I think the next President could change the image of this country around the world in 10 minutes by making an inaugural speech that would start off and say, ‘As long as I’m President we will never torture another prisoner, as long as I’m President we will never attack or invade another country unless our own security is directly threatened.’”

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, well, what he ought to be saying is, is that America doesn’t torture. If the implication there is that we do now, then he’s wrong. And you bet we’re going to protect ourselves by the use of military force. What he really is implying is — or some imply — you can be popular; if you want to be popular in the Middle East just go blame Israel for every problem. That will make you popular. Or if you want to be popular in Europe, say you’re going to join the International Criminal Court.

Popularity is fleeting, Michael. Principles are forever.

Maureen Dowd today:

Obama breezed through West Virginia, the state he couldn’t charm even wearing a flag pin and promising to invest in “clean coal.”

Jimmy Carter was an expert at this sort of thing, too. His Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare had lately been enraging the tobacco belt by his attacks on smoking — but North Carolina’s support had been a key element in Carter’s election. So during the 1978 midterms the president visited a tobacco warehouse there and and delivered himself of this wonderful straddle: “We must find ways to make cigarettes even more safe.”

And when Carter was governor of Georgia he unveiled a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the state capitol and soothed the crowd with, “The time for racism is past.” The subtle beauty of this bank shot may be clearly seen by substituting “slavery” for “racism.”

I don’t know much about art, or about art history. I don’t always even know what I like, and when I like something, I don’t always know why. But I liked Robert Rauschenberg’s art, at least most of the time.

Which is odd, considering that before his death on Monday a good part of his energy went into a sort of counter to the only visual-art movement I ever really cared about, Abstract Expressionism. “Dr.” Barbara Rose, an art historian writing in the Wall Street Journal, who I suspect is not in fact a doctor but a Ph.D., ranks Rauschenberg second only to Jackson Pollock as the biggest innovator in art, and here again I exhibit my inability to perceive as an art historian would: I never gave a damn about Pollock. Some of his works are pleasant to look at, but none are impressive. I too can generate a huge amount of random stuff and select a tiny part of it that is less irrelevant than the rest, and as our sainted Veep says, So? In a decade or so computers will produce stuff at least as good as Pollock.

But there were several saving graces for Rauschenberg’s work, including his belief that art could change the world, his sense of humor, and his interest in turning the making of art into a community operation. In most cases it seems that painters are like writers in that their art is created in solitude. If I were given the choice of what to do in the next incarnation, I guess I’d probably pick music; musicians are poor like other artists, but at least they get to hang out with other musicians while they’re doing their art. Rauschenberg, who was heavily influenced by John Cage among many others, seems to have transcended that problem.

People ask me, “Don’t you ever run out of ideas?” In the first place I don’t use ideas. Every time I have an idea it’s too limiting, and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven’t run out of curiosity.

He also cut a heroic figure: paralyzed by a stroke in the late sixties, he continued to work to the end of his life. As late as two months ago, he traveled to Valencia, Spain, to applaud a friend’s opening.

But of course, the real measure of an artist is his work. If you haven’t seen much Rauschenberg, or if you want a good overview, check out

• ArtCyclopedia
• ArtNet

The photo was taken from a small boat and with a small camera, but look hard enough and you will eventually see two water snakes. That they are facing away from each other doesn’t mean they’re not friends.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, as it used to be called, was previously the lead standard for dysfunctional government agencies. By comparison even the FBI was efficient.

Then came the Homeland Security Act of 2002, legislation of a stupidity so stunning that even George W. Bush, in a rare divgation into common sense, at first opposed the measure.

But Senator Joe Lieberman (Likud-CT) shepherded this bureaucratic camelope into law. The old INS disappeared into the bowels of the new Department of Homeland Security, where part of it was reborn as a miscarriage called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This new monstrosity, created from the conflation of racism and xenophobia with the paranoia of Bush’s “war on terror,” appears to be even more cruel, more indifferent, more sluggish, less accountable and more of a cause for national shame than its unfeeling predecessor.

The Washington Post has exposed the mess to daylight in a shocking series of articles by reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein. This is the kind of thing that newspapers can still do better than any other institution we have. Here’s a good place to start, and I hope you will.

Barney Frank is known for a lot of things. The most prominent gay member of Congress, he’s now the chairman of the Financial Services Committee. In his 14th term in the House, he made a kind of splash by appearing, without smiling, on The Colbert Report, a non-trivial accomplishment in itself.

But he does have quite a sense of humor, as the Times reports.

Between an economic stimulus package and the Federal Reserve’s rescue of Wall Street, he said, “they [the Bush administration] have been pushed into accepting a lot of government help for the market.”

“People aren’t good at doing things they dislike,” he added.

Then, in a flash of trademark wit, he said that asking the White House to support more government intervention was “like asking me to judge the Miss America contest — if your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”

From McClatchy Newspapers:

Let’s say you’re in favor of letting the states legalize abortion and and drugs and same sex marriage if they want to. And you favor an immediate start to our withdrawal from Iraq. And you think the telecom companies should be punished for warrantless wiretapping. And you hate the Patriot Act for its gutting of civil rights. And no matter what the Creep from Crawford thinks, you think habeas corpus belongs in the Constitution after all.

Folks, have I got a candidate for you! He’s an Iowan born and bred. He went to high school in Iran. He’s a former CIA spook and federal prosecutor. Plus he’s a proud member of both the NRA and the ACLU.

Ladies and Germs, let’s hear it for the only candidate who’s really got your back — Big. Bob. BARR!

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s advice to the visiting new mayor of London, Boris Johnson:

“You don’t have to match your answers to [reporters’] questions. If you don’t give the right answers to their questions, they asked the wrong questions.”

From the normally mild-mannered Bob Herbert, in his New York Times column today. Wow.

…class is not a Clinton forte.

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.

From Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Harper & Brothers, 1943:

“According to my observations, mankind are among the most easily tamable and domesticable of all creatures in the animal world. They are readily reducible to submission, so readily conditionable (to coin a word) as to exhibit an almost incredibly enduring patience under restraint and oppression of the most flagrant character.

“So far are they from displaying any overweening love of freedom that they show a curious canine pride in it, and again are often simply unaware that they are existing in that condition. Byron, one of the world’s greatest natural forces in poetry, had virtually no reflective power, but in the last lines of his poem on Bonnivard, who ‘regained his freedom with a sigh,’ he displays a flash of insight almost worthy of Sophocles, into mankind’s easy susceptibility to conditioning…

“I do not know the origin of this idea that mankind loves liberty above all things, but the American revolution of 1776 and the French revolution of 1789 apparently did most to give it currency. Since then it has done yeoman’s service to an unbroken succession of knaves intent on exploiting the name and appearance of freedom before mankind, while depriving them of the reality.”

This preference for servility is particularly striking in the military, which is ostensibly dedicated to freedom but demands the opposite from the rugged individualists in its ranks. No novelist could create characters so apparently sturdy and yet so supple and submissive as Colin Powell and David Petraeus. They may be armed, but they are in service.

In all the coverage of the subprime mortgage mess, there has been a key element missing: the sales pitch.

This is where the rubber meets the road, where the actual swindle goes down, where the trap snaps shut and the sucker is held fast till he can be skinned alive. It is the Glengarry Glen Ross moment.

We must understand these moments when we listen to the head hogs — Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, Citicorp, AIG and the other giant loan sharks — as they whine that the whole disaster is all the fault of deadbeat borrowers who should have known better.

And these moments are all committed to paper somewhere, except I don’t know how to get my hands on it. So I’m asking for help. Does anybody out there know somebody who was or is involved with a subprime mortgage outfit?

These moneylenders don’t just send their high-pressure sales force into battle unprepared. Like any other high-pressure sales outfit, mortgage brokers must use work sheets, talking points, training manuals and even scripts. These are to be followed, sometimes word for word. That’s what it means when the voice on the phone says, “This conversation may be recorded for training purposes?”

Every reasonable objection the prospect may raise has been anticipated, and a suitably deceptive answer prepared. Every evasion and obfuscation and misdirection has been scripted. And I’d like to put this stuff on the internet where it belongs — not to expose or embarrass any individual, but to expose the shabby trickery of the foundation upon which the huge banking firms are built.

The most likely source for such documentation, it seems to me, would be a remorseful or disgruntled former employee of a mortage broker who hasn’t bothered to throw out the old scripts and manuals.

Do you know any such person? I would offer him or her, and you, complete anonymity of course. Written backwards, my phone number is 0075793068. In the same way, I can be reached on line here: moc.liamg@elttilood.emorej

Ken Silverstein finds ways to understand.

That said, there are a few things that make me like Hillary. First, she’s a bloodthirsty monster who’ll stop at nothing in her quest for power. That is refreshing, given that the Democrats’ default presidential-campaign strategy is to whine about how rough the Republicans play and to get trounced. Another thing that warms me to Clinton is that the media (in general) hates her and loves Obama, which makes me sympathetic toward her and suspicious toward him.

Two very good points. I don’t know that either of them would affect the likelihood of my voting for Hillary, but you do have to admire, in a certain way, someone who refuses to give up. Her political acumen and her fierce, dogged refusal to admit defeat would be great assets in a Vice President. Problem is, look who you’d get for Second Gentleman.

Want to know what’s really wrong with America? MBAs, that’s what. Actually maybe Sam Smith (excerpted below, hat tip to Xymphora) is onto something. After all, Bush is our first MBA president, although neither he nor Harvard talks about it much these days.)

At the time of the Enron collapse, I noted, “The last two administrations have been characterized by the invasive influence of an arrogant, autistic, and amoral class of late 20th century MBAs and similar members of the technocratic elite. This class has junked sixty years of social democracy, helped wreck the Russian economy, made every American worker a temp-in-waiting, carpet bombed the English language, trashed every moral concept in their way, and twisted reality so effectively they even convinced many that they were sex objects.

“And they are everywhere. You will find them running schools and universities and managing once great museums. They talk mush, think mush, market mush, report mush, and defend mush. They attempt to make up in certitude what they lack in wisdom; they can’t tell the difference between a phrase and a product; and they create infantile and self-serving distortions of economic principles that they declare to be the only principles in life worth observing. They are, in the end, just so many more televangelists, but with themselves as God. Perhaps worst of all, they are without the capacity for shame. Like other sociopaths, they are remorseless.”

Pollster John Zogby thinks it’s all over but the face-saving:

The Illinois senator showed himself to be resilient in the wake of three weeks or so of crisis and, much more importantly, he got back on the winning track. This is the evidence that some super-delegates have been waiting for.

Many of them — most of them — had clearly made up their minds that they would not support Mrs. Clinton, and so this had become a case of whether or not Mr. Obama could close the deal. That is what appears to have happened last night.

Where do we go from here? My understanding is that probably today, but certainly within 48 hours, about 30 super-delegates will endorse Mr. Obama. That should give him further momentum.

Mathematically, this will widen the gap between him and Mrs. Clinton. He has a bigger share of the popular vote, more pledged delegates, and will now overtake her in terms of super-delegates too.

I honestly believe that she will find a way to get out of the race before the next primaries — so as to not hurt her future and to not be blamed for hurting Mr. Obama and his chances in the general election.

Here are the reasons:

* There really is no mathematical chance for her to win

* Her campaign is virtually out of money - and it will be difficult for her to raise significant amounts of money after last night

* Not enough happened last night to give her any hope, so continuing would only give the appearance of wanting to damage Mr. Obama

Confused by all the blabber last night from Tim and Keith and Chris and Pat? Want to find out what actually happened in Indiana and North Carolina? Go here for your reality pill from Jay Cost, Doctor of Politics. Excerpt:

As you can see, North Carolina performed roughly as we might expect, falling in between Virginia and Tennessee. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the results were closer to the Virginia end (i.e. Obama +29) than the Tennessee end (i.e. Clinton +13). What might explain the difference?

Unlike Indiana, it doesn’t come from Clinton’s core voting group. She did extremely well among white voters in North Carolina. Obviously, she didn’t do as well with them as she did in Tennessee. However, she still trounced Obama among white men and white women, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Clinton’s problem was with the African American vote, which came in at about 33%. Her trouble in North Carolina, as well as the South in general, is that white voters are more likely to be Republican than in decades past. This has given Obama a demographic edge in the region — one that has actually grown in the past few months. Note that African Americans in North Carolina went for Obama more strongly than they did in either Tennessee or Virginia. In fact, we can see a general trend in the African American vote toward Obama — not just in these states, but nationwide. It has not been much commented upon — most likely because African Americans have been supporting Obama more strongly than any other group. Nevertheless, as time has gone on, the African American vote has clustered around Obama much more tightly.

The Bad Attitudes Bad Taste Award of the week is hereby awarded to Allen Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell for their oh so generous donation to the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Auction, now open for bid at AuctionBuzz.com. Robert is rolling over in his grave as we speak.

Thanks to The Mess That Greenspan Made blog for the link.

As usual, the Rude Pundit comes right out and says it about Obama’s chances today in Indiana:

Ah, fond memories of living in a town northeast of Indianapolis, of car rides past homes that that flew the Confederate flag on poles on their front lawns (and this was in a medium-sized city, not a small burg), of towns with black populations so disenfranchised and isolated that they are practically invisible, of migrant workers regularly abused by employers when violence wasn’t being committed against them by townspeople. And that’s not even to get into how flat and gray and ugly most of the state is for most of the year, after harvest and before planting season.

When a large swath of a state is populated by people from the Appalachian region who migrated northward for factory jobs decades ago and then those factory jobs dry the heck up for the most part, what you are left with is a bunch of resentful crackers looking to play “where’s the scapegoat?”

By all means go and read the whole screed, but bear in mind that I had to look hard to find an obscenity-free passage as long as the one above. And even then I had to make a substitution, since the word “heck” has never made it out of the Rude Pundit’s computer. What he really wrote, I am sorry to report, was “*uc*”.

Amazing stuff from Arianna Huffington about John McCain, whose habit of serial lying would have long since sunk any Democratic candidate:

At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. “I didn’t vote for George Bush” the man confessed. “I didn’t either,” his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband).

The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency. By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush — both literally and metaphorically — he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn’t stomach voting for in 2000.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post files “Dispatches from the Twilight of a Presidency” —

7:58 a.m.: By e-mail, the White House Communications Office sends out its “Morning Update.” It lists two events on Bush’s schedule for the entire day: a “Social Dinner in Honor of Cinco de Mayo” and, an hour later, post-dinner entertainment. To react to the main news of the day — thousands of deaths from the cyclone in Burma — Bush sends his wife out to make a statement. She criticizes the Burmese government for its failure “to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path” and “to meet its people’s basic needs.” Reporters, too tactful to draw parallels to New Orleans, quiz her instead about daughter Jenna’s wedding, and the names of future grandchildren. “George and Georgia, Georgina, Georgette,” the first lady says…

The White House regarded the briefing with an equal level of ennui. The press secretary, Dana Perino, was away, having given the commencement address on Saturday at her alma mater, Colorado State University at Pueblo. White House aides left vacant three of the five seats designated for their use. Behind the lectern, Perino deputy Scott Stanzel took 20 minutes to exhaust all questions from the diminished field of questioners.

Stanzel began with the news that the United States had provided a whopping $250,000 to relief efforts in Burma -- a figure one reporter termed “a drop in the bucket.”

“The most exciting woman on earth,” Orson Welles once called Eartha Kitt. Unfortunately for us, she made antiwar statements during a visit to the Johnson White House and was essentially blackballed in America for years. Our loss was Europe’s gain.

Here she is, at the age of 81 and looking a good 30 years younger. Astonishing. See for yourself:

As the Pigmy President and his warhogs continue to beat the drums for an attack on Iran, the need for Americans to step outside our media’s echo chamber becomes more and more desperate.

Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar gives us a chance to do so, in this analysis from TomDispatch, via The Smirking Chimp. Samples:

Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to “wipe Israel off the map.” That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time.” He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel…

Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as “the army of twenty million”) are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities to strengthen the country’s theocratic regime and their faction of it…

Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader. As the regime’s de facto number two, his quest is not only to “save” the Islamic Revolution, but also to consolidate Iran’s regional power and reconcile the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran’s major cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global modernity.

If the Bush administration had any real desire to let its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to …

Assuming it doesn’t destroy itself at the convention, what will the Democratic party look like in December?

It’s often said that the bitterness generated by fierce campaign attacks fades after the election if common interest sets in. But it’s also clear that antipathies have developed, and ill will has been borne, over long periods by those whose feelings were hurt. Will the Clinton attacks on Obama leave such wounds on the party?

Everyone’s starting from the premise nowadays that Clinton has no realistic path to the nomination. I think that locution is chosen to allow for the possibility that the Clinton machine, having already ineffectively employed the kitchen-sink attack, will proceed to pull out the plumbing behind the sink and throw it, then reach into the pipes and throw whatever it finds there. Whether they’d go to the point of tearing out the walls to have something to throw is uncertain at this point.

Given that the only path to victory for Hillary involves shenanigans at least, more likely outright cheating, and that everyone knows this and is looking for signs of an incipient con, it would seem a task beyond anyone. But that famous Clinton sense of entitlement kicks in; the mental lists of wrongs suffered and disappointments swallowed are rehearsed; and the determination to fight to the end arises. One can admire the discipline and persistence, yet fail to fathom the idea that the individual’s needs override the community’s.

What purpose is served, for example, by the Clinton campaign’s circulation of standard right-wing attacks on Obama to a pro-Clinton email list?

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren’t being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers — including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers — in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists.