Want to remove all slime from the election this fall and limit debate strictly to the issues? Rick Hertzberg knows how:

The solution is obvious. Obama should ask McCain to be his running mate. McCain should ask Obama to be his. And both should say yes.

A campaign pitting an Obama-McCain ticket against a McCain-Obama ticket would absolutely guarantee a general-election campaign that would be about The Issues and nothing but The Issues…

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.”

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!

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.

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.

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

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*”.

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.

There’s no question some damage has been done to the party’s probabilities of winning in November; Obama’s likability numbers have dropped, and his national lead over Clinton has nearly disappeared. Most likely, the damage will turn out to be trivial compared to the coming surge of propaganda from the right. Clintonistas might argue that these things were going to come out anyway, and Obama must be able to handle them to deserve the nomination.

But in addition to the counterarguments that attacks from Democrats have a certain kind of legitimacy that attacks from Republicans won’t, and that the Rovians will probably recycle some Clinton ad ideas against Obama this fall, there’s this: in the general election proper there’s only so much time. All the attacking done by Clinton, growing nastier as her chances dim, softens up Obama and obviates the need for that particular attack from the VRWC. It’s as if a deal had been struck between Hillary’s camp and McCain’s to ensure that the pro-war crowd can hold onto the reins.

From the Charlotte Observer:

RALEIGH — The N.C. Republican Party says it will not back away from a planned TV ad that uses footage of Barack Obama’s controversial former minister, despite objections from the expected GOP presidential nominee, John McCain.

The ad, released Wednesday on the Internet, tries to link the minister to two Democratic candidates for governor, both of whom have endorsed Obama…

McCain called the ad “offensive” and said it “degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats.”

“From the beginning of this election, I have been committed to running a respectful campaign based upon an honest debate about the great issues confronting America today. I expect all state parties to do so as well,” McCain wrote in an e-mail to Republican chairwoman Linda Daves, asking her to pull the ad.

Actually that’s only part of the story, as Bad Attitudes has learned from a source within the McCain campaign who could not to be identified because he is not authorized to talk straight to the press. Here is the rest of McCain’s email:

Suck on this, you silly bitch. If that ad runs even one more time, the first day I’m in the White House your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower. Your taxes will be audited from now until death do us part. Your body cavities will be searched every time you get so much as get near an airplane. I will veto any spending bill containing funds for North Carolina until such day as the North Carolina Republican Party drives you from the leadership post which you presently disgrace. And then I will burn down your garage and if it is is an attached one, so much the better. Are we clear now?

Bad Attitudes, for one, is not about to pull down such a shitstorm as this on our own head. Consequently we will do exactly what the Straight Talker wants us to do, which is to give Ms. Daves’ ad a little more out-of-state exposure:

If I were being honest, I would have to admit that now and then I teeter for a moment or two on the brink. Then I recall that I disagree with most of his announced positions on the matters most important to me, and I recover my balance.

After all, we can overestimate the importance of the occupant of the Oval Office. No doubt the character of the President colors the administration, and thus to some extent the American stage. But it seems to me that the President is an expression of the country, and can only do what the population allows. It’s true that Bush and Cheney initiated a war that most of us didn’t want. It’s also true that, unlike the current one, most US wars were popular at the beginning. I would argue that the biggest single factor in the difference is that people are generally better informed about the world than they used to be.

That may sound like a stretch. I mean, have you ever looked at a McGuffy Reader? Along with a bunch of socialization messages, some racial, some religious, some national, the Readers offered some decent literature, expecting quite a high level of reading accomplishment even in the lower grades. It’s as if they were trying to create thoughtful citizens of the world, or at least the weird world they believed in.

Nowadays we see the world as one big market under God, so we teach our children to be intelligent consumers. But our own actions make it a hard sell. We talk to them about the environment as we drive them to school in our SUVs. We teach them to coöperate and to share, but we invade other countries to steal their oil, and to generate opportunities for war profiteering by our most favored families. We tolerate grotesque inequities in wealth, education, and health care, yet we take pride in our classless democratic society. It’s this kind of stuff that muddles the minds of our kids and leaves them angry and vulnerable to odd theologies.

In the light, or rather fog, of the Zoroastrian dichotomy the dominant US religions incorporate, Americans often see candidates for office as avatars of the forces of Good and Bad. Indeed, one can argue that this problem has worsened in recent years as the parameters of political and religious thought have been stretched to extremes.

But a balanced view requires us also to weigh our technological and experiential advances in the balance. We transmit news around the world nearly instantaneously (though we edit it unmercifully). And people are more sophisticated about propaganda because of their lifelong familiarity with advertising. That doesn’t mean we generally notice it; but when we do, we can decode (most of) it.

As evidence for my “the President’s not so important” thesis, I offer the war in Iraq, in particular the beginning of it. What, you say, doesn’t the fact of the war happening in the face of world-wide protests prove the potency of the office? Yes, but that was never in doubt. Even before Walter Lippman manufactured consent, geostrategists understood the nature and importance of public opinion. And that understanding became quite explicit over time; take, for example (subscription required), Mao and Kissinger talking on Feb. 17, 1973.

Mao: We do not understand your affairs. Your domestic affairs, we don’t understand them. There are many things about foreign policy that we don’t understand either.

Kissinger: You have a more direct, maybe more heroic mode of action than we do. We sometimes have to use more complicated methods because of our domestic situation. But on our fundamental objectives we will act very decisively and without regard for public opinion. So if a real danger develops or hegemonic intentions become active, we will certainly resist them wherever they appear. And as the president said to the chairman, in our own interests, not as a kindness to anyone else.

Just in case you were confused about whose interests come first. Were you? If so, then you might want to consider what you probably already know about the history of the United States entering wars: namely, that popular enthusiasm for each one had to be ginned up, usually by employing various levels of falsehood and fable. Whether the war machine was channeled through William Randolph Hearst in 1898, Woodrow Wilson in 1917, FDR in 1940, or Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — and regardless of what you think about the justifications for those wars — the people were not demanding that the nation go to war. Perhaps this is the source of the general fear of rule by elitists: they keep sending our kids to some overseas conflict, the source and use of which we don’t understand.

There have never been such huge anti-war demonstrations before a war as our latest Middle East adventure provoked. The failure of those protests actually to stop the war was predictable; yet they were still useful, because they let the war machine know we’re paying attention. That may not sound like much, but in historical terms it matters.

History can be read as an attempt to set limits on the power of Thorsten Veblen’s leisure class. This task has consumed millions of lives so far in conflicts like the revolt of the English barons against King John, the Napoleonic wars, and the revolutions of 1848. The founders of the United States, rich white male owners of land, and in many cases slaves, were tired of paying for the instruments of their own subjugation. The civil rights movement was a similar revolt against a form of exploitation both longer in duration and more vicious in character. Likewise, the various attempts at gender equality intend to right wrongs perpetrated over millennia.

As we celebrate the bits of progress we’ve made in some areas, we simultaneously notice a consistent pattern of two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes failing even to reach that standard, we’re left playing whack-a-mole with the Seven Deadlies.

I claim this is due to a fundamental advantage owned by one side in the Great American Class War, the single most taboo subject in our culture of free speech. That advantage consists of nothing more than an overt consciousness of the existence of the war.

As much as we strut our so-called democracy, we Americans struggle still with our own monarchical demons. As Bob Altemeyer tells us, there are plenty of people in the US today who pay lip service to the Constitution and the republic, and even convince themselves that they honor the principles, but would willingly coöperate with a heavily repressive government against their neighbors, according to their own responses about hypothetical situations. Many believe that what the country needs is a strong leader to force everyone to follow the rules (lots of Canadians think this too, it’s not just Americans).

How they reconcile this naïve faith in the strongman theory of government with professed beliefs in freedom and democracy is, to say the least, beyond the scope of this discussion. But Altemeyer’s work leaves no doubt that more of our neighbors fit this category than we might expect or hope. Not convinced? Consider how many Americans will vote for John McCain in November. Think of those who spent their day trying to get within cellphone-camera range of the Pope. High RWAs are everywhere; I still see, here in perhaps the ultimate Left Coast city, bumper stickers proclaiming the owner’s true President to be the no-longer-Presidential Charlton Heston.

The most hopeful aspect of Altemeyer’s data is that those students who arrive at his university classes are able to grow and to some extent transcend their limited viewpoints when their personal experience doesn’t fit with their preconceptions. This, really, is all one can hope from a human, it seems to me. We make models of the world. When we’re young, our models are pretty much mashups of stuff from adults we like and admire. As we grow up, we encounter mismatches between our models and the world around us. Then what? As long as we keep modifying our models, we’re okay; it’s when we begin to berate the world for not matching the model that we create trouble for ourselves and those around us.

Altemeyer’s data suggest that people, even those brought up in very conservative households more oriented toward tradition than thinking things through for yourself, do tend to modify their models when confronted with new information. Education, thankfully, does seem to impart some wisdom along with the socialization.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.

Which brings me, finally, to my central question. What is the source of, and where are the supply lines for, the sense of entitlement that oozes from the Clinton machine? As we see this new strain of activism arise among younger Americans, why are Clinton supporters moved to complain that Obama has brought so many into the party?

They make no secret of it ! They BRAG that this new party is made up of Newbies and Youngsters and Independents and CrossOvers from the other party.

Yeah, well, you certainly wouldn’t want to attract any new voters into the party; that would upset the apple cart, or more accurately the bribery trough (subscription again, sorry).

I plan to keep reminding people that I predicted Obama would win at least as long ago as May 2007. I still doubt I’ll vote for him, largely because I don’t agree with his policies.

But what I find particularly galling is the Clintonites’ apparent belief that the nomination is theirs by right. From Herself to Carville to Penn to bloggers, the Clinton folks somehow can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that line is being cut, that they might not get that chance at the wheel (or the trough) that they’ve striven and sacrificed and perhaps prostituted for.

How do they justify trying to show that Hillary would be leading if only the Democratic primaries were run like the Republicans? Why do they persist in thinking that the nomination is theirs by right, and anyone who fails to help them get it is cheating? Is it just that they think their time in line deserves the expected payout? Can they imagine actually caring about the country more than themselves? Can they even separate, in their hearts and minds, the country’s welfare from their own personal advancement?

I’ve come, I must admit, to a certain cynicism about establishment politics. The American system, like all others, is at root a cover for plutocracy. In reality, this is the only type of government, though there are many skins for it. The question is, who profits, who’s fooled, who’s angry?

It seems at this moment that the Clinton/DLC wing of the Democratic party would rather see McCain in the White House than Obama, would choose to be in charge of the flailings of a dying empire rather than contribute to the building of a new world. I hope that evaluation is wrong.

When I encounter some of the ravings of the Hillary crowd, the thought crosses my mind of climbing on the Obama bandwagon, just to drive the Clinton machine and the DLC crazy. But I admit I’d probably be hoping also that we’d recover the wheel of the Democratic party, a hope bound to be frustrated. At least, so says the omniscient TM.

In this one-size-fits-all analysis, Mr. Obama must be the new Dukakis, sure to be rejected by white guys easily manipulated by Lee Atwater-style campaigns exploiting race and class. But some voters who lived through 1988 have changed, and quite a few others are dead. In 2008, they are supplanted in part by an energized African-American electorate and the young voters of all economic strata who fueled the Obama movement that many pundits didn’t take seriously before Iowa. And that some still don’t. Cokie Roberts of ABC predicted in February that young voters probably won’t show up in November because “they never have before” and “they’ll be tired.”

However out of touch Mr. Obama is with “ordinary Americans,” many Americans, ordinary and not, have concluded that the talking heads blathering about blue-collar men, religion, guns and those incomprehensible “YouTube young people” are even more condescending and out of touch. When a Washington doyenne like Mary Matalin, freighted with jewelry, starts railing about elitists on “Meet the Press,” as she did last Sunday, it’s pure farce. It’s typical of the syndrome that the man who plays a raging populist on CNN, Lou Dobbs, dismissed Mr. Obama last week by saying “we don’t need another Ivy League-educated knucklehead.” Mr. Dobbs must know whereof he speaks, since he’s Harvard ’67.

From Xymphora. What think?

I’m starting to think Obama is crazy like a fox. He keeps saying true but outrageous things which provoke Hillary and the Republicans into an over-the-top frenzy, so over-the-top in fact that it just emphasizes the truth of what he said. Once the smoke clears, Obama’s popularity goes up.

There has been an ongoing Great Depression in the rust belt and the mid-West since the late eighties (which has lifted in some farming communities due to the biofuel craze). People are bitter about it, and particularly bitter about how lying Clinton-era stats show how the 90s were the Golden Age, when their own communities were dying.

The Coasts, where people make money talking and manipulating intangibles, did well at the expense of the middle, where people used to make things. Having the mansion-owning Bi-Coastal elites feign outrage on behalf of the working classes makes people even more bitter.

I am not so completely clueless as never to have heard of the Obama Girl. But until recently I was clueless enough not to know who she was or what she did.

Now I find that she is a kid from Hazelton, a town in Pennsylvania that is about as hard as scrabble gets. And here is what she does:

I offer up for what it’s worth, and you’ll notice I’m not charging for it, my candidate for the bottom half of the McCain ticket. He is shown at the United Nations, holding up a vial which does not contain anthrax so that the world would tremble at the thought of how many people could be killed by a little vial like that if it did in fact hold anthrax. Remember Anthrax and how much fun we all had with it? What ever happened to old Anthrax anyway?

Via Scaramouche:

The sad thing about the attacks on Senator Obama for things said by his wife and by his pastor is that attention was paid to them by anyone except Jon Stewart. It was as if the Senator were being pilloried for consorting with persons who claimed that grass is green and — the horror, the horror! — that water runs downhill.

Reverend Wright and Michelle Obama may, for all I know, harbor private beliefs as evil as those which lurk in the minds of Richard Cheney, Osama bin Laden or, back in the day, Vlad the Impaler.

If so, however, the fact has not been reported. What has been reported proves only that both the Obama pastor and the Obama wife are guilty of truth-telling in the first degree. For example, anyone who believes that American foreign policy bore no causal relation to the 9/11 attacks is simply a fool.

And as to Michelle Obama’s deplorably recent feelings of pride in her country, I will refer you, as Judy in Canada has referred me, to this efficient evisceration of the whole issue by Rick Salutin of The Globe and Mail. I’ll add only this from Edmund Burke: ‘For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

The problem of patriotism really comes down to one question: Are patriots permitted to be critical of their nation, or must they be proud and unquestioning at all times? Once that’s answered, the puzzles dissolve.

Take Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, who said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback..” That’s Position 1. Candidate John McCain’s wife, Cindy, took Position 2: “I have and always will be proud of my country.”

It’s odd that no reporters put Cindy McCain on the spot, named dubious things the U.S. has done, like its genocidal assault on aboriginals, and asked: Are you proud of that? Michelle Obama is the one they keep saying has dug her and her husband a big anti-American hole, one she still hasn’t got past.

But under Position 1 — criticism allowed — her words imply she is a true patriot, and one with a generous spirit. She didn’t wait for solutions to what presumably blocked her pride in the past: like failure to deal with the ongoing problems of race in the U.S. She was ready to be proud on the fairly flimsy basis of reactions to her husband’s campaign. She’s not just a patriot, she’s an optimistic one.

Under Position 1, the patriot test is: Does she continue to want to be proud of her nation, while demanding it live up to standards. By that test, she is a patriot with no hole to climb out of, and so probably is her pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has taken a lot more stick than she has.

What did he say that anyone could object to on patriotic grounds — that the chickens are coming home to roost in events like 9/11? That’s just foreign policy analysis, stated metaphorically. You can disagree, but it isn’t unpatriotic. Or: “The government ... wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no, God damn America ... for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” That is utterly in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

According to the Hebrew prophets, God consigned his beloved chosen people to exile for allowing social injustice, allying with evil nations — i.e., shabby foreign policy — and religious infidelity. (The black church in the U.S. has always had a preferential option for the Old Testament parts of the Bible.)

Another way to put Position 1 is: You cannot say, Blessed is the nation, unless you can also say, Cursed is the nation — they go together under love of nation. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: “There can be no patriotism without permanent opposition and criticism.”

She said that in 1963, under fire from other Jews for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She was a lifelong Zionist but critical of the direction Zionism had taken. In fact, Jews often split into the two positions over loyalty to Israel. It’s odd how that, too, has now been woven into U.S. politics. Candidates for president are required to show unquestioning allegiance to Israel as much, or more, as to the U.S. The same is becoming true in Canada.

Of course, we also have unique Canadian versions of unthinking patriotism. When the “loyal” opposition criticized the handover of detainees by our forces in Afghanistan despite possible torture, Stephen Harper and his instruments replied: Why do they criticize what our troops do? Why do they care more about the Taliban than our brave Canadian soldiers? Got that — it’s unpatriotic to ask if our country did anything to be ashamed of?

Hannah Arendt also wrote about Judah Magnes, a Zionist pioneer and founder of the Hebrew University. “Being a Jew and a Zionist, he was simply ashamed of what Jews and Zionists were doing.” The sense of shame is what can save the honour of the group and the nation. It is what Position 1 patriots provide. If there are no patriots capable of shame for what is done in the nation’s name, so there is only praise and pride everywhere, then patriotism easily slides into stupidity and worse.

From today’s Washington Post:

Standing with two of his Senate colleagues at the Citadel, a set of ancient ruins in downtown Amman, McCain told reporters that he is concerned about Iran’s influence in Iraq and cited a recently discovered cache of weapons that he said could be particularly lethal in being used to target Americans in the country.

“We continue to be concerned about Iranian [operatives] taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back,” he said in comments after meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Tuesday afternoon.

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it is “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran; that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.”

A few moments later, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in his ear. McCain then said, “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

I was disorganized enough to have missed Obama’s speech in Philadelphia this morning, nor have I read it yet. But here’s the transcript. More later…

Okay, this is later. First a couple of other people’s reactions to the speech. Here’s James Fallows of The Atlantic, Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter:

…as impressive and intelligent a speech as I have heard in a very long time. People thought that Mitt Romney’s speech would be the counterpart to John Kennedy’s famous speech about his faith to the Houston ministers in 1960. No. This was.

Will this defuse the Rev. Wright issue? Who knows what cable news will make of the speech. But it was a great moment, to which Barack Obama rose.

(Update: …I will correct the preceding sentence. It was a moment that Obama made great through the seriousness, intelligence, eloquence, and courage of what he said. I don’t recall another speech about race with as little pandering or posturing or shying from awkward points, and as much honest attempt to explain and connect, as this one.)

10:59: Damn. We’re not used to this sort of honesty from a candidate. Can’t compute. Cynicism circuit shorting out.

11:00: Talking about Wright, he’s gonna hang the Reverend out to dry, says Wright’s comments present a “distorted” view of America. Whew. Thank god, the cynicism circuit can work again.

11:02: Oh, shit, now he’s getting Wright’s back. Saying that Wright’s a Marine who has credibility, intelligence, compassion. Shorting out again.

11:16: Addresses affirmative action and welfare anger and how politicians and the media have exploited those things. How the Reagan Revolution was based on it. The Rude Pundit gets an erection.

11:23: Brings up OJ, Katrina, Wright, says we can keep race as a divisive issue and “nothing will change.” This is the straightest talk this blogger has heard from a major presidential candidate in a very, very long time, maybe, truly, without hyperbole, in his lifetime.

11:27: “This union may not be perfect, but...it can always be perfected.” That’ll be the line that’s quoted endlessly. Like here.

Bottom line: that was a m______f___in’ speech by a m______f___in’ President of the United States. You remember what that’s like? No, not here either.

And here’s video of the whole speech.

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at 12:23 PM

Stipulating that true change must come from true grass roots rather than national politics, I propose a thought experiment related to the upcoming Presidential election.

The way I read the campaign right now, Sen. McCain is chortling on the sidelines watching Sen. Clinton, whom one of his supporters famously called a bitch, ripping into Sen. Obama, the purveyer of hope to many young and otherwise formerly excluded voters. What can one project from such a scenario?

First, it appears that we can confidently look forward to a Senator moving to the Oval Office for the first since JFK.

Second, the Clinton machine seems to be willing to exercise the Sampson option, bringing down the house to avoid losing. They’ve already run through a good portion of the book of tricks. They’ve tried to change the rules when it looked like it would help them; they’ve played the race card every time there’s a chance; recently they’ve switched to the victim card; and they excuse the lot by explaining that the Republicans will do worse in the general. Even some people who consider themselves friends and supporters are dismayed by the tone taken by the Clinton machine in the primary. It’s almost as if the Clinton/DLC faction has adapted to Republican attacks by mirroring the style.

This leaves Obama’s campaign in a quandary. To strike back is to abandon his most saleable feature, the ability to rise above the hurly burly and remain focused on hope, and, we can hope, solutions as well. Can he be provoked into losing his above-it-all-ness? (After all, Putin will be worse…)

Which provides the backdrop for my experiment. It looks like there four possible scenarios:

1. Going negative works, in that, whether Obama doesn’t strike back and looks weak or he does strike back and loses some of his aura, Clinton gets enough of a bounce to win the nomination. That, in my opinion, would leave us staring down the barrel of President McCain of the Hundred Years War.
2. Going negative works, and despite my prediction Clinton survives the Republican assault to enter the White House.
3. Going negative fails and Obama wins the nomination, but the Clinton attacks soften him up for the Republican attack dogs, and he’s so damaged that he loses to McCain.
4. Going negative fails, and Obama survives the Republican attack machine to win the whole shebang.

Options 1 and 3, either Clinton or Obama is nominated but loses to McCain, seem to me to leave the Clinton machine in the cold. If the Democrats lose in November in this political and economic climate, as Nader says, they should close up shop and go home. Or at least the DLC should. Maybe then we could begin to tilt the Democratic party back toward its democratic roots. Either way, the US and the world will be a weird and dangerous place with a temperamental lobbyist-loving militarist like McCain roaming the White House at night.

Option 4 avoids the worst dangers of McCain, but makes the Clintons the previous generation, no longer exciting or relevant.

Option 2, Clinton becomes President anyway, seems to me the least likely of the four, but it’s the only one in which the formerly all-pervading influence of the Clinton Clique on the Democratic party heirarchy is not greatly diminished.

The current direction of the campaign process, fodder for the VRWC’s echo chamber, is alienating many Obama supporters and some potential ones as well. Clintonian campaigning, like Rovian, is nearly the political equivalent of total war, i.e., there are no civilians and nothing is banned. Presumably it’s the lack of alternatives to the loss of power that has brought the Clinton machine to this expedient.

The question that intrigues me is, will true-blue Democrats blame the Clintons if the Democrat loses in November? Should they? Or will they blame the left wing for not signing onto four more years of Iraq and Wall Street-friendly financial policies?

Good stuff from Dennis Perrin on the MSM’s current fan-fluttering and attacks of the vapors over Obama’s pastor’s ventures into truth-telling.

In the real world, out where the flag-lapel crowd and the yellow ribbon boys never venture, 9/11 was indeed, as Reverend Jeremiah Wright said, the result of stupid and provocative actions taken by the United States in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Israel.

This is not to excuse the 9/11 attacks. They were evil, murderous and unforgivable. But so had been our own actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, over many years and many presidents. There are no good guys in this alley fight. This is essentially what Reverend Wright said, and he was right. Get over it, people.

And go read Perrin’s piece on the Reverend, from whence cometh this:

I've been pretty hard on the Obama campaign, and still am; but if anything would soften my view, it's this bullshit furor over Jeremiah Wright. If you are white and don't listen to black talk radio, now would be a good time to start.

Wright's opinions are not deemed crazy there, and you'll hear much stronger denunciations of imperialism and racism than you ever will on a white liberal's show. Sure, some dementia is present: this is America, after all.

But contrast the opinions exchanged between African-Americans to those expressed on the corporate kabuki programs, or worse, white reactionary broadcasts. Which do you think is closer to what's actually going on?

And speaking of white reactionary programs, here’s Rush Limbaugh, who is apparently back on his meds:

Later in the day, Rush Limbaugh dwelled on Mr. Wright in his radio program, calling him “a race-baiter and a hatemonger.”

The Clinton campaign’s response to the Ferraro flap provides another indication that the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm.

One who considers both remaining Democratic candidates classic examples of the DLC strategy for destroying the party may attempt to innoculate himself against ism charges by pointing to past votes for Presidential tickets headed by a black man, Ron Daniels, and seconded by a woman, Geraldine Ferraro.

I remain a big fan of Daniels, the kind of guy who, in a (subscription only) conversation with Lewis Lapham, Nader, Kevin Phillips and others, might say:

We need a transformative vision, one advancing the notion that America can be more than it is today for average, ordinary people. The Democratic Party should advocate a program of basic rights, like the one enjoyed by many social democratic countries in Europe. Americans really feel that they have the best standard of living in the world. They don’t, but they don’t know they don’t. Virtually every nation in Western Europe has universal health care. In Sweden, Norway, and Holland, the social benefits are so generous that poverty has been practically eliminated. Wages in most European countries now outpace wages in the United States.

If I remember correctly, back in August 2004 the dollar was still worth more than the euro; so presumably he was talking about value, not exchange rates.

My vote for Ron Daniels was the first time I was really happy casting a ballot for President, and I was still pleased the next day. That experience molded my judgment: I felt better about myself for voting for the candidate I really thought was the best. Indeed, I’d vote for someone running on his platform again.

1. Cut the defense budget in half next year.
2. Spend half the savings on retooling the weapons factories and retraining the defense workers, so the companies and individuals don’t get screwed by the switchover, and end up building stuff we actually want to use.
3. With the other half, rebuild the national infrastructure.

I wasn’t naïve enough to think that the American plutocracy would let such a program be implemented. But I still think it would work, in the sense of accomplishing all reasonable goals. It’s just a question of when we decide to move forward.

The reason we don’t do it, of course, is that “all reasonable goals” is an incomplete set: it doesn’t include the normal focus of American communal actions. The basis of our economic system, and thus of our political and social systems as well, is a particularly feral variation of the capitalist mythology. The skeleton seems to have been adopted in toto from Veblen. To help developing countries reach our exalted heights, we talk up free-market solutions we assiduously avoided, as William Greider documents.

Our economic methodology encourages the emergence of a very small number of very successful survivors. Whether they excel through honesty and business acumen (Buffett) or prefer to game the system (Gates, Ellison), they inhabit a rarified atmosphere reserved for those smart, lucky, and vicious enough to reach it. Social Darwinism, the philosophy was called, back in the days when it was considered gauche. Nowadays we know from gene-pool studies that variety is not merely the spice but the touchstone. Survival of the fittest in a vicious business world produces the most vicious businesspeople, who may not be ideal seed corn.

More importantly, we have arrived at the first moment in history in which life does not have to center around a struggle for insufficient resources. Sure, we're running out of oil, and private corporations are buying public water supplies; but that's because our economic system is geared toward concentration of wealth rather than distribution of capabilities.

If we chose, we could feed, clothe, house, and educate every American. Why don't we choose that?

Unfortunately the second half of this tale is neither so uplifting nor so edifying. The sad spectacle that surrounds the one-time nominee for Vice President, Geraldine Ferraro, for whom I voted proudly at the time, seems at this point devoid of moral beyond the simple one enforced on commuter trains in the Bay Area: don’t be a jerk, or at least don’t let others know you’re a jerk. It’s surprising how difficult some people find that task.

I’m surprised, too, by the reports that she said Jesse Jackson wouldn’t have been in the 1984 Presidential field if he weren’t black. Still, no one seems to be denying two things.

1. That such overt racism not only made it onto a Democratic Presidential ticket a quarter-century ago, but was still a known, available, and useful tool for the more vicious of the two DLC candidates in 2008
2. That in any contest to determine who is most vicious, the representative of the Clinton team will be in the running no matter the cost

To me this is another example of my political theory of entitlements. The territory of the Democratic party has been occupated by disgruntled Republicans. After the MLK/LBJ civil-rights bills, the racists, sexists, homophobes, and xenophobes congregated around the Republican banner. Those Republicans who thought of blacks as “mentally inferior” as opposed to “hanging material” gradually found themselves at the left end of the party, and some became independents or Democrats. Personally I’m stunned to find Ferraro among such reprobates, but there it is.

Dwelling on the conspicuous concern for self over party and country exhibited by both Clintons in every imaginable type of situation is duplicative. My point here is the sense of entitlement.

Many Democrats, uncomfortable with their decision to support wooden and unconvincing candidates (not all of whom even pursue legitimate wins), seem to consider the votes of everyone in America to the left of Katherine Harris their rightful territory. Sure, you say you wouldn’t have voted for the Democrat even if we legally prevented you from voting for a Green or a Libertarian; but we know you’re lying. Your vote is ours, so hand it over.

Perhaps it’s a similar deal with Ferraro. As a woman who’s withstood the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, perhaps she figures it’s her turn. She, and her avatar Hillary, deserve their time with the scepter. Will she overcome the challenge, diminish, and go into the West? Or succumb to the lure of the Ring, the Dark Side, the power?

Hillary’s supporters, no more DLC than Obama’s at the party-hierarchy level, nevertheless have a greater sense of entitlement. [Update: (Sirota) “Why do the Clintons always treat the public like we are just drop-dead stupid?”] Is that what we mean by electability? How likely is that to work in the general?

The Clinton wing of the DLC seems to have announced its willingness to follow what Seymour Hersh called the Sampson Option: pull down the house rather than let anyone else win.

Good! Let the Republican party disappear, the DLC rename itself the Republicans, the Green party rename itself the Democrats, and the remaining Greens return to leading the way.

From the New York Times:

“Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist,” she said. “I will not be discriminated against because I’m white. If they think they’re going to shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff, they don’t know me.”

Creating a movement’s not like it used to be.

It’s very hard in this modern day of ours to build mass movements. Look how hard it is just to get people to turn out for rallies and marches. We did better dozens and dozens of years ago on this score as a nation. But we’re calling our campaign an ’08/’09 campaign and by that we mean that we’d like to bring together in each Congressional district about 1,000 publicly conscious citizens who will form a watchdog lobby on Congress and put before Congress about ten major redirections of the country, like single-payer health insurance etc. … Every Congressional district has about 600,000 people in it. Just about every Congressional district has community colleges, colleges and other institutions that can be tapped into for these 1,000 people. I can’t overemphasize, as a person who’s worked on the Congress for over forty years and testified and exposed it, I can’t overemphasize the enormous turnaround value of a thousand people connected to one another holding accountability sessions, challenging the members of Congress putting pressure — you know, the good old-fashioned American way of lobbying, how it can change the Congress. And the Congress can pivot the entire federal government. It’s the most powerful branch of government if it chooses to use its constitutional powers, and that’s what we’re aiming for. The more people we get in this campaign the more we’ll say to them, Well, after November there’s going to be a real focused movement in each Congressional district. So we’re going to have the table out there for people to put their cards on in terms of mobilizing. Without that it’s not going to happen.

Muhammed Cohen expostulates wittily on on McCain's possible VP choices, considering Rice, Powell, Romney, Huckabee, and several others.

The Democrats are almost certain to field either a female or a black candidate; so the Republicans need to keep up with the Joneses (Veblen’s urge to emulation). Cohen considers the positives and negatives of the people John McCain is probably considering. For instance, the governor of Alaska, popular for anti-corruption stances, would be an excellent pick, but pregnancy means she’s unlikely to be interested in spending every waking hour on the campaign trail.

One of the most interesting possibilities is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, 36, a Roman Catholic son of Punjabi immigrants, who has apparently become a Limbaugh favorite. Cohen recommends him.

In the end, though, Muhammed Cohen figures there’s one choice who comes closest to being everything the Republican party wants.

Is there a black man out there who would firm up McCain’s right flank, get love from the Republican establishment, and, unlike Rice, at least potentially appeal to African-Americans? Yes, and he’s been hiding in plain sight since 1991.

At its heart, the vice presidential choice is a cynical, craven appeal to voters. On one hand, the vice presidential nominee is supposed to be ready for the presidency, and voters can even prefer the running mate to headliner. But the presidential nominee absolutely, positively doesn’t want the vice president to become president. The Clintons raised the cynical art form to a new low in recent days with their suggestions of Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama as Hillary Clinton’s running mate while questioning his fitness for the top job.

But when it comes to cynicism in politics featuring race, one name should leap to mind: Clarence Thomas. …

[…]

…the most cynical part of putting Thomas on the ticket is perhaps the most appealing to Republican grandees. As a sitting Supreme Court Justice, appointed for life and virtually untouchable, Thomas would have to be nuts to trade that job for the vice presidency. But that doesn’t mean he can’t run for the office while keeping his Supreme Court seat. It’s possible that he could serve as vice president and a Supreme Court justice at the same time, but the simpler solution would be to resign as vice president if he’s elected.

Trent Lott won re-election to a six-year term as Mississippi senator, but resigned a year later to become a lobbyist. Thomas would simply be setting the clock further ahead. Thomas’ resignation in November would let McCain pick from a large field of Republican worthies likely to be out of work after the November vote. A pitcher of spit that’s a heartbeat from the presidency looks pretty good if you’re unemployed.

Naw, they wouldn’t stoop to that…

Seems to me that these are the only poll numbers that Democratic voters, delegates and super-delegates ought to be paying serious attention to. And these match-up figures have held fairly steady throughout the ups and downs of the primary season.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain trails Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in hypothetical matchups, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Wednesday.

Illinois Sen. Obama leads McCain by 12 percentage points — 52 percent to 40 percent; New York Sen. Clinton leads McCain by 6 points — 50 percent to 44 percent, the poll found.

This piece of mine ran several days ago in Salon. com. To see it in its original home, go here. One of the commenters, Blueturtle, made a point that hadn’t occurred to me, but seems aesthetically solid:

Beyond the Left's often correct belief that wearing the flag is facile posturing, there is a larger, deeper problem with the lapel pin.

Isn't it the great unspoken truth that the American flag is simply ugly? Bold, primary colors parceled out in too small stripes and indeterminant stars. It has always paled in comparison to the understated tricolor of France, the composite crosses of the Union Jack, or the beautiful exoticism of any number of developing nations' standards.

The stars and bars speaks for a nation that never could really figure out what it stood for. In response, states' rights and muddled federalism left us with a compromise guidon of cobbled together symbols.

Obama knows that will clash with any outfit that is not made for preschoolers in their bold jumpers.

Is a man fit to be commander-in-chief if he won't even fly the flag from his buttonhole?

Does that man, Barack Obama, think he's "too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest?" Because that's what William Kristol believes.

Grow up, the Chicago Sun-Times advises: "Oh for Pete's sake, Senator Obama, pin the darnn American flag to your chest. Otherwise, the poor dope will "catch a world of hurt for ... polarizing comments [that] make him sound like a hardened leftist."

Has Obama's failure to wear a flag pin really done "more damage to his White House hopes than a bomb bursting in air?" The New York Daily News thinks so.

Or is it just possible that Barack Obama knows more about getting to be president than all of these pundits laid end to end, as they probably should be? Is it possible that an empty buttonhole might actually help a candidate of either party, now that the nation's number one flag-wearer is circling the bowl with the lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded?

Let's go beyond the Beltway and take a look. Out there on the campaign trail, who's actually been wearing lapel flags in this race and who hasn't -- and how's that been working out for you guys anyway?

On April 26 of last year in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the Democrats held the first debate in the campaign that never ends. First thing that morning the candidates were all in a hurry to throw on their clothes, grabbing any old thing that came to hand. Yeah, right.

It was the most important day of their political lives to date, and they agonized over each tiny sartorial decision. Windsor knot or four-in-hand? Blue or red?

Here's where everybody came out on lapel flags. The photo coverage of the debate shows that only Joe Biden decided to wear one. The other seven -- Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd — went without.

Of course you'd expect that from a bunch of surrender monkeys, wouldn't you? So let's turn to the Republicans, tough-talking patriots to a man. Their first debate came a week later in Simi Valley, California. And sure enough, Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani, nonveterans all, were careful to pin on their flags.

Wait a minute, though. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Huckabee all left their little flags back home on the bureau. And so did John McCain. Hmm.

By May 15, at the Columbia, South Carolina Republican debate, Tancredo had stopped wearing his flag. By June, Democratic candidate Joe Biden had deflagged as well.

The only candidate of either party who chose to add a flag in the course of the campaign was Bill Richardson, who flagged up toward the end of the summer. With Biden's flag gone by then, Richardson had become the only Democratic candidate to wear a flag in the debates.

On the Republican side Tommy Thompson continued to wear his flag till the bitter end, which came in August when he placed sixth in the Iowa straw polls. The empty Thompson slot was filled the following month by Fred. The lobbyist/actor picked up Tommy's banner, so to speak, and was still wearing it in January when he, too, dropped out.

Rudy Giuliani, who probably wears a flag to bed, dropped out a week later after racking up a pathetic 15 percent of the vote in the Florida Republican primary.

Do we see a subtle pattern emerging here? Every presidential candidate of both parties who ever wore a lapel flag during the debates, even as briefly as Biden, bought himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

And every major party candidate who remains viable today — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — has seldom if ever been spotted with a flag in his or her lapel.

Don't think the press hasn't been noticing, either. To this day there has been a steady drumbeat of silence in the media over the flagless-ness of Huckabee's, Clinton's and McCain's lapels.

Nor would Obama's disrespect have made news if only he had thought to point the finger at everyone else still in the race when a TV reporter posed his trivia question back in October. But instead he gave an honest if incomplete answer.

Obama said he had worn a pin after 9/11 but stopped once he began to notice, and here I paraphrase wildly but no doubt accurately, that most of the people still wearing lapel flags were assholes.

On the evidence of the campaign so far, Obama wasn't the only one who noticed.

Clinton, Huckabee and McCain, we may say with confidence, would wear anything or even nothing at all if they thought it would help them win the nomination. Then why, when it came to miniature flags, did the three join Obama in opting for nothing?

Dosed with Pentothal, each would most likely come up with a variant of the answer Obama had hinted at: that lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don't want sticking to your fingers these days..

For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies, and a cruel war with neither point nor end.

No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.

The crisis call did not come at 3 a.m. It came much later in the morning and our leader's reaction was to continue reading to the children, then to go to ground instead of leading and calming the nation, and only then belatedly to deplore the attack that killed some 3,000 Americans on that clear September day.

Next he asked all Americans to support a counterattack by shopping, following which he invaded a country that had nothing to do with the attack on us.

It’s worth remembering what the GOP's president really did and did not do as the Republicans are set to run an Iraq War enabler to succeed him. Meanwhile the Democrats are wavering between two candidates, one of them another Iraq enabler who, like her rival (as well as Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, Carter, etc.) and like herself, has little foreign policy experience.

This just in from Judy in Canada:

Hello. all you friends south of the border. Paul and I were so disgusted at the news that our Rove-aping nasty prime minister, Harper, managed to give Obama problems at a critical moment in his campaign that Paul stayed awake most of the night stewing about it.

I was so shocked by the coverage it was getting that I wanted to write all the Sunday talk show types and tell them that Harper in no way represents the majority of Canadians. His is a minority government far to the right of 65% of the population.

He’s a roll-up of Bush, Cheney and Rove. Puts out awful attack ads, sets new foreign policy that makes most of us cringe, refuses to get serious about climate change. But worst of all, we’ll have a tough time getting rid of him because the Opposition is made up of four parties — and the Liberals, the largest and the most centrist, with a progressive leader, are still struggling among themselves after a long divisive leadership race 18 months ago.

So that’s the frustration we’re feeling here today as we as we realize that Harper is every bit the malicious bully we’ve thought and more. We’re ready for change we can believe in! And we share the concerns about NAFTA. How about co-operation on fair trade? That would be nice. Here are two stories that illustrate the way our PM operates.

I suppose this means Matt Gonzalez will now be called a traitor in Left Blogistan. If so, it will add more weight to the view that many so-called leftists are closet High RWAs.

Yesterday, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Ralph Nader announced that Matt Gonzalez, the former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, will be his VP running mate. Check out the video of the press conference.

[UPDATE: I don’t mean to blame everything on some abstract statisical group. My RWA score was higher than I expected, only slightly below the overall average, so I obviously am not exactly as I think of myself.]

On April 6, 1993, speaking at the University of Texas on the 75th day of the Clinton presidency, Hillary Clinton invoked Lee Atwater. He was the Republican dirty tricks expert who tutored Karl Rove in gutter politics. Atwater had died of cancer two years earlier, an ordeal which led him to repentance for his repulsive life. From Clinton’s speech:

He said the following: “Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the counry, Republicans and Decmocrats alike, that something was missing from their lives — something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican Party to take advantage of it. But I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society was what missing in me. A little heart, a lot of brotherhood.

“The eighties were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye-to-eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up with its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.

“I don’t know who will lead us through the nineties, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society — this tumor of the soul.”

Fifteeen years later Hillary hoped to speak to this vacuum, but Obama spoke better, and there you have it. As the Bible says, The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Americans enjoy thinking of themselves as the best and brightest. Unfortunately the data seem to contradict that belief.

Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic history and literature questions in a phone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750, not in 1492.

[…]

About a quarter of the teenagers were unable to correctly identify Hitler as Germany’s chancellor in World War II, instead identifying him as a munitions maker, an Austrian premier and the German kaiser.

On literature, the teenagers fared even worse. Four in 10 could pick the name of Ralph Ellison’s novel about a young man’s growing up in the South and moving to Harlem, “Invisible Man,” from a list of titles. About half knew that in the Bible Job is known for his patience in suffering. About as many said he was known for his skill as a builder, his prowess in battle or his prophetic abilities.

The proportion of writers who don’t know when it’s okay to split an infinitive was apparently not calculated by this survey, but we can certainly point to at least one New York Times writer who falls into that category. What Strunk calls incorrect comma placement is apparently part of the Times style manual, so the writer cannot be blamed for that.

It’s particularly impressive that in a country so taken with the literal truth of a book produced by politicians three centuries after the fact (if there was one), half of those in school, and therefore closest to the moment of learning, are seriously confused about what that book says.

But even if the best and brightest (i.e., Americans who slavishly follow whatever the right wing of the Democratic party says), sometimes make egregious errors, I thank whatever gods may be that we’re not like the benighted and godless commies (subscription required).

Our liberal enemies say that Nashi is a Kremlin project designed to protect against an Orange Revolution. Naturally, liberals like Garry Kasparov are not fascists or terrorists. But their criticism is precisely what allows teams of Chechen terrorists to roam free all over Europe. Vladimir Putin has subdued the spread of fascist ideology. Liberals now defend fascism. Their hatred for Putin has obscured everything else.

All hail the Great Leader Putin! Or, in our case, whoever the DLC nominates.

The prodigal fubar beat me to the punch this morning commenting on the NaderTraitor and his GOoPer sugar daddies.

Strange how NaderTraitor seems to pop up at the most inconvenient moments for the Dems. I really have a hard time understanding his motivation.

Perhaps somewhere in the Rove blackmail files, there is a picture of Ralph doing something really embarrassing, like giving fellatio to a billy goat. In fact, it is probably a three-way that includes Tony Blair — I never could understand how that smart intelligent liberal could become Bush’s Bitch overnight.

Shame Ralph couldn’t be a man about it and commit seppuku.

The same could be said for others, whose lives have contributed far less to the common good than Nader’s.

Hillary Clinton, yesterday:

“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. “We can’t let that happen again.”

We have also seen the tragic results of having senators who lacked the guts and/or the wisdom to vote against handing a loaded gun to that president. Since Mrs. Clinton clings stubbornly to her earlier belief that two and two do too make five, wouldn’t she just “let that happen again?”

I’m tempted to say the crybabies have escaped from the playpens, but such a severe cut might undermine my ability to convince them to grow up, so I’ll refrain.

Instead I’ll limit myself to this: silly season is back. It’s once again chic to portray yourself incorrectly as the aggrieved party in a situation of clear moral imperatives, to which the present is epilogue; and to reason from moronic and completely irrelevant bases.

I’ll offer an analogy to make this clear. Let’s suppose that a man, we’ll call him “George”, asks you for ammunition so that he can shoot people. If you give him one bullet, and he kills someone, you are an accomplis [sic], even if 100 other people also give him ammunition and weapons that he uses in his shooting spree. Moreover, to continue the analogy, you should ask yourself, what kind of man would express no remorse for lending that bullet and then would go so far as to give the guy another bullet four years later.

And after all, who can deny that opposing everything about a war involves more complicity than voting to start it and repeatedly funding every request? Simplicity itself: I think it, therefore it’s true, the facts be damned. But we’re different from Rush and Drudge and Hannity…

That’s good for a laugh but not for increasing understanding. As Bertrand Russell said, if you have a good logical argument, you make it. If not, you make emotional arguments. Or silly ones. You decide to vote for a war supporter even though you’re against the war, because the last time you prostituted your vote you didn’t get what you expected. Of course, you’ve never gotten what you expected. (This time, though, you just know it’ll be different.)

As with most areas of life, Americans are screwing up because they’re innocent of knowledge with respect to how their country works. And how other countries work. And what’s happened in the past. And, frankly, everything that isn’t on television. (Even then…)

Typical of the lot, Josh Marshall, from some blog called Talking Points Memo (probably a Frank Luntz associate), titles his post “Bush’s Chief Enabler Signs On”.

These folks are no doubt well intentioned; they might even hope to fulfill the role of citizens if provided with an education. But they start with the disadvantage of being Right-Wing Authoritarians.

I begin by noting the convergence of three qualities among Nader haters. First, they’re without exception conventional; they believe the Democratic Party is the fount of all goodness, and anyone who doesn’t succumb to the party’s blandishments is either a Republican or, worse, someone who sees how wonderful the party is and refuses to help it. “Who’s the candidate, what’s the platform, what policies can we expect?” Who are you to ask? We tell you who to vote for, and you do it, or you’re an enemy. Less human than the godly Democrats. The brave Democrats.

Bravely bold Sir Robin rode forth from Camelot
He was not afraid to die, O brave Sir Robin
He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin

Second, they have an uncanny knack for surrendering their personal judgements to those of the DJ, er, I mean, DNC. Or is it DLC? The Pope? Authoritarian submission in vitro. Whoever the party — sorry, The Party — nominates is fine with me. At least it won’t be whoever The Other Party nominates.

Third, they unleash their violent demons, previously inhibited by the necessities of the life of wimpy liberals, when they perceive that Authoritah would approve. With the addition of authoritarian violence, we complete the proof. Quod erat demonstrandum.

So what do we know of the genesis of RWA personalities — what issues lead people in that direction? Well, Altemeyer’s work has shown that two factors account for the vast majority of observed behavior: fear and self-righteousness. Those who fear opposition, who are scared that they won’t be able to hold onto their world views if things change, who wonder why everyone doesn’t agree with them, who can’t stand batting their ideas around in a free forum, are likely to feel threatened every time someone disagrees. Coupled with a belief that they’re right, completely, and anyone who disagrees is handing bullets to a shooter, you have the fanatic, also known these days as the Obama supporter. (One thing you gotta say about Clinton supporters, they’re not True Believers, they’re just hoping for high-status jobs.)

As a result they’re slinging mud that would make Drudge proud, pretending a deep knowledge of politics, while acknowledging the opposite in the same sentence.

Ross Perot’s campaign also seem [sic] to accomplish little for his objectives, which I barely remember, other than to help Clinton win the Presidency.

What proof is stronger than the lack of memory? If you can’t remember Perot’s objectives, they must not have been accomplished. He must have been wrong about the Giant Sucking Sound. But then, you wouldn’t know what that was anyway; you can’t get it on an iPod. (Actually I’m sure you could, but you wouldn’t be able to pay attention long enough to follow the argument.)

How would these people argue their case against Howard Zinn?

Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.

They offer no radical change from the status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.

They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.

None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

Americans do care about their country. They care about their environment, and what will be left for their kids. They demand to know which channel they should watch in order to wash their hands of the problem.

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

Unfortunately it appears that the sets of Democrats and concerned citizens have a decreasing intersection. Or perhaps it’s just the Will Rogers Democrat coming out: no matter who you’re for, unless they’re my choice too I’m against them. People who hate people, come together!

Or more accurately, people who believe they can only win by compelling others to act against their best judgement, against their will. Nader runs because the Democrats continue to offer Republican policies. He began exploring the minute Edwards dropped out. He offered to drop out in 2004 if the Democrats would adopt a few of his basic policies. But the Democrats were in hock to the same folks that own the Republicans.

Personally I feel a certain amount of negativity toward war enablers. That doesn’t mean people who act, speak, and vote against war. It means those who fund, vote, or speak for war. In other words, I’m no longer a Democrat, because I’m against war, while the Democrats continue to enable it. I favor peace, universal health care, controlling corporations, and trying to repair the environmental damage we’ve done; so I intend to vote for someone whose policies are in line with those goals. If you think the Democratic candidate will do that, I suggest you vote for that candidate. I don’t, so I expect I won’t.

This ran several days ago in Salon. com. To see it in its original home, go here. Not all of the commenters were won over by my arguments.

I know exactly how Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick felt on seeing his words from their author's womb unfairly ripped by Barack Obama.

I've been feeling the same way ever since the presidential campaign of 1984, when I wrote this for Walter Mondale:"In Reagan's America, a rising tide lifts all yachts." Mr. Mondale lost every state but Minnesota, but my line lived on. Through the years it has been stolen by the best — Molly Ivins, Ralph Nader, Joseph Stiglitz, Warren Buffett, Doonesbury — and always without credit.

Do I feel used? Cheated? No, I feel the same way I did in 1988 when the media went into snit mode on discovering that Joe Biden — the horror, the horror! — had failed to footnote a line or two he lifted from a British politician. I just feel indifferent.

The awful truth is that speechwriters have a secret, unwritten code. In obedience to it, the first thing we do on finding ourselves in the White House is to rummage through the papers of past presidents in search of things to pilfer.

Here's one such thing, from Warren G. Harding's keynote address at the 1916 Republican Convention: "We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it, and more anxious about what it can do for the nation."

With the subtraction of a few syllables and the addition of a soupçon of affectation ("Ask not?"), Harding's piffle could be and was recycled for John F. Kennedy's inaugural address — just as Harding himself had swiped it from a speech Oliver Wendell Holmes gave in 1884. Nor was Holmes likely to have been the first to come up with the general idea, which after all basically reduces to nothing more than, "Don't expect me to do everything around this house, young lady."

And nor was I the first to come up with that business about rising yachts. I can't find any earlier evidence of it on the Internet, but that means nothing. All us monkeys pounding on all those typewriters for all those years? Somebody wrote it before.

Virtually all writing is plagiarism anyway, whether the writer knows it or not. Very few ideas, except out at the cutting edge of science, have not occurred to somebody before and been written down in one form or other. The only function remaining for the writer is to repeat in today's idiom what has already been written, somewhat differently, for readers in the past. This is particularly true in political prose, which tends to be light on facts and innocent of all but a few childish ideas.

To criticize a politician for plagiarizing, then, is no more sensible than to criticize a fish for swimming. It is what both animals are designed to do. The only sensible criticism would focus on how effectively political speech does the job for which it is intended. How skillfully does the politician mix and administer the small dose of simplistic placebos which the patient is considered able to handle?

For instance, this draft language for a speech was written in 1860 by the incoming secretary of state, William Henry Seward. Note that it is entirely free of meaning:

"The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriotic graves, pass through all the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation."

Seward's boss repurposed this into:

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

This is equally free of meaning, but goes a considerable way toward explaining why Seward was the incoming secretary of state and Lincoln was the incoming president. It ain't what you say but how you say it.

And that is why the Clinton camp has found itself reduced to rolling out the pop gun of plagiarism at this difficult point in the campaign. They have no other artillery. But as somebody or other may have more or less said somewhere else, Obama probably has nothing to fear from smear itself.

In November I hope to vote for a candidate promoting the following policies.

• Adopt a single payer, Canadian-style, health care system
• Cut the bloated, wasteful military budget
• Adopt a Wall Street securities speculation tax
• Support solar energy not nuclear power
• Reverse U.S. policy in the Middle East
• Impeach Bush/Cheney
• Adopt a polluter carbon tax
• Crack down on corporate crime and corporate welfare
• Open up the Presidential debates
• Repeal the anti-union Taft-Hartley law

Also sprach Vicente Navarro:

The class divide is larger than ever. Obama and (later) Clinton have called for ending this divide and healing this schism. One can understand the calls to end the race and gender divide. But, what is meant by ending class division? The call by Obama to “unite the rich and the poor” is intriguing to say the least. It seems to assume that rich and poor have a commonality of interests that simply needs to be mobilized for a better America. This certainly makes Obama nonthreatening to the media and to the political establishments (the rich), which may explain the very favorable coverage he is receiving from the establishments’ media.

Ted Rall is at it again.

“I want the Republicans to feel the way I did in 2004,” an Iowa Democrat told The New York Times. So do I. I want them to watch everything they care about disassembled. Take Reagan and Bush’s names off the airports, nationalize major corporations, demolish Gitmo, gay marriage — anything that pisses them off.

I want revenge. Obama preaches reconciliation. “I will create a working majority because I won’t demonize my opponents,” says Obama. The Illinois senator is an interesting politician and might make a good leader. But not yet. Give me eight years of Democratic rule as ruthless and extreme and uncompromising as the last eight years of Bush. Then we can have some bipartisanship.

Obama’s let’s-tiptoe-through-the-tulips-with-the-GOP shtick amounts to bargaining with yourself. If a vendor at a flea market offers to sell you a lamp for $10 and you’re willing to pay $8, you don’t offer $8. Demonize, Barack, demonize!

Oh, and Obama says he wouldn’t have voted for the Iraq War. I say he’ s lying. So do his votes for funding the war since he joined the Senate. His voting record on Iraq is the same as Hillary’s.

Hillary, no. Obama? Nobama. What to do?

I subscribe to the Evans-Novak Political Report and you don’t so here’s what the Prince of Darkness has to say this week:

Amid the exciting windup of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and the mop-up of the Republican contest, the reality is that 2008 shapes up as a very bad year for the GOP. The fact that the Democratic turnout in yesterday’s Virginia primary was double the Republican reflects the larger, more boisterous Democratic rallies from Iowa to the Potomac primaries. The pessimism and gloom in the business community is particularly pronounced.

Adding to the dark mood among Republicans is the increasing prospect that they will not be able to bolster their morale by running against the detested Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.). Her unification of Republicans has been one of the few GOP assets going into the campaign. It will take time and effort to work up a passion against the likable Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) no matter how leftist he really is.

While the Democratic delegate race looks like a dead heat, all the momentum is with Obama. He showed increasing ability to win white votes yesterday. The Clinton campaign is in disarray with the sacking of the campaign manager and the resignation of the deputy campaign manager, plus the migration of campaign contributors to Obama. Clinton’s reliance on the March 4 Ohio and Texas primaries, where her nominal lead is based on out-of-date polls, is risky in the extreme.

James Fallows passes along a participant’s perspective on the so-called crucial role of so-called organization in Obama’s recent string of stunning victories. Read the whole thing here.

My note re organization: At 11 AM I got a call asking if I could be the Obama “lead” at our [Washington state] caucus location, which had 12 precincts caucusing. Someone delivered to me a few hundred campaign pins, a few posters, and lots of stickers. When I showed up, a few minutes after noon, the place was plastered with Hillary posters. Obama early-arrivers volunteered to take all the materials off my hands. The materials were all snapped up before 20% of the ultimate attendees arrived. There were 2,000 people there. They voted at least 5 or 6 to 1 for Obama over Clinton overall, if not higher. I was the only “organizer” for Obama, and I did almost nothing nor could I. We were simply swamped with people.

Today, when I didn’t have any info on the Maine caucuses, except that she was expected to win, I read that Obama had addressed an overflow crowd yesterday, with 3,000 people not being able to get in and being forced to stand out in the snow. Note that this is just what happened in Seattle at Key Arena on Friday. The giant overflow crowd left outside in foul weather is a sign of an organization that has been overwhelmed, not an organization that has been successful. As soon as I read that, knowing what had just happened in WA, and having seen the amazing demographic diversity of the Obama supporters in our caucuses (which made me think, “This is not a regional phenomenon”), I told [xx], “He’s going to carry Maine.” It didn’t take a genius!

This piece by Spencer Ackerman in The Washington Independent is the best analysis I’ve seen anywhere of the tangled web Hillary wove for herself by supporting Bush’s war. Its conclusion:

And there’s a final significance to Clinton’s turn against the war. In November, the Democratic nominee will probably face a Republican who believed deeply in the war, but who also repeatedly criticized the war’s execution—Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz). McCain, a war hero, has national-security bona fides that few candidates possess. He will be able to inhabit the space Clinton has carved out for herself over the past two years: sober critic and skeptic of Bush. However, he’ll also be able to pounce on her inconsistency and vacillation, if Thursday’s debate is any indication, in a replay of the “flip-flopper” charge that doomed Kerry four years ago. Unlike Obama, Clinton will have no way of pivoting to a broader indictment of the militarism that McCain cheerfully espouses. It may be that, nearly six years after Clinton thought she had positioned herself to avoid all the pitfalls of the war, her calculation itself was what ultimately sealed the fate of her candidacy.

Just in from Reuters:

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama surged to a big lead over Hillary Clinton in California hours before “Super Tuesday” voting began in 24 states, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Tuesday.

In the Republican race, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney held a 7-point advantage on Arizona Sen. John McCain in California, while McCain added to commanding double-digit leads in New York and New Jersey.

On a sprawling day of coast-to-coast voting, the biggest ever in a U.S. primary race, the U.S. presidential contenders in both parties were fighting to win a huge cache of delegates to this summer’s nominating conventions.

In California, which alone provides more than one-fifth of the Democratic delegates needed for the nomination, Obama led Clinton by 49 percent to 36 percent, the poll found. The margin of error was 3.3 percentage points.

Gary Hart is one of the many first-rate public men who have been denied a fair shot at the presidency by our trivial, ignorant and astonishingly gullible press.

Thanks to Don Heiny for calling my attention to the unanswerable arguments that Hart lays out in the essay from which this is taken:

Sorting through a great deal of obfuscation, Senator Clinton still seems to cling to the argument that Bush mismanaged the whole project, that it was worth doing but it was done badly. Thus, she seems to accept unilateral invasion as a first resort, even when intelligence, as it was in this case, is less than clear. She seems to be willing to follow policy makers, in this case neocons, who had a publicly announced imperial agenda in the Middle East. And she permits the impression to grow that "triangulation," in matters of war, requires placing protection of political career over protection of the national interest.

…at 8:32 a.m., EST, from CNN:

WASHINGTON — Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton is losing ground to Sen. Barack Obama in a national CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released on the eve of critical Super Tuesday presidential primaries and caucuses.

The two are virtually tied in Monday’s survey, which shows the New York senator has lost a comfortable national lead she’s held for months over Obama and other rivals.

The survey also shows Arizona Sen. John McCain as the clear Republican front-runner.

Obama, who trounced Clinton in January’s South Carolina primary, garnered 49 percent of registered Democrats in Monday’s poll, while Clinton trailed by just three points, a gap well within the survey’s 4.5 percentage point margin of error.

If I weren’t already committed to voting for Edwards, I’d seriously consider writing in Mr. Twain.

The rumor that I buried a dead aunt under my grapevine was correct. The vine needed fertilizing, my aunt had to be buried, and I dedicated her to this high purpose. Does that unfit me for the Presidency?

The Constitution of our country does not say so. No other citizen was ever considered unworthy of this office because he enriched his grapevines with his dead relatives. Why should I be selected as the first victim of an absurd prejudice?

Why indeed?

And for those of us still harboring pretensions to writing, his advice remains as valuable as Strunk’s.

Substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

What the hell is Obama doing imitating the widely and appropriately despised Harry and Louise ads, originally run by the insurance industry back in the days of the Clinton health-care fiasco in an attempt to head off any rational solution? Which, by definition, would omit them.

Dude, when you’re running to the right of Billary, are you expecting Democrats to fall for it? ’Course, they probably will…

One of the enjoyable aspects of the current election campaign is watching the antics of the wingnuts as they’re forced to choose between John McCain and a firing squad.

Over the past month a new Axis of Evil has emerged — not one based in Damascus, Tehran or Pyongyang — but instead in Cedar Rapids, Charleston, South Carolina, Derry, New Hampshire and Boca Raton, Florida. It is the liberal and “independent” voters in these 4 states that have nearly completed a deed that makes Kim Jong Il envious — the near crippling of the American Electoral System.

These four states have combined their native liberal populism with an imported liberal electorate and have forced the GOP to accept a nominee so distasteful that in more than one poll — the numbers of voters choosing not to vote and those choosing to vote third party actually exceed those who will hold their nose and vote for Maverick, War Hero, Amnesty Supporter, John McCain.

I admit, I’ve always known that South Carolina and Florida were secret hotbeds of liberalism. But I was hoping no one would notice.

I’m not interested in sending any more traffic to the wackos at Human Events Online, but if you really must read the article Steve Thomma, who’s been filing some excellent stuff for McClatchy, links to it.

Late to the party, as usual, I’ve become a major Sam Smith fan in a single visit.

If you’re one of those folks who think Edwards’s $400 haircut matters, but Clinton’s $1200 makeover doesn’t, you shouldn’t read this post.

One of the delusions of elite liberals is that that they lack prejudice. To be sure, they treat black[s], women and gays far better than once was the case. But if you are poor, uneducated, own a gun, weigh a lot, come from the South or mainly read the Bible it is another matter. Class and culture have replaced the genetic as acceptable targets.

[…]

For many years, as the Democratic establishment has become wealthier, the traditional Democratic base has been steadily pushed away as too dumb, too prejudiced, or otherwise too unworthy of the party. It wasn’t that abortion, gays and family values were intrinsically so important. But if your campaign contributors won’t let you talk or do anything about pensions,