Thursday, January 31, 2008

Hillary is a Malevalent Smear Artist Specializing in the Politics of Personal Destruction

Michael Zeldin preceded Ken Starr as Whitewater Special Prosecutor. Today he has an interesting WSJ apercu into Hillary Rodham Clinton's character, or lack of same.
...when an opportunity presented itself in the debate, Mrs. Clinton, without so much as a blink of an eye or the slightest blush, denounced Sen. Obama for representing "Tony Rezko in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago." Her accusation invites scrutiny. Not so much for the truth of the accusation (the facts are quite straightforward and completely benign) but as a window into Mrs. Clinton's character and as a lens with which to see whether a Clinton presidency will be a vehicle for change.

Zeldin goes on to demonstrate that HRC was far more implicated in the Whitewater scandal than Barack was ever involved with Rezko. And then Zeldin exposes Hillary's chief character defect, that one can infer readily that she is a vicious hateful malignant hag:
I suggest that this provides a window into Mrs. Clinton's character because notwithstanding the enormous suffering she had to endure when accused of wrongful conduct in her representation of Madison Guaranty -- a representation that appears to have been no more than a routine business transaction -- she is willing to behave no differently than did her Whitewater accusers if she can gain politically. She appears to have learned no lessons from the Starr investigation.

And a complete opportunist to boot:
Mrs. Clinton's willingness to ignore the truth for short-term political advantage is exactly what breeds the partisanship that's paralyzed Washington for too many years, and the cynicism felt by so many Americans, especially the young. Getting ahead by any means possible is the strategy. Once elected, the candidate falsely believes that he or she will be able to set things right and govern differently. All that was said in the campaign is rationalized -- it will be forgiven and forgotten as part of the hyperbole of the election process.

I am not a supporter of Barack Obama and I am told that he has numerous skeletons in his closet that will eventually be outed. However, until these come to light, the dozens of scandals in Hillary's past are simply not going to go away because the serial chronic liar who is her spouse says she has been "exonerated." Here's Zeldin:
No one forgets and no one forgives in Washington. (Ask John Kerry if he has gotten over the Swift boat smear campaign.) How you get elected defines who you will be once in power. Mrs. Clinton has shown us with this one simple, baseless accusation why it will be hard for her candidacy to represent a change. She appears too comfortable with the politics of personal destruction if she can gain a political advantage.

Ms. Clinton may feel that she is "entitled" to the Dem nomination, but her moral autism will almost certainly lead to defeat in November. Hence, I won't be unhappy if she gets the nod at the Denver Convention this summer!

Monday, January 28, 2008

Clinton Still Has Plenty of People to Lie to

Christopher Hitchens' classic polemic "No One Left to Lie To" is the best book on revealing the opportunistic fraud that is Billy Jeff Clinton, who aside from Jimmy Carter, is the worst US president since Nixon. Hitchens notes that after Obama crushed Clinton in South Carolina
the best Clinton can say is that this is no better than Jesse Jackson managed to do. Really? Did Jackson come south having already got himself elected the senator from Illinois? [ed. note: Jesse was born in S.C. as well] And, come to think of it, was Jackson so much to be despised and sneered at when he was needed as Clinton's "confessor," along with Billy Graham, during the squalor of impeachment?

Hitchens knows more about Clinton's back pages, and those of his cohort-in-crime spouse, than just about anyone:
This calculated willingness to shop on both sides of the street of racial politics was actually analyzed quite shrewdly by Dick Morris, the former consigliere of the gruesome twosome, in conversation with Sean Hannity last week. The Clintons, he thought, would be quite happy to lose big to the "black vote" in South Carolina. It would enable them to signal that they were the ones to stem the flow of the color tide. Morris' host protested that this seemed a touch cynical. Morris jovially assured him that he knew the people he was talking about.

Morris accused Hillary & her BJ of racism because he knows them all too well, and Christopher notes just why Dick Morris was rehired by the Clintons:
As indeed he did. It was Hillary Clinton who insisted on recalling Morris to the embattled White House, notwithstanding his various disgraces and notwithstanding the fact that he had been the adviser and strategist for Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Why am I saying "notwithstanding"? It was because he had performed so well for Helms, including helping him with the famous "white hands" ad that showed a white man crumpling up a letter that told him of preference for "minorities" in hiring, that Morris was thought of by the then-first lady as such a guru.

The so-called First "Lady" knew that Morris had a take-no-prisoners style on race issues that suited the Clintons' amoral opportunism and unethical mindset just perfectly. And of course, the Clintons [and Morris] knew the cowardly degenerate leftist MSM would never call them on horrific crimes-against-humanity like the following:
I never quite understand how the Clintons' initial exploitation of racism was overlooked the first time around and has been airbrushed from the record since. After falling behind in the New Hampshire primary in 1992, and after being caught lying about the affair with Gennifer Flowers to which he later confessed under oath, Clinton left the campaign trail and flew home to Arkansas to give the maximum publicity to his decision to sign a death warrant for Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was a black inmate on death row who had shot himself in the head after committing a double murder and, instead of dying as a result, had achieved the same effect as a lobotomy would have done. He never understood the charge against him or the sentence. After being served his last meal, he left the pecan pie on the side of the tray, as he told the guards who came to take him to the execution chamber, "for later." Several police and prison-officer witnesses expressed extreme queasiness at this execution of a gravely impaired man, and the prison chaplain, Dennis Pigman, later resigned from the prison service. The whole dismal and cruel and pathetic story was told by Marshall Frady in a long essay in The New Yorker in 1993 and is also recounted in a chapter titled "Chameleon in Black and White" by your humble servant in his book No One Left To Lie To. For now, I just ask you to imagine what would have been said if a Republican governor, falling in the polls, had gone out of his way to execute a mentally incompetent African-American prisoner.

But the aforesaid cowardly degenerate MSM was being guided by illuminati like [chronic DWI offender] Sidney Blumenthal and Cueball Carville, who kept the willing useful idiots of the NYT & its pilot fish from overturning the applecart by exercising the lost art of journalism.
But the faithful platoon of houseboys around the Clintons rallied when it came to race:
...leaf back, if you will, to the New York Times of March 23, 1992, and the jolly headline, "Club Where Clinton Has Golfed Retains Ways of Old South." Yes indeedy, the Country Club of Little Rock had 500 members, all of them white, and the aspirant candidate had himself photographed there more than once until Jerry Brown made an issue of it. It was then announced by Clinton's people that "the staff and facilities" at the club were "integrated"—a pretty way of stating that the toilets were cleaned by black Arkansans. Yet all this was forgiven by credulous liberals who were sure that they had discovered a New Democrat who was a Southerner to boot.

Many of these same people do not like it now that they see similar two-faced tactics being employed against "one of their own." Well, tough. And many of the most prominent and eloquent black columnists—Bob Herbert, Colbert King, Eugene Robinson—are also acting shocked. It's a bit late. I have to say that Bob Herbert shocked even me by quoting Andrew Young, who said that his pal Clinton was "every bit as black as Barack" because he'd screwed more black chicks.

Hill doesn't mind, being a feminazi with a whole bevy of white chicks in her own boudoir batting order.
How is Hillary Clinton, or Chelsea Clinton, supposed to feel on hearing [Andy Young's] endorsement? One gets the impression, though, at least from the wife, that anything is OK as long as it works, or even has a chance of working. When Toni Morrison described Clinton as "black" on the basis of his promiscuity and dysfunction and uncertainty about his parentage, she did more than cater to the white racist impression of the African-American male. She tapped into the sort of self-hatred that is evidently more common than we might choose to think.

So how does the new Clinton attitude toward racial politics differ from their old shell game with the press---ever easily gulled when it comes to racial politics among Dems? Christopher sums up:
Say what you will about Sen. Obama (and I say that he's got much more charisma than guts), he is miles above this sort of squalor and has decent manners. Say what you will about the Clintons, you cannot acquit them of having played the race card several times in both directions and of having done so in the most vulgar and unscrupulous fashion. Anyone who thinks that this equals "change" is a fool, and an easily fooled fool at that.

The NOW feminazis and low-life Latinos still hang on to Hillary's apron strings, but the African-American segment of the Democratic Party have lifted themselves out of the ooze and begun to move forward on their own.

Leaving the ragged remnants of the Clinton Inc investors to wallow in the mire.

Bubba Again Injects Race into Obama's Campaign

Bill Clinton is experiencing a well-deserved muzzling by the Clinton Inc crowd, so they say. The WSJ has his latest outrage:
Asked by a reporter why it took "two" Clintons to beat Mr. Obama, Mr. Clinton replied that "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina" in 1984 and 1988. And he added that both Rev. Jackson and Mr. Obama had run "a good campaign here." Hmmm. The reporter hadn't mentioned Jesse Jackson, but Mr. Clinton somehow felt it apposite to refer to him anyway. He thus associated Mr. Obama's landslide victory with that of a black candidate who never did win the Democratic nomination, much less the Presidency, and who had run overtly as an African-American candidate in contrast to Mr. Obama's explicit campaign theme of transcending race.

It's too much to expect that the subsequent endorsements of Caroline & then Teddy Kennedy will ever humble this out-and-out megalomaniac. Only a crushing defeat brought on by his numerous tragic [and comic] faults would begin to do that. But the WSJ asks another question which stares at one in the face:
Imagine if Mitt Romney had made the Jesse Jackson comparison. Democrats would have immediately denounced the remarks as "racist," or as a part of some Republican "Southern strategy."

The cowardice and bias of the MSM defies description.

Kennedy Endorsement Spurred by Himbo Eruptions?

Teddy's decision to support Barack Obamma in the primaries might have been motivated by Bill Clinton's intemperate behavior & chronic prevarications during the SC campaign:
The endorsement appears to support assertions that Mr. Clinton’s campaigning on behalf of his wife in South Carolina has in some ways hurt her candidacy.

Hopefully, some leaks of the Clinton spousal SC post-mortem consultatons will leak out, with blow-by-blow commentary!

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Samuel Huntington Scores Again, Ditto Bernard Lewis

Fouad Ajami had a good piece in the NYT recently on how Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" ran completely counter to:
the zeitgeist of the era and its euphoria about globalization and a “borderless” world. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a “clash of civilizations.” Soil and blood and cultural loyalties would claim, and define, the world of states.

This of course was anathema to the Clintons' champagne socialism of kumbayeh globalization which would remove all those pesky hostilities through applications of materialism and Bubba-love.
Huntington’s cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was “The West and the Rest”: the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest — Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. And in this post-cold-war world, Islamic civilization would re-emerge as a nemesis to the West. Huntington put the matter in stark terms: “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”

While the over-lawyered Clinton foreign policy was allowing the DoJ to run national security [or rather, let Al Qaeda through the cracks], the blissful Dot-com bubble proceeded to burst and the World Wide Web got taken down to earth during a summer squall. Then came 9/11:
Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history’s compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a “youth bulge” unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated the histories of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, as well as South Asia, had faded; “indigenization” had become the order of the day in societies whose nationalisms once sought to emulate the ways of the West.

Meanwhile the bonfire of the vanities continued to blaze and the Masters of the Universe continuted to convene to confer and dispense wisdom to their underlings:
Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no “universal civilization,” Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called “Davos culture,” consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland
.
So now that the dreams of the nineties are tatters, what is to be done?
More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.

Don't look to the EU for strength, though Sarkozy might prop up their sagging backbones. The US has to elect a president who will "monitor and defend the ramparts" of America and the West. And unless Obama would provide a miraculous transformation, a Democrat wouldn't do that.

Bubba Continues Himbo Eruptions

The NYT is concerned.

BJ continues with the Himbo Eruptions, as this prevaricating megalomaniac digs his own political grave [and sabotages his wife's candidacy] with his out-of-control mouth.

Bill Clinton's champagne socialism [or is it near-beer?] has gone stale, and with Caroline and soon Teddy coming on board, the next few months will be exciting.

Ditto for the Republicans, if Romney squeaks by McCain in Florida.

GOP will beat HRC; but Obama Would Get the Independents

Rich Lowry is impressed with Barack-O and thinks the crime spree of the Clinton Inc crowd might be headed off.

I'm a conservative and Obama moves me back to the day when I was a young idealistic Dem worker for Gene McCarthy in '68 [just found my GM national staff badge coincidentally this evening] .

I was lucky enough to hear Dr. MLK live at SLU & also hear RFK give a speech live. The vibes are a bit the same. The cynicism evaporates. I think Obama somehow encapsulates MLK's cadences & JFK's appeal to the intellect while giving a speech. Haven't seen anyone as good in forty years....honest!! I listened to it twice---and haven't done that since forever!

Today someone did a projection and McCain beats HRC 46-44 right now, but only ties Obama----so Obama is the greater threat. No Romney numbers out?

Strategically & in my mind, I hope HRC gets the nomination, which will give the GOP the presidency. But my heart kinda wants Obama to win and get a shot. He might win, but the GOP could win in 2012, if he's as bad as the Clintons say he is!!!

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Another Obama Endorsement & Crist Goes for McCain

Caroline Kennedy has endorsed Barack Obama as the first presidential candidate who reminded her of her father. [Leaving out RFK, I suppose.] Interesting.

Popular Republican Governor Charlie Crist has just endorsed John McCain, following Sen. Martinez by one day. Wonder if Jeb-boy is in the wings? [The Jeb team liked Fred T]

Sadly, McCain has blotted his "straight-talk" brand with a complete slander of Mitt Romney's position on Iraq. If he thinks that's what it takes to change the debate away from economic issues which are now front-and-center to Floridians, he may have done so, but he blotted his copybook big-time.

Finally, one of Tubby Tim Russert's round-table of reporters made an interesting observation on why Giuliani left N.H., where his poll numbers sat still despite the big bucks he was throwing into the NH primary for TV ads. This reporter Todd said that Rudy no longer seemed eager to press the flesh or face endless questions from NH residents---a process which he was masterful at when Mayor of NYC. For some reason, he never mastered the town-meeting format. So he flew off to Florida and doubled down here.

Looks like he's going to be subject to a bad beat.

Dick Morris on Bill Clinton's Next Moves

Dick Morris ascribes near-genius political deviousness to Bill Clinton and as his [and Hillary's] former adviser, he knows them better than most.
Why is Bill Clinton courting such intense publicity, in evitably much of it negative?

Is he crazy? Crazy like a fox.

He has two goals and is achieving them both spectacularly.

First, he wants to be the same kind of lightning rod for Hillary that she was for him during his run for the presidency.

As the 1992 Republican convention approached, Hillary ratcheted up her comments and profile precisely to attract GOP fire so that they would leave Bill alone. He and I discussed the plan.

Hillary's comment, for example, about "baking cookies and serving tea" put her squarely in the Republican Party's sights as the convention approached. The Republicans fell for the lure big time and spent their entire convention going after Hillary. Bill was scarcely hit.

And the 1992 GOP convention is one of the few that afforded its party no bounce at all. Now Bill is returning the favor. In the days before Iowa and leading up to New Hampshire, Hillary was the prime topic of political discussion.

She took shots for misusing Bill's record and trying to adopt it as her own, for minimizing King's contribution to civil rights, for crying, for attacking her opponents, and for changing her campaign style to become more likeable.

Now, she rarely gets hit anymore. They're hitting Bill instead.

Like a red cape, he is attracting the attention of the bull so his wife the matador escapes unharmed. The other method behind his madness is that Bill wants to suck up all the oxygen in the room and dominate the coverage of the Democratic contest. By doing so, he cuts Obama out of the news, pushes him off the front page, and usurps the headlines.

Of course, he also crowds out Hillary, but that's OK, given her large leads in the national polls and in all the big states whose primaries are coming up. If there were a newspaper and television blackout, Hillary would cruise to an easy win, so Bill, by injecting himself into the coverage and hogging it, is accomplishing the same goal.

His tactics now are reminiscent of those he used to black out John Kerry during the lead-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. By scheduling book signings and speeches in Boston, he effectively took the coverage away from the prospective Democratic nominee, a man who would have eclipsed Hillary's presidential ambitions had he won the election.

Ultimately, the Clintons are playing a game of jujitsu with Obama, using his own strength against him.

By challenging Obama for the black vote — via going door to door in South Carolina in minority neighborhoods, for example — Bill is highlighting the question Will Obama carry the black vote? Of course, he will. He leads, 4-1, among African-Americans now. But by making that the central question, Obama's South Carolina victory will be hailed as proof that he won the African-American vote. Such block voting will trigger the white backlash Sen. Clinton needs to win.

Once whites see blacks voting en masse for a black man, they will figure that it is a racial game and line up for Hillary. Already, she carries white voters by 2-1.

The Clintons can well afford to lose South Carolina as long as the election is not seen as a bellwether of how the South will vote but as an indication of how African-Americans will go. It's a small price to pay for the racial polarization they need to win.

So to seize the limelight, take Hillary out of the line of fire, and to call attention to his head-to-head battle with Obama for the loyalty of America's blacks, Bill Clinton is seeking all the coverage he can get, positive, negative, or neutral.

It looks like Bill might have overdone it and riled up even the white voters in S.C. to abandon Hillary to vote for Edwards. In any rate, the negative flak he is getting may eventually not be worth the Machiavellian moves he's putting on Obama.

Bill Clinton's Biggest Lies Accepted by NYT

The NYT Caucus purports to be a "political blog." It's wide-eyed ingenuous stance toward the campaign basically demonstrates a total bias toward the Democrats and the Clintons in particular. The gist of the link above simply accepts BJ Clinton's answer on why Hillary is not a polarizing figure. The blog ends with this disingenuous attempt at covering over the travesty of the two Clinton's infestation of the White House for eight years:
He concluded, oddly, with an unfortunate reminder of some of the grimmer aspects of his tenure in the White House: “And she was exonerated of every single charge leveled against her in the eight years I was president,” he said.


Hillary EXONERATED? This guy’s used to lying his way through every single CRISIS that Clinton Inc runs into. And the NYT, so fast to editorialize on any Republican misstatement, lets this gigantic enormous lie simply end its story!

She’s never been exonerated about the cattle futures windfalls, since there was never full disclosure.

She’s never been exonerated about having her so-called health care task force operate in secret in direct violation of the laws. In fact, that was confirmed.

She’s never been exonerated about any of the Castle Grande lies and overbillings - or how the missing Rose Law billing records just happened to show up near her office, conveniently, right after the statute of limitations expired.

She’s never been exonerated for her role in the Whitewater development…but hey, that was only a simple resort scam designed to fleece seniors.

She’s never been exonerated about her role in the disgraceful Travel Office scandal, where nonpartisan career government employees all lost their jobs to make room for her friends, nor for trying to cover it up with a fraudulent IRS audit and criminal charges against Billy Dale - charges which took a jury only minutes to laugh out of court.

How about the FBI files on her political opponents, which were illegally obtained by her chosen aide, Craig Livingstone? How much of that information did she copy? How much does she still have and plan to use? Exonerated? I don’t think so.

As I recall, one of the deputy independent counsels during Whitewater even prepared a draft indictment of her for perjury, which Janet Reno quashed. That’s not exoneration either. Not in this universe.

And of course this morning's Today Show lets the lying shrew-bitch simply explain the Rezko picture as "one of thousands" that she doesn't remember.

Let's hope the MSM begins to attempt some objectivity down the road as the lying 42nd POTUS disgraces himself in S.C., tying down Barack while his odious spouse campaigns in other Super Tuesday states. This is the dirtiest campaign the Clintons have waged yet, in their progress toward the biggest disgrace in the Dem rogue gallery since the ineffectual and still bleating Jimmy Carter.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Ron Rosenbaum

The Wall Street Journal agrees with me that Ron Rosenbaum is the classiest writer on the entire internet. And with the possible exception of Edward Jay Epstein, the most knowledgeable sleuth on the information superhighway. And now that EJE is in semi-retirement in Hollyweird and Environs, Rosenbaum reigns supreme in literary and spy cat-herding.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Al Franken is a Vicious A**hole, in Case You Didn't Know

The Red Star Tribune
has an interesting vignette about what a piece of work Weird Al Franken really is:
...Franken's curiosity was raised about why Fritz didn't want to be in a pic.

He's a conservative, another Carl yelled out by way of explanation.

At that point, Franken reportedly began peppering Fritz with questions about supporting President George W. Bush and former President Ronald Reagan's tax hikes. Fritz told me he got tense and, as he does in those situations, started chewing the inside of his mouth, a gesture he said was mimicked by Franken; Fritz also thought his style of speech was mocked by Franken.

An aide eventually interrupted Franken's act, Fritz said, by announcing to the candidate that it was time to go.

Fritz told me Monday that he then stuck out his hand to shake Franken's. "Well, at least it's nice to meet you," the GOPer said he told Franken, who reportedly replied, I can't say the same.

There was no handshake, said Fritz.

That Franken is a Lying Liar is evident to anyone familiar with his book. He used Harvard students to write some of his material and is dishonest, insincere, and above all, a prime specimen of human garbage.

Sounds about right for the good folk of Minnesota, where I personallly spent the worst four years of my life.

BJ Clinton Brings Up Race, then Scolds Barack for Bringing Up Race!!

Living-fossil BJ Clinton simply has no shame. And his wife is a kept woman as he disgraces himself again and again. BJ will lie, cheat and steal to get what he wants in an election, and the New York Times will at most tut-tut a bit and then after the scorched-earth d damage is done, say that the Dems will have to "move on."

Bill Clinton and his wife are beginning to demonstrate what a vicious pair of venomous opportunists they always have been on a new and broader stage. Hopefully, Barack will be able to surmount the traps and race-baiting that pious hypocrite Hillary and nasty degenerate BJ throw in his direction.

If Barack, a new and inspirational candidate even given his somewhat soft credentials, can survive the blast of hate-spew that BJ is emitting on a daily basis, it looks like we may be able to disinfect the Democrat Party of its two malignant tumors-in-chief.
UPDATE Victor Davis Hanson says it all better than myself or anyone else.
Our first female President is here only because of her husband, and he here only because his long-suffering wife is the only ticket left back to the White House, which is an apparent addiction that he can't kick. Even if Hillary wins there will be an asterisk, since the campaign has taught us that we have no idea of whether we are voting for Hillary, Bill, or both. This second Clintonian tutorial about feminism overshadows even his earlier exploitative sexual conquests, and suggests he (and she) view gender relations as mercenary and contractual, where each plays on stereotypes, and uses the other's gender advantages for personal aggrandizement (tough guy Bill rides to the rescue to smear meanie male rivals, loving wife loyally forgives sins and stands by her man as a paragon of marriage partnership and loyalty, albeit shedding a tear now and then for her suffering).

Read the whole article by Hanson to see how the Greek gods reward limitless hubris on the level of BJ.
UPDATE #2 Robo-Moron Gail Collins actually stumbles onto the truth [while dispensing stupidity in her other paras]:
The implicit promise of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy was that she had learned from Clinton I. In her, Americans would have a candidate who had been in the very center of White House decision-making. And the very fact that so much had gone wrong was added value. She is nothing if not a good learner, and — the story went — she had discovered at great price where all the landmines lay, both in the presidency and her own character. And she had forged a separate political identity in seven years in the Senate. During an era when the challenges to a new president could be sudden and overwhelming — and here Hillary isn’t ashamed to play the terror card — she was uniquely prepared to hit the ground running and achieve the greatest do-over in American history.

Now, Bill’s role as Chief Attack Dog undermines all that. If he’s all over her campaign, he’s going to be all over her administration. Instead of the original promise of the thoroughly educated Hillary, we’re being offered the worst-case scenario — that the pair of them are going to return to Pennsylvania Avenue and recreate the old Clinton chaos.

Can someone do an intervention on BJ? I doubt it. That dog is too old.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

I Escaped from Gaza and Hamas "Escapes" to Egypt!

The Breakout of the Gaza Strip reminds me that it was almost 10 years ago that I was short-listed to run UNRWWA in the Gaza Strip---a thankless task my health couldn't put up with.

At that time, there was a glimmer of hope, though the Oslo Accords had not panned out, the Barak government in Israel and the Clinton Administration appeared serious about some sort of long-term reconciliation, if Arafat could be brought on board. Of course, that little terrorist lost any chance of some sort of compromise by walking away from Camp David and starting the Second Intifada, so I was finally happy that I'd never received the appointment.

Condi Rice made the cardinal mistake of including parties in an election who were not willing to look for peace with Israel. She naively believed that Hamas had no chance of electoral success, not realizing just how balkanized the Palestinian political system had become.

Now a full-fledged terrorist movement controls the Gaza Strip and there is no short-term solution. The EU and UN bleed openly for the terrorists, but no one gives them much clout in the Road Map.

So as long as the rockets fly out of Gaza and the Egyptians keep the roaches in their motel [the Hamas leadership, not the sad victims of their leadership, who nevertheless voted for a terrorist government] until some new step is devised to get everyone off the dime.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

David Brooks voiced some of my own thoughts. I am still a Fred-head, but am now thinking of voting for McCain or Romney in the FL primary, simply because McCain could WIN against Hillary/Obama. As Brooks notes, he's everybody's second choice[except the die-hard dead-enders like Rush & the NRO Corner crowd]. I usually ride with their posse, but nowadays, I'm thinking of what monstrosity Hillary would appoint to the SCOTUS. Perhaps another ACLU leftist like Ginsberg? Or her girl friend Jamie Gorelick, who single-handedly gave Al Qaeda a free pass to destroy the WTC?
...a funny thing has happened this primary season. Conservative voters have not followed their conservative leaders. Conservative voters are much more diverse than the image you’d get from conservative officialdom.....The lesson is not that the conservative establishment is headed for the ash heap. The lesson is that the Republican Party, even in its shrunken state, is diverse. Regular Republican voters don’t seem to mind independent thinking. There’s room for moderates as well as orthodox conservatives. Limbaugh, Grover Norquist and James Dobson have influence, but they are not arbiters of conservative doctrine.

Brooks then quotes McCain's impressive victory speech in S.C.:
McCain defined a more inclusive conservatism: “We want government to do its job, not your job; to do it better and to do it with less of your money; to defend our nation’s security wisely and effectively, because the cost of our defense is so dear to us; to respect our values because they are the true source of our strength; to enforce the rule of law that is the first defense of freedom; to keep the promises it makes to us and not make promises it will not keep.”

Purists will cavil that McCain's record on Amnesty and campaign contributions sully his record as even a Republican, let alone a conservative.

But I keep thinking about Hillary's SCOTUS appointments and remember the French maxim "le meilleur est l'ennemi du bien."

The Permanent Fifth Column

John McCain is ascending again in the national presidential polls around 40 years after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.
There are two narratives about Tet, which began on the night of Jan. 30, 1968. In the liberal version, the sheer scale of the North's offensive exposed America's politicians and generals as dupes or liars when they claimed that progress in the war was being made and that victory was within reach. "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," said CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite in his broadcast of Feb. 27, 1968, adding that "we are mired in a stalemate" that could only be ended by negotiation, not victory. The comments reportedly prompted Lyndon Johnson to remark that "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

But that was the psychological war.
Conservatives tell a different story. While the U.S. might have been caught off guard by the offensive, the result was nonetheless a rout for the North, which lost every significant tactical engagement and suffered tens of thousands of casualties. Contrary to Johnson's grim political assessment, public support for the war effort actually rose in the wake of Tet: A Gallup poll showed that the percentage of Americans who considered themselves "hawks" on the war went to 61% from 56% following the offensive, while the number of self-declared "doves" dropped to 23% from 27%.

The Tet Offensive in reality gave the illuminati who man the elite forecastle of the ship of state their opportunity to seize the wheel and steer the country in the direction of defeat and subsequent revolution that many of them advocated in their heart of hearts.
In fact, what Johnson had lost was the support of the media elite, who (conservatives say) used their privileged positions to skew perceptions of what was actually happening in the war. "In all honesty, we didn't achieve our main objective [in the offensive]," admitted North Vietnamese general Tran Do, who in later life became a pro-democracy dissident. "As for making an impact in the United States, it had not been our intention -- but it turned out to be a fortunate result."

It is this second narrative that largely explains why Mr. McCain is succeeding among Republicans in 2008 in a way he did not eight years ago. Last time, he ran and lost as an anti-establishment, "moderate" Republican. This time, although he continues to depend heavily on the votes of independents, his fundamental appeal is to American honor, which is also the trait he uniquely embodies among the GOP contenders. He seeks to turn his personal code of honor -- the "No Surrender" slogan -- into a national code. He rails against a news media that only begrudgingly recognizes American military gains, repeatedly citing as Exhibit A Time magazine's refusal to name Gen. David Petraeus as its Person of the Year for 2007. Above all, he not only warns against the policy consequences of a failure in Iraq, but also stands against a philosophy, or psychology, that seeks to make a virtue of failure.

Indeed, the elites wished to turn the American tradition of victory into defeat, optimism into pessimism, and in the transition seize more control of the country. This was not done consciously or by some sort of plot, but as a reflex following the ascendancy of the mainstream media in the new age of TV.
This is another Vietnam legacy. Beyond the purely pragmatic argument that the war in Southeast Asia was unwinnable, there was also a sense among opponents of the war that defeat would, in some deep way, be balm for America's soul. "For all the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted?" asked antiwar writer James Carroll in 2006, explicitly making the connection between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. On the subject of honor, Mr. Carroll added that "the goal of 'peace with honor' assumes the nation's honor has not already been squandered."

Mr. Carroll penned those lines when American fortunes in Iraq were approaching their nadir. Since then, the military balance has shifted dramatically in America's favor, just as it did following Tet with the appointment of a new commander (Creighton Abrams) and the implementation of a new strategy (focused on providing security at the local level). In Vietnam neither of those changes proved sufficient for victory, partly because the moral and strategic case for involvement had become so muddled, partly because the consequences of withdrawal were dimly perceived, and partly because the constellation of political circumstances -- Watergate above all -- conspired against sustaining the gains that had been achieved.

Carroll is a defrocked priest whose hatred for the Catholic Church is only matched by his hatred for his own colonel father and of course, his surrogate father of the USA. This man is a traitor, pure and simple, and his preposterous gibberish about "moral redemption typifies the mush-minded twaddle emitted from the left.
Yet there is no cosmic rule that says that all that will again come to pass with Iraq, and the essence of Mr. McCain's message is that it must not. His case is easier to make because this time Americans do have the benefit of hindsight about the consequences of defeat, and they are not the redemptive ones imagined by Mr. Carroll. Among them: the mass murder of the people who stood with us; the enslavement of entire nations by fanatical and confident ideologues; the blow to U.S. interests and the stain on American prestige.

These are some of the practical and ethical arguments for seeing the Iraq war through to a decent conclusion. But honor is a different, deeper matter. For the Democratic candidates in this race, it has only a conditional and tenuous relation to the word "victory" in its usual sense. If it means anything at all to them, it seems to be mainly in the sense of the good opinion of America's traditional friends, many of whom opposed the Iraq venture from the start. This kind of honor, also known as ingratiation, is gained by improving America's poll numbers in global opinion surveys.

Honor is not a word in the vocabulary of the poll-chasers on the left, so eager to be liked and elected rather than to be respected. They are shallow and in the case of the Clintons, actually criminal, in their pursuit of the bitch-goddess: failure.
There is another kind of honor, however, which is uniquely bestowed by one's adversaries and enemies. It is the honor one acquires by defying temptations of popularity, by the acceptance of long odds, by suffering, by what is called the nobility of the last-ditch defense. It is the honor many Americans feel they lost in Vietnam, and which, through Mr. McCain's not-so-improbable resurgence, they now seek to regain and make their own.

McCain understands that kind of honor, a concept utterly beyond Dem candidates jockeying for who gets to sell out the US in the international arena.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Corrupt Cretins Rule US Campuses

Marxist supremacy on East Coast campuses is no surprise. Here's a yawner from the Daily Princetonian:
Princeton employees' overwhelmingly high support for Democratic candidates — 90 percent of donors who listed the University as their employer gave to a Democrat, and no professors donated to the GOP — outpaces its peers. The Harvard Crimson reported that 86 percent of Harvard professors' contributions went to Democrats, while according to Georgetown's student newspaper, The Hoya, 75 percent of the donations made by the school's employees went to Democratic candidates.

The Mainstream Media mirror the stupidity of tenured morons, though the percentage of Dumbo-rats in Hollyweird is probably higher.

Stuck on Stupid, just like Mafia bloodsuckers looking for a handout.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Bhutto Killer Identified

Bhutoo's killer hails from Waziristan, which implicates Al Qaeda & its allies in the murder---though loon sites like Newshoggers get it wrong again.

Lawrence of Arabia spent some time at a Brit airbase in Waziristan as "Airman Shaw," his new moniker after he left the corrupt corridors of power. The only totally stupid statement Obama has made so far [though there have been some near-misses] has been concerning a US invasion of Waziristan, which would make Iraq look like a Sunday School picnic!

I'm under the weather with a monster cold/cough/virus & still mourning Brett Favre's ignominious overtime interception.

Go Pats!

More Evidence Edwards is a Complete Fraud---From Feingold

Russ Feingold has a problem. He sees John Edwards, hedge fund gazillionaire on sub-prime mortgage evictions of Katrina victims & putative daddy of Rielle Hunter's gestating fetal-unit, as campaigning exactly opposite from positions John-boy voted on in the Senate:
The one that is the most problematic is (John) Edwards, who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq war … He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record.

When you had the opportunity to vote a certain way in the Senate and you didn't, and obviously there are times when you make a mistake, the notion that you sort of vote one way when you're playing the game in Washington and another way when you're running for president, there's some of that going on.

Wonder what "that" means...? I'm guessing ugly political corruption based on hypocritical phony BS, but I could be wrong.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Bubba Clinton Bubbles Over More Often

The New York Times has now legitimized one of those dirty little secrets the reporters who are not certified Clinton Inc. satellites have been itching to write about.
After weeks of complaining publicly about Barack Obama’s record, the news media’s coverage of the Democratic presidential race, or both, Mr. Clinton on Wednesday ripped into a television reporter who had asked him about a Nevada lawsuit concerning participation in the state’s caucuses this Saturday. Mr. Clinton believed the question had seemed sympathetic to Mr. Obama’s stakes in the suit, Clinton campaign officials said.

Seen in the light of a Clinton Inc. reporter's public accusation of Mitt Romney in S.C., the tepid and tentative question elicited a volcanic response, allowing a glimpse into the mental instability chronic liar Bubba has faced all his lifetime. As the ACOA and chronic sex addict that he is, despite Clinton Inc. outliers like David Gergen and George Stephanopoulos to the contrary, the press are beginning to look like they'd like to goad him into headline-making fury.
His so-called “purple fits” and “earthquakes” have been a constant to those who have worked with him. Some have dealt with it by avoiding him, others by simply responding with silence. One senior White House aide, George Stephanopoulos, who was often a target of Mr. Clinton’s fury, has written of taking an antidepressant because the vicissitudes of the job were so intense.

Mr. Clinton has reflected on his temper over the years, perhaps most revealingly in his autobiography. At one point in it, he recalls a day in junior high school when he hit a boy who had been taunting him. It was a moment from which he came to draw lessons.

“I was a little disturbed by my anger, the currents of which would prove deeper and stronger in the years ahead,” Mr. Clinton wrote. “Because of the way Daddy behaved when he was angry and drunk, I associated anger with being out of control and I was determined not to lose control. Doing so could unleash the deeper, constant anger I kept locked away because I didn’t know where it came from.”

Despite his brilliance and achievement-filled life, Bubba knows that he doesn't know who his real daddy is---his promiscuous mother played around while her husband was still in Italy during WWII. David Maraniss, the author of First in His Class almost had a career-ending blackball for bringing up the sensitive subject of Bubba's bastardy. And Maraniss's wide-ranging brilliant biographical work earned him a PTS ["potential trouble source" in Scientology jargon] marker that he has spent years in the penalty box writing on sports and other relative trivia.

The Clinton Inc. "Politics of Personal Destruction" extends to journalists. Hence, hacks like the AP Johnson suck-up in South Carolina earn brownie-point gold stars for calling Hillary's reaction to a campaign office HQ in NH "spectacular," while earning additional merit badges for attacking Republican Romney in public for alleged mistruths.

America has been infected with Clinton Inc. machinery that matches Scientology in its take-no-prisoners approach---a vast center-left conspiracy that makes any close examination of the Clintons' past felonies and misdemeanors culpable and subject to early punishment if the dynamic duo returns to the White House.

Ask David Maraniss about his latest book on the Green Bay Packers. He ain't gonna get another big buck-advance for political books this lifetime.

Moral Vanity of Liberals

Arthur C. Brooks has an hilarious anecdote about the unreflective bigotry and even unreasoning hatred one encounters talking to people of the "left:"
A politically progressive friend of mine always seemed to root against baseball teams from the South. The Braves, the Rangers, the Astros -- he hated them all. I asked him why, to which he replied, "Southerners are prejudiced."

Brooks goes on to outline the emblematic irrationality that so-called "liberals" often reflexively demonstrate as they unconsciously display their own uninformed "views:"
The same logic is evident in the complaint the American political left has with conservative voters. According to the political analysis of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose perception of irony apparently does not extend to his own words, "The right wing, that is not where America's at . . . It's just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate . . . They are hate-triots."

Liberals, of course, have a fair different assessment of their own perspectives:
What about liberals? According to University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, "Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others." They also "believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference." Indeed, generations of academic scholars have assumed that the "natural personality" of political conservatives is characterized by hostile intolerance towards those with opposing viewpoints and lifestyles, while political liberals inherently embrace diversity.

It is simply amazing how liberals ape and mirror the unconscious self-righteousness I encountered while living overseas in France during the Gaullist era and in Saudi Arabia while talking to "devout" Muslims----the unreflective chauvinism in France and disdain for real diversity in Saudi were everywhere, and the victims simply projected their own insecurity about their particular fanaticism towards those who didn't believe or belong to the group of patriots/Muslims. Brooks adumbrates a bit about liberals in the USA and their attitude toward the "other" and "difference" as the French philosophers so much in vogue among them would put it:
As we are dragged through another election season, it is worth critically reviewing these stereotypes. Do the data support the claim that conservatives are haters, while liberals are tolerant of others? A handy way to answer this question is with what political analysts call "feeling thermometers," in which people are asked on a survey to rate others on a scale of 0-100. A zero is complete hatred, while 100 means adoration. In general, when presented with people or groups about which they have neutral feelings, respondents give temperatures of about 70. Forty is a cold temperature, and 20 is absolutely freezing.

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

My alma mater Michigan's statistical prowess is probably the best in the US. Just what, however, is the reason for the left's apparent intolerance, all while the liberal imagination believes itself to be above petty partisan bickering:
Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.

To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

This doesn't sound very tolerant to me -- nor especially rational, for that matter. To be fair, though, let's roll back to a time when the far right was accused of temporary insanity: the late Clinton years, when right-wing pundits practically proclaimed the end of Western civilization each night on cable television because President Clinton had been exposed as a perjurious adulterer.

I can remember back then that the media were in full hue and cry about how irrational the right was to claim that a felony committed by a sitting president was fit reason for impeachment. Didn't one have the sophistication to realize that sex crimes weren't covered by the U.S. Constitution when Articles of Impeachment were considered? How narrow an interpretation of the law did conservatives have, that exposure to consistent perjury for political benefit could be considered as moral turpitude and unfitness for high office? How pre-modern, or at best, merely modern!
In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.

Which brings us to the conundrum of current American politics, that the most partisan unreflective hatemongers in American politics reside on the left, where bigotry is second-nature:
Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.

The spirit of the Salem Witch Trials and "McCarthyism" and "smear politics" and "the politics of personal destruction" are the serene empty-headed possession of the ultra-left, whose obscenities and screechings are the daily bread of blog sites like Kos & C&L & vapid moronic screeds on foreign policy who shall remain unnamed.
In the end, we have to face the fact that political intolerance in America -- ugly and unfortunate on either side of the political aisle -- is to be found more on the left than it is on the right. This may not square with the moral vanity of progressive political stereotypes, but it's true.

This has been noted so often by so-called "centrist" blogs, Ann Althouse comes to mind, that it is accepted as part of the on-line community---the fact that any thoughtful commentary not containing the latest liberal buzz mantras of the last 24 hours is automatically dismissed with snarky dismissive disdainful put-downs by youngsters with a good education. The hoi-polloi are the riff-raff Kossack crowd are the street mobs of the left.

Their venomous hatred of any but their own kind will eventually poison their hearts and probably ruin their mental health---if it hasn't already.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

A Couple of Observations on Hillary

John Cole and Andrew Sullivan had a few comments on the Nevada debate Tuesday evening that moved me a bit to express my own comments:

I am fascinated by her because she has become the loathesome Doppleganger of her odious spouse. She herself is slowly morphing into a Manichaen daemon of pure evil, a sort of Darth Mutter [or Mudder?] of the dark side of the Force.

Hillary and her husband have turned the bald-faced public spectacular lie into an art form. She hasn’t a scintilla of shame or an ounce of compunction when she concocts or repeats whatever might advance her interests or destroy her opponents, regardless of the truth or accuracy of what she’s saying.

Pandering is where she excels the most in the fine gradations of saying what will get her votes. She probably picked up this particular skill-set on promising to do what she perceives the particular interest group or ethnic/gender/sex-orientation subset she is wooing from her husband/spouse/collaborator-in-chief. He never hesitates to change the record or lie openly about his own record & achievements & felony/misdemeanors. It’s what he does.

And going to the videotape or soundtrack doesn’t make him miss a beat, as he will explain how his mental reservations or jesuitical special exemptions from law & morality [he learned well from the Jesuits at Georgetown during his undergrad years] make him immune from the normal constraints that limit politicians or public figures.

He is the world’s best and biggest liar and she seems an avid student who may well surpass him someday if she is elected POTUS.

Her high negatives among those polled are probably because I may reflect the feelings of a large plurality of American voters. If the Democrats nominate her for the '08 campaign on the top of their ticket, I have a hunch she might drag the ticket into the losing column.

Just a hunch.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Identity Traps Mire HRC & Obama

David Brooks has an unusually perceptive piece in today's NYT Op-Ed demonstrating the uncharted waters both candidates are treading:
The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

In the immortal words of Pogo, we have met the enemy and they are us.
All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Connerly and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Isn't it interesting that the collision between two of the 'Revolution of 1968' mantra movements are now nearing head-on kill-or-be-killed momentum?
Clinton’s fallback position is that neither she nor Obama should be judged as representatives of their out-groups. They should be judged as individuals.

But the entire theory of identity politics was that we are not mere individuals. We carry the perspectives of our group consciousness. Our social roles and loyalties are defined by race and gender. It’s a black or female thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Even in this moment of stress, Clinton wants to have it both ways. She wants to be emblematic of her gender and liberated from race and gender politics. As she told Tim Russert on Sunday: “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us wants to inject race or gender in this campaign. We’re running as individuals.”

Brooks is having none of it. Clinton has turned BS into a high art-form:
What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities. The Clintons are hitting Obama with everything they’ve got. The Obama subordinates are twisting every critique into a racial outrage in an effort to make all criticism morally off-limits. Obama’s campaign drew up a memo delineating all of the Clintons’ supposed racial outrages. Bill Clinton is frantically touring black radio stations to repair any wounds.

Meanwhile, Clinton friend Robert Johnson, a one-man gaffe machine, reminds us of Obama’s drug use and accuses him of being like Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Another Clinton supporter, Gloria Steinem, notes that black men were given the vote a half-century before women.

When living fossils like loathesome childless crone Steinem & the imbecilic Johnson & the robo-Barry White sex-machine Rangel get behind Hillary, you know she is too OLD & her time is TOO FAR BEHIND to really register with the up-and-coming youth who want hope and change rather than policy-wonk partisanship. Brooks has a great finale:
This is the logical extreme of the identity politics that as been floating around this country for decades. Every revolution devours its offspring, and it seems the multicultural one does, too.

The final two points I’d make are: First, this whole show seems stale and deranged to the younger set, as Obama and Clinton seemed to recognize when they damped down the feud yesterday afternoon. The interesting split is not between the feminist and civil rights Old Bulls, it’s between the establishments of both movements, who emphasize top-down change, and the younger dissenters, who don’t. Second, this dispute is going to be settled by the rising, and so far ignored, minority group. For all the current fighting, it’ll be Latinos who end up determining who gets the nomination.

At last, a bridge to the 21st century.

The winner of this civil war might be Bill Richardson for VP?

Clinton's Continued Surrogate Attacks Spur Dormant White Rascism Against Obama?

Eugene Robinson doesn't make a lot of sense most of the time, but I think he nailed it this time:
the strategy could be more subtle. I can't help but recall a certain piece of history.

In 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president, a controversial hip-hop artist named Sister Souljah made an ugly comment about the Los Angeles riots: "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" Candidate Clinton highlighted the remark in a speech to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, comparing Souljah to Ku Klux Klan member David Duke. The episode demonstrated that Clinton was not only tough on lawlessness but also willing to challenge "special interests" -- in this case, black activists.

The Clintons are reading the polls, too; they might well be resigned to the possibility that most black Democrats will vote for Obama. This would mean that South Carolina is probably already lost and that the campaign's focus now has to be on Florida and the many states whose delegates are up for grabs on "Tsunami Tuesday."

Is it possible that accusing Obama and his campaign of playing the race card might create doubt in the minds of the moderate, independent white voters who now seem so enamored of the young, black senator? Might that be the idea?

Yes, that's a cynical view. But history is history.

My bet is that Hillary is going after the cracker redneck yellow dog Democrats in Florida up in the panhandle---she knows S.C. is overcooked and her "Sister Souldjah" moment is at hand.

The Clintons will do ANYTHING to get back to the White House! ANYTHING!

Economic Freedom: US Slips to Fifth

The Heritage Foundation finds that Europe and Asia are making radical progress as they switch to more open economies and adopt straightforward lower taxes.

Looks like "supply side" is working, despite socialist dogma that the state is paramount in directing economic policies. Here's the good news:
Hong Kong and Singapore retained their No. 1 and No. 2 rankings respectively on the annual Index of Economic Freedom for the 14th successive year. Both port cities benefit from low taxes and liberalized trade. Hong Kong, however, saw its score dip slightly due to higher inflation and greater tax revenues.

European countries accounted for half of the top 20 economies considered free or mostly free, with Ireland at No. 3, Switzerland at No. 9 and Britain at No. 10. The U.S. ranked No. 5, and Canada ranked 6th.

Moves by newer members of the European Union to introduce straightforward tax policies to attract more investment were having a radical impact on the region as a whole, the authors said.

"What we are seeing is a very strong commitment to economic freedom in the new EU countries, and this is having a positive impact on policies in the some of the older European countries ... such as France," said Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. "I think we will continue to see this evolve over time and we expect to see gradual improvement in economic freedom throughout Europe as a whole."

And of course, the bad news:
While Europe was moving more greater economic liberalization, the prevailing sentiment in the United States was protectionism, said Mary Kissel, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal's Asian edition.

"We have Democratic candidates coming out against free trade agreement and for higher taxes," she told reporters. "On the Republican side too, there's talk of protecting American jobs. Meanwhile, you have a Congress which is considering a clutch of bills aimed at punishing China for exporting too much to American consumers."

Sadly, the retarded economists in every country have a lot of clout with politicians. Yet the truth appears to be that in the long run, liberalization works:
The index, which grades 157 economies on 10 economic factors, including property rights, regulation of wages and prices and trade barriers, shows "a very high correlation" between a liberalized economy and a country's prosperity, Feulner said.

Unfortunately, in the short run, ignorant or cynical political types can sway votes away from the greatest good for the greatest number.

Saudis Do USA a Back-handed Favor

Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi has pronounced Saudi oil production as keyed to revenue requirements. Although this is somewhat risible, he is actually doing the US a favor.

When GWB was elected in 2000 after famously pronouncing that the price of oil would not go much above $20/bbl. because he could "jawbone" OPEC into keeping up production, he was not yet known as being a completely feckless second-rater. However, the current price of about @100/barrel means that the US:

1] Should develop onshore fields like ANWR whose 15 billion proven recoverable bbls might come in even higher with new production technology.

2] Develop offshore fields whose gigantic reserves under salt domes in the Gulf of Mexico can be exploited with new technologies at a huge profit.

3] Look into new coal technologies such as coalbed methane extraction and clean coal as the USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with more clean coal underground than almost the rest of the world combined.

4] Develop small nuke reactors using Euro-technology and cookie-cutter production techniques to get away from the China Syndrome hysteria of the late '70s.

5] Realize that the huge oil-price spike introduces profitability into long-capped US once over-exploited fields which now through new technology and higher profits can be exploited for large profits.

6] Keep interest in alternative and renewable technologies alive.

Without the anthropogenic global warming calisthenics of hyper-ventilating hysteria, we can still look for hydrogen-based energy sources and explore new methods of energy, without taking politically expedient and bogus side-tracks like ethanol based on corn---a boon for small farms, but a hoax as far as energy production is concerned.

Beirut Blast Targets American Embassy Vehicle

Beirut continues to be a locus for assassinations that are targeting pro-American, pro-Western political notables.
...suspicion would fall on al Qaeda or Hezbollah.

He said the attack would have been well planned, with spotters tipping the killer off when the vehicle left the embassy and when it approached the blast area.In the past three years, there has been a string of explosions in Lebanon targeting mainly anti-Syrian politicians and journalists.

The last car bombing on December 12 in the Baabda suburb killed Lebanese army Major General Francois Hajj and two other people.

This might be timed to coincide with Prsident Bush's visit to the Middle East, as was perhaps the Iranian provocation with the cigarette boats last week. The enemies of a genuine accord between Israelis and Palestinians may visit more violence on western targets in their efforts to destabilize the region.

In that frame of mind, even Hamas would fall into the list of suspects for the latest Beirut blast.

Big Brain Big Bang Eternal Recurrence?

Cosmology is an ancient science and I took a course in the subject from the standpoint of Philosophy at St. Louis University long ago. A very batty Jesuit priest named Fr. Foote taught the course & usually spoke in sentences ten minutes long, with infinite tangents and dangling modifiers turning his lecture into terminal confusion. Twice a week. There was no chance to ask questions because confusion reigned.

I do like the New York Times because of its Science page every Tuesday. The only major daily to have a whole staff of gifted amateurs examining the expanding boundaries of our human knowledge. The Big Brain piece today is a splendid example.

I am a devotee if not a follower of Friedrich Nietzsche, easily the most intriguing philosopher ever to lose his mind over conundrums and paradoxes that normal people shrug their shoulders over, but bat-guano CA-RAYYY-ZEEE philosophers freak out over to the extent that they spend the last decade of their life---from his mid-forties in Nietzsche's case---in an asylum before dying of sheer madness.

As my sainted mother, herself of German extraction, would say: "Ach, du lieber!"

Nietzsche's theory of "eternal recurrence" verges on reincarnation and posits that we are condemned to repeat our lives in exactly the same way again and again and again. A little like the cosmologists of Cal Tech and MIT, Nietzsche was constantly bumping his head against ceilings of improbable thoughts that 19th century contemporaries judged to be the products of the spirochete that was slowly eating out Friedrich's gray matter---probably from a careless dalliance in his university days when instead of collecting dueling scars, he acquired an incurable social disease.

Und so weiter und so fort.

Nowadays physicists are actively studying the physical basis of Nietzsche's thought experiments. Boltzmann's Brains floating in free space unattached to owners are a simple extrapolation from FN's wildest divagations. Perhaps if I reincarnate, it would be far wiser to be a disembodied brain floating in an etherial vacuum like the Star Child at the end of Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, observing as he prepares to incarnate on this vale of tears as a Nietzshean Superman.

Was man nicht in Kopf hat, muss man in die Beine haben.

Is the Reagan Era Over? Rush Examines Newt's Infatuation with Huckabee

Rush Limbaugh has fine-tuned his Fingerspitzgefuehl to the point that he appears prophetic when his on-air analysis pans out days, weeks, even months later to be true. He discerns the cloud no bigger than a man's hand before anyone else. Here he is on Newt tooting his own flute:
I have suspected -- I've not known, but I have suspected -- that Newt is advising the Huckabee campaign.

I don't know this. It's just a wild guess, but based on this comment, "The Reagan era is over. The George W. Bush era is over. We're at a point in time we're about to start redefining, as a number of people have started talking..." Yes, they are. Every one of these Republicans is starting to talk about redefining the party, and this has been going on since the early days of this, not just now. If you recall, all during last year, I told you this was my big concern: that Reaganism and conservatism were going to be redefined so as to fit the mold of whoever these guys on our primary roster are. One of the things that Newt said is "redefine the nature of the Republican Party in response to what the country needs." Something about that rubs me wrong. Something about that sort of grates on me. The Republican Party is supposed to sit out there and I guess (slurps) moisten its index finger, stick it in the air, find out what people want, and be that? That's not who we are! Now, it may be who populists are. In fact, it is exactly who populists are. Even if you have no intention of following through on what you plan to do as you promise all these wonderful things to your supporters, as a populist. But this is not what the Republican Party has been. It's what the Democrat Party had been.

Cue Fred Thompson, who is coming out in S.C. and hitting his marks suddenly with vim and vigor.

Fred used the very line about Huckabee that Rush is implying about the new populism: that it's the old Democrat Party, the party of failure and corruption that is now seducing Republicans hankering for another bite of the apple like Newt. Huckabee is Democrat social programs with a Republican cultural bias. And Newt seems to like that.

Unless Rush is wrong, and he seldom is. Check the link above for more salutary wisdom from Limbaugh about Mark Steyn's stout defense of capitalism---that much derided economic system that still puts the USA as producing 25+% of the world's goods and services. Why do Americans forget how great and strong we are?

[Newt] said, "The era of Reagan is over. ... It's the end of the Reagan era." It is not. If the Reagan era is over, if the Reagan coalition is dead, what replaced it? Could somebody tell me? Precisely nothing has replaced it, and that's why so many people are scratching their heads, why so many people are a little nervous, because there isn't any real leadership out there that causes people and inspires people to get behind it and go rah-rah and make certain things happen.

I mean, is there a Gingrich coalition that has replaced the Reagan coalition? For that matter, what is the McCain coalition? If we're going to have a new era, what is the McCain era? What is the Huckabee era? What is their winning coalition? They don't have one. You know, all this sounds like Third Way kind of talk, the triangulation of the Clinton years in the nineties. But I don't know what the McCain era would be, and I don't know what the Huckabee coalition is. They don't have a coalition. They're out trying to get votes of independents and Democrats. They're pandering to moderates and independents. Folks, I just want you to think about this: What happens if either of these two guys happen to win, attracting the votes of independents, moderates, the Jell-Os, and Democrats? Does that not equal the demise of the Republican Party? Do you think McCain's out there actually trying to get Republican votes? Is Huckabee trying to get Republican votes? Romney is. Giuliani is. Fred Thompson certainly is. But if we have a nominee that is a nominee on the basis of moderate and independent and Democrat voters, then what happens to the Republican Party?

Do they not know this? If they do know this, is this their aim? Is their objective, for whatever reason -- sour grapes, they don't think they can win as Republicans because they're really not Republicans. Is this the objective here, to redefine (or maybe ruin) the Republican Party? Even so, the coalition of Democrats, independents, moderates, the Jell-Os, that is not a coalition. They don't have a coalition. McCain doesn't have one. Huckabee doesn't have one. They want to transform the party into a center-left party like these so-called conservative parties in Europe, and to do that, they've gotta say, "The Reagan era is over," and they have to embrace expediency, which, in the end, of course, is a losing proposition. Let me hit you right between the eyes here. If you want to find out what would happen to the country with a McCain or Huckabee president, take a look at what's happened to Governor Schwarzenegger in California. Here was a guy who actively ran as a conservative and as a Republican and, as you know, was elected. We all know now what has happened to him.

Schwartzenegger is turning California into a Canadian socialist wannabe province like Michigan, a state which has taxed itself into economic penury. A state where businesses rush to get OUT of its high-tax, high-politically correct environment of Euroweenie mediocrity. Does Rush see any hope on the horizon?
this Republican roster of candidates has always been somewhat disquieting, and we know that it is because if you look at it, it's pretty much evenly spread, the support around all the top-tier people. Look what happens, by the way, when one of them happens to pipe up. Look what happens. I have a headline: "A Combative Thompson Sways Voters -- 'But then last night -- we hadn't even been thinking about him -- all of a sudden it was clear he was the one,' said Mr. Berenberk, a retired teacher. 'The bluntness, the forcefulness. He was really impressive.'" He's talking about Thompson in the last South Carolina debate. So candidate aside -- put Thompson aside for a moment -- when conservative truths are heard, it's an affecting and effective message. People have revelations when they hear it. They just haven't been hearing it from people who want to lead the party and who want to lead the country. So what's lacking here is not ideas and not principles, but the right people to speak them and the right people to develop strategies to win elections based on those ideas and principles. What's lacking, if you will, is intellectual and political leadership.

This jives a bit with the ditzy girl O'Reilly has on to analyze body language and gestures and facial expressions. Last night, she judged Fred Thompson to have "terrible body language..." So Fred has the message, but so far he hasn't revved up enough to deliver the message effectively? Or will he be the last man standing in the OK Corral after the primaries wreak their havoc?
Mark Steyn may have the answer to what we need, and the hope for change might be trumped by the common sense of the American people, many of whom don't know how good they have it.

Rush's lament might presage enough cognitive dissonance to get voters to examine what sort of "change" and "hope" the various snake-oil salesmen, of whom Newt appears ready to join along with Ah-Noooold, are really peddling.

Hitchens Eviscerates the Clintons---Again & Again!!

Christopher Hitchens employs his best polemical artillery to lay waste to the grandiose edifice [some would call it a cocoon] the Clintons have erected inside the Democrat Party.
For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her "greatness" (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?

Sure her husband was disbarred for his serial-rapist tendencies and the ensuing perjury in front of a Grand Jury. Billy Jeff's dissembling, dissimulation, manipulations, prevarications, and outright contrary to past fact statements on just about everything are matters of public record. And both Bill & Hill think it's insulting to ever try calling them to account. They are unaccountable, irresponsible, and consider themselves above the laws of the land. Hitchens keeps on applying the metaphorical wood to their figurative backsides:
What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter "Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?" in the paperback version of my book No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton "rapid response" team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women's "issues."

Over-the-hill childless crones like Gloria Steinem continue to support this tag team of intimidation towards any female that resists getting hit upon by the Buffoon-in-Chief. The feminazis, as Camille Paglia so aptly reveals, have discredited themselves by an emotional unconditional surrender to "the rapist in the Oval Office" and his hapless spouse. But the feminazis will stand by their [wo]man even though the moral caverns they traverse to do so are dark and deep. Hitchens' sum-up:
Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.


But the black community, as they are far less malleable and complicit than feminazis in the submission to the various houseboys and man-servants that the Plantation Big House of Clinton Inc., rolls out the "vulgar libels" against Barack Obama. As the Wall Street Journal notes in "The Politics of Pigmentation,"
there's .... a cautionary tale here in how identity politics can come back to bite. The left's color-by-numbers approach to attracting votes has essentially painted the Democrats into a corner, making it very difficult for them to prevail in national elections without winning nearly every black vote. The result is the very antithesis of what King fought for -- an over-reliance on blunt racial appeals instead of issues and ideas.

Throughout the campaign, Mrs. Clinton has led Mr. Obama among black voters, thanks mostly to name ID and her husband's popularity. With his victory in Iowa and close second in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama has started to cut into Mrs. Clinton's black support. With her remarks, she's now given him an opportunity to make further inroads. And as the fallout shows, she'll have to be very careful about pushing back on this front if she wants to keep black supporters from abandoning her en masse, not only now but in November when they could decide to stay home.

Barack has acquitted himself well in standing above the nasty little dust-up caused by clumsy Clinton ham-handedness as Hillary accused Obama of attacking her in a bare-faced lie---it was the neutral Cong. John Clyburn of S.C. who was the one pointing out the possible insensitivity of subordinating MLK to LBJ.

The Clintons thought they could steamroller their way to the Democrat nomination, but Obama now appears to be a formidable obstacle, as his ju-jitsu politics allows Hillary the space to fall on her face---he needn't respond, she does it to herself.

The Military-Hating NYT Spews PTSD Garbage on Front Page

The NYT has always denigrated the US military, usually in subtle indirect fashion, as a homage to the loathesome Upper West Side reptiles who are its prime audience. These Pauline Kael denizens ["I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon"] have either treasonous DNA in their genes, or have acquired it by transference living among the mentally-disturbed and ideologically twisted parasite hives that flourish in the neighborhoods. [I worked for Paul O'Dwyer in '68 in NYC & visited every Democratic "club" in Manhattan, so I denigrate from personal experience.]

James Taranto deconstructs the latest inflections that the NYT propagates concerning the evil ex-military. Interesting that the stats this agitprop drivel comes up with don't vary widely from a control population of young males of the same age. Nor, of course, does the NYT note the ethnic or racial backgrounds of the ex-military murderers, so its PC stance is another hypocrisy inserted into its article. It mentions about a half-dozen cases all implying white male murders, but no info that could implicate the crime-prone black or Hispanic vets who might live in murderous neighborhoods and be susceptible to violence, as the young Vegas vet was living in a gang-ruled turf in a nasty 'hood.

The two pieces of crap that wrote the piece were both female, and presumably anti-Iraq war in their orientation. Powerline puts some perspective on the Upper West Side view of the military & PTSD:
The Times article goes on just about forever--it is nine pages long on the web--but it consists almost entirely of anecdotes about a handful of the 121 alleged crimes. The stories are indeed sad, and some of the soldiers and veterans involved no doubt did suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Still, the Times' approach is astonishingly unsystematic, especially since the paper takes seriously the idea that the U.S. military may be responsible for the supposed crime wave:

At various times, the question of whether the military shares some blame for these killings gets posed.

When it is not recounting stories of crimes committed by servicemen, always from a point of view sympathetic to the idea that service in a theater of war was a contributing factor--"plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, [Mr. Sepi] often needed alcohol to fall asleep"--the paper waxes pretentious:

Decades of studies on the problems of Vietnam veterans have established links between combat trauma and higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, gun ownership, child abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse — and criminality. On a less scientific level, such links have long been known.

“The connection between war and crime is unfortunately very ancient,” said Dr. Shay, the V.A. psychiatrist and author. “The first thing that Odysseus did after he left Troy was to launch a pirate raid on Ismarus. Ending up in trouble with the law has always been a final common pathway for some portion of psychologically injured veterans.”

Now put yourself in the place of a newspaper editor. Suppose you are asked to evaluate whether your paper should run a long article on a nationwide epidemic of murders committed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan--a crime wave that, your reporter suggests, constitutes a "cross-country trail of death and heartbreak." Suppose that the reporter who proposes to write the article says it will be a searing indictment of the U.S. military's inadequate attention to post-traumatic stress disorder. Suppose further that you are not a complete idiot.

Given that last assumption, I'm pretty sure your first question will be: "How does the murder rate among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan compare to the murder rate for young American men generally?" Remarkably, this is a question the New York Times did not think to ask. Or, if the Times asked the question and figured out the answer, the paper preferred not to report it.

As of 2005, the homicide rate for Americans aged 18-24, the cohort into which most soldiers fall, was around 27 per 100,000. (The rate for men in that age range would be much higher, of course, since men commit around 88% of homicides. But since most soldiers are also men, I gave civilians the benefit of the doubt and considered gender a wash.)

Next we need to know how many servicemen have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan. A definitive number is no doubt available, but the only hard figure I've seen is that as of last October, moe than 500,000 U.S. Army personnel had served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Other sources peg the total number of personnel from all branches of the military who have served in the two theaters much higher, e.g. 750,000, 650,000 as of February 2007, or 1,280,000. For the sake of argument, let's say that 700,000 soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors have returned to the U.S. from service in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Do the math: the 121 alleged instances of homicide identified by the Times, out of a population of 700,000, works out to a rate of 17 per 100,000--quite a bit lower than the overall national rate of around 27.

But wait! The national rate of 27 homicides per 100,000 is an annual rate, whereas the Times' 121 alleged crimes were committed over a period of six years. Which means that, as far as the Times' research shows, the rate of homicides committed by military personnel who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan is only a fraction of the homicide rate for other Americans aged 18 to 24. Somehow, the Times managed to publish nine pages of anecdotes about the violence wreaked by returning servicemen without ever mentioning this salient fact.

Hinderaker's Powerline piece effectively shows that the two pieces of crap and their editors are COMPLETE IDIOTS!

Hinderaker finally poses a perfect question. As a reporter for about two years of my variegated career, I can report that the rate of alcoholism is roughly about fifty percent, including the many years I was not a reporter and as a diplomat or oil strategist, interacted with reporters in informal cocktail or lunch situations. Here's Hinderaker's accurate observation:
I've got a suggestion for the editors of the Times: next time, why don't they undertake a research project to identify all murders and other forms of homicide committed (or allegedly committed--no finding of guilt necessary!) by people who are, or recently have been, employed by newspaper companies? They could write a long article in which selected crimes allegedly committed by reporters, editors and typesetters are recounted in detail, accompanied by speculation about whether newspaper employment was a contributing factor in each case. No need to wonder whether reporters, editors and typesetters commit homicide at a rate any different from the rest of the population--a single murder is too many!

Here's another idea: the Times' story on veterans' crimes repeatedly focused on the role of alcoholism, which the paper associated with the stresses of military service. How about a survey that compares alcoholism rates among reporters and soldiers? Just on a hunch, I'll wager a dollar that the alcoholism rate for reporters is higher.

And you'd win that wager, John, by a handy margin.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Clinton Camp Busy in Process of Destroying Itself

Napoleon had a famous answer to someone who asked him how he had won the Battle of Austerlitz:
"I applied a lesson I had previously learned never to interfere in a battle when the enemy is in the process of destroying itself."

It appears Sen. Obama is applying to same lesson as the CEO & ExVP of Clinton Inc. are sending out whackjobs to try to blame Obama for Hillary's habit of putting her foot in her mouth.

Tonite it was Rep. John Lewis [Ga] who was on PBS Evening News flailing & trying inarticulately to explain how Obama was to blame for exploiting Shaheen's calling him a druggie in NH & Robert Johnson of BET doing the same last night. When it was pointed out that the Clintons were accusing him of exploitation of their mistakes when he actually had remembered Napoleon's maxim & kept quiet, this got the Snoop Doggy Dog of Congress more exercised than ever.

When Hillary makes a comment and the media begins to criticize while Obama keeps quiet, it might be a good idea underreact, rather than push the panic button as Billary have been doing the last few weeks.

And the Clintons should like Obama in the link above, send a memo to their organizers not for outside distribution to keep their yawping and frothing at the mouth to a minimum, or S. Carolina will be another Iowa.

NYT Op-Ed Page Breaks Out with the Truth

William Kristol has employed his niche on the NYT to point out liberal lies and mealy-mouthed doublethink. Of course, the loons on the left cannot abide one of their altars of disinformation to be sullied by facts and reality-checks. Here's a bit of Bill's spanking of the queen of both-sides mouth-talk:
Yesterday, on “Meet the Press,” Hillary Clinton claimed that the Iraqis are changing their ways in part because of the Democratic candidates’ “commitment to begin withdrawing our troops in January of 2009.” So the Democratic Party, having proclaimed that the war is lost and having sought to withdraw U.S. troops, deserves credit for any progress that may have been achieved in Iraq.

That is truly a fairy tale. And it is driven by a refusal to admit real success because that success has been achieved under the leadership of ... George W. Bush. The horror!

Yes, the Heart of Darkness resides in the chest of Hillary, but the horror is perceived outside this Queen of Darkness.

Success has more than just a thousand fathers, now mothers are getting into the act!