Blogito, Ergo Sum - 24 March 2008

What Mr. McCain almost never mentions are two extraordinary moments in his political past that are at odds with the candidate of the present: His discussions in 2001 with Democrats about leaving the Republican Party, and his conversations in 2004 with Senator John Kerry about becoming Mr. Kerry’s running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket.

There are wildly divergent versions of both episodes, depending on whether Democrats or Mr. McCain and his advisers are telling the story.

They're in the same locked file-cabinet with his war records, still undisclosed after all of these years.

The goal now, the liberal press realizes, is to try to sow as much discontent in Republican ranks as the Democrats have created for themselves in theirs. Please, somebody, help get them off of the front page!

Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who backs Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, proposed another gauge Sunday by which superdelegates might judge whether to support Mrs. Clinton or Senator Barack Obama.

He suggested that they consider the electoral votes of the states that each of them has won.

“So who carried the states with the most Electoral College votes is an important factor to consider because ultimately, that’s how we choose the president of the United States,” Mr. Bayh said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

Which is, of course, the very reason for which the superdelegates exist. They were never intended to be a rubber stamp applied after all of the other delegates had been seated..

And at least some of them have to be uncomfortably aware of that fact. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. On occasions, it has been known to be chopped off.

But, of course, everybody and their brother, including brother Obama, knows that Florida and Michigan have been counted, really, even if the Democrat leadership is pretending that they haven't been and won't be.

But the widely-read political website at www.realclearpolitics.com has one count at only 87,861. Don't delude yourselves into thinking that both Hillary and Obama don't know this. Or the superdelegates.

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.

It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she’ll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama’s wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.

And she will, too. Heeeeeere's Hillary! The delicious irony is that she is an equal-opportunity haunter. For years she haunted Republicans; now it is the Democrats, both black and white.

What really happened was that a lot of white people woke up with a start, astonished to learn that what was being preached in black churches might well have come from Muslim madrassas in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Iran. And, fairly or not, that led back not to Obama as Black Panther but Obama as a product of the madrassa. Nobody really wants to speak about that, either, but it's still there, just the same.

Even swaddled in flags, Obama is vulnerable on the issue of patriotism. He’s right that you don’t have to wear a flag pin to be patriotic, and that Republicans have coarsely exploited patriotism for ideological ends while failing to do truly patriotic things, like giving our troops the right armor and the proper care at Walter Reed.

Not that Maureen would exploit the canards of the right armor and proper care for ideological ends, blaming them solely upon Republicans even as the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the nation's purse-strings. The Democrats longed for years to be back in control, only now that they are they are trying to pretend they are helpless in the face of a Republican minority.

Reminds me vaguely of the old explanation for why communism wasn't working well: they said it couldn't, not as long as capitalism still existed anywhere, so capitalism had to be eradicated first.

So if we get rid of ALL of the Republicans, presumably then we can fund things like body armor and Walter Reed. In a non-ideological way.

Algore, in his dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks mode, would have been president if only he had had the sense to let Clinton be run out of office over the Monica trysts. Instead, he supported Clinton's extra-marital sexual activity and mendacity, so if he paid a price for them it was because of his own behavior afterwards, not Clinton's.

Well, Jimmy will never run for anything again, and the Algore is busy scamming hundreds of millions of dollars on his own hook, now, so they have no reason to protect Hillary; but Nancy is another matter.

Nancy has to be reelected again, and again. Nancy needs money in order to do that. Algore isn't going to give her any of his, but the Clintons might. Nancy also has to know what her fate would be like if she trashed Hillary too openly and yet Hillary somehow won, the Terminator finally succeeding in the end.

Frank Rich can likewise be fun to read, watching him twist is great sport. He predictably loves Obama's speech on religion, thinks Romney's was "snake oil". Obama's was brave, but Romney's was self-serving. Uh huh. Ditto, with Hillary and Iraq:

Mrs. Clinton needn’t have Mr. Obama’s poetry or pearly oratorical tones to deliver a game-changing speech. She just needs the audacity of candor. Yet she seems incapable of revisiting her history on Iraq (or much else) with the directness that Mr. Obama brought to his reappraisal of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

If Obama spoke directly about anything, it certainly was NOT his relationship with the Reverend. He was either a nutty old uncle whose utterances Obama missed hearing much of the time, and on the apparently few occasions when he did hear them he thought they might perhaps have appeared to be, ah, controversial, but not to black church-goers who were accustomed to hearing them.

If anything Obama said about Wright could possibly be interpreted as directness, then Obama would not still be endlessly tap-dancing around the issue. What we get from Obama is an explanation of how he can manage to simultaneously accept and reject the Reverend Wright...he was direct about that part. Hillary, of course, is not:

On Monday she once again pretended her own record didn’t exist while misrepresenting her opponent’s. “I’ve been working day in and day out in the Senate to provide leadership to end this war,” she said, once more implying he’s all words and she’s all action. But Mrs. Clinton didn’t ratchet up her criticisms of the war until she wrote a letter expressing her misgivings to her constituents in late 2005, two and a half years after Shock and Awe. By then, she was not leading but following — not just Mr. Obama, who publicly called for an Iraq exit strategy a week before the release of her letter, but John Murtha, the once-hawkish Pennsylvania congressman who called for a prompt withdrawal a few days earlier still.

If some of you thought Murtha being first made Obama a follower, forget it. For those of you who think Hillary's accept-and-reject stance is similar to Obama's, forget that, too. For those of you who think Hillary's remarks are merely controversial, banish the idea from your heads.

I'm far from a Hillary fan, but I find Rich's rationalizations to be highly amusing. I also am smiling broadly at watching him cut Obama the same slack that he once cut Bill Clinton, the same willful blindness for the same reasons.

What if Mrs. Clinton had come clean Monday, admitting that she had made a mistake in her original vote and highlighting her efforts to make amends since? John Edwards, arguably a more strident proponent of invading Iraq in 2003 than Mrs. Clinton, did exactly that also in the weeks before her 2005 letter. He succeeded in lifting the cloud, even among those on the left of his party.

Oddly enough, the fact that Edwards is out of the race and Hillary may yet win it has not had any impact upon Rich's brain.

Among the dupes Rich managed to forget were Bayh and Biden, Cleland of heroic Vietnam fame together with Kerry, Daschle, Dodd, Feinstein and Reid, Rockefeller and Schumer, just to name the most prominent household names.

As Adam Nagourney of The New York Times delicately put it last week, she is “looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama” so that she can win over superdelegates in covert 3 a.m. phone calls. If Mr. Wright doesn’t do it, she’ll seek another weapon. Mr. Obama, who is, after all, a politician and not a deity, could well respond in kind.

And did you notice the smoothness with which Rev. Wright just became plain old Mr. Wright? Even though Hillary had nothing to do with inventing either the Reverend or the just-plain-Mister Wright, she'd have been willing to do that, you understand, causing Mr. (not Sen. in Rich's laudatory piece, oddly enough) Obama to, well, lose his cool.

The Republicans can also count on the help of a political press that, whatever its supposed tilt toward Mr. Obama, remains most benevolent toward John McCain.

This was strikingly apparent last week, when Mr. McCain’s calamitous behavior was relegated to sideshow status by many, if not most, news media. At a time of serious peril for America, the G.O.P.’s presumptive presidential nominee revealed himself to be alarmingly out of touch on both of the most pressing issues roiling the country.

Never mind that Bear Stearns was disposed of in a fire sale, the dollar was collapsing, job losses hit a five-year low, and the price of oil hit an all-time high. Mr. McCain, arriving in Iraq, went AWOL on capitalism’s meltdown, delegating his economic adviser to release an anodyne two-sentence statement of confidence in Ben Bernanke.

Obama, of course, gave a meaningful speech about...race. Or did I miss Obama's speech on all of the tops which Rich faults McCain for not making while he is visiting Iraq? After which Iraq mention, Rich simply starts in on unvarnished distortions.

Troubling as it is that he conflates Shiite Iran with Sunni terrorists, it’s even more bizarre that he doesn’t acknowledge the identity of Iran’s actual ally in Iraq — the American-sponsored Shiite government led by Nuri al-Maliki. Only two weeks before the Iraqi prime minister welcomed Mr. McCain to Baghdad, he played host to a bubbly state visit by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Rich, who is contemptuous of McCain for allegedly confusing Shiite Iran with Sunni terrorists, apparently doesn't know the difference between Shiite Iraqi Arabs and Shiite Iranian Persians.

Nor does he take into consideration the fact that, for Iraq, Iran is an important border state, much the same as Canada and Mexico are for the United States, and thus some form of diplomatic recognition is an imperative, not an option.

You have to read elsewhere than in Rich's newspaper to find out the truth about what happened to Mr. Ahmadinejad on his brief visit, but bubbly hardly describes it. In fact, it was virtually a complete failure for Ahmadinejad, as he accomplished virtually none of his objectives. People he wanted to see wouldn't meet with him, places he wanted to go turned out to be not available, and half of the Iraqi congress didn't show up for his state visit.

If the same treatment was given to Bush, Rich would be deliriously touting what a disaster it was.

But, you see, the MSM did not describe Ahmad's visit that way, so if Rich knows the actual truth, which we must always acknowledge could be possible, then he apparently hopes that his readers do not.

The worry is that if the New York Times gets hold of it, they will publish everything.

That's the conclusion of some smart political writers: that the rest of us in the media are just pretending there's still a viable race.

This was prompted, I suppose, by the collapse of party efforts to stage do-overs in Florida and Michigan, which might have given Hillary Clinton a chance to make up some ground. And Bill Richardson's endorsement of Barack Obama on Friday could be seen as icing on the cake.

Remember when the media wrote off Hillary after Iowa, and again during the 10-state losing streak on the way to Ohio and Texas? Well, this time they really mean it.

Now I'm not going to contend that Hillary has a great chance to win the nomination. She'll clearly finish behind in pledged delegates, and even the delegates with super powers are going to find that awfully hard to overturn.

But what if she finishes the season with a series of big wins, beginning in Pennsylvania? And if more doubts are raised about Obama? Could party insiders have second thoughts?

I think they're making a huge mistake about Florida and Michigan, and Obama would have been better of with almost any kind of re-vote scheme rather than limbo.

That's because those votes were taken and various groups of people ARE adding them up, even if the DNC doesn't want to. How many superdelegates will feel it is their obligation to take them into consideration, somehow? Obama doesn't know and can't find out before the convention.

Nor does Obama know how badly he's been damaged by Wright, and he can't find that out until he either wins or loses a state which he is expected to win, or if he suffers a crushing loss in a state he was expected to lose only slightly.

At Politico, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen say the media are engaging in make-believe:

"Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote -- which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle -- and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else."

Apparently they've written off any thought of an Obama collapse being added to the mix. What the Democrats fear most of all right now is that Hillary will win the popular vote.

Time's Mark Halperin has made a little list, the last item of which I thought rather revealing:

In the eyes of the media, their opinion is all that really matters. And, to my surprise, this was the next item to come up on Media Notes:

The Obama speech is still being debated -- a healthy sign, in my view -- and Rich Lowry thinks he pulled a fast one:

"In his hour of political need, Barack Obama went to his base -- the media. He delivered a speech about the nation's racial divisions that couldn't possibly get anything but lavish praise from the press, burying for now the controversy over his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. A gifted writer, Obama can plumb depths most politicians can't, and he spoke truths about the state of race relations in America in an unusually frank and subtle way." Still, "in the end, Obama made the case for the respectability of a man who is a hater."

The other thing the Democrats fear is something they also don't want to talk about, even if Obama says he does. And that is the racial aspect, honestly discussed. Because if Obama suddenly starts winning overwhelming percentages of the black vote, shutting Hillary out entirely in that demographic, it's going to have an effect. Another reason to wish that Hillary would just drop out now.

Thanks to proportional representation, which was enacted as part of radical Democratic reform a generation ago, no candidate can replicate George McGovern's nomination victory in 1972 by capturing winner-take-all primaries. It is not possible for Clinton to score large enough victories in the remaining nine primaries (starting with Pennsylvania on April 22) to move ahead of Obama in delegates or the accumulated popular vote. Those goals became unreachable with the apparent Clinton failure to force a revote in Michigan and Florida.

Popular Vote Total 13,345,318 49.5% 12,634,376 46.9% Obama +710,942 +2.6%

Estimate w/IA, NV, ME, WA* 13,679,402 49.6% 12,858,238 46.6% Obama +821,164 +3.0%

Popular Vote (w/FL) 13,921,532 48.5% 13,505,362 47.1% Obama +416,170 +1.4%

Estimate w/IA, NV, ME, WA* 14,255,616 48.6% 13,729,224 46.8% Obama +526,392 +1.8%

Popular Vote (w/FL & MI)** 13,921,532 47.5% 13,833,671 47.2% Obama +87,861 +0.3%

Estimate w/IA, NV, ME, WA* 14,255,616 47.6% 14,057,533 47.0% Obama +198,083 +0.6%

You see, those numbers are out there in the real world, not the insular world of DNC politics. By one count, Obama leads in the popular vote by only 87,861 votes, which can easily be made up in Pennsylvania several times over.

If you were a Democrat superdelegate, wouldn't you be wondering how much consideration the 'super' nature of your position required you to give to these numbers? Sure, you would.

...the Obama high command privately contacted superdelegates Friday to report that his Pennsylvania and Indiana polling numbers have "come back" (without specifying by how much). Obama agents are also trying to minimize the distinctiveness of his embrace with Wright by distributing photos and letters showing Bill Clinton's contacts with the Chicago preacher in 1998, when the president was wooing friendly clergymen in his campaign against impeachment.

Obama obviously doesn't want to simply wait until Pennsylvania and Indiana actually vote and we all know for sure. Why not?

The consensus among knowledgeable Democrats is that Obama will win over enough superdelegates to clinch the nomination before the national convention in August, partly because of fear about the consequences if he does not. But one longtime associate said this of the Clintons in private conversation last week: "They will do anything -- anything -- to get nominated." That reminder deepens the Democratic dilemma.

It isn't a matter of winning over superdelegates, it's keeping them afterwards. Because they can change their votes at any time...one of their super talents.

I don't think any of them really want to commit too much before Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana are heard from,

Isn't it kind of odd to hold primaries where the goal is for the last states to vote not be made to count?

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.)

Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu.

Also this, which I think is a key point to the potential white backlash we may yet see in the upcoming primaries:

There are a lot of people who understand the bad things that happened to blacks in America, beginning with slavery and continuing through lynchings, forcing them to eat and drink in separate locations, ride in the bad of the bus, etc, but there are also quite a large number of white people who never participated in any of those things, too. The Reverend Wright doesn't seem to be interested in making distinctions between white people, however, issuing a blanket condemnation.

Now, by way of which vent or orifice is this venom creeping back into our national bloodstream? Where is hatred and tribalism and ignorance most commonly incubated, and from which platform is it most commonly yelled? If you answered "the churches" and "the pulpits," you got both answers right. The Ku Klux Klan (originally a Protestant identity movement, as many people prefer to forget) and the Nation of Islam (a black sectarian mutation of Quranic teaching) may be weak these days, but bigotry of all sorts is freely available, and openly inculcated into children, by any otherwise unemployable dirtbag who can perform the easy feat of putting Reverend in front of his name. And this clerical vileness has now reached the point of disfiguring the campaigns of both leading candidates for our presidency. If you think Jeremiah Wright is gruesome, wait until you get a load of the next Chicago "Reverend," one James Meeks, another South Side horror show with a special sideline in the baiting of homosexuals. He, too, has been an Obama supporter, and his church has been an occasional recipient of Obama's patronage. And perhaps he, too, can hope to be called "controversial" for his use of the term house nigger to describe those he doesn't like and for his view that it was "the Hollywood Jews" who brought us Brokeback Mountain. Meanwhile, the Republican nominee adorns himself with two further reverends: one named John Hagee, who thinks that the pope is the Antichrist, and another named Rod Parsley, who has declared that the United States has a mission to obliterate Islam. Is it conceivable that such repellent dolts would be allowed into public life if they were not in tax-free clerical garb? How true it is that religion poisons everything.

I think Hitchens is a brilliant, articulate man who is a delight to read, but that doesn't mean I think he is always correct, and something in his past apparently seared a distaste into his soul to the point where he can no longer distinguish any difference between theology and theologists.

Finding the evil in Wright and Meeks, Hagee and Parsley, no more equates their poison with 'religion' then saying that philosophy poisons everything because Marx and Hitler wrote books and gave speeches about theirs. It is the individual practitioners in any field who must be judged upon their merits, not the field condemned because of them.

Literally billions of people have found Christianity to be uplifting and decent, but within that huge number of practitioners we should not be surprised to find a very tiny percentage who have perverted their religion in order to gain personal advantage. Not all doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers or CEOs or just about any practice you can mention live up to the code of ethics of their peers, after all, and thus the discovery of a doctor named Mengele, for instance, does not mean the study of medicine is poisonous, or the fact that nuclear physicists made the first use of fissionable materials an act of war mean that learning how to unleash nuclear power was an evil discovery.

One year ago, the neighborhood of Doura in southeast Baghdad was al-Qaeda’s headquarters in the capital city, and the daily dumping ground for dozens of victims of sectarian violence. Public association with Americans or Iraqi leaders, in any form, meant death for its residents. If Americans entered a neighborhood, Iraqis slowly slipped away and refused to talk — even behind closed doors, let alone on a busy market street.

Today, the streets of Doura are safe and bustling, as I witnessed firsthand during a trip three weeks ago. I can still smell the briny scent of fish on sale in busy markets, my boots sliding over the dust, and the muezzin’s afternoon call to prayer echoing in the distance. I saw Baghdad alive again.

It is unfortunate that the term has slipped so casually into the language, but it should be clear by now that the violence which has ceased since the surge drove al-Qaeda out of Baghdad is not actually correctly described as "sectarian". It should be obvious that we do not have enough troops, perhaps in the entire total of our military forces everywhere, to mitigate a full-scale sectarian war in a country with millions of people fighting each other because they belong to different sects.

As our conversation shifts to next steps, Omar emphasizes that “we need to keep the young men busy, and can’t allow their minds to wander in bad directions.” Pushed for specifics, he responds: “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” Public jobs, private jobs, security jobs, and construction jobs; the young men have stopped fighting, and now must find an honorable way to earn a living.

Last year, al-Qaeda fighters exploited young men like these, paying them large sums of money to plant roadside bombs or transport munitions. For local young men, the choice was stark: Resist and face execution, or feed your family.

We have expended much blood and treasure in Iraq. But neighborhoods in Al Anbar, Baghdad, and throughout Iraq today provide a glimpse of what the long-elusive victory in Iraq might look like. A Muslim world in which al-Qaeda’s ideology of submission and suicide has been heaved onto the ash heap of history — not through U.S. force of arms alone, but through a genuine partnership between Iraq’s Muslims and America’s men and women in uniform.

Some say that it hasn't been worth it. Incredible. It's like saying the fire department isn't worth it because fireman were killed trying to get people out of the burning Twin Towers, and a lot of money is spent on salaries and equipment lost in that attempt.

The latest polls reflecting Obama’s near-collapse should serve as a morality tale of John Edwards’s two Americas — the political obtuseness of the intellectual elite juxtaposed to the common sense of the working classes.

For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base — while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else.

Indeed, the more op-eds and pundits praised the courage of Barack Obama, the more the polls showed that there was a growing distrust that the eloquent and inspirational candidate has used his great gifts, in the end, to excuse the inexcusable.

Indeed, in saying more or less that this is the typical way black churches behave, which I devoutly hope is not true, he's slandering those black churches and pastors who do NOT behave like Wright. And if there aren't any, we need to know it, because at the moment most Americans have no idea.

Americans are just now waking up to the shocking notion that they have no idea what is being preached inside Muslim madrassas and mosques, but it would be a much greater shock to learn that Wright is "mainstream" in his theology.

But they can count and compute — and must try to deal with these facts:

(1) Obama is crashing in all the polls, especially against McCain, against whom he doesn’t stack up well, given McCain’s heroic narrative, the upswing in Iraq, and the past distance between McCain and the Bush administration;

(2) Hillary may not just win, but win big in Pennsylvania (and maybe the other states as well), buttressing her suddenly not-so-tired argument about her success in the mega-, in-play purple states. Michigan and Florida that once would have been lost by Hillary in a fair election, now would be fairly won — and Clinton is as willing to replay both as Obama suddenly is not; and

(3) The sure thing of Democrats winning big in the House and Senate is now in danger of a scenario in which a would-be Senator or Representative explains all autumn long that the party masthead really does not like Rev. Wright, whose massive corpus of buffoonery no doubt is still to be mined. (The problem was never “snippets,” but entire speeches devoted to hatred and anger, often carefully outlined in a point-by-point format).

And if she can be shown to win the popular vote, by almost anyone's measure except simply her own, their job will suddenly become all that much easier.

I liked the line about a "massive corpus of buffoonery no doubt...still to be mined", only I think buffoonery is a bit mild.

Global warming, anyone? Captain Ed reports on the Australian from his new post at Hot Air:

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant

Namely, since CO2 has not been the driving factor in previous periods of global warming, why should we think it is this time?