More and more I am seeing the question asked, and I ask it here,
Why is the news media still reporting as if Hillary Clinton is a viable presidential candidate?
What if Barack Obama was trailing by 157 delegates, 814,000 votes, and 10 states? What if Obama had $3 million banked to Clinton's $30 million instead of the reverse? Would the press still be cheering about what a “down to the wire” race this was? Of course not, they would be calling upon him to drop out of what they would claim is no longer a race at all.
So why all of the cheerleading for the junior Senator from New York?
Because she represents the political machinery of the Democratic Party. She knows where the bodies are buried, she knows where the favors are owed, she knows who is in debt to her and to her husband and is calling in those markers. The same moneyed interests that provide the capital to keep the trough filled in Washington own the media, and they also own the machine the Clintons are part of.
What would happen if Barack Obama claimed that he had flown into a war zone and had been forced to run for cover with bullets flying around him, and a film of the event was released that showed him strolling with his daughter and being greeted by a young girl, as Clinton’s trip is shown here and described by Fact Checker at the Washington Post? It would get a lot more attention than the media is currently giving to this outrageous lie from Senator Clinton.
But because she is given this pass, and because the political machinery of the Democratic Party does not have the courage to stop her, she continues her outrageous campaign against the electability of Barack Obama, including the use of a whispering meme about Jeremiah Wright’s effect on that issue. Her husband openly talks about how wonderful it would be to have a contest in the fall between two candidates who love America.
I hope the Democratic Party enjoys four years of the McCain presidency.
Update: 9:05am
Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings writes about this in a bit more farcial mode,
Frankly, though, the fact that she can't tell the difference between having an eight year old read her a poem on a tarmac and fleeing through a hail of bullets doesn't give me a lot of confidence in her grasp of military affairs.
You should click the link and read all of it.
Update: Sunday, 8:00am
Frank Rich, whom I seldom agree with on anything, makes much the same point in his op-ed piece in the New York Times today.
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.
...
Instead Mrs. Clinton darkened that cloud by claiming that she was fooled by the prewar intelligence that didn’t dupe nearly half her Democratic Senate colleagues, including Bob Graham, Teddy Kennedy and Carl Levin. Even worse, she repeatedly pretends that she didn’t know President Bush would regard a bill titled “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002” as an authorization to go to war. No one believes this spin for the simple reason that no one believes Mrs. Clinton is an idiot. Her patently bogus explanations for her vote have in the end done far more damage to her credibility than the vote itself.
...
But as violence flares up again in Iraq and the American economy skids, the issues consuming the Democrats are Mr. Wright and Geraldine Ferraro, race and gender, unsanctioned primaries and unaccountable superdelegates. Unless Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton find a way to come together for the good of their country as well as their party, no speech by either of them may prevent Mr. McCain from making his second unlikely resurrection in a single political year.
I still disagree with those who make the claim that "politics has always been..." There have always been battles about policy, and I agree that those do no lasting damage. Here we have two candidates with policies that are all but indistinguishable, and the fight is about character and capability. The damage is being done, and it will get worse.
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