The Clinton Speech

Olbermann, Mathews and Company were swooning over the Clinton speech last night to the point that I thought the FCC might start fining them for indecent behavior. I thought there was a lot of good in and about the speech, but I was just a bit less ecstatic than the MSNBC crowd. For one thing, I just don’t see Hillary Clinton as being all that great of an orator, and I never have. She has her moments, but when she raises her voice for drama or emphasis, it just doesn’t come off well.

Her recitation of the “touching” people she has met has always struck me as tedious and a bit trivial, but I loved the way she wrapped that into the challenge to her supporters,

“I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage?”

That was one of the moments that she really appealed to me. Another was when she said what Democrats have done and can do. I tensed when she said, “We did it once before with President Clinton and the Democrats,” but she won me over with, “and we will do it again with President Obama and the Democrats.” That’s actually kind of standard convention rhetoric, but she sold it and made it ring.

She gave a lot of policy reasons why all Democrats should vote for Obama, including and especially her supporters, and she made a convincing argument that she supported those policies. She did a superb job of attacking both George Bush and John McCain, and providing reasons why Democrats should vote against McCain.

What she failed to do was talk about the positive qualities of Barack Obama. After spending the primary talking about how unready he is and how much he lacks experience, she made no effort to reverse her stand in this speech. She described no positives about his character at all, and rebutted none of McCain’s current attacks on his character. She did not talk about Obama’s judgement, or his leadership, or his wisdom, or his patriotism, or his steadfast calmness under fire. She talked only about the policy positions that he and she had in common.

So, does she think he is ready to lead this country? Well, in the primary she did not think so, and since that time she is apparently unwilling to say.

And don’t think that the McCain campaign missed that, either. It was less than an hour after her speech that a spokesman was issuing a press release noting that she had at no time stated or implied that Obama was qualified and had sufficient experience to be President.

Hillary's Home Run

Center field, over the bleachers, into the parking lot, with three on base.

Well, a bit of hyperbole perhaps, maybe in part due to contrast with prior rhetoric, but this was well done. It was the work of a statesman statesperson. It was what the Democratic Party needed, and John McCain is reaching for the DiGel.

Those who dislike her saw the beginning of her speech as more of her self-rhetoric, but she was not speaking about herself. Listen carefully, she was speaking about her people – the people who campaigned for her, who donated to her campaign, who sustained her. She spoke of them with warmth and gratitude, and with every word she drew the crowd in. She transformed the mood. She made the crowd part of the moment.

So that when she announced the suspension of her campaign and her endorsement of Barack Obama she drew resounding cheers.

Her endorsement of Obama was on a party line basis rather than being personal, and that is entirely understandable and reasonable. In fact, to become personally effusive in this speech would have been in poor taste. An endorsement given as graciously and unreservedly as hers was in this speech, is above reproach. She did not stop with her own endorsement, she urged her supporters to join her in that support. This was everything that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party could have hoped for.

Remember the speech that Obama made about race after the Jeremiah Wright issue? Hillary Clinton should get the same degree of credit for the last part of this speech that he got for that one, because she made the same speech about the gender divide.

When she began, my first thought was that she was going to blame gender for her loss. She did not. What she did say is that the “glass ceiling” is a fact in our society, and it is not going to go away just because we don’t talk about it. She than talked about it in much the same way that Obama, earlier, had talked about race, not with rancor but as a wound in our society that is healing but is still unhealed and cannot be merely covered with a bandage. There is work still to be done, she says, and she intends to continue to lead the way in doing that work.

Well, says this 65-year-old male, I’m with you on that.

Beaten Into Submission

Now that she is graciously going to “suspend” her campaign and announce “her support” for Barack Obama and “party unity,” we will all join hands with her, sing Kumbaya together and move on in sweetness and harmony toward November.

Not quite yet for me.

When I was in grade school if someone was spitting on me, throwing rocks at me and stabbing me in the back at every opportunity, it took more than having a teacher tell them “Stop that” for me to be willing to be friends with them. Just because they said “Okay” and apologized in the formula dictated by the teacher did not mean that I believed for a second that their nature had changed one iota.

They had to prove something with actions, not mere words. I would deal with them afterwards using the old adage of, “When you dine with the devil, sup with a long spoon.”

The Clinton person received at least two phone calls: one from 23 members of Congress, the other from 8 Senators. All were people allied with her and high in the Democratic hierarchy. They were angry with her behavior Tuesday night and they were telling her, not asking, to concede the nomination and to support the winner.

So in the end, the Democratic leadership did step up to the task, and they had to, because in the end Clinton had to be beaten into submission.

I do not think that should be glossed over for the sake of her history, or for her position or for her precious voters.

She did not run a “historic campaign.” She ran a narcissistic, angry, incompetent, incoherent, dishonest and divisive campaign. She lied about her past, she lied about her accomplishments, she lied about her present, she lied about her opponent and she made promises that she would be unable to keep if elected and that were therefor lies as well.

It does not seem likely that this Clinton person will be named as running mate, because to do so would be a stunning demonstration of incompetence by the newly elected nominee. If, perchance, he does get blackmailed into it, he had certainly best get himself a very long spoon.

Update: why two posts disgusted with this Clinton person, and only one about Obama's historic victory? Because one is about her speech Tuesday night, and the other is about my opinion of her tepid attempt (so far) at riding the party unity pony.

And because this speaks for itself. I cannot improve on it.

Although Churchill might.
"Future generations will say, this was their finest hour."

Deranged Narcissism

The pundits are pretty much unanimous in saying that the first thing Barack Obama must do, having won the nomination for President of The United States of America, is go kiss Hillary Clinton’s ass. The pundits should kiss my ass. Only in the mind of a pundit should the nominee for leader of the world’s most powerful nation go and court the junior Senator from New York.

Having lost that nomination, Hillary Clinton is saying the same thing the pundits are. She let it be known through a news anchor that she wants a private meeting with the nominee as soon as possible. I sincerely hope that Senator Obama lets it be known that he is too busy at the moment. I hope that he lets this Clinton person, the one who lost the nomination bid, know that the loser does not dictate terms to the winner.

Her speech last night has been referred to as “deranged narcissism.”
Given that it included no more than a brief mention of her opponent without acknowledging his victory, a statement that “South Dakota had the last word” without acknowledging that Montana had yet to close its polls, the same spurious claims of superiority in popular vote and in “states with the electoral votes to win in November,” a list of her demands, and a final statement that she will make “no decision tonight,” I would say that description fits rather well.

Especially since all of those self-serving claims and statements were preceded by a vow to unite the party for a victorious election in November.
“I will unite the party,” she says, and adds without saying it “but only on
my own terms.”

“I will make no decision tonight” she says. The decision is not hers to make. She is so narcissistic that she cannot see, or so arrogant that she will not accept, that the voters have made that decision. The decision belongs to the voters, and they have made it. She can try not to accept it, but is made.

And now she wants to dictate terms. She stands at the podium on the night that Barack Obama wins the nomination, on the night that Barack Obama makes history, and dictates terms about what she wants.

Clinton has let it be known through her news contacts that she wants to be on the ticket in the number two slot. For her to make that demand, to even hint at it, is an unconscionable intrusion on the prerogative of the nominee to name his own running mate.

All of this is business as usual in Clintonland. She is going out with power plays, dictating terms under which she is willing to play her role in reuniting the party. “I have my loyal voters,” she is saying, in effect, “and if you want them back in November here’s what you have to do for me, because this is still about me.”

Hillary Clinton divided the party, and it is her responsibility to reunite it. It is not the responsibility of Barack Obama to come crawling to her begging for forgiveness, and the idea of him doing so is repugnant. Even now, the GOP is running film clips of Clinton attacking Obama, of her making statements about his lack of qualification to serve, and they are running those clips as part of their candidate’s campaign for the presidency. She gave them that ammunition and it is her responsibility to repair that damage. She must do that without Barack Obama having to beg her to do so.

Hillary Clinton is now the junior Senator from New York. She is one of fifty one hundred people to hold the title of Senator, and is not even the senior one from her state. She needs to accept that reality and to deal with it.

Barack Obama will become President without this Clinton person.

Nail the Coffin Shut

Before you tell me that we should not be jumping on what was nothing more than a slip of the tongue by the Clinton person, nothing more than unfortunate and awkward phraseology, just how quickly did she and her campaign hop on the “bitter” comment by her rival? And that Obama remark was not made for public consumption as hers was.

Enough has been said about the nature of her remark and what she may or may not have meant by it. Almost enough has been said about her non-apology, so I will add but little.

“…I regret if the remark was offensive..” That not only is not an apology and does not address the person to whom it gave the most offense, it does not acknowledge that the remark is offensive, tasteless and without tact.

“I did not intend…” When offering an apology, one’s intentions are irrelevant and offering a lack of intention is an excuse not an apology.

She followed that with some gibberish about looking to our past leaders for inspiration, being honored to hold Robert Kennedy's seat in the Senate, and admiring the Kennedy family. What that had to do with her remark is undecipherable, and she sounded like a three-year-old trying to justify an extra cookie at snack time.

But there is a larger point demonstrated here, and not for the first time, and I have not seen it addressed by traditional or cable media.

Years ago I watched a movie about a Navy destroyer chasing a Russian submarine during the Cold War, trying to force it to surface. The chase went on for several days with the destroyer crew continuously at battle stations. On day three, befuddled by tiredness and stress the gunnery officer misinterpreted an order from the captain and fired a nuclear torpedo, starting WW3 by accident.

A major responsibility of any person in a position of high authority is to husband their resources so as to assure that they are able to perform the duties of the job properly at all times. We cannot have as president a person who is so unaware of their own limits that they consistently press beyond those limits and function erratically and with inadequate mental resources, unable to properly perform the awesome responsibilities that go with the leadership of the most powerful nation in the world.

The Clinton person has consistently demonstrated that she does not know her limits. The Bosnia lie was due to her being tired. We have heard other gaffes attributed to her being tired. She has even bragged about her “drive” and how she works for twenty-four hours without stopping. That is a mental disease, not an asset, and it repeatedly has rendered her “unfit for duty.”

This is just another in a long list of episodes that illustrate that this woman is constitutionally unfit to serve as the leader of this nation.

This corpse is beginning to reek; put a lid on the coffin and nail it shut.

Clinton Crusade

I know I said only the one more blog about Clinton. I lied. Actually it was true at the time, but then I heard some of her speeches in Florida, some of her rhetoric about seating the Florida delegation despite that a) the election was declared in advance to be outside the Party rules and thus void, b) she and all of the other candidates agreed in writing not to campaign or participate in it.

“They should count [the Florida votes] exactly as they were cast. Democracy demands no less.”

“...people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded. We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe. Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide
by the will of the people.”

“I remember very well back in 2000. There were those who argued that people’s votes should be discounted over technicalities...”

“We believe the popular vote is the truest expression of your will. We believe it today, just as we believed it back in 2000, when right here in Florida you learned the hard way what happens when your votes aren’t counted and the candidate with fewer votes is declared the winner.”

“I have a lead in the popular vote that I added to last night,” which is, of course, an outrageous lie.

Initially willing to negotiate, when Obama's campaign showed signs of flexibility on the issue, Clinton immediately hardened her stance and insisted that both delegations be seated in their entirety.

To every person who has voted for or supported her she is extending a clear invitation to believe that, when Obama is given the nomination, Clinton was cheated out of what is properly hers by virtue of this fictitious "popular vote majority." How many people in whom she creates this sense of having been cheated by the process that Clinton has called illegitimate will choose not to vote for the person whom she has labelled as usurper?

And she has the gall to claim that she is “fully committed” to supporting the cause of the election of a Democrat to the White House in November.

Delusional Politics

One last fling at Senator Clinton, just a couple more of her delusional claims that I feel the need to address, and then I will dump her on the slag heap of history.

She is claiming that she is winning now after losing for so long because she has finally “found her true voice” as the populist, beer- and shot-drinking champion of the “hard working” blue collar class. Apparently people who make more than $50K per year do not work hard for it. Hmmm. She better not say that in person to my wife.

Why should we believe that this is her true persona, anyway? It’s about the fourth or fifth one she’s tried. The “inevitable” one didn’t work very well, the “ready on day one” one didn’t work, the “obliterate Iran” one didn’t work… The truth is that there is no “real Hillary.” Hillary Clinton will become whoever she needs to be to get votes.

I have no real problem with her staying in the race, and I don’t even really object to her using some rather delusional arguments as to why people should vote for her. I do object to her using arguments that weaken the Democratic Party and which delegitimize the eventual winner, such as her claim the she is leading in the popular vote.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, that claim can only be supported by including Florida and Michigan and by eliminating all of the caucus results. The states of Florida and Michigan are invalid not just because the Democratic Party declared them to be, but because an unknown number of voters stayed home for those elections knowing that those elections would not count. They simply cannot be considered representative elections.

Not only do you have to include Florida and Michigan and eliminate all of the caucus states to support Clinton’s claim, you also have to assume that not one single person in Michigan voted for Obama; that more than a quarter of a million people who voted “uncommitted” were actually voting for some imaginary person with that name or were expressing with their votes that they did not care who won.

Hillary Clinton is insisting that the eventual nominee will either be a person who had fewer popular votes, or a person who had fewer elected delegates, one or the other. She is insisting that the Democrats field a nominee who can be claimed to be not a legitimate winner of the nomination process. In the same breath she is claiming to be “fully committed” to supporting the cause of the election of a Democrat to the White House in November.

That’s her delusion; not that she can win; that she is supporting her party.

Dismasted

Of all the metaphors used to describe the Clinton campaign, so far I have not seen this one. As far as I know it is original and I offer it with great glee and delight.

All her masts are stumps, she's down by the head and listing to starboard. Her hull is badly holed, her scuppers running red, her railings in splinters, her guns unhoused, her powder barrels empty, and her gunports awash. And she is no John Paul Jones.

Update, Wednesday afternoon
Yes, Bruce, a Navy man. And I happen to be re-reading Patrick O'Brian, as in Master and Commander, at the moment. I think this is my third reading of the entire series, but it will be the fourth for some of the books.

Batting Zero

In an expedition that MSNBC labeled “Theatre of the Absurd,” Senator Clinton experienced a gas tank fillup and made the following remark, among others,

"I am tired of OPEC setting the price and determining how much supply there is, by any definition that is a monopoly."

Senator Clinton is not exactly renowned for the precision of her statements, but even for her this one is a little loose, and in more than one dimension.

The precise mechanism by which she thinks OPEC sets the price is left unclear by her statement, and would probably be of interest to the New York Mercantile Exchange or the Intercontinental Exchange which are under the impression that they actually set the price of oil. They will probably be a bit surprised to find out that it’s OPEC doing it without their knowledge.

OPEC sets production quotas for its members, but quite a few members get greedy on a regular basis and break those quotas. So OPEC can’t really determine how much OPEC supply there is, let alone how much world supply there is.

When I want the definition of a word I usually go to Answers.com, and they define “monopoly” as follows,

Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service

As of March 2008, OPEC controlled 35.6% of world oil production. That’s about, um, 65.4% short of a monopoly. In terms of the portion of the market it needs to control it’s about 200% short of a monopoly.

Perhaps she meant to say that OPEC has a monopoly as a supplier of oil to this country.

The largest supplier to this country is, oops, Canada. Last year the second largest was Mexico, but they are in third place this year. Unless Canada and Mexico joined OPEC when nobody was looking, two out of three of the largest suppliers of foreign oil to this country are not members of OPEC.

Here, too, OPEC is about 200% short of a monopoly.

So of the three parts of Senator Clinton’s complaint, precisely zero of them were accurate. Even for her that’s a pretty low batting average.

Holiday Season

My nephew sent me an email about Hillary Clinton going to a gas station with a blue-collar worker to buy some gasoline. The trip was, of course, staged since Clinton has not driven a car or bought gasoline for many years due to Secret Service restrictions, and my nephew accompanied the story with amusing and appropriately caustic remarks. Clinton, it seems, was just appalled that it would cost about $63 for half a tank of gasoline.

She has proposed a “gas tax holiday” which, here in San Diego, would reduce that to about $60.25 in most parts of town, or $60.60 in others. Now doesn’t that just make your day?

As a result of that “gas tax holiday” the potholes that we have in out streets, which are maintained by the city, would now be just as bad on the highways, the maintenance of which is funded by – the gas tax. Quite a few people would be added to the unemployment rolls because the construction jobs for highways would be cut because they had been funded by – the gas tax. With any luck not too many bridges will collapse because maintenance funding… Well, you get the point.

Meanwhile, one’s mortgage payment would still be, oh, $6,985 or so per month, unrelieved by any sort of “mortgage interest holiday.” Milk would still cost $3+ per gallon, unrelieved by any sort of “inflation holiday.” Layoffs would continue, unreduced by any “jobs exporting holiday.” Drought would continue to wreak havoc, undeterred by any “global warming holiday.”

And so on.

And my sanity will diminish due to the lack of a “politics holiday.”

Update: Wednesday, 3:30pm
MSNBC Hardball this afternoon did a segment on Clinton's gas tank-filling expedition, referring to it as "Theater of the Absurd."

Restoring Trust

Richard Cohen writes in an op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday,

…but let me suggest that Bush's "worst legacy" is what he has done to whatever trust Americans still had in their government. This administration's incessant lying, its secrecy -- its creepy Cheneyism with its petty justifications for torture and violation of privacy -- is its worst legacy, one that will endure long after Wal-Mart opens a branch in Sadr City. Only an idiot would trust this government.

And so it will be the job, the obligation, the solemn task of the next president to restore that trust.

He goes on to suggest that McCain or Obama can do that but that Clinton cannot, and I disagree with him. I have been listening to this campaign for, what, fifteen months now. Fifteen long, painful months.

Not one of these three can do it.

I am sick to death of this process and have all but reached the point that I don’t give a flying damn who the Democrats nominate, I don’t want to vote for any of them.

I don’t know how much of what McCain says is true, I don’t know how much of what Clinton says is true, I don’t know how much of what Obama says is true, I just know that for all the crap that all of them have been flinging enough of it has stuck that all of them stink like the sewers of Gomorrah.

They lie and they pander and they make promises that they cannot keep. They say they will cut taxes or alter taxes, but tax rates are the province of Congress; a President can suggest but not enact tax laws. That does not prevent them from making a promise that they know to be a lie.

They make one promise to one audience and a contrary promise to the next because the only thing that any of them ever say is whatever they think will make the current audience vote for them, or give them money, or both.

Whatever this is, democracy it is not.

Return to MAD

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why this statement from Senator Clinton in the Democratic debate of April 16th is being so completely ignored. Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann discussed it in a segment on Countdown on the 17th, and I saw one blog post about it around that date but cannot find it now.

In response to a question of “Would you extend our deterrent to Israel?” Clinton jawboned as usual, but within her response was the following,

Well, in fact, George, I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the same with other countries in the region.
…
…we will let the Iranians know that, yes, an attack on Israel would trigger massive retaliation, but so would an attack on those countries that are willing to go under this security umbrella and forswear their own nuclear ambitions.

The emphasis (bold) is added by me.

Last night on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, in response to a question about Isreal being attacked by Iran, she added,

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," Clinton said. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

This is not “George Bush lite,” this is George Bush on steroids. She doesn’t just rattle the saber, she pulls it out of the scabbard and waves it around.

Our latest NIE states that Iran has halted its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Bush’s rhetoric claims that we don’t know, and have no way of knowing, whether they have restarted it and must therefor be afraid of Iran having
“the knowledge to produce nuclear weapons.” Even he has enough sense, in light of that NIE, to cease the rhetoric about Iran actively trying to obtain them.

Not so Dick Cheney and, notably, Hillary Clinton. Both are still using rhetoric that Iran is “pursuing nuclear weapons.” Even Dick Cheney is not saying that we should begin making overt threats of nuclear retaliation.

Not only that, her proposed policy is illogical in the extreme. She proposes to “create an umbrella of deterrence” of our nuclear weapons over Israel, despite the open secret that Israel has some 200 nuclear weapons of its own and the means to deliver them. If Israel’s nuclear weapons are not a deterrent, exactly why would ours be? Or does 200 weapons constitute insufficient retaliation to suit her thirst for vengeance?

Let alone the utter insanity of her plan to extend that “umbrella of deterrence” and commit us to a NATO-like posture of automatic mutual defence with a host of other nations, most of them dictatorships, in one of the most unstable parts of the world.

And, standing with saber in hand, threatening and blustering about the bloodthirsty use of nuclear weapons against anyone attacking an ally, bloodthirsty because that ally has weapons of their own, she says that she is going to begin a major diplomatic initiative.

Theodore Roosevelt said to, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Hillary Clinton only heard the “big stick” part of that, and she didn’t understand that while speaking, which she is not doing softly, you weren’t supposed to be waving the “big stick” in the other person’s face.

Why is no one other than Keith Olbermann talking about this?

The United States has not openly threatened to use nuclear force since the end of the Cold War, when that threatened use was a countermeasure to the enemy’s actively deployed nuclear weaponry. Bush has hinted at it with his “all options are on the table” rhetoric, but not even he has openly stated a desire to return to the days of a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Now here is Hillary Clinton talking openly about threats to “obliterate” another nation, about a nuclear “umbrella of deterrence,” and using the language of Mutually Assured Destruction. And no one seems to notice.

Just Olbermann, “one still small voice, crying in the wilderness.”

If we want to become a nation at peace we could not elect a worse person than someone who, for the past seven years in her pursuit of the nation’s highest office, has been on a constant quest to prove how “tough” she is. We could not do worse than someone whose campaign is now built around the rhetoric that she is “comfortable in the heat of the kitchen.”

We could not do worse than one who talks of “obliterating” another nation.

Clinton's New Strategy

Can anyone tell me what this column is about? I picked it up from Google News reader and thought it was something from the Onion, but it appears to be an actual column in the Washington Post. The column starts like this,

Hillary Clinton took an important step Monday toward winning the Democratic nomination by launching an ad targeting Barack Obama's recent comments about working-class voters clinging to "guns or religion." The ad is a marked change from her recent determination to use a positive message until the Democratic convention…

Where has Douglas E. Schoen been while the rest of the media is talking about Clinton’s “kitchen sink” strategy? He goes on to say that,

Clinton has provided a compelling case for her candidacy thus far.

Um, to whom has she done this? That gem is immediately followed by,

After all, the superdelegates have the power to end the Democratic contest now and have chosen to wait.

And that illustrates her “compelling case” exactly how?

You should follow the link above and read the column, and then give me a comment to let me know if you think this Schoen person is completely out of touch with reality. Also let me know if you can think of a reason why the Post would print this, even on page A15.

I was getting really disgusted with her, as John Cole at Balloon Juice put it, "running to every microphone with a zeal that would impress Chuck Schumer to claim that America’s blue collar workers are under assault from a San Francisco effete liberal latte-sipping out-of-touch Obama," until I read that she was having all of the impact of a whiffleball hitting one of the Pyramids of Giza.

And, of course, as a recovering alcoholic of 26+ years, I was duly impressed with her ability to down a shot of Crown Royal in a single gulp. That surely swayed my vote, as I’m sure it did for every MADD member who was watching.

But, according to Doug Schoen, she “needs to go negative.” She gets any more negative, and the entire nation will be ankle deep in barf.

Telling Hillary Clinton to "go negative" is pretty much like telling Jon Stewart to "do snark." It's like telling a fish to swim, or a lion to eat zebra.

Throwing Stones

Senator Clinton attended a forum where she was asked to describe her faith and moral values at Messiah College near Harrisburg, Pa. She certainly didn’t hesitate to describe her opponent’s moral values, apparently never having read the words in the bible about casting the first stone. As far as I am able to tell, Senator Obama confined himself to talking about his own faith and values, and declined to offer the presumption of knowing what lies inside another person’s soul.

To quote from the New York Times article, Senator Clinton,

…decried what she called Mr. Obama’s lack of faith in American values, labeling a description he gave of “bitter” voters in small-town Pennsylvania as “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.”
…
…even placed Mr. Obama in the same upper-crust echelon as Al Gore and John Kerry, noting that even though both former Democratic presidential candidates were men of faith, “large segments of the electorate concluded that they did not really understand or relate to or frankly respect their ways of life.”

Apparently the news media is driving this, because the Times article says that her statements were in response to a question. So if she is accused of divisive politics she can use that wide-eyed innocent teenager look of hers and claim in that patented surprised tone that she was merely answering the question she was asked. She is, of course, required to answer all questions fully and in depth; except ones about blue dresses or anything she doesn’t want to talk about. She’s really good at not answering those.

Democrats had better hope that Senator Obama does not win the nomination, because Senator Clinton is certainly doing her best to assure that he cannot be elected President.

Me? I have become rather indifferent. If Obama is nominated I will vote for him, but I think he will get to Washington where he will be out-numbered by a ratio of 535:1 and accomplish little or nothing. A Democratic Party that will allow Clinton to do what she is doing is a party that will not allow Obama to create change. If Clinton is nominated I will sit the election out.

Who speaks for you?

To the Democratic voters in Pennsylvania,

You live in an area known as the “Rust Belt” in tribute to a steel industry that died a slow and lingering death. You have watched your job and the jobs of your neighbors shipped overseas for higher corporate profits.

The cost of feeding your family has increased by 24% recently. The cost of heating your home and driving your car has increased 84% in that same time. The cost of health insurance premuims, copays and deductibles has gone up by 17% and more. While all those costs have risen, your wages have gone down by 4% in the same period.

For decades the politicians have been saying that they care about you and that they will make things better for you, but they pass tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit only those who make far more income than you do. They cannot pass an increase in the minimum wage until they decide to accompany it with offsetting tax breaks for businesses. They are eager to bail out the failed hedge funds and pass tax breaks for failing home builders but cannot decide to rescue homeowners facing foreclosure.

So which candidate is speaking for you?

Is it Hillary Clinton, who appreciates that she finds you to be “optimistic, upbeat and positive” in your outlook?

Or is it Barack Obama, who says that he understands why you are pissed off and agrees with you that things need to change?

Answer that question with your vote on April 22nd.

That Rocky Analogy

This is too rich not to plagiarize it. It’s from Attywood in today’s post, although I have added a few tidbits of my own.

“I know what it means to get knocked down. But I’ve never stayed down, and I never will. Let me tell you something – when it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up.”

-- Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia yesterday.

Great analogy.

Except that Rocky loses.

And Clinton started out the race as a favorite of Apollo Creed-like proportions and became the underdog of her own making.

And the actor who played Rocky supports John McCain.

And she actually said, “I never get up.” I know she didn’t mean to but…

It’s called “foot-in-mouth disease” in my circles.

Another Last Straw

What do you do with the camel after you have placed the "last straw" on its back, the straw that broke its back? In the Democratic Primary Election you place yet another freaking straw on its back.

First this week we get that Clinton (I'm through using honorifics) is lying to us about the Tuzla trip; pointless, self-aggrandizing, blatant lying. When caught out she mumbles something about, "I mis-spoke, let's move on."

When, for once, the media doesn't move on, she tries to deflect attention from it by doing something that the Republican machine has so far declined to do. From Steve Benen, in part,

...we now have a situation in which John McCain defended Obama against Wright-related charges, and Mike Huckabee defended Obama, but Hillary Clinton sat down with editors of a conservative newspaper to reignite a fire that had already largely gone out.

He has more on this,

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor made.

“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.” […]

The Clinton campaign has refrained from getting involved in the controversy, but Clinton herself, responding to a question, denounced what she said was “hate speech.”

“You know, I spoke out against Don Imus, saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that,” Clinton said. “I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving.”

And he suggests why she would do this,

It’s hard to overstate how disappointing this is. Clinton waited until the story had died down and then decided to make her first public comments on the controversy, going after Obama for staying with his church.

This may sound cynical, but my guess is that media interest in Clinton’s debunked Bosnia story had become too great a distraction. The controversy (and damaging videos) undermined Clinton on two fronts — credibility and national security experience — both of which are of critical significance.

So, how better to change the subject that to revive the Jeremiah Wright story with brand new criticism?

Clinton has been offered repeated chances to comment on the Wright controversy for three weeks. She’s not only declined, she’s avoided saying a single word. Today, all of a sudden, Clinton has all kinds of concerns she’s anxious to share. What a remarkable coincidence.

I keep thinking that we have reached the limit of just how disgusting this woman can be. I keep finding out that there is more.

Predetermined Outcome

Updated: 9:05am, Updated again: Sunday, 8:00am

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.

Health Care Plans

Well, last night I listened to one more endless lengthy long, drawn out argument discussion on the relative merits of the health care plans being touted by the two Democratic candidates for president. I’m not sure why these two feel the need to argue so passionately over plans which differ in such minor ways and which offer so little benefit to the people of this country. These plans consist of putting two slightly different shades of lipstick on a very ugly pig.

Deductibles. Copays. “Reasonable and customary.” Pre-existing.

If you don’t know what any of these terms mean it’s because you live in a country where health care is provided, rather than one where health insurance is the norm. The two terms get used interchangeably these days, but they are by no means the same thing and, in fact, they are in many ways in opposition.

Health care is the prevention and treatment of illness and injury.

Health insurance is where you pay money while you are not sick to not get health care when you are sick. Because you had to first pay the deductible, and you were without funds at the moment. Because the copay was more than you could afford right now. Because the specialist you needed to see charged more than the “reasonable and customary rate” as determined by the insurance company.

Health insurance is where you enter into a contract with a corporation that you will pay a monthly premium and they will then pay for the health care that you need. You keep your end of the contract and they frequently do not. Instead of demanding that they treat you as the customer that you are when that happens, you beg and plead with them to grant you some sort of largesse.

No country in the world spends more on the treatment of illness and injury and gets less for their money, and the reason is health insurance.

My father used to say, “Don’t piss in my ear and tell me it’s raining.”

Well right now we have Obama pissing in our one ear and Clinton in our other ear and they are chanting in unison, “Whoo hoo, it’s raining and I have a better umbrella.”

Both candidates say their plans offer universal health care and both candidates are lying because both plans address universal health insurance and not universal health care. Under both plans it will remain true that in this country you will not get health care unless you can pay for it, either in cash or by means of an insurance policy. An insurance policy, please note, which you were able to pay for so either way money rules.

Both plans offer subsidies to help pay for the cost of health insurance, but that money comes from the pockets of the taxpayers so I fail to see how that is helping the taxpayers. Both plans claim to have measures to reduce the cost of insurance, but the specifics are unclear and enforcement of market controls by government has always been suspect at best.

Neither plan makes the slightest attempt to reduce the actual cost of providing health care and, in fact, both plans increase that cost by increasing the degree of regulation with a resulting increase in administrative overhead at the medical provider level.

Both plans provide enormous reward to the insurance industry: more insurance plans sold, more health care denied, more profit.

Both plans are, at best, incremental changes to a failing system.

When Hyman G. Rickover was proposing to power submarines with nuclear reactors he ran into serious opposition from conventional thinkers. He called them “oxcart planners” because he said that if they had prevailed throughout history we would still be fighting land battles with armor-plated oxcarts instead of tanks. He didn’t just change the way the submarine service was powered, though, he changed its fundamental nature.

Diesel-electric submarines were not true submarines at all, but merely ships that could submerge for limited periods. A program known as GUPPY in the 60's and 70's extended underwater periods for small percentages at a huge expense, but they were still merely ships that could submerge for limited periods. Not until Rickover rammed the nuclear power plant down the throats of the "armored oxcart" crowd did we have a true submarine - a ship that was in its element submerged.

Incremental change yields, at best, small improvement at large cost. For fundamental difference one needs to implement fundamental change.

The way health care is managed in this country needs a Hyman Rickover. We need to rid ourselves of “oxcart planners” and engage in fundamental change. We need to eliminate health insurance from health care planning in America, and start taking care of our citizens instead of rewarding our corporations.

Democratic Debate

I actually watched the debate last night between Obama and Clinton, and I watched it all the way through. My blood pressure stayed at 100/60 the whole time, although I did wave my finger (I’ll let you guess which one) at the television a few times. The perception of who came out ahead is always colored in these things by the likes and dislikes of the viewer, and anyone reading this has no real doubt about my opinion of Senator Clinton. Even with that thumb on the scale, however, I thought Senator Obama did very well indeed.

My opinion of Senator Clinton is not exactly enhanced when she is asked why she formed her health care plan behind closed doors in 1993 and her response is, “Well I was trying to start the national conversation on health care.” That was one of the finger-waving moments. How, precisely, does holding meetings in secret start the national conversation? People are talking about you then, not with you about health care.

I seem to recall a similar thing with the energy issue and Cheney. That certainly served us well. What kind of “national conversation” did that start?

She also didn’t answer the question of how she is going to enforce the mandates in her plan. Neither did Obama and his plan also contains mandates, but at least it has fewer of them. For the record, I oppose government mandates of any sort because either they are accompanied by punitive measures or they are meaningless. Neither option is attractive.

Confronted with the “tax and spend” issue I liked Obama’s response. He talked about principles, about what is right for the nation, about the proper way to apply progressive taxation. Clinton talked about detail of how she will pay for her health care plan, saving “x” dollars by electronic records and so forth, but that was not the question. The question was how she would respond to the Republicans on the charge of “tax and spend.”

The main part of her campaign is that she is better equipped to go against the Republicans in the general election but when asked, here, how she would do so on a specific issue she missed the point of the question and did not answer it. Obama did answer it and his answer was not bad at all. He seemed ready for that general election battle.

On the immigration issue it seems to me that Obama’s position was significant in a couple of ways. In declining to blame job losses on immigration he is rather transparently courting the Latino vote, but I think he’s doing more than that. I think that stance is part of his “bringing people together” theme, because I don’t think this is merely a campaign slogan for him. I also respond to his position that we have to get beyond the blaming and scapegoating and deal with the bigger problem, which is the jobs that have been lost and why they have been lost.

My suspicion is that some African-American unemployment absolutely is caused by illegal immigration. So is some white unemployment. What we need to deal with is unemployment and we do that by creating decent, well-paying jobs. We don’t do that by blaming and dividing, by setting one people against another. That's the point that Obama spoke to, and I liked it.

Finally, there’s Iraq. Senator Clinton still, after all these months of the campaign, trots out the “if we knew then what we know now” meme. She still claims that "certainly I did an enormous amount of investigation and due diligence to try to determine what, if any, threat could flow from the history of Saddam Hussein being both an owner of and a seeker of weapons of mass destruction. But her "due diligence" did not include reading the then-current N.I.E.

It is not her vote that so greatly disturbs me. It is not even her refusal to admit the error of that vote that so disturbs me. The empty, patently absurd, vacuous arguments that she uses to defend that vote betray a personality that would spell disaster in a national leader.

We’ve seen that delusional self justification for the past seven years.

She also said, "I believe in coercive diplomacy." And I, most emphatically, do not. That is what starts wars. That is what started this war in Iraq.