As Polls Blow It (Again), O Has Mo

You'd think with 42 races behind them, the pollsters would have the Dem primaries nailed, but again yesterday they proved their utter worthlessness as prognosticators.

Yesterday, as the polls in North Carolina and Indiana opened, the RCP average of the big-time polls showed Obama up by 8 in North Carolina and Clinton up by 5 in Indiana. Oops, again, as Obama doubled that in NC, trouncing Clinton by 16%, and pulled within two points of her in a last-minute surge in Indiana, as the northwestern counties with their big black populations came in.

Obama's performance yesterday is tantalizingly close to a closer -- except that when it comes to calling it "it," the Clintons have a different definition of "it" than most of us. She was looking for Hoosier double digits to balance out what was certain to be a drubbing in NC, but she got just two digits, which isn't the same as double digits by a long shot.

And speaking of long shots, Obama's 200,000+ margin in voters yesterday now puts him back on top of the popular vote, which Clinton previously could lay claim to by counting Michigan and Florida's screwed-up primaries. So the only cloak left for Hillary to wrap her hopes in is that she can win in the big states, especially the ones with a lot of old-line Dems who aren't exactly in the front lines of the tolerance movement. Not much to cling to.

So it looks like the primaries turned out pretty darn well for the GOP. Hillary played her part in bruising the party and playing up Obama's many weaknesses, and we ended up with the one candidate most likely to appeal to Dems who are mature enough to fear an Obama presidency.

But GOP campaign chief Tom Cole says the party is facing a disastrous election in November. Is he just fundraising -- gotta have a big problem to raise big funds! -- or is he right?

Calling It: Super-Delegates Will Go To Obama

Fellow blogger Thomas talked with Hugh Hewitt today and predicted Hillary would sway the superdelegates because they will ultimately prove themselves afraid of a mid-summer Obama meltdown.

I disagree, and it's not a spur of the moment position I'm holding. I've gone back and forth and have certainly found a lot of merit in Thomas' argument. Would that the Dems would nominate Obama and the meltdown would follow.

But in the end, it comes down to this: When you get 92 percent of Indiana black voters voting for Obama, you can bet on 99 percent of black superdelegates going with him, too. That's a healthy block.

And what of the whites? Of course some are tied to Clinton for reasons good, bad and nefarious, and some have genuinely bought into the curious idea that an under-qualified, over-rated junior senator is a good pick for president. Neither faction is enough to lock the election for either candidate.

That leaves what we in public affairs call "the mass in the middle." We know two things about them that are above question: They're white and they're Dems. Now ask yourself, what is the most insulting thing you can call a white Democrat? No, not "conservative." Not even "Bush-lover." It's:

Intolerant!

Fear of being called intolerant will make every other weight on their scales feel like feathers. With their Obama vote, they will forever be able to say they were one of the brave ones who broke the color barrier, they are up there with Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. We all know that a vote for Hillary offers no such tolerance coups, even if she is the first woman candidate. We all like chicks ... but do we all like blacks?

And what the heck, anyone who's still undecided at this point is certainly not a hard-core liberal since the "very liberal" category is going almost two-to-one for Obama. Consequently, it would be worth the risk of losing to a middle of the road Republican like McCain just to get the tolerance cred.

Ultimately, fear of being called intolerant will carry the day for Obama -- and they say America has race problems!

The Danish Perspective

This email is making the rounds, perportedly from a very American-thinking Danish friend:

We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an
election.

On one side, you have a b!tch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer, and a
lawyer who is married to a b!tch who is a lawyer.

On the other side, you have a true war hero married to a woman with a huge
chest who owns a beer distributorship.

Is there a contest here?

Unfortunately, there is.

Maureen Channels Marvin

I hate it when she does that.

Maureen Dowd wrote one heck of a funny column today with next to no fingernails on the blackboard. Next to; she did say that New Orleans was "the city [Bush] let drown."

She concludes the piece by channeling Dr. Suess' “Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now!”

“The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. ... I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. ... You can go in an old blue shoe.

Just go, go, GO!”

But she won't, she won't go now. No matter how they howl, she won't go now. Not on a horse, not on a cow. Look at the ruckus they raise! But she just stays and stays and stays!

Leaving Obama with this:

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.

“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”

His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?

Nice. It must be crushing to him that we aren't just handing him are nation on a platter because he's so darn special.

Caution: White Guy Blogging

So I've been scrutinized, and that's who I am!

I hate blacks and I hate women. I've got all the power. I cannot be relied on. I have a terrible temper, and I'm fine with having it.

Funny, that's not what I feel, act or think like, but Nora Ephron writing at Huffpo sums up white men in so many words, so it must be so.

No one will call Ephron anything derogatory and overused to the point of meaninglessness -- racist, sexist -- for denigrating me and my white male brothers as terribly as she has, but that's OK; we expect it. It just comes with having all the power, you know.

Since the Dems have been running icons this election season, they've ended up where they deserve to end up, even if Ephron isn't crazy about it:

Here's another thing I don't like about this primary: now that there are only two Democratic candidates, it's suddenly horribly absolutely crystal-clear that this is an election about gender and race.

You could say it's an election about the economy and the war, but what fun would that be? Why focus on vital things when it's much more fun to call people names -- or accuse others of calling people names, or accuse their spouses of calling people names?

But when you run a race like the Dems have run, which as a Dem you have to do because identity politics is what you are, you end up with results like this; you end up running a race that means nothing because the only difference between the candidates is sex, race and age.

And for some reason, they've left age out of it. Until after the primaries, when they face that old white guy.

I might just be an insensitive, out of touch white guy, but it seems to me that it doesn't matter if the president is a man, a woman, a black or a white or anything else. What matters is policy and position -- not about race and gender, but about things that actually matter.

You'd think it would be the Dems that are saying that, but it's not. It's me, the GOP white guy, because they're fixated on the genetic matter of two individuals instead of where their policies will take us.

That leaves us white men, and all the intelligent people who join us in this effort, to think not of race or gender, but of the future, and to vote from our brains, not our hearts, skin or our sex organs. It's unfortunate, really, that all the power still resides in my white male brothers in Pennsylvania and Indiana, but that's the card they've been dealt by the Dems.

America's great talk on race never happened. Blacks will vote overwhelmingly for Obama. Older white women will vote overwhelmingly for Clinton. What a shame that is. I think what Ephron meant to say was this: White Dem men in Pennsylvania and Indiana will actually be voting about what matters, while most of the blacks and women will be voting about symbols that really don't matter at all.

OK, they matter. But only if you're a sexist or a racist.

Update: For a much more intelligent article on the issue, read this one at the other CSM.

Clintons Send Chelsea Off To The Gay Bars

Here's something most candidates don't normally hear from the crowd on the campaign trail:

"We love your highlights!"

"You're gorgeous, baby!"

That, according to WaPo poli-blog, The Trail, is what greeted Chelsea Clinton as she hit the late night gay bar scene in Philadelphia (can you say "brotherly love?") last night.

What's Chelsea doing hanging out in gay bars? Lest rumors fly:

Hillary Clinton's big supporter in the state, Gov. Ed Rendell, always heads to four or five of the most popular of them before elections, and he invited the former first daughter along for the trip.

Sounds like pandering to special interest voters to me.

It's handy having a daughter in her 20s so that Bill and Hil don't have to take campaign assignments like this themselves:

A crowd of more than two dozen followed Clinton from Tavern to Woodies, a couple of blocks down the street. After being introduced by Rendell, Clinton gave a brief speech to the mostly male crowd, which briefly stopped dancing and checking out the dancers standing on tables (and wearing only briefs) to listen to her.

Her response to beefy men in briefs?

"I'm so excited to be here!"

Gays are an audience like any other. Heck, the other day, the director of the Desert Chapter of our Building Industry Association (hardly a liberal bunch) was flaunting his new ad, showing two men cuddling and talking about buying a new house.

"We can't ignore the gay market," he said. "A lot of our electeds are gay and we really can't ignore them."

But I do take issue at the choice of Chelsea's venue. There are plenty of places to pander to the gay vote besides gay bars on a Friday night: universities, churches, gay political clubs. In sending their daughter out to the gay bars, the Clintons were manipulative, exploitative ... and Clintonian, as in:

“I grabbed her ass,” one young woman exclaimed to her friends after snapping a picture with her arm around the former first daughter. (MSNBC)

I mean, really! Haven't they just turned their daughter into a campaign slut? (Albiet an effective one, as this morning Google cranks out 22,800 hits for "Chelsea gay bar crawl.")

As I click "Publish Post," make that 22,801.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Sunday Scan

Chinese Faking Protests?

What, you might ask, are Chinese soldiers doing holding fake Tibetan Buddhist monk robes?

Could they be preparing to stage violent protests by "monks" in order to justify more violent attacks in response by the Chinese military?

That's an easy conclusion to reach if you read Big Lizard's Forget It, It's Chinatown post, which uses Japanese-language blog postings from anti-Communist Chinese nationals living in Japan to hint at what really might be going on with Chinese military action in Tibet ... and, incredibly, anti-Chinese Olympic torch demonstrations.

Japanese-language blog postings from anti-Communist Chinese nationals living in Japan? Isn't the blogosphere amazing?

Clinton Schizophrenia

In public, the public Clinton makes her case that President Bush should boycott the Olympics grand opening in protest to Chinese suppression of pro-religious freedom demonstrations in Tibet.

In private, the somewhat less public Clinton stuffs cash into the couples' bank accounts, cash "earned" from his position as an advisor to China's main internet provider, Alibaba, which is helping the Chinese government totalitarians track down and prosecute Tibetan protesters.

Reports the LA Times in a front-page expose today:

Alibaba, which took over Yahoo's China operation in 2005 as part of a billion-dollar deal with the U.S.-based search engine, arranged for the former president to speak to a conference of Internet executives in Hangzhou in September 2005. Instead of taking his standard speaking fees, which have ranged from $100,000 to $400,000, Clinton accepted an unspecified private donation from Alibaba to his international charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation.

This is the same charity the Clinton's do not list on Hillary's Senate financial disclosure forms, despite the fact that it has raised some $500 million, with much of it coming from the Saudi royal family and the sheiks of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar. The Capital Research Center says of the foundation:

Bill Clinton is masterminding his charitable foundation’s fundraising campaign at the same time that he advises his wife’s presidential campaign. Might that create some conflicts of interest? At the very least, linking nonprofit fundraising to political proximity is sure to generate lots of philanthropic clout—but to what end? Bill Clinton promises to disclose the names of donors to the William J. Clinton Foundation when his wife becomes president. How reassuring.

The wrap-up of the LAT story was pretty amazing:

Human rights activists said clear evidence of Alibaba's collaboration with China's state security apparatus surfaced last month with the appearance of a "most wanted" posting for Tibetan rioters on the firm's Yahoo China homepage.

The postings, which appeared March 15 on both Yahoo China and Microsoft's MSN China homepage, carried photos of suspected rioters and a phone number for informants to call. The postings vanished later the same day after news accounts highlighted them.

Yahoo officials said they had no advance warning from Alibaba that the postings would run. "We made our concerns known that the displays were inappropriate," one Yahoo official said, but were told by Alibaba officials "that it was a standard news feed."

The Clinton foundation spokeswoman would not address Alibaba's role in aiding the crackdown in Tibet. Instead, she emphasized the former president's efforts to push AIDS relief in China. "He has both pushed and helped the government of China to acknowledge and tackle the growing HIV-AIDs crisis facing their country," she said.

I'm struggling here to figure out why funding AIDs relief answers questions about Clinton failing to support human rights in China because he's taken money from the Commie oppressors. And I'm failing to see how Hillary Clinton can be president without Bill Clinton influencing her every move.

And I'm sure the Obama camp is happy it has the LAT working so hard for him.

Politics, Italian Style

That's the derrier of Italian porn star whore Millie D'Abbraccio, and it's gracing not a movie poster, but her campaign poster for a seat on Rome's City Council.

She's running as a Socialist. Surprise!

And here's her the big idea of her campaign:

If elected, D'Abbraccio wants to create a red light area with strip clubs, erotic discos and sex shops called "Love City" just kilometers away from the Vatican.

"It would be something cute, clean -- nothing to do with prostitution," said the actress whose films include "The Kiss of the Cobra" and "Paolina Borghese, Imperial Nymphomaniac." (source)

Cute and clean. Uh-huh. As screwed up as DC is, and as far out as our leftists are, things here are better, far better, than they are in Europe.

Which is why leftists love Europe so much.

BBC Warming Wilt Chronicled

In last week's Sunday Scan, I ran a piece documenting how BBC had edited a news item on lower global temperatures to basically take out any reference to lower global temperatures.

Now The [UK] Register has run the series of emails between Warmie fundamentalist Jo Abbess and Beeb editor Roger Harrabin that resulted in BBC cowering in fear of being branded a "global warming skeptic."

The exchange started hot and got hotter, with Abbess finally threatening Harabin:

"It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel. They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth. I would ask : please reserve the main BBC Online channel for emerging truth." [Our emphasis]

Abbess was worried about the consequences of Harrabin's report. People might think The Wrong Thoughts. She spelled it out:

"A lot of people will read the first few paragraphs of what you say, and not read the rest, and (a) Dismiss your writing as it seems you have been manipulated by the sceptics or (b) Jump on it with glee and email their mates and say "See! Global Warming has stopped !"

And she signed off with a threat:

"I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics."

Harrabin meekly responded:

"Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more."

So the initial copy ...

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

... became:

But this year's temperature would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

If the debate on global warming is over, how come Abbess had to debate BBC into changing its story?

And if the media is to be believed, why did BBC fold?

BTW, a Google search on Jo Abbess now turns up a relatively strong 110,000 hits. I dug three pages into it and every link had to do with this scandal. God bless the blogosphere.

hat-tip: Icecap

Green Vs. Green Combat

And while we're on the subject of strange happenings in the Greenie/Warmie world, I must pass along this story from the NYT as the story that gave me the most giggles in the last week:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Call it an eco-parable: one Prius-driving couple takes pride in their eight redwoods, the first of them planted over a decade ago. Their electric-car-driving neighbors take pride in their rooftop solar panels, installed five years after the first trees were planted.

Trees — redwoods, live oaks or blossoming fruit trees — are usually considered sturdy citizens of the sun-swept peninsula south of San Francisco, not criminal elements. But under a 1978 state law protecting homeowners’ investment in rooftop solar panels, trees that impede solar panels’ access to the sun can be deemed a nuisance and their owners fined up to $1,000 a day. The Solar Shade Act was a curiosity until late last year, when a dispute over the eight redwoods (a k a Tree No. 1, Tree No. 2, Tree No. 3, etc.) ended up in Santa Clara County criminal court.

The couple who planted the trees, Carolynn Bissett and Richard Treanor, were convicted of violating the law, based on the complaint of their neighbor, Mark Vargas, and were ordered to make sure that no more than 10 percent of the solar panels are shaded.

A few weeks after The San Jose Mercury News wrote about the situation, the first act ended with the couple pruning 10 feet to 15 feet of Tree No. 6’s upper branches. The event drew more cameras than an episode of “Extreme Home Makeover.”

The Bissett-Treanor team responded as liberals will -- they turned to Big Brother, specifically in the form of Joe Simitian, a Dem (natch) state senator from nearby Palo Alto, who now will busy the state legislature with a new bill that will grandfather the owners of trees that pre-existed the installation of neighboring solar panels from prosecution under The Solar Shade Act.

The story concludes:

The state, Mr. Simitian pointed out, has a law to encourage the construction of one million solar roofs. “I’m trying to avoid a million neighborhood arguments,” he said.

Yes, that would be a lot of hot air.

Maoist Moron

In case you thought nothing much happened in San Francisco this week because the Chinese conspired with the Newsome administration to re-route the Olympic torch parade, you'd do well to visit this lengthy and impressive photo album at Pajamas media.

It was, in fact, quite a show with multiple anti-Chinese causes present and plenty of hostility flaring between pro- and anti-Chinese factions. Included is this photo of some anti-Chinese street theater:

Note the long-haired imbecile on the left in the Mao t-shirt. Who wears a Mao t-shirt on any day, and who is idiotic enough to wear one to an anti-China demonstration?

Beware when the left embraces your cause, because lame-brains will be coming to your side.

hat-tip: Jim

Five Years In Iraq

The invaluable MEMRI marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with excerpts from articles written by liberal Muslim commentators, all of which are worth reading.

I particularly liked this excerpt from an interview by Iraqi Journalist 'Abd Al-Jabbar Al-'Atabihad of a news vendor in Baghdad. He asked the vendor how he felt on the anniversary of the invasion and was told:

"At the start of my journey I stopped by the newspaper seller to ask how he was after five years of change. He said: I will sum up what you ask in a few words. Despite everything that happened and is happening, I feel pride in the fact that the years of dictatorship are gone. There were no worse years than those, when we were afraid of our own shadows and our own children. I won't claim that the situation now is ideal, but compared to the past, it is much better, without any comparison…

Despite the sorrows I find in our present situation, I feel relieved. In the days [of the dictatorship] I didn't feel optimistic. Now, I am optimistic about what is to come. What is happening now is passing; while it has gone on long, it will end - it could end in the twinkle of an eye.

How do liberals, who are supposed to be the strongest champions of freedom, oppose the war in Iraq when it is so obvious that the work we are doing there is the good, hard work of defending freedom, and freeing the oppressed?

Also in the MEMRI post is an "Apology to the Valiant American Soldier" by Iraqi liberal (truly liberal, as opposed to the shameful disgraces that constitute liberalism in the US today) Khudayr Taher. Its beauty surpasses mere words; it is much deserved blessing for our troops:

"We forsook you and betrayed you - we, whose history is an expression of massacres, conflagrations, and ruin. We killed you, and we killed our dream and aspiration of reaching the sun, the moon, and the stars - [we killed our dream] of availing ourselves of the opportunity to live as true humans, thanks to your presence.

"My dear, brave American soldier, you noble individual who traversed land and sea in order to write the story of Iraqi freedom for the first time in its modern history - you believed, in accordance with logic, self-evident truths, and rational thought, that a people who had been subjected to repression, starvation, and killing would dance for joy, and would thank Allah who sent you to them as a liberating angel. [You believed that] they would strew flowers and break out in songs of joy that would smash the chains of slavery, ignominy, and humiliation.

"Not even a writer of surrealistic [literature] or [theater of] the absurd would have imagined that the Iraqi people would revolt against their liberator and would rush ardently back to a new bondage of a different kind - that of the religious cleric, the tribal sheikh, and the gang leader. It was unthinkable that the people would go against logic, rational thought, and self-evident truths, in a mad rush towards the abyss and total ruin.

"My beloved, brave American soldier, we apologize to you, and we are saddened at our wretched and miserable selves. Since we are a people that slaughters itself, and kills one another, cutting off heads, what can you expect from us other than ingratitude, perfidy, and stabbing you in the back for the benefit of Iranian and Syrian intelligence and Al-Qaeda?..."

Pass that one along, will you?

Seething Dems

"She has no idea how many times I defended her. How many right-leaning friends and relatives I battled with. How many times I played down her shady business deals and penchant for scandals -- whether it was Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Cattle Futures, Web Hubbell, or Norman Hsu. She has no idea how frequently I dismissed her husband's serial adultery as an unfortunate trait of an otherwise brilliant man."

So writes Seth Grahame-Smith this morning at HuffPo, and that's just the beginning of a verbal unloading on Hillary (more than Bill, although he's swept up in it too) that leaves you wondering: If Grahame-Smith is aware of all this stuff, how could he have ever been for her anyway? How could he have defended her for 17 years, as he said he did, knowing that this is just Hillary Clinton being Hillary Clinton?

Mitt Romney recognized he wasn't going to win it, and stepped aside, leaving the nomination much less contested for John McCain. The seething anger we see throughout Grahame-Smith's piece could have been avoided if Clinton had realized what Mitt Romney recognized, but that's not in her genes.

So, rather than step aside and become the hero of her party, she made a strategy decision to go negative in advance of Ohio and Texas. Not just negative -- personal. She cynically chided Mr. Obama's message of hope. She played the victim card. The gender card. The Muslim card. ...

She accused Mr. Obama of his own shady business deals (the irony of which nearly ripped a hole in the fabric of space/time). She accused him of being two-faced on NAFTA, when it was her campaign that had winked at the Canadians.

There's nothing new in the HuffPo piece; it's all rehashed, recycled and previously reported. But it is a gauge of the anger that's present in the Dem party now, and the needle is buried deep in the red zone. He sees it as a no-win for the Dems, and seeing it so, this 17-year Clinton man agrees with Samantha Power that Hillary is a monster:

And if she does manage to secure the nomination, what about the scores of disenfranchised Obama supporters (many of them young people with little loyalty to the Democratic Party)? How will she bring them back into the tent? Hillary seems confident that this can be remedied by offering Mr. Obama a spot on her ticket. Really? And what would his motivation be for accepting? Playing third-fiddle to Bill?

However, if Mr. Obama goes on to secure the nomination, she'll have handed his rival a treasure trove of sound bites. All John McCain has to do between August and November is play clips of Hillary questioning Obama's experience and belittling his platitudes. In a way, she'll have become Mr. McCain's second running mate.

There's one little piece Grahame-Smith brings up that I'd forgotten. He chides Hillary for chiding Obama on his lack of foreign policy experience, noting that Bill Clinton, when elected, had less foreign policy experience than Obama has.

Times were different, but the reality of the Democrats hasn't changed. Threats to America are only seen from within. It's "Bush tromping on our rights" that rallies them, not "Al Qaeda drawing blood, and wanting more."

But that's an argument for after the conventions. Over the next few months, we will see the heart of the Dem party break as former Clintonites like Grahame-Smith seethe over the damage being done, and young Obamaniacs get a harsh dose of ugly political reality. The wound is destined to become much more infected by the time the Dems (with Florida and Michigan or without?) limp into the convention hall.

We always knew Hillary was a ball-breaker. Now we know she's a heart-breaker, too.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Clinton's Defense Chief Speaks

Maybe she's lobbying for a gig as head of Hillary's Pentagon. Whatever the reasons, feminist Gloria Steinem had a lot to say to The NY Observer, including:

• “From George Washington to Jack Kennedy and PT-109 we have behaved as if killing people is a qualification for ruling people.”
  
  
• “Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight [sic] years. [The media would ask], ‘What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?’ ... I mean, hello? This is supposed to be a qualification to be president? I don’t think so.”
  
  
• “I am so grateful that she [Clinton] hasn’t been trained to kill anybody. And she probably didn’t even play war games as a kid. It’s a great relief from Bush in his jump suit and from Kerry saluting.”

Thank you, Gloria, for reminding us of just how anti-military the Cintons are. From their first day in office, they attacked military institutions, budgets and weapons systems. To these two Vietnam anti-war protesters, the military became nothing more than a PR tool to fire up when scandal hit.

Remember Bill Clinton's notorious letter to his draft board, in which he laid out his opposition to the Vietnam war?

I have written and spoken and marched against the war. One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine. After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans here for demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16. ...

Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill and maybe die for their country (i.e. the particular policy of a particular government) right or wrong. Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors. I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year. ...

The decision not to be a resister and the related subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life. I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.

A lot of folks from my generation, myself included, were against the Vietnam war. Many of us, myself included, now realize that was youthful folly and wish we could take back what we said and thought at the time. But to my knowledge, Clinton and his life partner are not among us in that regard.

So during this campaign, as Hillary Clinton campaigns as the more adept of the Dem candidates at military issues, the more capable of handling the challenges of radical Islam's war on us, I've had to ask, "Where are the challenging questions? Who in the MSM is going to stand up to this?"

Now Steinem has opened the door pretty wide open. The Clinton campaign, having benefitted from Steinem's gallant effort to rally radical feminists and anti-war activists to the campaign, will distance themselves from the remarks, glad that they've been said.

They'll go for the best of both worlds now: Rallying the radicals and pandering to everyone else by apologizing for the criticism of McCain, calling him a hero. They will not address the other statements regarding Clinton's anti-war past, of course.

Ta-da; here's the statement, tacked onto the bottom of the NYObserver piece:

"Senator Clinton has repeatedly praised Senator McCain's courage and service to our country. These comments certainly do not represent her thinking in any way. Senator Clinton intends to have a respectful debate with Senator McCain on the issues."

Exactly.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Pimped Out At MSNBC

God protect us from idiot journalists ...

... a big job, even for God.

In this MSNBC clip, David Schuster interrupts lib commentator Bill Press, who is talking about Chelsea Clinton's campaigning, and says:

But doesn't it seem like Chelsea is being pimped out in some kind of way?

Since when do the public airwaves deserve speech like this? Can't Schuster say what's on his mind -- that the Clintons are exploiting their daughter -- without bringing whoring into it?

Schuster subsequently apologized, in that smarmy, limited, disgusting new style of apology that's becoming the national norm:

Some people have taken it literally. To the extent people feel I was being pejorative, I apologize for that.

What would be so hard about saying, "I'm sorry I used that word. It wasn't appropriate, it was pejorative, and I apologize to Chelsea Clinton, the Clinton campaign and our viewers." That's an apology that's worth uttering; Schuster's actually makes matters worse.

That said, the Clinton campaign apparently is using Chelsea in unseemly ways -- as Schuster explains before getting to his apology. He states that the Clinton's are using her to call super-delegates, "the unseemly side of politics."

And indeed it is. Words fail me ... Exploitative? Manipulative? Unconscionable? Clintonesque? Yes, that's it.

By happy coincidence, my Demotivator Calendar from Despair.com just happens to have as its February theme exactly the image and phrase that captures the Clintons:


As it says, it's best to avoid standing directly between a competitive jerk and his goals ... be the jerk a campaigning Clinton or a self-aggrandizing cable news reporter.

Ask Not Who You Can Smear For Your Country

On the subject of the Kennedys' endorsements of Barack Obama, Soccer Dad commented, "Think that any members of the MSM or Democratic Party will say, 'I knew Jack Kennedy ...?'"

... and you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy. Dan Quayle's ears probably still hurt from the verbal cuffing he got from Lloyd Benson during the VP debate, yet Barack Obama remains pretty much uncuffed by such unflattering comparisons.

Until today.

Writing in the Washington Monthly under the coy headline Ask Not, Ted Widmer lays out why Obama is no Jack Kennedy. Here's one of several paragraphs Widmer spins out on the topic:

Kennedy, of course, was a decorated veteran of World War Two, which he fought in the South Pacific. But before and after the conflict, he had acquired travel experiences that most people take a lifetime to accumulate, richly detailed in biographies like Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life. His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom in the pivotal year 1938, and young Kennedy was in the audience of the House of Commons as the Munich deal was furiously debated (the experience shaped his first book, Why England Slept). As a young man, he made American officials uneasy with his relentless desire to see parts of Europe and the world that few Americans ever encountered. In 1939 alone, he took in the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. As the war was ending, he attended the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, filing seventeen dispatches for the Chicago Herald American.

There's more, and it's all interesting, including how Widmer lionizes Kennedy's youthful encounters with Europe will dismissively brushing away Obama's youthful encounters with South Asia.

Now keep in mind that Widmer was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton.

Oh.

So, the answer to Soccer Dad's question -- will the MSM do a forthright comparison of Kennedy and Obama, a subject Caroline Kennedy's endorsement makes so ripe? -- remains "Not yet."

We have today a well planted counter-attack from the Clinton camp, a sign of a well-oiled political machine. But the overwhelming silence from the media is itself a sign of an MSM that has turned its back on Clinton and is "objectively" cheering Obama on.

Is it because they like Obama so? Maybe a bit. But if we conservatives know that Hillary will be the easier of the two to beat in November, don't you think the the overwhelmingly Democratic leadership of the MSM (the NYT editorial board notwithstanding) gets that, too?

Hat-tip: RCP; Illustration: Kyo

Poll Check: South Carolina Update

With 95 percent of precincts reporting in South Carolina, here's an update on this morning's Poll Check post. Real Clear Politics polling averages on the eve of voting are first; actual results are second:

Obama -- RCP: 38.4, Actual: 55
Clinton -- RCP: 26.8, Actual: 27
Edwards -- RCP: 19.2, Actual: 18

In South Carolina, the polls had it pretty right, as we see the undecideds breaking nearly entirely for Obama.

Now, let's revisit the questions I set up this morning:

First, if Edwards can't carry the state he was born in, the state next door to the state he represented in the Senate, why is he still running?

Who knows, but his staff says he is in fact still in the race, according to one Edwards staffer who was quoted on Fox tonight. Today's results proves that the man is attractive to too few, and useless to any Dem ticket. The man's wife has breast cancer; every day he remains on the campaign trail is a disgusting, egomaniacal day.

Next, what do the polls tell us about racial voting in the South? The hard data isn't in yet, but based on the exit polls, Obama got well but about 25 percent of black voters were with Obama, and all but about 25 percent of white voters split their votes between Clinton or Edwards. So, why do we bother to listen to the Dems about civil rights? This is change? I don't think so.

And finally, if Obama finishes with a lead of these proportions, what does it tell us about his future as a prez wannabe? He won a state where 50 percent of the Dem voters are black. He hasn't yet shown us if he can win a major, diverse state -- but this was a great day of Obama going into those big states.

Fox just announced that Caroline Kennedy will have an op/ed in tomorrow's NYT endorsing Obama, saying he has the impact on her that she's always heard her father had on others. That should help Obama greatly in New York, especially if she shows up on TV.

Quote Of The Day: Prez Bill Edition

"We are not Argentina. We are not a banana republic. No CEO, no prime minister, no one in any public position, anywhere on this earth, could get away with a straight-faced claim that 'I honestly believe my wife is the best candidate for the job.'”
-- Bruce Feirstein in Vanity Fair

All across America, Dems are waking up to a stink under the sink, the aroma of Bill Clinton campaigning again for president, striving to make 2008-2016 the era of the "We-Presidency."

Feirstein's example in the hallowed liberal walls of Vanity Fair:

Watching the Democrats debate in South Carolina, I was struck by the heated “I’m here. He’s not” exchange between Senators Obama and Clinton because it so perfectly encapsulates the problem with the two Clintons: Bill is out there with a shiv—presumably with the full countenance of his wife—while Hillary deftly manages to avoid being held accountable for him, or taking any responsibility herself. And therein lies my real issue, should this hydra-headed candidacy succeed: Bill Clinton will always be there. He’ll always be larger than life. And, if the last few weeks have demonstrated anything, we’ll never know who’s really calling the shots.

There was a time when "Bill Clinton will always be there" would have been a good thing to Dems. What happened?

Possibly it's that liberal/feminist sensitivities make the Left want Hillary to be her own woman, and they resent Bill for not letting her become that.

More likely, it's that they've found they really don't like Clintonian politics. This is what Jonathon Chiat wrote about today in the LAT:

Something strange happened the other day. All these different people -- friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read -- kept saying the same thing: They've suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we've reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons.

That list of "all these different people" is code, of course, for Obama supporters, but Chiat's viewpoint is fascinating even if partisan:

... But now that loathing seems a lot less irrational. We're not frothing Clinton haters like ... well, name pretty much any conservative. We just really wish they'd go away.

The big turning point seems to be this week, when the Clintons slammed Obama for acknowledging that Ronald Reagan changed the country. Everyone knows Reagan changed the country. Bill and Hillary have said he changed the country. But they falsely claimed that Obama praised Reagan's ideas, saying he was a better president than Clinton -- something he didn't say and surely does not believe.

This might have been the most egregious case, but it wasn't the first. Before the New Hampshire primaries, Clinton supporters e-mailed pro-choice voters claiming that Obama was suspect on abortion rights because he had voted "present" instead of "no" on some votes. (In fact, the president of the Illinois chapter of Planned Parenthood said she had coordinated strategy with Obama and wanted him to vote "present.") Recently, there have been waves of robocalls in South Carolina repeatedly attacking "Barack Hussein Obama."

In both Chiat's and Fierstein's piece, there's not a whiff of policy, of preferring Obama over Clinton because of his position on health care or the war or the economy; it is just a visceral and growing dislike of having to share a "D" with the Clintons.

Let's all shout a rousing "Told you so!" and wonder that so many Dems are finally seeing what was so obvious to us all along: That the Clintons are shamelessly political, that they see no reason not to be vicious in pursuit of their personal goals, and that with them, it's all about them.

But there's something much bigger here: It is becoming increasingly apparent that if Clinton wins the presidency, there will be a substantial group of Dems who are not on board with her, her husband, or their politics. Whatever marginal "mandate" she will claim from what would very likely be a very narrow victory will hardly even represent a mandate from the Democratic party.

That means there will be insubordination in the ranks, with congressional committee chairs not willing to goose-step along to her commands, a media that will be all too willing to set their truffle hogs digging after the next Clinton scandal, and a party that very well could be looking for an alternative in the elections of 2012.

For we conservatives who take the long-term view, it's beginning to look like even if Clinton gets the nomination and wins, this could be a no-lose election.

Dixville Notch Deuce

Today, the 19 folks who voted in Dixville Notch, NH, are back in hibernation, removed from the national spotlight for four years, when New Hampshire once again greedily grabs the national spotlight by tenaciously clinging to its role of host of the nation's first primary, and they crawl, locust-like, to the polls.

As you may recall, here was their call:

Obama - 7
Edwards - 4
Richardson - 1
Clinton - 0

McCain - 4
Romney - 2
Giuliani - 1

The media dutifully reported this political Puxatawney Pete-watch as if it mattered, just as they reported all the polls, as if they mattered. They were both equally accurate ... or inaccurate, naming McCain, but totally missing Clinton.

ABC's polling whiz, Gary Langer, writes this a.m.:

There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.

Sure, like it's never happened before and inaccurate polls are a troubling new phenomenon. The efficacy of Langer's "critical look" is undone a few sentences later when he says:

In the end there may be no smoking gun. Those polls may have been accurate, but done in by a superior get-out-the-vote effort, or by very late deciders whose motivations may or may not ever be known.

If they were "done in," no matter how they were done in, they were not accurate, so defending their accuracy is a refusal to understand that it's impossible to predict something as dynamic as the American political process, so there can be no fix. And therefore, no reason for over-coverage of polls ... or high-paid positions like polling director for ABC News.

Despite the failure of the New Hampshire polling, what will we see next? South Carolina polls!

Imagine an economic model that pegs the economy right half the time -- would we use it?

Or a set of business metrics that predicted a company's performance in half the quarters right and half the quarters wrong -- think its authors would hold onto their jobs long?

Or a global weather prediction model that got half ... oh, forget that one.

hat-tip: memeorandum

"Booo!" Hillary's Bad Messaging Catches Up With Her

clipped from youtube.com

When Hillary spoke about change following her defeat in the Iowa caucuses (clip above), standing behind a podium bedecked in her "Ready for Change" logo, she was flanked by Bill, Madeline Albright and a number of other hangers-on from the 90s.

What was stuck on the front of the podium was drowned out in cognitive dissonance by what was behind the podium.

There is a strategy in messaging in which you address your greatest weakness in your theme, like the very establishment reality of Hillary Clinton theming her campaign as "Ready for Change."

Clinton correctly sees Obama as her primary opponent, not Edwards. Given his level of experience that borders on being totally untested, Obama has no choice but to be the candidate of change.

Facing this, Hillary had two options: Experience or Change.

Change can work for her, since she is the first woman with a shot of being president, and that certainly is a change. And, she argues to the Dems, the biggest change that's needed is a change from George Bush's policy. But Obama can trump that, being the first black president and representing much more of a change, since he's different from both Bush and the Clinton establishment.

Hillary's "change" messaging strategy is hurting her, not helping her, as she learned today when she spoke to Dems in New Hampshire:

By comparison [with Obama] Hillary was twice booed. The first time was when she said she has always and will continue to work for "change for you. The audience, particularly from Obama supporters (they were waving Obama signs) let out a noise that sounded like a thousand people collectively groaning. The second time came a few minutes later when Clinton said: "The there are two big questions for voters in New Hampshire. One is: who will be ready to lead from day one? The second," and here Clinton was forced to pause as boos from the crowd mixed with cheers from her own supporters. "Is who can we nominate who will go the distance against the Republicans?”

If she hopes to bounce back from her Iowa hit and what appears will be another hit in New Hampshire, Hillary needs to replace her "change" messaging and replace it a "competence" message.

She should burn the "Ready for Change" signs and replace them with a new sign: "Tested. Trusted. Ready."

You can't deny the first and the last word, and they effectively sandwich the dubious claim of "trusted," effectively buffering it with her strong messages.

Now Let's Inflame The Muslims

Bill Clinton confidant Bob Kerrey, fresh from injecting Barrack Hussein Obama's Muslim background front and center into the campaign apologized today. And in the process, he set the stage for a chorus of fury from Muslims.

Kerry concluded a statement that never mentioned the words "Muslim"' or "Islam" with this:

“What I found myself getting into in Iowa - and it was my own fault - it was the wrong moment to do it and it was insulting,” Kerrey told the AP. “I meant no disrespect at all.”

Did he really say that calling someone a Muslim is de facto insulting? Disrespectful?

You ... you ... you Muslim you!

Out of the frying pan and into the fiery wrath of Islam.

Justice William Jefferson Clinton?

Bill Clinton is better known for expelling on robes than donning them, but don them he might if Douglas Kmiec's view, outlined in the WSJ, is correct.

The issue [there's that word picture again!] of Mr. Clinton's potential role has a serious side for Democrats already concerned about her persistently high negatives. The notion that Mr. Clinton will be a "shadow president," effectively circumventing the constitutional limitations on presidential service, presents a campaign opportunity for the GOP.

So if neither a Senate nor executive position will do, what does work? While it's probably not something the Hillary campaign would want us to contemplate, we should remember that there are three branches of government, and that it is widely anticipated that there will be one or more vacancies on the Supreme Court during the next presidential term.

Yeah, I know; I thought that too. But Bill's suspension from practicing law expired in 2006.

Kmiec lays out a good case for why Hil would appoint Bill -- who taught law at Arkansas, so he must be good -- and you leave the piece shaking your head in wonder ...

... and adding one more reason to the long list of reasons why HRC must not be the next prez.

hat-tip: Real Clear Politics

Postal Service Recalls Hillary Stamp

Get your morning chuckle here.

Sunday Scan

Pope Talks Tough

Pope Benedict XVI deftly chose Naples, with its long history of mafia killings and crimes, to speak out against using religion to justify violence but it's pretty clear he was directing his comments at others in the interdenominational audience of clerics:

"In a world wounded by conflicts, where violence is justified in God's name, it's important to repeat that religion can never become a vehicle of hatred, it can never be used in God's name to justify violence," he said. "On the contrary, religions can and must offer precious resources to build a peaceful humanity, because they speak about peace in the heart of man." (Breitbart/AP)

The Pope reportedly spoke to many Muslims during the confab, but only one was invited to his lunch table, Ezzeddine Ibrahim, one of the 138 Muslim scholars who recently signed a letter to Christian leaders urging Christians and Muslims to build on their common belief in one God to work for peace.

That's a conversation that should keep going.

Doolittle Didalot, Gottago

The SacBee reports that the ongoing ... three years ongoing ... investigation of GOP congressman John Doolittle in the Jack Abramoff scandal has led his supporters to demand a finding:

"After three years of investigation, if they haven't uncovered something that is chargeable, they should abandon this investigation and remove the cloud they've created over a very fine human being," [Lew] Uhler declared.

Sounds like a good idea, but I'm not so sure about Uhler's use of adverbs and adjectives. Political consultant Jeff Flint, who I've worked with a time or two, put it pretty well:

"I don't think we owe John Doolittle the right to run and lose. That's not acceptable to me. It's the most conservative district in the state. The only Republican who can lose it is John Doolittle, and he needs to step aside.

John?

Green From Green Offsets

The Contra Costa Times reports that "Joseph Farms is on the front end of a boom." It's actually the booms from rear ends that has dairy farmer Carl Morris sitting on an extra $250,000. Morris captures and sells the methane from his cows' manure and sells it as carbon credits to companies and individuals striving to cut their carbon footprints.

Just keep your footprints out of the now valuable cow pies!

More seriously, the paper, which reports from the fiercely beating heart of the Greenie and Warmie movements, now pegs the carbon offset business at $5 billion a year -- totally unregulated.

Is it an offset to merely save a tree, or do you have to plant a tree? No one knows. Is it an offset to sell carbon offsets for methane you are required by air quality regulations to capture? Again, no one knows.

C-SM rarely calls for more regulation of the marketplace, but c'mon. If there was a $5 billion market dreamed up by hardcore capitalists, you know Congress would have regulated it by now. Why not a market dreamed up by hardcore Warmies?

Decadence Triumphs

One of the most interesting reads of the week (with a hat-tip to Bookworm) is Michael Knox Beran's NRO piece on the death of Count Gottfried von Bismark, the great-great- grandson of Count Otto von Bismark, uniter of Germany.

Gottfried didn't quite live up to Otto's greatness, but he did have his superlatives. He had more cocaine in h is blood than the pathologist who autopsied him had ever seen. He also was an over-achiever when it came to infections, having Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, and an HIV infection.

Still, Beran posits, Otto and Gottfried really weren't that far apart.

In their coverage of Count Gottfried’s death, the newspapers contrasted the splendor of the ancestor’s achievements with the shameful notoriety of the descendant’s. Yet Otto von Bismarck was in his own way a character quite as demoniacal as Gottfried, only he enacted his Walpurgisnacht yearnings on a much grander scale. The Iron Chancellor fantasized that he was a bomb; confessed himself capable of lying awake through a whole night “hating”; and spoke of the “brutal sensuality” and “depraved fantasy” that led him “so close to the greatest sins.” His dreams were violent, his imagination washed in the darker oils: at the heart of Bismarckian self-culture was the question, What have you really hated till now?

It all makes half of my skin crawl, the German half.

Weimar Whiner

Speaking of Germany and crawling skin, historian Eric D. Weitz thinks the Weimar has taken far too much blame for the descent of Germany into Nazism. From History News Network:

Crazy or sane, left or right, these analogies all picture Weimar as nothing more than a conflict-ridden, sex-crazed epoch moving inexorably toward totalitarian dictatorship. Somehow, in some undefined way, a quantum of crisis became a stress-load that the political system could no longer bear. Too much sex or too much unemployment or too many Jews, and bamm! -- system collapse.

Bamm as opposed to bam notwithstanding, Weitz is not ready to let sex, unemployment or Jews take the rap. He's got a much more nefarious villain to poke his finger at:

Weimar did not collapse. It was deliberately murdered by a coalition of establishment conservatives and the extreme right. High government officials, bankers and factory owners, pastors and priests, army officers, old-line aristocratic landowners, some well-placed intellectuals -- those were the establishment conservatives. They were well-situated in powerful institutions like the state bureaucracy, the church hierarchies, big business, and universities, and they disposed of great resources. Yet they whined incessantly because the democracy had limited (though certainly not destroyed) their powers in the revolution that followed World War I and established the Republic. They were anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and anti-Semitic, if less rabidly so than Adolf Hitler and his cronies.

Weitz concludes, "when establishment conservatives play with the extreme right, draw them into the political system, make their ideas acceptable, then democracy is truly in danger."

The name of his column? Weimar America, natch. Weitz may have raised the intellectual level up a notch or two, but he's nothing more than another academician calling Bush a Nazi.

Hillary Dumped Socks

Is the new, softer Hillary real? Do I really have to ask? The Times of London answers, back arched and hissing loudly:

AS THE “first pet” of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed “chilly” Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?

Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.

Some believe the abandoned pet could now come between Hillary Clinton and her ambition to return to the White House as America’s first woman president.

Well, that sounds like a bit of an over-statement, but still:

“In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. “But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.”

Where are the media, though? The entertainment media were somehow falling all over themselves this week, gushing out reports on Ellen DeGeneres unadopting her adopted dog.

Where is the passion for Socks? Where is the outrage?

Bush Working With Dems On Iraq Transition

If I could nominate one news article this week as the one most likely to drive MoveOn.org and the Kos-sac into a fine dither, it would be the second excerpt from Bill Sammon's The Evangelical President that ran in the SF Chronicle.

In Sammon's piece, we see a president that is supposedly too stupid to articulate his way to the end of a sentence, and too partisan to ever look beyond the hateful blinders of his GOP cohorts, actually planning for the possible transition of the Iraq war to a Democratic president.

(Not that he thinks that will happen. In the first part of the two-parter, Bush predicts that Clinton will win the primary but lose the general, a statement that's obsessed the leftyblogs.)

Sammon reveals that Bush is "quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president."

Chief of Staff Josh Bolten told Sammon:

“He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat not only will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out.”

The Left will think the Bush is taking recreational breaks with Marion Barry when they read the president's remarks to Sammon:

The Examiner asked Bush why Democratic candidates such as Clinton and Barack Obama, who routinely lambaste his handling of Iraq, should take his advice.

“First of all, I expect them to criticize me. That’s one way you get elected in the Democratic primary, is to criticize the president,” Bush replied. “I don’t expect them to necessarily take advice from me. I would expect their insiders to at least get a perspective about how we see things.”

He added: “We have an obligation to make sure that whoever is interested, they get our point of view, because you want somebody running for president to at least understand all perspectives, apart from the politics.”

Besides, Bush suggested that Clinton and Obama just might benefit from his advice.

“If I were a candidate running for president in a complex world that we’re in, I would be asking my national security team to touch base with the White House just to at least listen about plans, thoughts,” he said.

And apparently the Clinton campaign, and possibly others, are doing just that -- listening to the thoughts of a man MoveOn et. al. would have us believe is incapable of thinking. Why shouldn't they? Unlike most of us, they've seen Bush up close and bluster as they will in public, they know he's a smart man with a clear, long-term vision.

Of course, his long-term vision could become a short-term vision in the hands of a Dem president, but it looks more and more like we will be able to wrap up Iraq much more successfully than appeared would be the case earlier this year.

Part of the reason for optimism is that Bush has done such a good job of making that possible. He's taken the hits on surveillance and Guantanamo so others won't have to. He's changed tactics and leadership. He's cobbled together his shattered party to stand up to Dem white-flag bullying. And, we now learn, he's reaching out to anyone who may take his chair to help them form a viable ongoing policy for Iraq.

There must be no joy in Kosville.

hat-tip: Jim