Obama throws his whole church under the bus.

Reverends Otis Moss, James Meeks, Michael Pfleger and Jeremiah Wright could not be reached for comment...

Yet.

Update: Found Via Maggie's Farm, "Faith Flashback: Obama Says Christian Right Drives People Apart".

Except for those clinging bitter unemployed gun-toting people it brings together, of course.

Meanwhile, Sweetness And Light links to the Chicago Tribune:

CNN is reporting this afternoon that Sen. Barack Obama is leaving Trinity United Church of Christ, his longtime religious home on Chicago’s South Side and a place that has triggered repeated controversies during his presidential bid.

Obama press aides could not immediately be reached to confirm the report.

The latest controversy erupted this past week when an Internet video emerged from an appearance at the church last weekend by the Rev. Michael Pfleger.

Pfleger, who has had numerous run-ins with Chicago’s Roman Catholic archdiocese involving his political activism, mocked Sen. Hillary Clinton from the pulpit during a guest appearance at the church. The priest also suggested the former first lady is a white elitist who felt entitled to the Democratic nomination.

Indeed he did.

More: Byron York notes:

CNN is reporting, based on CNN contributor Roland Martin, that Barack and Michelle Obama have resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ.

You can watch Martin and Soledad O'Brien give two big thumbs up to Wright's NAACP appearance back in late April here.

O' Brien was still gushing the next day. A week later though, CNN's John Roberts would helpfully declare the network "a Reverend Wright-free zone", before Obama declared himself completely Trinity-free today.

Can't wait to find out how all this will be written up in the next issue of The Trumpet!

Meanwhile, John Podhoretz has a few questions:

The breaking news is that tonight (Saturday night), Barack Obama will announce he has resigned his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago — the former pulpit of Jeremiah Wright from which the Catholic priest Michael Pfleger made his incendiary remarks about Hillary Clinton. This is of course the same church that Obama said contained within it every aspect of the black community (which raises the question of whether he is, by the same logic, resigning from the black community). There’s something about this decision that raises more questions than it answers. Is Obama doing this now because he is on the verge of securing the nomination and no longer needs to worry so much about disappointing his base? Or is he worried there is more to come on YouTube from the Trinity United stage and he wants to have dissociated himself from it all beforehand? Is he going to have to give another major speech on race to revise and amend his previous speech on race?

The answer to that last question depends on how tough a grilling he'll receive from the press. When cynical steely old media finally turns up the heat on its favorite candidate, will it be room temperature, or merely tepid?

P.J. O'Rourke revisits the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago after touring it as a kid: "At least people are still dressed the way I was a half-century ago: In jeans or shorts, T-shirts, and gym shoes. Except these are people of 40 or 50."

Beyond the steep decline of its visitors' sartorial standards, there is much about the museum itself that O'Rourke is displeased with. Hilarity ensues thusly:

The European inflictions are grimly illustrated. The first one upon which we are expected to reflect is the only decent thing (not counting the wheel, iron, cigarette papers, etc.) that Europeans brought to America's Indigenous peoples, "Religious Conversion." Second is "Disease," which should stir our sympathy but hardly our guilt. The exhibit points out that disease was the chief cause of suffering after European contact. Therefore, the horrors that beset The Ancient Americas following 1492 would have happened if the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María had been manned by Jimmy Carter, the Dalai Lama, and Bono.

You escape the pity parlor of When Worlds Collide and traverse a space of video screen talking heads and interactive displays with all their buttons being pounded by toddlers. This is "Living Descendants." The ancient Americans' modern relations are regular folks, as well as their ancestors were, and with clothes on, too, the same as you and me. Of course, if they're the same as you and me, why do they need a room in a museum any more than we do? Well, "despite centuries of injustice and oppression, today's "Indigenous peoples strive to sustain their cultural traditions."

You could say the same of the Irish. Being one, I looked for the exit to go find a drink. I wandered into a solemn, quiet, awe‑engendering place. Looking around the large, gloomy hall I saw the full-scale cutaway of winter quarters in MacKenzie Bay. Its labels are curled and yellowing but unchanged: respectful, factual, precise.

The ancient Americans weren't regular folks. They lived strange, spectacular lives on strange, spectacular continents untrod by man and more remote for them than Mars--or the world of museum curation--is for us. The ancient Americans were tough as hell. They did their share of nasty stuff. But even the Aztec don't deserve to be patronized, demeaned, and insulted by what is--or is supposed to be, or once was--one of the white man's great institutions of learning.

Give the "Ancient Americas" exhibit back to the ancient Americans, and the Field Museum along with it. If any of the heirs and assigns of the Aztec, Inca, or Maya feel inclined to practice a little human sacrifice on anthropologists, sociologists, moral relativists, neo-Marxists, and other conquistadors of modern academia, call it "maintaining the natural order of the world."

Yet another reminder that It'll be all right on the night.

Power Line's Scott Johnson catches Barack Obama touring Mount Rushmore:

He express[ed] curiosity about the filming of a chase scene in "North by Northwest," Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 classic starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint that included a death-defying scramble over Rushmore's presidential faces.

"How did they get up there in the first place?" he asked ranger Wesley Jensen.

"They didn't. It was a movie set," Jensen told him.

"Pretty spiffy, isn't it," said the Illinois senator, summing up his overall impressions.

As Scott writes, "Kids say the darndest things."

These gaffes are particularly damning to Obama though, because of his ridiculously messianic early expectations:

I wonder if Obama as gaffe machine will have legs outside the Blogosphere and conservative op-ed columns, though. At least this one is on record before it's deleted with a jump cut.

Chris Noth, "Mr. Big" in Sex And The City, "Thinks New York Is Too ‘Commercialized’":

The actor, who began residing in New York City in the 1970s, told Interview magazine that its appeal has greatly lowered over the years. “New York is pretty much commercialized to the point of no return,” he complained. Noth also misses the city’s creative scene, stating, “It’s very suburban. The art scene really left, except in patches. It’s all about sort of a corporate sensibility, and it’s squeezed out room for any other kind of sensibility.”

Ironically, for a guy who makes his living playing a cop on TV, it sounds like Chris longs for the nadir of Big Apple's law enforcement, proving once again the inviolability of Bill Whittle's Lou Grant Effect.

After demagoguing General Petraeus in their own ads--complete with special bro pricing from the New York Times, "Dems Angry That McCain Uses Petraeus's Image In His Ads, Too."

Mickey Kaus asks, "Where does Obama get that 'hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year'--an alleged increase he blamed on 'people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up'?":

The latest FBI statistics I can find are from 2006, not last year. They show about a 14% increase from 2005, by my calculation. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center only claims:

According to hate crime statistics published annually by the FBI, anti-Latino hate crimes rose by almost 35% between 2003 and 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available.

A 35% increase over four years is not "doubled last year." (Never mind why the SPLC may have picked 2003 as their base of comparison ).

Am I missing some Obama data source? Or is this an overly overlooked incident of Obama pulling convenient facts out of the air? ...

Suppose John McCain had said the same thing! ... Er, actually, McCain probably will say the same thing. And he'll probably get a pass too. Who'd attack him for it? Obama? The Dobbs-deriding MSM? This is not an area where you can rely on the normal adversarial political process to yield the truth, because Obama, McCain and the MSM essentially agree on immigration.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin notes that "Obama’s Electoral Problems Transcend Race", even as an MSNBC guest claims, "On the race issue, I wish Geraldine Ferraro would give it a rest. I don't think people were saying she was racist when she made her earlier remarks."

Well, other than an MSNBC host; two guesses as to his name.

And speaking of Ferraro, Ed Morrissey writes:

Geraldine Ferraro has not gone away, quietly or otherwise, since becoming a focal point of the charges of racism and sexism in the Democratic primary campaign. Today, she writes about healing the divide in the party, but not before the Barack Obama campaign acknowledges the hurt feelings it caused women and make amends. Since Obama’s advisers refuse to do so, Ferraro wants a study done to determine how much the two campaigns engaged in racism and sexism.

You can hear more from Jennifer Rubin, Capt. Ed, and Tammy Bruce, on the subject of identity politics amongst the left, on this week's edition of PJM Political.

Dean Barnett writes, "We went through similar times in the early 1990’s. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union crumbled and we won the Cold War. Yet it was beyond the typical liberal’s ability to acknowledge that Ronald Reagan had anything to do with these accomplishments":

What bin Laden said about the strong horse and the weak horse was right. And he and his minions don’t look like the strong horse running for their pathetic lives in Waziristan for years on end. The Islamic world has watched as al Qaeda has become the weak horse. President Bush deserves credit for fighting the war with the steadfastness he has. Remember, it was less than four years ago when John Kerry implored us to fight a more sensitive war on terror. Somehow I doubt sensitivity would have had the same impact on the Jihadists as the predator drones that now fill their skies.

I’ve never been reticent about pointing out the Bush administration’s shortcomings. Its spendthrift ways, its elevation of unqualified lackeys to positions of importance, its longtime adherence to ineffective tactics in Iraq, its inability to communicate…I better stop – I could go on all day. My point is that the Bush administration has been a flawed vehicle, and I’ve never shied away from saying as much.

But President Bush is on the verge of winning the big ones. It will be no small thing if he has shown and mostly secured the path to victory in Iraq and in the War on Terror before leaving office. It will drive the left crazy and as was the case with Reagan, it will take liberals decades to admit it, but Bush will strut back to Crawford a big winner.

Few remember that Abraham Lincoln spent years running a dreadful war effort presided over by the ineffective likes of George McClellan and Joe Hooker. And those who do remember such things view them charitably, as Lincoln got things right by the end. If President Bush does wind up also having gotten the big things right, something that seems increasingly likely, the enormous successes of his administration will dwarf the failures in history’s eyes.

As the American Thinker wrote a couple of years ago, paraphrasing the slogan of another president whom history has judged far more kindly than the harsh chattering classes of his time, "Give 'em hell, George."

Libertas' Dirty Harry, who bravely suffers through all sorts of Hollywood drek so you that don't have to, has surprisingly kind words for the new Sex And The City movie.

(As does Kyle Smith of the New York Post, who's also celebrating his first anniversary in the Blogosphere.)

CNN helpfully airbrushes Obama's Memorial Day "fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience today" gaffe for him.

Meanwhile, an equally-obliging MSNBC runs interference for Father Pfleger, much as CNN has done for Rev. Wright.

How many points would Newsweek's Evan Thomas say the media is worth to their candidate this time around?

Dan Rather* in 2001:

Bill O'Reilly: I want to ask you flat out, do you think President Clinton's an honest man?

Dan Rather: Yes, I think he's an honest man.

O'Reilly: Do you, really?

Rather: I do.

O'Reilly: Even though he lied to Jim Lehrer's face about the Lewinsky case? :

Rather: Who among us has not lied about . something?

O'Reilly: Well, I didn't lie to anybody's face on national television. I don't think you have, have you?

Rather: I don't think I ever have. I hope I never have. But, look, it's one thing

O'Reilly: How can you say he's an honest guy then?

Rather: Well, because I think he is. I think at core he's an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing anybody would say so, but I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.

-Fox News's "The O'Reilly Factor," May 15, 2001

But that was then, this is now, and the President no longer has a D after his name: "CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to McClellan: Is President Bush ‘A Serial Liar?’"

Read More »

At least in terms of energy policy, as Victor Davis Hanson notes:

I don't quite understand why one party or the other doesn't campaign on delivering more energy to the American people to lower costs, keep the world price down, and money out of the hands of terrorists, and to address U.S. debt and the falling dollar. There seems no contradiction between wanting nuclear power, clean coal, tar and shale, more drilling off our coasts and Alaska — and more conservation, more money for hydrogen, biofuels, more solar, wind, etc.

But unfortunately the former seems to be the more conservative position, the latter the more liberal, when in fact they hardly are incompatible, since the first is the short-term solution that ensures we don't go bankrupt and empower our enemies as we evolve toward the long-term answers. Nothing could be more populist than trying to deliver affordable energy; but it's a position that so far neither candidate is addressing — maybe because Obama's base is still anti-nuclear and against drilling; and McCain is almost indistinguishable from him on the coasts and ANWR. One otherwise would have thought that energy would be the critical issue of the campaign, and instead — relative silence from both on stump?

Related thoughts from James Pethokoukis.

Pretty amusing anecdote from The Diplomad, who writes, "Go to ‘Google,’ type in the phrase ‘highly educated voters,’ hit ‘Search News.’ Go ahead. We'll wait . . . OK, what do you get? All sorts of stories about Obama voters, and how he attracts the ‘highly educated.’ You will get the same from the pundits on network and cable news: lots of blather about how Obama appeals to ‘highly educated’ Americans":

A few years ago, more than I care to mention, I headed a large office at the State Department. I got tasked with hiring a couple of Presidential Management Interns (PMIs). These PMIs come from the elite of the elite student body at the elite of the elite universities. They get hired on a temporary basis and then, usually, get offered prestigious jobs in the government. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that whatever else I did, I had to hire women. So I began to pore over the resumes. My heart sank. I felt inadequate and so, so inferior to these kids. Their resumes, impeccably printed and organized, using dozens of words ending in "-ization," and listing prowess with a dazzling array of complex software programs, described accomplishments beyond my wildest dreams -- especially for when I was the applicants' age!

I thought I should resign and give up my job to one of the "brilliant" child wonders. Ah, naive me. I obviously had spent too much time overseas. I saw resumes as truthful documents actually written by the applicants, applicants, in this case, full of accomplishments and possessed of massive brains throbbing with energy and ideas. As I, however, kept reading, even slow-witted me began to notice oddities. They all began to look the same: the font, the format, the wording, the list of classes and even -- horrors! -- the "accomplishments." I noted this in passing to a cynical old friend (now, alas, departed) who worked in "human resources" (what a great phrase that). He laughed, "You dope! They get classes on how to write resumes! They have professors and computer programs that put these things together for them." (Remember, folks, computers were new things back then.) He said, "Just randomly pick a couple of women students, they're all the same, hire'em, and move on."

I could not do that. I stole a friend's idea and devised "The World War II Test." I invited the applicants for interviews. These PMI wannabes came off as slick and somewhat rude. I noted something among my subjects, a sense of entitlement, they all, to varying degrees, emitted a message along the lines of "Why are you bothering me with this silly interview? I am obviously brilliant. I have a degree from Columbia. I am not going to spend my whole life as you have in this stupid bureaucracy. I just need this to add to my resume. I am in a hurry." I hit them with the test, which consisted of about dozen questions about WWII and its aftermath. I recall a few,

Can you tell me how US troops got into Europe in the first place? When was WWII? (I would accept a variety of answers as long as the applicant could defend the dates as the true start and end of WWII.) What nations comprised the principal Allied and Axis powers? Who was Neville Chamberlain? What he did he do at Munich and with whom? Who was Mussolini? What did he do to Ethiopia? Who was Stalin? Who was Hirohito? What was D-Day? What President ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs and why? Can you name a result of the Conference at Yalta? What was the Berlin Airlift?

Of the 14 or 15 applicants I interviewed, only one got them all right -- the only male in the crowd, by the way. None, zero, zip of the rest got even ONE right. Not a single one. A very irritated applicant asked me, "Do we really need to know this old stuff?" I noted that we worked with NATO and Europe, hence, it was important to know the background that led to the creation of NATO and the then just-concluded Cold War. She stared at me and said, "What does World War II have to do with NATO, the Cold War and Europe?" I promptly offered the job to the male -- oh, the cries from "Human Resources" -- who turned it down for a more lucrative one in the private sector. In the best Foreign Service tradition, I stalled hiring anybody else, let my two-year assignment run out, and left my poor successor to get stuck with one of the clueless ones.

Back to our story. I wonder how many of the "highly educated voters" could pass that WWII test? Or the Vietnam War Test? Or the Cold War test? Or know much about American history? Or understand the economy? And worst of all, the odds are they can't fire a gun, either.

Well, there's always Wikipedia to fall back on...

Found via Michelle Malkin, who spots a school once again conflating pop culture with the real thing.

Ramesh Ponnuru writes that some are finding the phrase "War On Terror" offensive. A headline writer at the BBC, found by way of Tim Blair, safely ensconced in his plush new virtual digs, inadvertently creates one possible replacement euphemism.

I know it's designed as a hit piece against McCain, but Fred Kaplan's Slate article sounds remarkably reassuring in spite of its author's intentions:

Many foreign-policy mavens have wondered which John McCain would step to the fore once he started running for president in earnest—the McCain who consorts with such pragmatists as Richard Armitage, Colin Powell, and George Shultz; or the McCain who huddles with "neocons" like Robert Kagan, John Bolton, and William Kristol (before he started writing op-eds for the New York Times).

Last month, the Times published a story about the battle for McCain's soul that's being waged by those two factions.

On Tuesday, McCain cleared up the mystery: He's with the neocons. He is, fundamentally, in sync with the foreign policy pursued by George W. Bush for his first six years in office.

Compare and contrast the above with Jennifer Rubin's take on Obama's Middle East advisors:

I have no doubt that Obama’s staff will rush forward to declare, as they have before, that Brzezinski is only a informal adviser. But the question remains why Obama has had a retinue of advisors (both formal and not) like Brzezinski, McPeak, and Malley who hold views so antithetical to Obama’s supposedly unassailable record and views on Israel. You can understand how rational voters, Jewish or not, would conclude that something is amiss and wonder why Obama does not disassociate himself entirely from these people. But no, those Jews are just hung up on Obama’s name and the phony emails about Obama’s Muslim upbringing. That must be it.

Heh.

Incidentally, Rubin, along with Tammy Bruce, Ed Morrissey, and Steve Schmidt, a senior McCain campaign adviser, were the guests this week on PJM Political. If you missed it on XM's POTUS '08 channel today, tune in here.

Listening to the clip of Father Pfleger on The Hugh Hewitt Show, before he goes off into the high dudgeon apex of his anti-Hillary shtick, I got a distinct Dick Shawn in The Producers flashback from the tone of his voice:

Come to think it, Pfleger sounds infinitely more appropriate for the role that Shawn's character was auditioning for.

As I wrote back in March, when the New Black Panthers dropped in on Barack Obama's Website:

Remember those carefree days so long ago when all we worried about with liberal presidential candidates were bimbo eruptions?

After squelching the Panthers, the Ayers, and Reverend Wright, comes yet another radical chic acquaintance to be thrown under the bus, and airbrushed out of the campaign:

As I have traveled this country, I've been impressed not by what divides us but by all that that unites us. That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward-looking rhetoric...

I'll bet he is.

Update: "Meanwhile, Back at Trinity United..."

More: "Houston, we have a problem."

Last Update For Now: "All of Barack Obama’s men of bad faith": Your one-stop shopping guide to all of Obama's men of the cloth (as Mort Sahl once quipped about Jesse Jackson, that cloth being cashmere), so far.

Well give 'em credit: at least they're threatening to recreate 2000 instead of '68. But like much of "progressivism's" rhetoric, this nostalgic cliche is starting to feel almost as old and clapped out as your local folkie playing "Imagine" and "Give Peace A Chance" on his out of tune acoustic guitar. Or, given her early role in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, another chorus of "Let's Do The Time Warp, Again!"

“I’ve got a lot of flak from feminists who feel that I should be supporting Hillary Clinton, but I thought the whole point of feminism is that you’re not supposed to be defined by gender,” she says…

Always busy, [Susan] Sarandon is about to start work on the romantic period drama The Colossus, but with the presidential election campaign being heatedly contested, she also has bigger things to consider.

“If McCain gets in, it’s going to be very, very dangerous,” she says.

“It’s a critical time, but I have faith in the American people. If they prove me wrong, I’ll be checking out a move to Italy. Maybe Canada, I don’t know. We’re at an abyss.”

Yes, it's always a choice of polar opposites, isn't it? The Heaven-on-Earth of the messiah-like rookie liberal Democrat senator, or the abyss of the war hero moderate Republican senator.

And speaking of which, Allah notes:

She’s been a trooper up ’til now — 36 years of her life lived under Republican presidents and still, somehow, she hasn’t left yet. How does she stand it?

Meanwhile, Brian Faughnan has the logical response that most will have after the third consecutive go-around of this rhetoric: prove it to me, sister:

It's a valiant try by Ms. Sarandon, but the voters are unlikely to be fooled. We'll never know how many cast votes for George Bush in 2004, anticipating that Alec Baldwin, Robert Redford, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Moore, and many others would pack up and move to Canada. Alas, they failed to hold up their end of the deal.

Tell me Ms. Sarandon: how do I know that if I vote for John McCain, you'll keep your promise?

Canada--it's just a jump to the left!

Another presidential year, another plea from the left to avoid the L-Word, as Paul Beston writes at Tech Central Station:

"A lot of these old labels don't apply anymore," Obama told the New York Times recently, referring to political terms like "conservative" and "liberal." In his stump speeches during the campaign, he has frequently championed policy goals by claiming that they aren't in fact liberal: "There's nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics," he has said. "That is common sense. There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they come home . . . . There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has healthcare. We are spending more on healthcare in this country than any other advanced country, but we've got more uninsured. There's nothing liberal about saying that doesn't make sense, and we should do something smarter with our healthcare system."

In arguing that "labels don't apply anymore," Obama is making the same claim, nearly verbatim, that Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and other Democrats have made over the years, stretching back over a generation. What these candidates found out the hard way was that labels mean plenty, especially when they refer to something that people understand--like liberalism.

Americans learned over several decades what liberalism, at least modern liberalism, was all about. Contrary to some claims that conservatives, in a sinister plot, defamed the word, liberalism did a pretty good job defaming itself: from the anything-goes ethos of the 1960s to radical war protestors, from tax-and-spend government and welfare policies to lax criminal justice, pacifism abroad, and a wide-ranging contempt for the institutions and values of American life, liberals took what had been the dominant political current in American politics and made it into a pejorative term. Today, while centrist American voters may blanch at some of the Republican Party's positions, they have no wish to go back to governmental progressivism.

If they did, Obama-never one to miss a rhetorical trick--would be resurrecting the word "liberal" as change we can believe in.

Obama's evasion of the implications of "liberal" are worth noting by contrast with conservatism, a "label" that most politicians of that persuasion accept gladly, if they aren't already wrapping themselves in the mantle. Whatever the despair of the Bush years, conservatism does not come saddled with the hardened negatives that centrists and independents tend to associate with liberalism. For many, it still represents sensibility and practicality, as well as success, dating back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The Bush years have in fact not discredited conservatism, a point made suggestively--if, one senses, accidentally--by, of all people, Michael Dukakis.

"'What's conservative about invading Iraq?" he asked in a Washington Post story. "What's conservative about a $400 billion deficit?" Though Dukakis went on to say, shades of 1988, that "The terms have lost their meaning," his rhetorical questions underscore that even liberals don't connect the Bush administration's failures to traditional conservative principles. They criticize Bush by holding his policies up to conservative standards--and finding him lacking. What Bush has discredited is not conservatism, but the Republican Party. The number of Americans answering to that party identification has slipped markedly since Bush entered the White House.

Placed in this light, John McCain's "maverick" status might be the best chance that Republicans have. The candidate can claim, plausibly or not (depending on the issue), to be a "Reagan conservative" - still a golden phrase - while freely criticizing the Republican Party, an avocation that comes naturally to him. In doing so, he can run on ideas instead of institutional, party identification.

Contrast that with Obama or Hillary Clinton, either of whom will run under the banner of the Democratic Party - an affiliation that has increased during the Bush years - but will avoid voicing the party's governing philosophy, which is, was, and remains liberalism.

Both Hillary and Obama have attempted to define themselves as "Progressives" rather than "Liberals"--but that word has its own set of repercussions, not quite airbrushed out of history.

Found via Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog, PrestoPundit quotes this excerpt from Vanity Fair's recent cover story on RFK:

As Kennedy began [to speak at Kansas State U.], his voice cracked, and those near the stage noticed his hands trembling and his right leg shaking.

After praising [Al] Landon's distinguished career, he said, "I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.' " ...

At first he seemed tentative and wooden, stammering and repeating himself, too nervous to punctuate his sentences with gestures. But with each round of applause he became more animated. Soon he was pounding the lectern with his right fist, and shouting out his words.

Rene Carpenter watched the students in the front rows. Their faces shone, and they opened their mouths in unison, shouting, "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"

Hays Gorey, of Time, called the electricity between Kennedy and the K.S.U. students "real and rare" and said that " .. John Kennedy ... himself couldn't be so passionate, and couldn't set off such sparks."

Kevin Rochat was close to weeping because Kennedy was so direct and honest. He kept telling himself, My God! He's saying exactly what I've been thinking! ..

Kennedy concluded by saying, "Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies--and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once said was the last, great hope of mankind. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America but for the heart of America. In these next eight months we are going to decide what this country will stand for--and what kind of men we are."

He raised his fist in the air so it resembled the revolutionary symbol on posters hanging in student rooms that year, promised "a new America," and the hall erupted in cheers and thunderous applause.
As he started to leave, waves of students rushed the platform, knocking over chairs and raising more dust. They grabbed at him, stroking his hair and ripping his shirtsleeves. Herb Schmertz was left with a lifelong phobia of crowds. University officials opened a path to a rear exit, but Kennedy waved them off and waded into the crowd ...

PrestoPundit doesn't give the date, a transcript of the speech in the Kennedy library notes that it occured March 18th, 1968.

As James Piereson has noted, it's impossible to picture JFK uttering such language himself, which illustrates how far to the left liberalism as a whole swung in less than five years after his death, and which has repercussions to this day. As I looked at the start of the month in a Silicon Graffiti video, by 1970, Radical Chic would become so prevalent that establishment liberal elites such as Leonard Bernstein would think little of holding fund raisers in his Park Ave. duplex for such fascist groups as the Black Panthers, who would quickly be supported by the Weathermen, who were founded by William Ayers, whom Sen. Obama has ties with.

Thomas Bartlett asks, "Did a 'dream team' of biblical scholars mislead millions?":

Marvin Meyer was eating breakfast when his cellphone buzzed. Meyer, a professor of religious studies at Chapman University, has a mostly gray beard and an athletic build left over from his basketball days. His friends call him "the Velvet Hammer" for his mild demeanor. He's a nice guy.

The voice on the other end belonged to a representative of the National Geographic Society. They were working on a project and wanted his help.

"That's very interesting," he remembers saying. "What do you have in mind?"

"We can't tell you," was the reply.

That was not the answer he expected.

"Let me see if I understand this," Meyer said. "You'd like me to agree to do a project with you, but you won't tell me what that project is. Is that right?"

"Exactly."

He would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement first — which, in the end, he agreed to do. Not long afterward, Meyer found himself locked in an office in Washington, with a desk, a pile of dictionaries and lexicons, and one of the most sought-after religious texts in recent history, the Gospel of Judas. For a week he worked almost nonstop on the 26-page text, translating the Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language written with Greek letters, into English. As he translated, a startling portrait of Judas Iscariot emerged. This was not the reviled traitor who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. This was the trusted disciple, the close confidant, the friend. This was a revelation.

When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April 2006, it made headlines around the world — with nearly all of those articles touting the new and improved Judas. "In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal," read the headline in The New York Times. The British paper The Guardian called it "a radical makeover for one of the worst reputations in history." A documentary that aired a few days later on National Geographic's cable channel also pushed the Judas-as-hero theme. The premiere attracted four million viewers, making it the second-highest-rated program in the channel's history, behind only a documentary on September 11.

* * *

One of the seven million people who watched the National Geographic documentary was April D. DeConick. Admittedly, DeConick, a professor of biblical studies at Rice University, was not your average viewer. As a Coptologist, she had long been aware of the existence of the Gospel of Judas and was friends with several of those who had worked on the so-called dream team. It's fair to say she watched the documentary with special interest.

As soon as the show ended, she went to her computer and downloaded the English translation from the National Geographic Web site. Almost immediately she began to have concerns. From her reading, even in translation, it seemed obvious that Judas was not turning in Jesus as a friendly gesture, but rather sacrificing him to a demon god named Saklas. This alone would suggest, strongly, that Judas was not acting with Jesus' best interests in mind — which would undercut the thesis of the National Geographic team. She turned to her husband, Wade, and said: "Oh no. Something is really wrong."

She started the next day on her own translation of the Coptic transcription, also posted on the National Geographic Web site. That's when she came across what she considered a major, almost unbelievable error. It had to do with the translation of the word "daimon," which Jesus uses to address Judas. The National Geographic team translates this as "spirit," an unusual choice and inconsistent with translations of other early Christian texts, where it is usually rendered as "demon." In this passage, however, Jesus' calling Judas a demon would completely alter the meaning. "O 13th spirit, why do you try so hard?" becomes "O 13th demon, why do you try so hard?" A gentle inquiry turns into a vicious rebuke.

Then there's the number 13. The Gospel of Judas is thought to have been written by a sect of Gnostics known as Sethians, for whom the number 13 would indicate a realm ruled by the demon Ialdabaoth. Calling someone a demon from the 13th realm would not be a compliment. In another passage, the National Geographic translation says that Judas "would ascend to the holy generation." But DeConick says it's clear from the transcription that a negative has been left out and that Judas will not ascend to the holy generation (this error has been corrected in the second edition). DeConick also objected to a phrase that says Judas has been "set apart for the holy generation." She argues it should be translated "set apart from the holy generation" — again, the opposite meaning.

As with The Da Vinci Code, It sounds like National Geographic attempted to not-so-boldly go into the same moral inversion that Kenneth Anger had already gone 30 years ago, only to have the rug pulled out from under them. As Orrin Judd writes, "When the marketing campaign comes first the translation is bound to be sketchy."

Michael Ledeen writes, "It's been a bad day for the Dems' efforts to rewrite history":

First Obama gets caught inventing American armed forces in Poland at the end of World War II, and then Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Odom give us this bit of puffery in the WaPo: "The United States would have a better chance of success (with Iran) if the White House abandoned its threats of military action and its calls for regime change."

It's a hoax. This White House ( I say with great regret) has NEVER called for regime change in Iran. On the contrary, this administration has constantly said that they want a change in behavior, and have not advocated a change of regime. Indeed, back when, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage actually said that Iran was a democracy, and his boss, Colin Powell, loudly announced he didn't want to get involved in "Iranian family squabbles."

And aside from "well informed journalists" and other self-proclaimed insiders, no one I know of, this side of Norman Podhoretz (NOT a high ranking official of the government), has threatened military action against Iran either, aside from the age old vanilla language "nothing off the table."

This nonsense gets published and debated, as if there were anything to debate. Meanwhile we might remind ourselves that Odom and Brezezinski served a president named Carter, who refused to sign a "no first use" promise with regard to nukes, with the Soviet Union. So it was fine to have it on the table then, but bad now.

Related thoughts on Obama and Brzezinski from Jennifer Rubin.

At Hot Air, Allah writes, "Obama rejects McCain’s proposal for a joint trip to Iraq":

If they’re worried about the military giving them a dog-and-pony show, the answer isn’t to decline the trip but to counterpropose a more comprehensive trip than even McCain’s suggesting and turn it into a real fact-finding mission. Don’t spend two hours looking at charts with Petraeus. Take four or five days; go to Basra and Mosul. If they simply can’t suspend campaigning for that long, send a joint team of advisors from both sides. He won’t do it because he’s afraid of what he might hear, which goes back to a point I’ve been making ever since the Jamil Hussein saga: The left would have you believe Iraq hawks can’t admit that any aspect of the war might be going badly, but the opposite has always been more nearly true. For purposes of the Narrative, it’s doves who can’t admit that any aspect of the war might be going better, as if to acknowledge that the surge has helped to improve security or that the Iraqi army is performing better than expected lately or that plenty of Shiites are tired of Sadr’s crap would be to validate neoconservatism or somehow tacitly rubber-stamp an invasion of Iran. So how about it, Barry? Break the mold. I’m sure there’ll plenty of grim news in the briefings too to help take the sting out of the reports of progress. Exit question: How on earth did we arrive at an election scenario where the hawk is trying to bait the dove into talking about Iraq?

I think it sort of vaguely echoes this moment from 2004, to be honest. But the real question will be what Team McCain does with it as each campaign moves forward.

As Ken Shepherd notes, the media has become increasingly lax on reporting on Obama's miscues precisely during the period when he began to gather momentum as the DNC's increasingly presumptive nominee:

Barack Obama's penchant for gaffes is hardly anything new, but as the Illinois Democrat has come closer and closer to becoming the official Democratic presidential nominee, it seems the mainstream media have become less and less likely to note his gaffes. A cursory Web search finds a few instances of the mainstream media picking up on Obama gaffes in 2007, when Sen. Clinton was well ahead of Obama in the polls and was widely expected to be marching towards coronation in Denver.

"Obama's gaffes start to pile up" read the headline for a March 28 Lynn Sweet column [in the Chicago Sun-Times]. March 28, 2007, that is.

Of course, this is far from the first time the MSM has collectively backed off on reporting on their candidate's gaffes once he became the nominee. As far as old media was concerned, Kerry was just another guy, to borrow one of Bill Parcells' favorite phrases, about someone who's a competent team player but no athletic superstar, until he locked up the nomination and became untouchable.

Related: "Obama camp on Auschwitz: Sorry, he meant Ohrdruf".

More: And he meant it when he referenced Auschwitz (back then he referred to a grandfather, not an "uncle" as he did yesterday) previously in 2002, I'm sure.

"Media Coverage [Of Economy] Was More Upbeat at Start of the Great Depression"--Of course, that was right around the time that FDR was campaigning as a sort of Jurassic libertarian, which illustrates how radically narratives can change over time.

But then economic coverage is far from the only example of old media's having undergone a post-1960s hardening of the attitudes. As Orrin Judd recently wrote, "What Actually Remains Of Nixonland...is just a press corps that treats everyone like the enemy and, therefore, fails at the basics of its profession."

When I first started playing guitar, I remember reading a sort of dual-interview published in 1982 in the now sadly-deceased Musician magazine between Robert Fripp of King Crimson (a pretty amazing guitarist in his own right) and John McLaughlin, who, as I've written before, I think can safely be considered amongst the greatest guitarists alive:

McLaughlin: I don't meditate or fast or anything, but I reflect on the ramifications of what I do. For example, there's a relationship between two chords that you've known, that I've known, for a long time, and only recently do I begin to discover this more intimate relationship, what it means. Even though I've looked at these chords from every possible viewpoint, I'm looking for a way that maybe exists up there, but I don't know where it is. Then, a little while ago, I discovered it, it just arrived. So the work that we do, I don't think we benefit from it until later. But once we have colors and palette, the richer the palette is, the richer the music can be.

Fripp: That D major chord which changed you from a pianist to a guitarist, what color would that be for you?

McLaughlin: What color...? (pause) I think it could be green.

Fripp: Exactly what I would've said...

McLaughlin: It's got to be yellow and some blue.

Fripp: A major for me is yellow and A minor inclines toward white, which is my C major. Graham Bond said it was red.

McLaughlin: C major, red? No, E major, I would say, is red.

Fripp: E major for me is very blue, a kind of royal blue, and when you get to E minor it becomes more of a night blue, with kind of stars...

McLaughlin: That's very interesting...

Fripp: G is very greenish, but not quite.

I've long thought that this passage was simply musical hyperbole, but perhaps its an example of a condition that Oliver Sacks describes as "synesthesia".

(I wonder if Jan Hammer "suffers" from that...?)

Dropping into a story you know nothing about and trying to make sense of the players (especially when they have no desire to talk to you because they sense a hatchet job in the works) is typically an old media recipe for disaster--and increasingly so in the age of the Blogosphere, where the subjects of the story can easily rip holes in the story's narrative. (Related thoughts here and here.)

Parachute photojournalism on the other hand, can often lead to spectacular results.

Was Obama's uncle part of the Russian brigade that liberated Auschwitz...or, far more likely, has Hillary just been out-Tuzla'ed by Obama (or his speech writers)?

And will Hillary, looking for a way to put her own recent gaffe behind her, take advantage of the opportunity she's just been handed?

Update: Jim Geraghty writes:

If the MSM would either A) be more forgiving of Republican officials who they don't like or B) be a little tougher on Democratic officials they do like, the world would be a better place. In this case, I don't think Barack Obama is deliberately lying, or trying to pull a fast one. It sounds like a family "legend" in which the specific horrors of war witnessed by his uncle are mistaken as the years go by. It happens, and Obama only deserves the lightest of metaphorical slaps on the wrist for it. But it would help if his fans in the press actually paid attention to what he says.

Exactly. More at Hot Air.

More: Charles Johnson writes:

Jim Geraghty thinks Obama wasn’t really lying here; it was just another gaffe.

But what kind of “mistake” is it to make up an (apparently) nonexistent uncle, and attribute heroic actions to this nonexistent person that they could not possibly have performed? And what kind of person would give a speech to veterans on Memorial Day—and make up a phony war story?

Definitely not just a gaffe; rather, a deliberate attempt to invoke the name of Auschwitz for political gain.

Charles adds that "This digression into fantasy was apparently not in Obama’s prepared speech".

"I think it is important to take prospective presidential children into account when casting one's vote. You know, because we do not need another Amy Carter fiasco. Accordingly, I provide you with this picture of Meghan McCain so that you can do due diligence."

Further due diligence performed here.

Today's gaffe by Obama is rather small potatoes (though the quick airbrush work immediately afterwards by his campaign staff is noteworthy), but since the media reports all gaffes made by Republicans, and few from Democrats (expect for those Democrats who are the current year's apostates), it seems fair game to point it out, particularly in an election year.

Much like 2004, the starboard side of the Blogosphere is once again doing the work that was expected of old media, even if they never were as objective or fair to both sides as we imagined they were.

Update: Hugh Hewitt adds:

It is difficult not to conclude that Senator Obama has developed his reputation as a powerful orator and skilled politician in a protected media environment and in races against candidates that were deeply flawed.

Not to mention some rather unique turns of history.

The Sundries Shack adds, "After this campaign, I swear, I don’t want to hear one more person crack wise about Dan Quayle ever again."

In the interim, an article idea for someone with some time and a flatbed scanner: Last year, Noemie Emery wrote a terrific Weekly Standard article that opened up the memory hole and reminded us that despite the grudging admiration of the Gipper upon his passing, how much the vast majority of elite journalists hated the Gipper in the last couple of years of his administration. Similarly, I'm hoping that someone will go through the op-eds of 1988, and upload to the Internet a sampling of the the gallons of ink spilled back then over how inexperienced Quayle was, simply to be veep, even though at the time he had more years in the House and Senate than Obama has today.

Related: What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the fermentations of the Obama!

Just read that Sydney Pollack died, at age 73. I wasn't a big fan of Pollack's fairly doctrinaire punitive liberal worldview that was often on display in the films he directed. But as an actor, frequently cast in rather dark, amoral supporting roles, he managed to project a surprising amount of likability, even as the adulterous friend of Woody Allen in Husbands and Wives, and as Victor Ziegler, the sinister business tycoon in Eyes Wide Shut. (Or as Dustin Hoffman's agent in Tootsie, in a memorable scene where the above headline derives.)

Film directors rarely make good actors, and in both professions, few have careers that thrived as long as Pollack's. In an industry that increasingly allows few grown-ups behind the cameras, and even fewer in front of them, his gravitas will be missed.

Noel Sheppard writes:

It's Memorial Day, and the good folks at the New York Times thought it appropriate to not only attack the President's position on a new G.I. Bill, but also to despicably lambaste him for "[h]aving saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war," and "having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways."

On Memorial Day!

Thankfully, White House press secretary Dana Perino has already issued a written statement concerning this deplorable act by the Times on a sacred day when our nation commemorates its fallen heroes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once write, "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function". The Times certainly has the first half of Fitzgerald's equation down could, as James Taranto has noted on numerous occasions. But the jury's still out on the latter portion of Fitzgerald's theorem:

Nice sentiments on Memorial Day, dontcha think? Yet, the Times then stooped to misinformation to strengthen its point:

Mr. Bush — and, to his great discredit, Senator John McCain — have argued against a better G.I. Bill, for the worst reasons. They would prefer that college benefits for service members remain just mediocre enough that people in uniform are more likely to stay put.

They have seized on a prediction by the Congressional Budget Office that new, better benefits would decrease re-enlistments by 16 percent, which sounds ominous if you are trying — as Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain are — to defend a never-ending war at a time when extended tours of duty have sapped morale and strained recruiting to the breaking point.

Strained recruiting to the breaking point? I guess the Times editorial board forgot about an Associated Press article on this very subject that was posted at the paper's website on May 13:

The Marine Corps far surpassed its recruiting goal last month, enlisting 2,233 people, which was 142 percent of its goal, the Pentagon said. The Army recruited 5,681 people, 101 percent of its goal. The Navy and Air Force also met their goals, 2,905 sailors and 2,435 airmen. A Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that if the Marine Corps continued its recruiting success, it could reach its goal of growing to 202,000 people by the end of 2009, more than a year early.

Fortunately, the White House fired back. As Noel Sheppard noted:Curiously, this was the second time in one week the White House struck out at the press, with the first being Ed Gillespie's letter to NBC concerning the editing of Richard Engel's interview with the President.

Makes one wonder why Bush and Company have waited until his final year in office to start pushing back when the media are out of line.

That should have been an ongoing effort by the Bush White House since, if not day one, then certainly after 9/11.

To be fair to the Times though, its writers might not have known it was Memorial Day, particularly since it's not a holiday worthy of celebration on on Google's splash page.

Unlike, say, Walter Gropius' 125th birthday.

On Friday, I linked to thoughts on Hillary playing the sexism card by Peggy Noonan and Brent Brozell, and wrote:

One hopes that the unending alternate cries of racism and sexism by Democrats directed at their own constituents and media have some lasting repercussions. The next time the rhetorical racist or sexist card is played as a cheap debating tool against a Republican, he should consider replying with something along the lines of: Wait a second--all we heard for literally six months in 2008 from your party was how racist and sexist Democratic voters are. Perhaps you should get your own house in order before criticizing others.

Oh--it was just meaningless talking points back then to score points with your constituents? Some things never change, I guess.

And the Boston Globe noted this:

Though the bruising Democratic nomination fight is nearly complete and Clinton has mostly avoided direct attacks on Obama in recent days, she chose yesterday to lodge her strongest complaints of the campaign that she has been the victim of sexist coverage in the media.

"I think that both gender and race have been obviously a part of it because of who we are, and every poll I've seen shows more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman to vote for an African-American, which rarely gets reported on either," Clinton told The Washington Post. "The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable or at least more accepted."

While racism should be equally rejected "when and if it ever raises its ugly head," Clinton said, she believes "the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by comments and reactions of people who are nothing but misogynists."

In the Wall Street Journal, Donald Boudreaux takes Hillary's remarks to their natural conclusion:

Hillary Clinton is now complaining that her candidacy has been harmed by sexism. Interviewed earlier this week by the Washington Post, Sen. Clinton said the polls show that "more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman [than] to vote for an African American." This gender bias, she grumbled, "rarely gets reported on."

So a woman who holds degrees from Wellesley and Yale – who has earned millions in the private sector, won two terms in the U.S. Senate, and gathered many more votes than John Edwards, Bill Richardson and several other middle-aged white guys in their respective bids for the 2008 Democratic nomination – feels cheated because she's a woman.

Seems doubtful. But hey, I'm a guy and perhaps hopelessly insensitive. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that her campaign has indeed suffered because of sexism.

This fact (if it be a fact) reveals a hitherto unknown, ugly truth about the Democratic Party. The alleged bastion of modern liberalism, toleration and diversity is full of (to use Mrs. Clinton's own phrase) "people who are nothing but misogynists." Large numbers of Democratic voters are sexists. Who knew?

But here's another revelation. If Mrs. Clinton is correct that she is more likely than Barack Obama to defeat John McCain in November, that implies Republicans and independents are less sexist than Democrats.

It must be so. If American voters of all parties are as sexist as the Democrats, Mr. Obama would have a better chance than Mrs. Clinton of defeating Mr. McCain. The same misogyny that thwarted her in the Democratic primaries would thwart her in the general election. Only if registered Republicans and independents are more open-minded than registered Democrats – only if people who lean GOP or who have no party affiliation are more willing than Democrats to overlook a candidate's sex and vote on the issues – could Mrs. Clinton be a stronger candidate.

I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. But if I ever become convinced that Mrs. Clinton is correct that sexism played a role in her disappointing showing in the Democratic primaries – and that she truly is her party's strongest candidate to take on John McCain – I might finally join a party: the GOP. At least it's not infested with sexists.

Exactly. Of course, given the ability of Democrats to pivot their ethics on a dime whenever necessary, I doubt Hillary's complaints will have any impact longer than 30 seconds after she drops out of the race. But it's good to see someone else taking the implications of current rhetoric seriously.

"Somewhere, Dan Quayle scratches his head in bewilderment", Jammie Wearing Fool notes--and probably accurately, as Barack Obama hits Florida:

At four different points during the speech, Obama referred to the town as “Sunshine,” as opposed to “Sunrise.” Amazingly, the crowd of 16,000 played along and no one corrected him. Sunrise is a city in Broward County, possibly best known for its role in 2000 presidential election.

JWF writes:

Good grief.

Let's face it, the media doesn't want to poke fun at him because they dread being called racist. [Sexist? They can apparently live with that.--Ed]

It is what it is, and what it is is a fawning press gives this guy a free pass.

Somewhere, Dan Quayle scratches his head in bewilderment.

And possibly John Kerry as well, who had his share of similar geographic gaffes in 2004.

Jon of the Exurban League reminds Olbermann fans, "How soon they forget":

Just one month ago, Olbermann referred to the assassination... of Hillary.

On Olbermann's April 24, 2008, program, guest Howard Fineman was discussing the delegate math with Our Hero, stating, "some adults somewhere in the Democratic party to step in and stop this thing, like a referee in a fight that could go on for thirty rounds. Those are the super, super, super delegates who are going to have to decide this."

To which Olbermann replied, "Right. Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out."

Let's roll the tape.

And while one expects Night of the Long Knives-style rhetoric from Olbermann, who violates Godwin's Law with seeming impunity on a regular basis, he's not the only person in the media to have similar assassination porn fantasies regarding Hillary. As Mark Steyn writes, "The modern Democratic party is like Islam: You're either a believer or an apostate", and Hillary, like Joe Lieberman before her no longer This Year's Model, is now very much in the latter camp.

Update: Along with a link to Hillary's earlier assassination fantasy in a March interview with Time, Matt Murphy (the one who's with the Judd Brothers, not the Blues Brothers) digs another classic Billary moment out of the memory hole: "considering that she has repeated the sentiment, it's amusing to recollect that her husband drew a direct connection between talk radio and the Oklahoma City bombings on less evidence than this."

I actually said to my wife over dinner that Hillary's finding out what it feels like to be a Republican presidential candidate: in the past, the media was quite happy to creatively interpret her gaffes--"What Hillary meant to say was this", but these days, with the media desperate for Hillary to bail from the race (see: Russert, Tim), there's no room for error, as Charles Johnson notes:

Hillary Clinton is finding out what it’s like to be a Republican tonight, as MSNBC and CNN and the Associated Press go for her jugular vein; she mentioned the assassination of Robert Kennedy as an example of how things can change in an election’s late innings, and the left wing media are almost universally accusing her of insinuating that Barack Obama will be assassinated.

Welcome to the GOP, Hill!

UPDATE at 5/23/08 7:57:48 pm:

Keith Obermann’s rant: “You actually used THOSE WORDS in this America, Senator?! You cannot SAY THIS!!!”

Yes, nothing like getting lectured by Keith Olbermann on what you can or cannot say on public airways--on Keith's network, you can turn the phrase "pimped out" into quite a lucrative hosting gig.

"It's IowaHawk's world; Hillary is just living in it":

From the earliest days of the campaign, the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination has been a hard fought, neck-and-neck struggle. But now, as the race enters its final stretch, it has become increasingly obvious that the eventual outcome is no longer in doubt. With a difficult general election looming, Democrats need to put our family squabbles aside and unite behind the eventual nominee. And so, in the interest of Party unity, and his own health, I am calling on Senator Obama to gracefully accept defeat.

First, let me congratulate Senator Obama and his staff for running a tough campaign. He has been a worthy sparring partner, and one I would have once been happy to consider for my vice presidential undercard, had he not been a constant pain in my ass for the last six months. But even Senator Obama must know at this point that, even if he somehow pulls off a miracle by sweeping the remaining primaries and locking up all the contested superdelegates, he simply cannot escape the inevitable mysterious accident that will clear the Democratic nomination for Yours Truly.

Frankly, there's just no way around the stark mathematics of the situation: Inconvenience(Me) = 1.0 * Accident(You). It is an inescapable statistical fact, as proven over and over again by my loyal team of Karma accountants -- including Sid Blumenthal, Howard Wolfson, and Harold Ickes. Contrary to what some people say, my boys did not learn untraceable poisoning techniques from the Russians. In fact, it was the other way around. And let's face it: even if Senator Obama receives prompt medical attention for his eventual post-nomination accident, voters in the general election will be repulsed by his grotesque and permanent Dioxin scarring. Once again, Hillary Time.

So today Senator Obama faces a clear choice: (a) stay in the campaign through the convention, wasting millions of dollars on primary advertising and expensive food tasters, or (b) withdraw immediately and graciously transfer his war chest to the only remaining Democratic candidate capable of appealing to hard-working white voters, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton. Same outcome either way, with the possible exception of body count.

Though he may be young and inexperienced, I am confident Senator Obama will choose wisely. But to sweeten the pot, I am also prepared to guarantee him a post as Secretary of HUD in my administration, plus a two-year moratorium on plane crashes involving his senior campaign staff and immediate family. Senator Obama is a young man, and if he serves me loyally he will be eligible to run again in 2016. Barring any unforeseen changes to Presidential term limits.

I know this may come as a temporary disappointment to the various misguided Democrats who have supported Senator Obama in the primaries. But trust me, you'll grow up and get over it. We need an electable Democrat on the slate in November, but unfortunately the research shows the wheels on the Obama campaign bus are about to come off.

Possibly due to mysteriously loosened lug nuts.

IowaHawk, May 12th.

Luigi and Dino Vercotti could not be reached for comment.

Hillary obama rfk
by dollarsandsense123

She manages to weave a strange flashback to Bobby Kennedy's assassination in '68 into a reason--I think--for her to stay in the race.

And speaking of Kennedy conspiracy theories, this is probably as good a place as any to link to Peter Robinson's terrific multi-part video interview this week with James Piereson, whose Camelot and the Cultural Revolution last year did a superb job of not only debunking the conspiracy theories regarding JFK's death, but also explaining why they developed in the first place.

Update: Bumped to top; video found via John Stephenson who writes, "So, is the final nail in her political coffin? I vote yes!"

More at Hot Air.

Related: I reserve the right at some future point to revise and extend my earlier remarks:

Brent Bozell writes:

At the dawn of the Democratic primary race between Barack and Hillary, news anchors like ABC’s Diane Sawyer were caught up in the question: Is America more poisoned by racism or sexism? If like ABC, you think the country is still dragging its knuckles in the primordial slime, then the expected primary victory of Obama provides the answer: the country is more sexist.

Hillary’s now playing this card, even including the national media as an accomplice, as the rest of the poker palace is emptying out. Remember how the first President Bush suddenly discovered the "Annoy the Media, Vote Bush" tactic in the last futile days of 1992? Hillary looks just as pathetic trotting out this "Annoy the Media, Vote Hillary" angle in obvious desperation. Yet some in the press are biting. Washington Post reporter Lois Romano interviewed Hillary and asked her if her media coverage didn’t suggest mistreatment of women. Romano suggested "I get the idea that it's really pissed off a lot of women."

The chauvinist-pig national media? It sounds odd to hear liberals entertaining the notion that their profession hates women. It is never a function of the "news" media being too liberal. It is the lament that the news media are not liberal enough.

Hillary is charging that sexism has been greeted as more respectable in this campaign, when it should rejected just as heartily as racism, and the news media are complicit in this ugly turn of events. "It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by comments and reactions of people who are nothing but misogynists."

But in contrast to Mrs. Clinton's take, Peggy Noonan notes this:

Where to begin? One wants to be sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton at this point, if for no other reason than to show one's range. But her last weeks have been, and her next weeks will likely be, one long exercise in summoning further denunciations. It is something new in politics, the How Else Can I Offend You Tour. And I suppose it is aimed not at voters -- you don't persuade anyone by complaining in this way, you only reinforce what your supporters already think -- but at history, at the way history will tell the story of the reasons for her loss.

So, to address the charge that sexism did her in:

It is insulting, because it asserts that those who supported someone else this year were driven by low prejudice and mindless bias.

It is manipulative, because it asserts that if you want to be understood, both within the community and in the larger brotherhood of man, to be wholly without bias and prejudice, you must support Mrs. Clinton.

It is not true. Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they'd give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they'd call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they'd realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes. She should be a guy and say thanks.

It is prissy. Mrs. Clinton's supporters are now complaining about the Hillary nutcrackers sold at every airport shop. Boo hoo. If Golda Meir, a woman of not only proclaimed but actual toughness, heard about Golda nutcrackers, she would have bought them by the case and given them away as party favors.

It is sissy. It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say "Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other's bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it's like that for the boys and for the girls."

And because the charge of sexism is all of the above, it is, ultimately, undermining of the position of women. Or rather it would be if its source were not someone broadly understood by friend and foe alike to be willing to say anything to gain advantage.

Of course. But one hopes that the unending alternate cries of racism and sexism by Democrats directed at their own constituents and media have some lasting repercussions. The next time the rhetorical racist or sexist card is played as a cheap debating tool against a Republican, he should consider replying with something along the lines of: Wait a second--all we heard for literally six months in 2008 from your party was how racist and sexist Democratic voters are. Perhaps you should get your own house in order before criticizing others.

Oh--it was just meaningless talking points back then to score points with your constituents? Some things never change, I guess.

Update: "‘Racial minorities cannot be racist in the U.S.A.’ and ‘all whites are racist in the U.S.A.’"

Except for a single very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the four-million year old black monolith has remained completely inert. Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery.

Much like his lyrics, Dave Matthews puts a typically goofy ironic spin on what numerous conservatives--and even some musicians--said last year: "The whole joke of Live Earth was how wasteful it was":

The May 29 edition of Rolling Stone looks ahead to the summer concert season, and the rock-music mag is praising the Dave Matthews Band for their use of biodiesel for buses and "biodegradable goods for catering." But this exchange was interesting, about Al Gore's "Live Earth" concerts.

ROLLING STONE: Some people argue that the live experience is sort of inherently "un-green."

DAVE MATTHEWS: There’s no doubt that it is. The whole joke of Live Earth was how wasteful it was. But the idea that touring will end is sad. I’d like to think that the traveling minstrel is not a thing of the past, but the methods of travel have to be improved.

As I wrote last year, right around this time:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

Or as Glenn Reynolds said at the time, "I'll start acting as if it's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting as if it's a crisis."

Noel Sheppard catches an interesting flip-flop from Chuck Schumer:

As the oil executives hearings on Capitol Hill received great media attention given soaring gasoline prices, supposedly impartial press members missed a classic gaffe by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as it pertains to the benefits of OPEC raising production quotas versus America drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

On Wednesday, Schumer once again claimed "if [Saudi Arabia] did a million barrels of oil a day increase from today, it would go down about -- the translation to gasoline would be about $.50 a gallon, maybe $.62."

Yet, on May 7, Schumer felt a likely similar increase from drilling in ANWR would "reduce the price of oil by a penny."

In City Journal, Max Schulz has a great piece titled "California’s Potemkin Environmentalism", but as Schumer's hypocrisy illustrates, it's a nationwide phenomenon of post-Biblical proportions.

Update: More here.

Related: "Speaking Truth to Horsepower".

ABC's evening news program attempts to play the age card on McCain, which seems like an awfully strange medium for that message: at 65, ABC's Charles Gibson is only six years younger than McCain, and given the similar demographics of his viewers, is it wise to posit to them that someone of their generation might be too old to be president?

President Reagan was 10 years older than my dad, and I can remember Ed Sr. being, shall we say, less than thrilled when the media tried a similar whispering campaign 28 years ago.

On the other hand, as Mark Finkelstein notes:

In a political season in which Barack Obama has delighted in playing the age card—see "lost his bearings," "wander around," and multiple mentions of McCain's "half-century of service," Democrats are now demonstrating that they're even willing to use an opponent's superannuation on each other.

I'd love to know the conversations going on in AARP HQ, and the mental hoops their staff will go through before their house organ reflexively makes the case for young Mr. Obama.

Update: Ed Morrissey sits in on "McCain Conference Call on Health Records":

At the point of the time when I had to start my show prep, the CBS News doctor had begun filibustering the conference. He apparently figured that some sort of conspiracy surrounds McCain’s use of hydrochlorothiazide, a routine diuretic indicated by the kidney stones McCain has had in the past. I hung up at the eighth follow-up on this question.

Someone at CBS playing the age card seems particularly ironic; CBS's viewership demographic skews pretty elderly as well--as does its talent pool: on 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney is 89, Mike Wallace is 90, and Morley Safer is a comparatively teenybopperish 76. As Slate's Kurt Andersen noted six years ago:

So 65 is the new 50. Why? I think it's primarily an epiphenomenon of the baby boom. The national TV news anchor was invented during baby boomers' formative years, when all those anchors were roughly the same age as our parents. To be anchorlike was to be sober, wise, older, parental—and so it remains. Because baby boomers persist in thinking of themselves as youngish, they can't quite accept as bona fide an anchor who is not a decade or two older than they are. And because people in their 40s and 50s now run the culture—including its TV news operations—that cultural norm is enforced.

Except when it's convenient that it not be, of course.

With apologies to Jack Benny for the above headline; while I'm not in the market for a new car at the moment, the timing of Honda's new sales pitch makes it an awfully appealing proposition...

Certainly better than this gaffe (at least I hope it's a gaffe--never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity) by Dunkin' Donuts' latest spokesperson. In any case, mister, they could use a pitchman like Michael Vale again!

James Lileks explores the exciting, convenient world of 21st century commercial aviation, and contrasts it with the stone knives, bearskins, and Boeing 707s of our forefathers:

"Airport" was shot during the glamorous days of air travel, when all the men wore suits and the women wore dresses and tiaras and spike heels. No one plodded down the jetway like cows on the way to the butcher's nail gun; you strolled across the tarmac, flicked your cigarette into the whirling blades of the propeller for luck, and settled down for a civilized, nine-hour flight from Chicago to Milwaukee, with a full meal service that included prime rib carved from a cart that rolled right down the aisle.

It probably wasn't that good. For one thing, people smoked on the old planes, and smoked a lot. Even the stews who knew they were flying in a pressurized tube at 25,000 feet were tempted to crack a window. The planes were loud and in-flight entertainment consisted of a Bob Newhart comedy LP, passed around from seat to seat so you could read the liner notes. But it seemed more civilized.

Ideally it was this Newhart album. To paraphrase Steven Den Beste: The Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline & Storm Door Company: a user manual for cost-conscious airlines, a sneak preview of the future for the rest of us.

Related: This is probably as good a place as any to hang a link to this--Kyle Smith spots a TV viewer in England who seems to just slightly miss the point of AMC's Mad Men series, set during the New Frontier-era buttondown days of the aforementioned Mr. Newhart. Perhaps a link to my initial review of the show from last July will help ease the current delicate state of transatlantic relations.

(Or, perhaps not...)

Esquire's Stephen Garrett reviews Che, Steven Soderbergh's hagiographic (is there any other kind of Che movie from monolithic Hollywood?) new biopic:

Steven Soderbergh has a big fat crush on Ernesto “Che” Guevara. But don’t tell him he’s biased. “I’m an agnostic,” he told the press corps at the Cannes Film Festival, where his two-part, four-and-a-half-hour paean to the Third World’s favorite revolutionary made its world premiere on Wednesday night. “I’m not personally invested in building him up or tearing him down.”

And yet. With Che, the combined version of two Spanish-language films separately entitled The Argentine and Guerrilla (rushed to completion for Cannes, by the way, and shot and shown digitally without titles or end credits), the Oscar-winning director turns away from the box-office catnip Ocean’s Eleven franchise to pay penance at the altar of high cinema. The impulse is unimpeachably admirable; the result is heartbreakingly misguided. Why try to avoid passing judgment? Why pretend that you haven’t anyway?

Che already has a slew of biopics to his name, most recently by Brazilian underclass auteur Walter Salles, whose 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries predictably romanticized the Argentine doctor during a young-adult road trip that enlightened him to the plight of the impoverished. Soderbergh himself said that he sees his films as companion pieces to Salles’ work, forming a trilogy of Che’s life -- albeit one without the butchering death squads, homophobia, and other unsavory aspects that liberals might find a tad too distastefully indefensible. (So much for agnosticism.)

Indeed. As the blurb above the review notes:

Steven Soderbergh's nonjudgmental, four-and-a-half-hour biopic about Che Guevara never elevates the Cuban revolutionary beyond iconic T-shirt status.

Yes, young men fall all over themselves to attend film school and make the brutal climb up the Hollywood food chain to become film directors, all in search of the raw power that comes with...nonjudgmentalism!

Update: "Fortunately, No One Will Watch It". True--except for all of the college kids whose professors will force them to watch, both in first run at the theater, and--especially--in perpetuity as a classroom propaganda "teaching aid" once it's out on DVD.

"Democratic Sen. Barack Obama questions Republican Sen. John McCain’s commitment to the troops. CQ Politics has the video. McCain has the son in Iraq."

Good luck with that approach...

Neither Kyle Smith (at Pajamas HQ) nor "Dirty Harry" of Libertas have kind words for the newest Indiana Jones movie. And Harry notes that in addition to its slack pace, this:

As far as the film’s politics, act one’s anti-anti-Communist message serves no story purpose whatsoever. Jones did not need to be fired in order to be sent off on an adventure and the story-point is never again picked up or resolved, making it a first for an Indiana Jones’ film: an awkward, ham-fisted political message shoe-horned in at the expense of story quality.

Why should we expect the maker of Saving Private Ryan and Munich to avoid postmodern solipsism?

Update: On the other hand, perhaps there's a glimmer of hope for the good doctor.

Compare and contrast. First up, found via Kathy Shaidle, Ghost of a Flea notes, "A fifteen year old British boy faces prosecution for calling Scientology a cult."

Meanwhile, Steven Pollard of England's Spectator writes:

I make a point, as my friends will attest, of wearing a pair of stars and srtripes cufflinks. It might be slightly pathetic, but I want to demonstrate my solidarity with the nation leading the fight against barbarism.

Understandably, when strangers see but don't hear me, some jump to the conclusion that I am American. And it's instructive to see how some people behave when they see the cuffs.

On countless occasions I have been sneered at, sworn at and, twice, spat at. I would say - my memory is impressionistic on this - that by far the most common insult is a muttered "F*c*ing American". And I cannot recall such behaviour from anyone who looked older than 40ish.

Not being American, for me this is simply useful in seeing how common such prejudice is. Of course, just because it is only the under 40s who are vocal, it does not follow that others do not share their views.

It's not that usual to hear people give voice to their anti-semitic or anti-black bigotry. But in my experience, there is one prejudice which is now entirely acceptable: anti-Americanism.

Yes, if only America would just go away, along with another inconvenient democracy, which France's ambassador to Britain dubbed, shortly after after 9/11, as that "sh*tty little country", no doubt, all of England's myriad structural problems would resolve themselves instantly.

Update: Oh to be in Massachusetts:

Hummer Village of Norwood is where you go if you want to buy a Hummer in Massachusetts. We sent Mike Underwood there for a story on gas prices and people who don’t give a damn. They offered him a Hummer for a day. No “hummer” jokes please. I already made them all, until Underwood begged me to stop.

Underwood is a Brit. Not the soccer hooligan variety. A very civil, thoughtful, well-meaning chap. I told him this would be an important part of his American experience, where he could learn what it was like to be an American. Big, gas-guzzling, obnoxious, all over the road, disliked … and loving it. I told him to surrender himself to the Hummer, open himself to his inner Hummer.

That's the stuff!

As "Dirty Harry" of Libertas writes, "Expect a lot of this":

Variety’s Todd McCarthy makes a pre-emptive move (I thought liberals didn’t believe in that?) against conservatives in his pan of Steven Soderbergh’s attempt to Lawrence-of-Arabia the mass-murderer Che Guevera:

…and presents American and Latin American authorities so exclusively as cardboard mouthpieces of imperialism and abusive dictatorships, respectively — that some conservative political commentators might work themselves into a lather over it.

You see, any rise of indignation over a $60 million, five-hour attempt to further t-shirtify a sworn enemy of the United States responsible for the murder of at least 600 innocent people (that we know of) is purely knee-jerk lathering on our part. Oh, and we should also avoid any lather over the fact that Che’s psychotic crimes failed to find a few minutes in a 300-plus minute film:

This structure very conveniently elides the period wherein Che, as effective co-head of Castro’s Cuban government, presided over mass executions, the persecution of homosexuals, the ruination of the island’s economy, the ill-fated alliance with the Soviet Union, and so on.

Sadly, I’ve yet to read any review, good or bad, that registers any frustration whatsoever over Soderbergh’s decision to skip the murderous parts of Che’s life.

Think about it: Todd McCarthy’s in more of a lather over our possible lather than Che’s actual crimes or Soderbergh’s glossing over of them.

"Hannah Arendt had it right", Pat Moynihan once told an interviewer. "She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."

Power Line looked at Hollywood's 2004 attempt to whitewash Che (Hollywood seems to alternate each year between films inflating the peccadilloes of the blacklist with films whitewashing the real horrors of Che and Castro) in a post titled the "Motorpsycho Diaries".

Howard Kurtz spots vile commenters on Michelle Malkin's blog responding to Ted Kennedy's recent brain tumor announcement--but fails to notice an even worse level of vitriol amongst the far left commenters on the blogs of his print employer, the Washington Post.

And it's not the first time Kurtz's partisan blindspot in this area has occurred.

More at Michelle's Hot Air Website.

Bill Clinton in 2006:

[Clinton] said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies — and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.

Of course, from Bill's point of view today, those allies sometimes align themselves with the wrong side of the occasional warring internecine struggle:

-"I think most of the press people are in Obama's demographic. ... There have been times when I thought I was literally lost in a fun house."

Why, it's like a revolving door between the two camps. That's never happened before!

Bill at least has the knowledge that since the days of FDR, old media has been a de facto ally to liberals in power (with a few rogue outliers of course, from time to time). John McCain has little excuse if he didn't anticipate his former media allies turning on him once he became the GOP's nominee.

In over your head with too large a mortgage? Just toss the keys to the mansion in the mail, and return it to the bank. From baseball great Jose Canseco to freshman California Democrat congresswoman Laura Richardson, Michelle Malkin looks at the growing trend of "jinglemail".

It's curious that Obama has declared comments about his spouse as part of the ever growing, all-inclusive list of off-limits criticisms, when he himself had no problem criticizing the overtly political rhetoric of another candidate's spouse not all that long ago.

Journalists have long used horse race analogies when writing about politics; apparently the New York Times feels that turnabout is fair play, as Kevin D. Williamson spots its horse racing blogger self-describing himself as an anti-Bush, pro-defeat leftist. Williamson writes:

Sure, you expect some scathing leftist commentary on the Times' business page, the food section, the arts coverage, the travel notes, baseball columns, local news, the special weekend sections, the colophon, and the classified advertising, but the horseracing blog? Is nothing sacred?

Hey remember the good old days, long, long ago, when the Times' former ombudsman took flak for admitting the obvious? Now even the sportswriters there don't bother to hide their biases.

(Or maybe he's seeking employment elsewhere and wants to subtly get his resume out there.)

"It's not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me."

Michelle Obama in February: "Don't Go Into Corporate America".

Larry Kudlow, today: "Stocks Don’t Like Obama".

While we're promised that we'll wake up in 2015 to Obamatopia, it sounds like there will be lots of recurring reruns of Carter Country in the interim.

Taking a cue from a post by Tom Maguire of the Just One Minute blog, and following up on my weekend post on Sen. Tom Harkin, I look at the ongoing attempts by the far left to delegitimize Senator John McCain's service in Vietnam, several of which have come from the same people who told us that another ex-Navy officer, who, by the way, served in Vietnam, was the man to vote for in 2004. As Tom wrote on Thursday:

Times contributer Matt Bai will have a long NY Times magazine entry this Sunday. Apparently it is an upscale attempt to Swiftboat John McCain (You know I use that term mockingly) by de-legitimizing his wartime experience. My advice to Attack Dems intent on this path - have fun storming the castle!

And just yesterday, as I was putting this video to bed, Ed Morrissey spotted yet another example of what seems to be a trend, coordinated or not.

(Earlier Silicon Graffiti videos can be found here.)

James Taranto writes that "Last night found us at the annual dinner of the Commentary Fund, publisher of Commentary magazine...where Sen. Joe Lieberman delivered the Norman Podhoretz Lecture":

Lieberman cited at length a 1999 National Review article by Norman Podhoretz, in which Podhoretz credited President Clinton with saving Democrats from McGovernism. "I think the Democrats have been pretty thoroughly purged of the McGovernite spirit," Podhoretz wrote. "It pains to me [sic] to admit this, but I would estimate that there is now more isolationist sentiment in Republican than in Democratic ranks." Lieberman argued that in many ways, the 2000 ticket of which he was a part was more hawkish than its Republican counterpart.

Since then--really, since the end of 2002--the Democrats have turned hard to the left on foreign policy, with Lieberman a rare dissenting voice. The Connecticut senator praised President Bush for his Knesset speech last week, and said that Bush's criticism of those who advocate appeasement applies to Obama, whether the president meant it to or not.

In his most devastating criticism, Lieberman noted that Obama favors talks without preconditions with anti-American dictators in North Korea, Venezuela and Iran, while taking an antagonistic approach toward democratic allies in South Korea, Colombia and Iraq, opposing trade deals with the first two and threatening to withdraw U.S. military support from the last.

It's reminiscent of John Kerry*, the Democrats' 2004 nominee, who traipsed about the country denouncing America's allies as a "coalition of the bribed and the coerced" while promising to subject American foreign policy to a "global test." Hardly anyone remembers it now, but Lieberman actually endorsed Kerry. How could he?

We may never know. We thought about putting the question to Lieberman after the lecture, but instead we decided to ask him about the 2000 nominee. Two years after that election, we noted, Lieberman's erstwhile running mate was delivering angry anti-Iraq rants to MoveOn.org. What, we asked, happened to Al Gore?

Lieberman's answer: "Damned if I know."

Considering Al's many twists and turns over the last 20 years--and where he goes, so goes the center of gravity of his party, sad to say--that's really the question, isn't it?

Ed Gillespie, counselor to the president emails Steve Capus, the president of NBC, to ask why President Bush's comments were selectively edited by NBC correspondent Richard Engel:

Mr. Capus, I'm sure you don't want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the "news" as reported on NBC and the "opinion" as reported on MSNBC, despite the increasing blurring of those lines. I welcome your response to this letter, and hope it is one that reassures your broadcast network's viewers that blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don't hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division.

Sincerely,

Ed Gillespie

Counselor to the President

I think we can safely answer that one--Engel, by admitting publicly in 2006 that "War Should Be Illegal; I'm Basically A Pacifist", is keeping pace with the sea change throughout his industry (and his employer is far from immune, of course), which has finally eschewed the 80-year old "objectivity" model that hamstrung journalism throughout the 20th century. That's also the subtext that underlies this recent Howard Kurtz article, even if it's a topic that Kurtz himself is unusually reticent to tackle, for understandable reasons.

Of course, that doesn't excuse the selective distortion of a quote, whether written or recorded. But then that's a pretty well established old media trend popularized by another institution that's increasingly happy to admit its own biases.

Ann Althouse discusses her favorite driving songs here. One of my favorites--at least as long as our overseas betters actually allow us to drive--is this:

Given the song's stately, rolling feel, it's not a coincidence that its working title was "Driving To Kashmir".

Here's a winning whining message:

“We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

In addition to his off-the-rack Burberry suits and Neville Chamberlain's umbrella, it sounds like Obama's all set to don Jimmy Carter's cardigan as well.

Update: Roger Kimball also has a strong sense of Carter redux.

I've been meaning to link to this all week--on Tuesday's edition of Breitbart TV's B-Cast live Internet news show, hosts Scott Baker and Liz Stephans ran the recent Top Ten Hillary Clinton Moments edition of my Silicon Graffiti video podcast series to close out the show. Skip ahead to the 82:00 minute mark to check out their set-up.

After my video ran, Liz Stephans made a great observation: note the contrast in Hillary's tone in the first two clips. Number ten on the list begins with Hillary's introductory campaign video on YouTube, with featured a beautifully lit set, a perfectly coifed and made-up Hillary, and her crisp, regal, I've got this election in the bag, and we all know it delivery.

The clip in number nine was shot on the campaign stump almost a year and a half later, and features a very different Hillary, shouting until hoarse and thrashing frantically into the wind. That's all you need to know about the Tuzla-sized gap between her initial expectations and results so far.

The Washington Post reports on the most spectacular merger news since the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central combined forces (which certainly worked out just swell for all concerned):

Top fundraisers for Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have begun private talks aimed at merging the two candidates' teams, not waiting for the Democratic nominating process to end before they start preparations for a hard-fought fall campaign.

Wow, just like that, huh? I thought all of Hillary's voters were bigots. And all of Obama's, sexists. And that while Hillary has "a lifetime of experience", all Senator Obama has for political experience is a single speech he gave in 2002. But in contrast to the second coming of the Messiah, Hillary was the personification of Michael Corleone, Glen Close in Fatal Attraction and Richard Nixon all rolled into one.

Nowhere is talk more cheap than politics, but doesn't the left get whiplash riding out all those 180 degree pivots?

Tough to like, you know, argue with this:

Homer Simpson, prototypical Darwin Award winner:

(Title via Declan MacManus.)

Newspapers are an industry that has done the most to spread fear of global warming, and have heavily donated to "green" causes. And now it's time for them to the pay the bill, or risk appearing even more hypocritical than they're currently thought of:

A prototypical publisher selling 250,000 newspapers on each of the 365 days of the year adds nearly 28,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, according to calculations we’ll explain in a moment. That’s roughly equivalent to the CO2 spewed by almost 3,700 Ford Explorers being driven 10,000 miles apiece per year. (Disclosure: I own a 12-year-old Ford Explorer. Anyone want to buy it?)

CO2 matters, because a dangerous buildup of the gas in the atmosphere – caused by the growing consumption of fossil fuels and the decimation of our forests – is causing the earth to warm to such dangerous and unprecedented levels that the health of the planet and its inhabitants are imperiled.

The problem for even the most environmentally sensitive print publisher is that every aspect of the business does uncontestable violence to the environment.

As the Insta-Man likes to say, I'll consider believing that there's a crisis when the people who complain the loudest start acting like there's a crisis.

Besides, isn't it time that Pinch thinks of the polar bears!?

(H/T for Nelson Muntz.)

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) in August of 2004:

On Monday the Iowa Senator lashed out at Dick Cheney, claiming the Vice President had no right to criticize Mr. Kerry's policies for the war on terror because Mr. Cheney had a deferment back then: "When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil."

Tom Harkin, this week:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s family background as the son and grandson of admirals has given him a worldview shaped by the military, “and he has a hard time thinking beyond that,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., said Friday.

“I think he’s trapped in that,” Harkin said in a conference call with Iowa reporters. “Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous.”

Harkin said that “it’s one thing to have been drafted and served, but another thing when you come from generations of military people and that’s just how you’re steeped, how you’ve learned, how you’ve grown up.”

A McCain spokesman said Harkin’s remarks were offensive and showed that Democrats are out of touch with Americans’ values.

“Senator Harkin’s comments are an affront to the many thousands of Iowans who have served our country so valiantly for generations,” said spokesman Jeff Sadosky. “This sort of attack shows just how out of touch Democratic leadership has become with the values that have made our country so great.”

And of course, back in 2004, Harkin was caught performing major puffery on his military record:

In 1979, Mr. Harkin, then a congressman, participated in a round-table discussion arranged by the Congressional Vietnam Veterans' Caucus. "I spent five years as a Navy pilot, starting in November of 1962," Mr. Harkin said at that meeting, in words that were later quoted in a book, Changing of the Guard, by Washington Post political writer David Broder. "One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaisance support missions. I did no bombing."

That clearly is not an accurate picture of his Navy service. Though Mr. Harkin stresses he is proud of his Navy record -- "I put my ass on the line day after day" -- he concedes now he never flew combat air patrols in Vietnam. . . .

Mr. Harkin's Navy record shows his only decoration is the National Defense Service Medal, awarded to everyone on active service during those years. He did not receive either the Vietnam Service medal or the Vietnam Campaign medal, the decorations given to everyone who served in the Southeast Asia theater. "We didn't get them for what we did," Mr. Harkin says. "It's never bothered me."

In 2005, Howard Dean claimed, "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy." He might want to start by getting his own house in order before going on the road.

Related: Gateway Pundit: "Phony Hero Blasts Real Hero"; more from Don Singleton and Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Just came across this on YouTube; it's a clip of John McCain appearing on Des Moines' WHO radio last July, when on-air talent Jan Mickelson played him Tom Harkin's comments from earlier that month, recorded on the floor of the Senate:

And if we leave, there will be a bloodbath in Vietnam. All of the people who supported us will be slaughtered in the streets. Well, it didn't happen.

Watch for McCain's "Oh My God" reaction immediately afterwards--and understandably so. Of course, just to bring this post full circle, look who tacitly agreed with Harkin.

Update: Harkin plays a big role in my latest Silicon Graffiti video:

Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times writes that he's just witnessed "Obama's Sniper Tale":

Is this another Bosnian sniper incident, where a Democratic candidate for president describes a scene involving some personal courage, but later videotape shows that maybe perhaps it wasn't really quite all like that exactly?

Sen. Barack Obama, the leading Democratic candidate for his party's nomination, is very fond of telling receptive audiences the story about how last May he walked right into the automotive lion's den of Detroit and told those industrialists they were going to have to shape up, change the way they do things and start making more fuel-efficient vehicles to protect our environment.

"And I have to say," the straight-talking Obama tells his chuckling followers, "that when I delivered that speech, the room got really quiet. [Laughter] Nobody clapped."

Well, in honor of Obama's return campaign visit back to Michigan this week, someone -- perhaps Republicans, perhaps someone closer to home politically -- assembled videotape of Obama's oft-told tale and spliced it side by side with videotape of that actual Detroit speech.

You'll never guess what. The room wasn't quiet at all. Obama, in fact, got a loud round of applause. And at the end of his address the camera's view of him at the podium is partially blocked because the audience of local businesspeople and automotive executives was rising to give him a standing ovation.

There were no departure ceremonies after the speech because of sniper reports. Far too dangerous for that. It was all he could do then to duck his head and just run for the vehicles. See for yourself below.

While the comparison to Hillary's Tuzla dash into fantasy is one way to look at this, given the setting, it reminds me of the imagined fables of another figure associated with the Clintons: Robert Reich, and a story that Jonah Goldberg tells in Liberal Fascism, based on a Slate article from 1997.

In "Robert Reich, Quote Doctor", Jonathan Rauch reviewed Reich's memoirs of his Clinton years, called Locked in the Cabinet:

Locked in the Cabinet, Robert Reich's new memoir of his years as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, is an engaging policy memoir: insightful, often witty and, what's most unusual for wonk kiss and tells, easy to read, partly because it's told in long stretches of well-written dialogue that add up to scores of novelistic scenes of Washington at work. The book reads like good fiction. Unfortunately, some of it is.

Call me old-fashioned, but I've always believed that there is something special about quotation marks. Whatever is between them, in nonfiction, is supposed to reflect accurately words that some real person actually said. Now, "accurately" leaves room for quibbling, and a memoir will be understood by most readers to be offered on an "as remembered" basis. Reich says, in his prefatory note, that he jotted notes to himself, "usually late at night," and then consolidated them to make the book. People know that Reich is not a reporter, and will adjust their expectations accordingly. Fair enough. Maybe he has a good memory.

So, much like Obama's speech above, Rauch went to the tape to compare what Reich describes with what actually happened, and noticed a slight descrepancy between, as Jonah would describe it, the "Thomas Nast cartoon world" where Reich "is in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly", a world that Obama seems to live in as well based on his above reminiscences, versus that shared consensual hunch we call reality...as documented on videotape:

Or, perhaps most striking of all, consider a set piece in which Reich speaks to the National Association of Manufacturers. He describes himself as being ambushed by cigar-chomping capitalists who hiss at him so loudly that he has to yell to be heard. "They plan to carve me up into small pieces," he writes. "There isn't a lady in the room. All men, in dark suits. They've finished lunch. Some are smoking cigars. Others are quietly smirking, ready for the kill." His speech over, Reich is lambasted by a "John," and Reich's answer elicits an eruption of "Wrong!" "Bullshit!" and "Go back to Harvard!" As Reich speaks, the audience hisses so loudly "that I'm not sure anyone can hear me." The cigar smoke, he says, "is making my eyes water. I feel dizzy." He says, "We're in a boxing arena, John's the champ, and the crowd is loving every minute." Finally, the meeting over, he races "out the back exit before they can pummel me."

As it happens, the meeting was a breakfast, not a lunch. The NAM says the attendance list shows that a third or more of the people present were women (including the NAM representative with whom I spoke). If anyone actually was inclined to light up a cigar after breakfast, he would have been breaking the NAM's no-smoking rule, according to an association representative (who, like another witness I talked to, saw no cigars). Most important, a transcript of the meeting shows a respectful Q and A session, in which none of the comments attributed to "John"--nor any like them--were actually made.

One would hardly expect a roomful of corporate reps to hiss, boo, and shout "bullshit" at a sitting U.S. labor secretary. Sure enough, the transcript shows nothing nastier than sprinkled applause and laughter. I asked Richard Boyd, the professional court reporter who transcribed the session, whether his transcript might have omitted hisses, boos, and imprecations. "I never witnessed anything like that with Robert Reich or anybody else at a NAM meeting," he said. "I'm absolutely certain I would remember it." Reich portrays himself as the little guy standing up to a roomful of abusive capitalists--pure Hollywood. Again, don't take my word for it; click here.

I asked Reich what was going on in each of these cases. In reply, he pointed to his Note to the Reader: "I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it." He said that his notes accurately reflected how he felt and what he perceived. In the three cases cited above, he felt varying degrees of hostility. "I am not representing the book to be anything other than it is, which is my account of my experiences, my perceptions, what I saw and heard around me," he said. "That's all I can say."

In effect, Reich is saying that he's not writing journalism or history. He's writing ... well, what? He elides the very distinction between history and myth, memoir and novel, reality and perception. The problem is that those are real people he misquotes, real history he rewrites.

Steve Wasserman, a former Random House editor who now edits the Los Angeles Times Book Review, points out an irony: Books are often viewed as better sources for history than newspapers, but newspapers, which are generally much more careful than the average publishing house about such niceties as checking quotes, are often the more reliable source. Reich's memoir, if that's the proper word for it, is now ensconced between hard covers and will be read for years to come as part of the historical record. That is a shame. Quote me.

That's one benefit of the Internet age: while an experience can be seared--seared!--into our brains, more and more, it's also being uploaded to YouTube, allowing us to verify, before trusting.

(With appropriate apologies to John Lukacs for the above headline, needless to say.)

In addition to racism and sexism, we can add ageism to the Democratic side of the election year, so far. Great way to capture that all-important AARP vote, fellas.

"I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn’t become a greater man than he will ever be".

--Sean Penn on the "phenomenally inhuman" Obama. Did Joyce Kilmer teach poetry at Ridgemont High?

Slightly sanitized below, but pithy nonetheless:

For many, many years I wrote cover lines, ad copy, captions, pet copy, and many other assorted items for Penthouse Magazine. From this experience (which is seared, seared!, into my memory), I think I am more qualified than 99.99% of all the human beings that have ever lived to know pure, prime, steaming hot bulls*** when I see it, and this sign delivers. As a former bulls*** artist second to none, I know power bulls*** when I see it, and I have to say this placard contains enough high-velocity bulls*** to drop a charging rhino at fifty yards.

Read the whole thing.

For those who enjoyed the calm, placid year of 2004, it's deja vu all over again: as the California Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage. As Allah writes, "An election-year bombshell, just across the wires. Rove, you magnificent bastard."

But will the ruling stick? Get ready to read a lot about this between now and November:

“Pro-family” organizations have submitted more than 1.1 million signatures for an initiative that would amend the state Constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage. If at least 694,354 signatures are found to be valid, the measure would go on the November ballot and, if approved by voters, would override any court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

What's Obama's opinion on this? It sounds very much like he takes a smoke-but-didn't-inhale nuanced all-bases-covered position. Or the lack thereof--here's what comes up at the top of the page when Googling the words "Obama" and "gay marriage":

Barack Obama and Gay Marriage/ Civil Unions: Although Barack Obama has said that he supports civil unions, he is against gay marriage. In an interview with the Chicago Daily Tribune, Obama said, "I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

Barack Obama did vote against a Federal Marriage Amendment and opposed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.

He said he would support civil unions between gay and lesbian couples, as well as letting individual states determine if marriage between gay and lesbian couples should be legalized.

"Giving them a set of basic rights would allow them to experience their relationship and live their lives in a way that doesn't cause discrimination," Obama said. "I think it is the right balance to strike in this society."

Which sounds very much like a rerun of 2004:

Each of the major Democratic candidates say they are against gay marriage. They are all, I believe, against a Federal Marriage Amendment. Fine, so am I. But what exactly will Democrats do to oppose gay marriage? As I've noted before -- when Dean was the frontrunner -- none of these guys seem willing to do anything to back up their positions. They want the courts to simply take the issue away from them while they insist they are firm on the issue. Dean was the most cynical and dishonest on the subject. But I can't see how Kerry's much better. There might still be room for Bush to get on the right side of the issue politically if he can force Democrats to answer the question "Would you do anything to stop gay marriage?"

Just update the names of the players on your scorecard.

Actually, given the seemingly permanent near-century-old reactionary state of "modern art", I'm just surprised there's a capital-C in the above-quoted UPI headline.

It sounds like Dr. Melissa Clouthier has a very similar take to my recent posts regarding what's in store in America in the next ten years or so:

Europeans are supposed to be enlightened. Yeah, I know. Whatever. But still, on the one hand they're turning into frigging Eurabia with all the conservative Muslims running around in burqas and on the other you've got thumbs that look like penises in public advertising aimed at children [in a new Playstation 3 ad running in Europe--Ed]. One of those philosophies is going to win, right? And which winner leaves Western Civilization the winner? The correct answer boys and girls is neither.

That seems to be the choices. Either nothing goes or everything does. Both ways lead to depravity and sexual dysfunction, ironically enough. One way leads to the objectification of women as vessels for male dominance or child bearing--underneath the black cover there's a vagina. The other way leads to the objectification of women and men and children as sex objects--no black sheet needed.

Americans, take note. This dichotomy, these two paths to destruction, is coming to a city near you.

Read the whole thing.

There's a passage from a 2005 essay by Umberto Eco that I've frequently quoted, as it neatly defines several elements of the mindset of our age in just a few carefully thought out sentences:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Indeed. While it's a cliche that ours is a cynical era, it really is just the opposite, as Eco noted. While college kids are instructed by their professors to "fight the power" and "speak truth to power" and to generally not trust that power (because it corrupts absolutely), all of that hard-bitten cynicism goes flying out the lefthand window at warp speed come election time. Jim Geraghty has a round-up of worshipful photos and illustrations of Obama that make him out, in quite hysterically literal fashion--to be the second coming; and in a post about Gene Healy's new book, The Cult of the Presidency, Betsy Newmark explains one of the reasons why we--and particularly the left, which often views government as a substitute religion--put our presidential candidates on such a pedestal:

With the Progressive Era and New Deal, our vision of what we asked of the federal government changed forever. Add in World War II, the Cold War, Great Society, and the War on Terror and it's clear that we're never going to return to a limited federal government or presidency. Liberals and libertarians will complain about the executive authority that George W. Bush has used in fighting against terrorism, but think of all that the Obama campaign is promising for their candidate. Some people have less concern for a presidential usurpation of power in order to defend us against terrorists and some people prefer to look to the president to use that power to fix our broken souls as Michelle Obama has promised that her husband, if elected president, could do for all of us.

"We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another -- that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

Whether we're looking for a president to keep us safe or fix our souls, we're certainly conceiving of a very different president than James Madison or even Alexander Hamilton ever envisioned. And we look to the federal government to have power encompass all of this. We're never going to be able to turn back the clock to an 18th or 19th century understanding of the presidency or the federal government. And perhaps there are few who would want to. When disaster strikes, whether it's a terrorist attack or a powerful hurricane, Americans will expect a president who can act with power and dispatch. If you think that George W. Bush is unique in his expansion of presidential powers, then you just haven't studied enough of our country's history. And there is not going to be some great return to an earlier understanding of what a president can or should be able to do whether we elect McCain or Obama.

Today’s “presidentialists of all parties”—a phrase that describes the overwhelming majority of American voters—suffer from a similar delusion. Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging. Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making.

I'm afraid there may be far too much carbonized bunkum built up in our brains from those 100 years for that to be possible.

Found via Pajamas, which has thorough and regularly updated coverage of the West Virginia Democratic primary, Marie Cocco of the Washington Post writes, "As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss":

I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven't uttered a word of public outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women's basketball team.

Would the silence prevail if Obama's likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they'd compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama's sex organs play?

There are many reasons why Clinton is losing the nomination contest, some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the groundswell for "change." But for all Clinton's political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.

No, the darker stain is the hatred of the other, the opposite in general that flows through the identity politics of the left, from otherwise surprisingly "diverse" quarters.

Cocco's mantra is that she won't miss the sexism of the left, but that implies that such wounds are being put in the past. Why? Sides of the left that their media normally keeps well under wraps were exposed for all to see this year. In an ideal world the cliche that "sunlight is the best disinfectant" would be true, but these rifts aren't going away anytime soon.

Update: This portion of the latest essay by Camile Paglia dovetails remarkably well with the above rococo Cocco WaPo piece:

Hillary has certainly given a blast of artificial resuscitation to male-bashing paleo-feminism, which is back with a vengeance. The blogosphere is awash with accusations of "traitor" against women who have the temerity to vote for Obama. Gloria Steinem's anointed heir, Susan Faludi, weighed in with a recent New York Times op-ed about Hillary bizarrely arguing that a sports referee or umpire is "coded feminine" (huh?) and parallels the vintage American feminist as "prissy hall monitor" and "purse-lipped killjoy" -- a stereotype that Hillary the pugilist has broken. (Oh, really? When has Faludi ever endorsed pugilistic feminism before?)

With nice synchronicity, that same week Rebecca Walker, Steinem's goddaughter, was complaining about entrenched feminist "ideology" in the Sunday Times in London. The brand of feminism promoted by her mother, feminist icon Alice Walker, is in Rebecca's words "close to a cult": "I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought." My own protest against the ideology problem in feminism has been going on, through word and deed, since the late 1960s. My latest salvo, "Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform" (the keynote address of a conference on feminism at Harvard University in April) will appear in the Spring/Summer issue of Arion, to be published in print and on the Web in June.

Another point: Most of the media fell hook, line and sinker for the "Iron my shirt!" stunt at a Hillary campaign event in January in New Hampshire, where two scruffy male hecklers were clearly in collusion with her staff. (The signs -- including one suspiciously permitted on the stage itself -- were carefully positioned and lit, and Hillary had a pat prepared line to draw camera attention to them.) Those dorky guys, at least one with a link to a radio station, are far too young to have the slightest knowledge of an era when women ironed men's shirts -- or when shirts needed ironing at all! Businessmen's shirts go to the cleaners nowadays, and everyone else's gear is just tossed into the dryer. That hoax was designed to reawaken the atavistic resentments of older women voters -- and it worked.

[Watch a clip of the "Iron my shirt!" stunt, below] (Embedded in Paglia's post--Ed)

A perfect symbol of the empty rhetoric and slick manipulations of the Clinton campaign is its chairman, Terry McAuliffe, a wheeler-dealer businessman and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Despite our shared Syracuse background, I despise McAuliffe with every fiber of my being. On primary day in Pennsylvania last month, I voted for Obama in the suburbs and then dashed to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia to catch a train to New York (where I was to tape a TV interview with Sandra Bernhard for the In the Life gay channel).

There big as life right at the top of my departure stairs in the airy main lobby was Terry McAuliffe, dressed in a dark suit like a well-appointed undertaker and chatting away conspiratorially with two similarly dressed clones. A wave of aggression swept over me. From 10 feet away, I locked on to McAuliffe like the deranged ED-209 crime-fighting robot that shoots up a corporate boardroom in Paul Verhoeven's "RoboCop." Nouns like "scum" and "rot" and adjectives like "vile" and "corrupt" flashed through my mind, ready for ignition and firing. I struggled but uncharacteristically held my tongue. My cardinal principle of free speech was restrained by my subordinate principle of respect for shared public space. McAuliffe had as much right as I do to be free from harassment in a train station. But passersby missed what could have been a tasty little scene of 1960s-style street theater.

Probably wise--there's been so little of that in this election.

In February, an Indian news agency reported that Obama is no fan of outsourcing business:

Continuing to play the anti-outsourcing card, Democrat presidential front-runner Barack Obama on Wednesday said while America cannot "shy away" from globalisation, it would have to take measures to ensure that jobs are not shipped overseas.

"We have to stop providing tax breaks for companies that are shipping jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that are investing here in the United States of America," Obama said in during a debate with rival Senator Hillary Clinton in Cleaveland [sic], Ohio.

Some outsourcing is better than others, of course.

Kate of the Canadian Small Dead Animals blog, who is actually vacationing in Beijing this week, writes that "Watching CCTV coverage of the massive Chinese quake aftermath (as best I can, considering the language gap) one can't help but notice how 'sanitary' the images are":

While there's plenty of footage showing collapsed buildings and roadways, crushed cars and landslides, the "rescued" quake victims dragged from the rubble before Chinese television cameras are uniformly limp, dazed, and amazingly clean. If one were of a suspicious nature, one might suspect there was some staging going on.

There also seems to be a lot of footage of soldiers moving supplies around in an orderly, efficient manner.

It seems all very reassuring, as I'm sure was intended. There is no question that the death toll will be both staggering and under-reported.

A totalitarian regime papering over its country's ongoing crises during an Olympic year? Maybe I should have called this post, "Recreate '38".

Mark Steyn's onboard, but not the folks that Zombie photographed this weekend in San Francisco:

The Palestinian community of the Bay Area "celebrated" Israel's 60th anniversary on May 10 by holding the "Nakba-60" festival, which mourned the founding of Israel as a "catastrophe" and called for the creation of a unified Palestinian state where Israel now stands -- in other words, demanding an end to Israel's existence. About 600 people attended the event in San Francisco's Civic Center Park.


* * *

There was a deep but unspoken rift apparent at the event, between the young radicalized Palestinians who wore American-style "urban" clothing and expressed in-your-face Palestinian nationalism that had little or nothing to do with religion or old-fashioned tribal culture; and the older, more conservative Palestinians who seemed quite uncomfortable with all the emphasis on sexuality and Westernized political ideologies.

Like I said, the next chapter in the culture war awaits.

The battles of the post-JFK mid-1960s were largely fought between the far left and the not-as-far-left: Democrats controlled all three branches of government, but the new left hated LBJ, hated the older generation of New Deal-minted liberals, and hated South Vietnam. The result was a--literally--bloody election year in 1968, and when Richard Nixon returned to the national spotlight as the candidate of law and order, he narrowly won over Johnson surrogate Hubert Humphrey.

In a much quieter fashion than forty years ago, we're seeing some of the same internecine struggles play out in this extended primary season between the far left Obama supporters, and the supporters of Hillary Clinton, who is cast in the role of the populist centralist. (If she actually won the nomination, and won in Novemer, she'd effectively govern much as Obama plans to, of course, because it takes a nanny state to control the village, but that's a whole 'nother story.)

Jim Geraghty, who in a previous post spots Joe Conason of Salon comparing Hillary to fellow Democrat George Wallace (just add it to this list), writes:

A note to add to this post: Saturday Night Live this weekend featured a faux-Hillary bragging to the superdelegates that the party had to nominate her over Obama, because "my supporters are racist."

It's become strikingly acceptable to declare Hillary's voters racist lately, isn't it?

Indeed it has. And it's arguably a form of projection in a way, after Rev. Wright's dramatic 15 minutes back in the spotlight a couple of weeks ago. As the Anchoress writes though:

Are Clintons racist? Nah, I don’t believe so. But conscious of, and fixated on race? Yes, that I’ll buy.

Absolutely. But next time the race card gets played against a Republican (and it already has, by Newsweek, not entirely surprisingly), we should remember that like Michael Corleone ordering up another hit, it's just business, nothing personal. And if enough people understand that, that might actually be a surprisingly positive outcome of '68, err, 2008.

Update: Charles Johnson writes that "According to the Washington Post, Indiana is full of racists and bigots": all Hillary supporters according to the Post, but as Charles notes, one of the examples that the paper uses to support their claim is this:

The bigotry has gone beyond words. In Vincennes, the Obama campaign office was vandalized at 2 a.m. on the eve of the primary, according to police. A large plate-glass window was smashed, an American flag stolen. Other windows were spray-painted with references to Obama’s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and other political messages: “Hamas votes BHO” and “We don’t cling to guns or religion. Goddamn Wright.”

As Charles adds:

Vandalism stinks, and whoever did this is a complete moron and a criminal. But the incident shows someone who’s upset by the racism of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. There are no racist words or slurs used. Why would the Washington Post call this “bigotry,” when there’s no evidence of it?

Because attacking bigotry is bigoted--or something like that. When we wake up in 2015 after our national coma, it will all make sense, I guess.

Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Robert Asahina and Pia Catton, editors of the New York Sun:

If you haven't seen any of Peter Robinson's terrific video interview series last week with Tom Wolfe, you can watch all five episodes here.

The New TeeVee blog embeds a video uploaded to YouTube taken during the midst of the horrific Chinese earthquake yesterday and notes:

The devastating earthquake in China today is just the latest crisis to showcase YouTube’s role as a primary source of firsthand accounts of breaking news. Last year, the video-sharing site gave us glimpses of the wildfires burning in southern California and of pro-democracy demonstrations in Myanmar. Now a video shot by a student shows us what it was like during China’s earthquake.

Meanwhile, Virginia Postrel adds:

From initial reports, the Chinese earthquake sounds pretty terrible. With magnitude of 7.9, it was 10 times as strong as the 1989 San Francisco quake and, according to U.S. Geological Survey stats (but not the LAT), more powerful than the 1906 quake that leveled San Francisco. And San Francisco, in either case, was much less populous than Sichuan province, which has 100 million people.

As bad as it was, however, the Sichuan quake would have been much worse had it occurred a few decades ago, when China was less open and prosperous and, thus, less resilient. As this MSNBC video points out a weaker 1976 quake killed a quarter million people. Back then, the Chinese government tried to suppress news of the quake, a stark contrast to today. Reading between the lins of this LAT report about local concerns, however, it seems Chinese government officials still don't quite know how to channel the charitable giving that inevitably follows such a disaster. But the Red Cross seems like a good start.

Back in 2001, in the aftermath of an Indian earthquake that killed 20,000, Jonah Goldberg also discussed the comparison between earthquakes in developed democracies and elsewhere:

Modern buildings have a tendency to fall down less than squalid tenements or shantytowns. Especially when you're rich enough to make them quake proof.

So again you ask, why is this relevant?

Well, if you listen to what the anti-globalization protesters are saying at the World Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or at my local coffeehouse, you'd get the impression that they have the best interests of poor people at heart. Of course, it turns out they don' t.

Globalization is generally something rich people are against and poor people are for, which is funny since rich people are supposed to be greedy and poor people are supposed to be content. This is true about both certain conservatives and liberals but for different reasons. Conservative anti-globalists and trade unionists fear what globalization will do to people inside our borders. That creates problems to be sure, but it's not nearly so evil as a certain breed of liberal nostalgia which wants to make the world safe for righteous tours of impoverished lands where noble savages still live in huts and starve with surprising regularity.

Okay so maybe most of them don't live in huts, but they do live in a crushing poverty that so many liberals think is preferable to being forced to eat at McDonalds or drink Starbucks coffee.

Modern buildings are also often a good place to be during hurricanes, much to the chagrin of some on the left.

Update: Via Instapundit on its brand new Pajamas-centric URL, Business Week explores firsthand earthquake blogging. That's something I'll be happy never to do again, and mine was nowhere near as severe as what Chengdu just went through.

Does Obama snowboard? Reading about his blame the staff first mentality, I'm waiting for the inevitable "I don't fall down. The son of a bitch knocked me over!" moment.

Update: Apologies for the above comments. Upon further review, Barrack Obama is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

More Related thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson.

Roger Kimball writes, "much that we associate with 'the Sixties' really had its origin in the 1950s", observations that societal critics as disparate as Alvin Toffler and Diana West each mentioned to me when I interviewed them. While some on the left will tacitly make that point when pinned down, it isn't internalized in how the left views history, because it undermines much of the "the most important decade of the 20th century" narrative of the 1960s, as someone who did one too many tabs of lysergic acid diethylamide in the waning years of that decade once claimed.

More from Roger:

What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: “The fifties,” Bloom wrote, “were one of the great periods of the American university,” which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and “were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe.” The Sixties, by contrast, “were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.”

[Rachel Donadio, writing in the New York Times Book Review] is chiefly interested in reminding us of the febrile cultural animation of the late Fifties. What she doesn’t say is, but what we can no see clearly with the wisdom of hindsight, is that the ideas of the Beats contained in ovo nearly all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the na‹ve political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come.

Indeed, the chief difference between the Beat Generation and the Sixties was the ambient cultural climate: when the Beats first emerged, in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the poisonous antinomianism the Beats advocated. But by the time the Sixties established themselves, virtually all resistance had been broken down. It was then that the message of the Beats gained mass appeal. Reaction to the Vietnam War probably did more than anything else to enfranchise their antinomianism, though the introduction of the birth-control pill certainly did a great deal to further the cause of the sexual revolution, a prime item on the agenda of the Beats. In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.

And as a refresher on the disastrous outcome of where all that inexorably led, I can't recommend enough this essay by Myron Magnet from the new issue of City Journal.

Update: When Peter Hitchens claims "The real issue for the 1968 generation has always been their right to have fun, however much it costs other people", that's true to a certain extent, but it ignores that neo-puritanism that quickly followed, as Rich Lowry observes:

The freedoms fought for in the student revolt soon curdled into the opposite: free speech became speech codes; sexual liberation became the regime of sexual harassment; civil rights became quotas. Meanwhile, Mark Rudd and a fringe of the New Left spun off into the Weather Underground, which took the destructive spirit of the campus protests to its logical conclusion in a campaign of terrorist bombings. Jonah Goldberg reminds us in his book "Liberal Fascism" that the radical left committed roughly 250 attacks from September 1969 to May 1970.

If the academics gave in, another segment of the parents resisted. They were the Nixon voters, reacting against the disorder and cultural radicalism with which liberalism became identified. Republicans held the White House for 28 of the next 40 years, and the alternative history of the 1960s is the rise of the right. Even now, with Barack Obama dogged by his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the Democratic Party's challenge is to free itself from the taint of 1968.

Good luck.

This just in from Salon--"Reagan didn't completely suck":

In "The Age of Reagan," liberal historian Sean Wilentz reckons with the enormous, ongoing influence of the teflon president.

The Age of Reagan? Say, now there's a title that rings a bell!

Death, taxes, and that France will easily surrender to any invading empire, no matter how far away they've come.

(Via Hot Air.)

From the home office In Little Rock, Arkansas...

By the way, the rather expansive new American flag which appears in the video is for sale here. Here's where you can find the Hillary as Indiana Jones video, and the Hillary as Norma Desmond clip. And the 3:00 AM mash-up in the video is here.

Previous Silicon Graffiti episodes can be found here.

Last year, there were 409 tornadoes:

"So far some 730 tornadoes have touched down this year, more than double the number for all of last year."

—ABC's Bill Weir on yesterday's Good Morning America, who--of course--blames the "more than double" increase on global warming.

I doubt Cindy Crawford would argue with those calculations.

(Nor would this fellow, but for different reasons.)

Ann Althouse--with an assist from the maestro behind Operation Chaos--reflects on Bob Novak's report that Michelle won't let Barack nominate Hillary as his veep:

Do powerful women hate to see other women succeed? Do they want to be the only woman? Or do you think "sisterhood is powerful" at the highest levels? Surely, Michelle Obama has plenty of reason to hate Hillary, but don't you think she wants to be the First Lady? If a woman is Vice President, that woman seems to be above the President's wife. She'd be the first lady.

Michelle would even have competition as the top spouse of the land, what with a former President roaming in and about the VP mansion. He'd catch the spotlight, project the glamour.

And speaking of Bill Clinton... Hillary certainly made it her business over the years to keep other women down whenever those women interfered with her plan to ascend to power via the spousal role. There was no powerful sisterhood then. And now: turnabout! Turnabout is... a bitch.

Heh.

As the Mirror Universe equivalent to the history of the American left that Kathy Shaidle reviewed today, Orrin Judd has an lengthy post with multiple reviews of leftwing author Rick Pearlstein's new book on Richard Nixon, including George Will's take:

Perlstein repeatedly explains Nixon’s or other people’s behavior as arising from an Orthogonian resentment of Franklins, including establishment figures as different as Alger Hiss and Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon “co-opted the liberals’ populism, channeling it into a white middle-class rage at the sophisticates, the well-born, the ‘best circles.’” By stressing the importance of Nixon’s character in shaping events, and the centrality of resentments in shaping Nixon’s character, Perlstein treads a dead-end path blazed by Hofstadter, who seemed not to understand that condescension is not an argument. Postulating a link between “status anxiety” and a “paranoid style” in American politics — especially conservative politics — Hofstadter dismissed the conservative movement’s positions as mere attitudes that did not merit refutation. Perlstein, too, gives these ideas short shrift.

As the pollster Samuel Lubell had already noted before the 1952 election, “the inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping.” Perlstein keenly sees that some liberals “developed a distaste” for the social elements they had championed, now that those elements were “less reliably downtrodden” and less content to be passively led by liberal elites.

The masses bought television sets and enjoyed what they watched. But Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (and formerly Adlai Stevenson’s administrative assistant) declared television a “vast wasteland,” thereby implicitly scolding viewers who enjoyed it. When New York was becoming a lawless dystopia, with crime, drugs and homelessness spoiling public spaces, August Heckscher, the patrician commissioner of parks under Mayor John Lindsay, sniffily declared that people clamoring for law and order were “scared by the abundance of life.”

A Newsweek cover story on Louise Day Hicks, who led opposition to forced busing of school children in Boston, described her supporters as “a comic-strip gallery of tipplers and brawlers and their tinseled overdressed dolls ... the men queued up to give Louise their best, unscrewing cigar butts from their chins to buss her noisily on the cheek, or pumping her arm as if it were a jack handle under a truck.”

Perlstein deftly deploys such judgments to illustrate what the resentful resented. Unfortunately, he seems to catch the ’60s disease of rhetorical excess.

Orrin--who knows a thing or two about book reviews himself--also makes a great observation:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much. [That's consistent with this Time article from January of 1970--Ed]

Of course, this perspective does tend to undermine the thesis that the consensus was never retrieved, but consider too that Nixon was followed by a Democrat who ran to the Right of where he and Gerald Ford had governed. The only other Democrat elected president since 1964 was likewise an Evangelical Southern governor. And, while Carter and Clinton only won very narrowly, several Republicans since have run up pretty big margins. The problem would seem to be a reluctance on the part of Mr. Perlstein and company to accept that the consensus has been restored but has shifted back to where it was pre-Depression, fairly far to the Right side of moderate. Thus, even when Democrats won back Congress in the 2006 midterm they've ended up governing little differently than Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay did.

It is instructive also to look at where the most divisive point in our politics is today: the racial/tribal divide between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This is an entirely predictable function of the identity politics that still characterizes much of the Left, although Mr. Obama tried desperately to run as a cipher, lest voters discover his pastor and his politics and, inevitably, reject him as just another Northern liberal too far out of the mainstream to elect president.

Orrin writes that he'll be posting a more detailed review soon.

Carol Platt Liebau makes an interesting observation--that while "Democrats and Barack's friends in the media will attempt to portray any opposition to his candidacy as nothing more than racism...Obama's troubles attracting white votes seem to postdate the Wright imbroglio":

Everyone knows that Democrats and Barack's friends in the media will attempt to portray any opposition to his candidacy as nothing more than racism. But Stuart Taylor makes an important point -- that Obama's troubles attracting white votes seem to postdate the Wright imbroglio, noting that Barack "easily won the caucuses in overwhelmingly white Iowa on January 3 and, over the next seven weeks, captured the white male vote in Maryland, Virginia, and Wisconsin and as many white male voters as Clinton did in South Carolina."

Here's the question: Would Americans be offended if a white pastor had blamed 9/11 on The United States? Yes -- in fact, the regrettable former rector at my church did the same thing, and his congregants were appalled. Would some (at least) Americans be taken aback at the news that a candidate's close confidant (and spiritual advisor) had said, "God d**n America"? Of course.

All this has taken a toll. One anecdote: A close friend of mine, a moderate Republican who was initially receptive-to-enthusiastic about the Obama candidacy recently wrote me, "I'm rethinking it after this Wright thing. And his wife is now proud to be an American for the first time? Forget her." If some white voters are turning from Obama, it's not because of his skin color. It's because of the views of those closest to him -- and what they suggest about the candidate's own views.

Just for the record: It's not Obama's Republican opponents who have made an issue of his race -- or who have most damaged his candidacy. It's his closest compatriots (like Wright and Mrs. Obama) and his intra-party competitors (like Clinton).

Much like John Kerry thought he would get a pass in 2004 on his early 1970s Winter Soldier salad days, Obama seems to have thought he'd get one as well from the MSM for his own radical chic past. (And he essentially did: note that the far left directed their outrage not at Rev. Wright himself, but at Sean Hannity, who originally exposed his rhetoric a year ago.) Little did Obama know that Rev. Wright craved the national spotlight almost as much as himself.

Richard Brooks of the Times of London writes that Tom Cruise's Valkyrie is being pushed back a year:

The fortunes of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise have suffered a blow with the news that his next big film has been postponed until 2009.

The release of Valkyrie, which tells the story of the 1944 assassination plot against Hitler, was first postponed from this summer to the autumn and is now not expected to appear until next year.

“We were originally expecting the film to be released in June,” said a senior executive at one of Britain’s leading cinema chains.

“I know there have been all sorts of problems with this production and we will not be screening it at all this year.”

The film is not only a blow to Cruise as an actor but in his more recent incarnation as a movie mogul at United Artists (UA), the studio which made the film.

One critic in Hollywood has declared “Valkyrie is dead”, with another arguing that the film’s problems could also wreck the revival of UA.

Not to mention totally bumming out these fellas.

At Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle, who blogs at Five Feet Fury, has an article-length review of Daniel Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left:

The Left boasts enthusiasm and energy to spare, but its inability to learn from the past is its fatal flaw. As Flynn explains in the book’s introduction, “because of the suspicions of tradition inherent within radicalism, [the Left] largely ignores that past.” After all, visionaries “preoccupied with the triumphal future cannot pause to learn from the mistakes of the past.”

This refusal to check the rear-view mirror is reflected in the Left’s compulsion for coining extravagant, inapt, and frequently offensive historical analogies: these days, every conservative leader is “Hitler”, every war is “Vietnam,” and every petulant protester is the new “Rosa Parks.”

As Flynn points out to devastating effect, the sheer stupidity of such comparisons should, by rights, be enough to cripple them as rhetorical devices; alas, widespread historical illiteracy and an aversion to criticizing “protected” identity groups render healthy mockery almost impossible.

Read the whole thing; as Kathy notes, Flynn’s book sounds like it would make an exceptional double-feature alongside Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which itself is a potent centennial history.

Update: I should add Benjamin Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help to make the above titles into a pretty nifty troika.

Roger L. Simon writes:

I am trying to figure out more about Barack Obama because I think there is something strangely disconnected about the man. One theory I have... and I welcome others... is that he doesn't take religion seriously at all--not just for himself, but in general. It is only something to be exploited. Therefore he thinks the words of Jeremiah Wright are "just for show" and he is free to cherry-pick what he wants and finds useful. Simultaneously, he doesn't believe Ahmadinejad or Hamas, thinks their religious principles are baloney, just like Jeremiah Wright's, and that they are simply exploiting them. Since it's all a schuck, the Islamofascists can be reasoned with. I couldn't imagine a worse man for our times.

Meanwhile, Stanley Kurtz reads through multiple back issues of Trinity United's newsletter (started by Rev. Wright in the early 1980s) and comes to the obvious conclusion: "What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?--I answer, Obama knew everything, and he's known it for ages."

(Or else he sure slept through a lot of sermons...)

As Obama tacks back to the center-left, the New York Times goes right along with the flip-flop; Walter Duranty could not be reached for comment.

While I'd call it an attempt at airbrushing, Ace has a much more colorful--and appropriately scatological--description.

Yet another Hillary supporter uttering quotes that would be right at home at the MRC--in this case, Hillary herself!

ABC News' Eloise Harper reports: An adoring group of more than 1,000 people greeted Sen. Hillary Clinton and her daughter today at a fundraiser in New York City. She thanked them for their support and later told the group that she is going to finish the nominating process.

"I want you to know how grateful I am for your support and how much you have sustained me throughout this campaign," she said. "But it has been a joy. Now I know that may be hard to believe, but if you just take the advice that I give to my own mother, and that is: Just turn off the television."

Hillary and her supporters are complaining that the media is in the tank for the candidate further to the left than she is. But hey, remember six years ago when her husband's former vice president was saying this?

And speaking of vice-presidents, at this rate, how long before Hillary or her supporters start calling the media--which kept their presidency alive in the 1990s--nattering nabobs of negativism?

Father Coughlin could not be reached for comment:

"All we're doing is going into the basket and saying, 'Damn, what did they do in '32, what did they do in '34, what did they do in '36,' and we're pulling them out, dusting them off, giving them a paint job, correcting the fenders a bit, and we're using them," Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) said. "To get us through the horrendous problems we may have over the next several years, we've got to make these old programs work, and we've got to be as inventive as hell."

Nice to know that with the Dow Jones about 12,700 points higher than it was in 1932, the left still sees nothing but Hoovervilles into eternity.

From Clinton-aide Lanny Davis's interview with the Politico yesterday:

Davis said he told a producer several times before getting on-air that he wanted to offer a counterpoint to CNN’s panel, which he thinks is too pro-Obama.

How can Davis say that? Why, other than literally swooning over him, they're completely objective and neutral!

Wow:

Another dividend from Operation Chaos, and Hillary's concurrent scorched earth final campaign days; I hope Team McCain puts together ads as potent as this one. (Or these ads that the GOP is rolling out, which apparently haven't been endorsed by the McCain camp.) On the other hand, salt this one away for the fall, where it's sure to be pressed into service again.

Another pleasant boomer/Gen X collective childhood memory ruined by postmodern Hollywood:

MAYBE every generation gets its own "Tron."

"Speed Racer" comes to us from the creators of "The Matrix," and as my cerebral cortex was reeling from the onslaught of its jelly-belly colors and "Lucy in the Sky" graphics, I wondered if there was some parallel universe where it might be considered an entertaining experience. Maybe Japan?

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

Or to paraphrase this extremely perceptive media critic duo, this film sucks--but it sucks in ways we've never seen before. It sucks in new and unusual ways--especially once you get past its Tron-on-acid visuals.

I think Jonathan Chait is actually pretty astonished himself, when he writes:

People who thought they knew Hillary Clinton have gazed in astonishment: What has she become? The answer is, a conservative populist.

Orrin Judd looks back on her husband's two successful elections won with endless conservative populist rhetoric and wonders: What took her so long?

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg notes that Hillary's rhetoric may sound populist in the (presumably) waning days of her campaign, it's certainly not conservative.

Astonishingly, via the Huffington Post:

We may now understand why Barack does not wear a flag lapel pin. He's afraid that Bill Ayers will stomp on him.

Heh. You know, some blogger should make a video exploring all of that ancient Radical Chic rhetoric coming home to roost.

Keeping wide swatches of nearby sources of oil off-limits to drilling only ensures that Americans will be paying the Pelosi Premium for some time to come.

As Jim Geraghty writes, this would be a slam-dunk issue for John McCain to exploit--so naturally, don't hold your breath waiting for him to take it on.

Paging Theodore Dalrymple: Grist for your next essay on the decline and fall of western civilization is waiting right here.

John Brummett of the Arkansas News Bureau writes that because "Bill Clinton has behaved ineptly and inanely" on the campaign trail, "His wife has taken to sending him to small towns, like the Republicans did to conceal Dan Quayle in 1988."

But Bill may not be the only one making Quayle-esque gaffes on the campaign stump:

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "Almost imperceptibly to the McCain campaign, I think Obama has already established quite new messianic rules of engagement that will be difficult to overturn". But "the eventual downside for Obama is that the loftier the prophet, the more transparent his all-too-human transgressions."

Update: John Hinderaker is on a similar wavelength:

This is much worse than anything Dan Quayle ever did. Needless to say, these bizarre moments won't be promoted by the media as evidence that Obama is stupid. But they'll be worth keeping in mind in the fall, when every time John McCain misspeaks, the Democrats' whispering campaign will suggest that he's getting senile.

Win or lose, come November, McCain may wonder why he spent so much time cultivating the MSM, as they inexorably turn on him.

Just to follow on from my post from this morning, here's yet another article that would easily have fit in on Newsbusters, except that its chief source of quotes is a liberal who is complaining about the partisan nature of CNN's political coverage:

When Clinton supporter Lanny Davis appeared on CNN during primary night, shortly before 10 p.m., there was a peculiar exchange with host Anderson Cooper.

Cooper: Lanny, let me start off with you. We haven't heard from you tonight. Your take on Barack Obama's speech earlier?
Davis: You haven't heard from me tonight. And I'm not sure — I’m not sure you want to hear from me tonight but —
Cooper: We heard from Paul Begala. This is your big chance.
Davis: Well, actually, I don't think we heard very much from Paul Begala. We did hear an awful —
Cooper: All part of the conspiracy against Hillary Clinton, I suppose.

During the Election Night broadcast, there was palpable tension between Davis and CNN reporters and panelists on camera — and apparently, with producers off camera.

Looking back, Davis said by phone this afternoon, he considers it “the worst experience I ever had on television.”

What bothers Davis most is that CNN is the network with which he’s had the longest relationship, where he’s maintained close friendships through the years, and that he's always considered middle-of-the-road in its coverage. But in his opinion, CNN has not treated Hillary Clinton fairly in the ’08 race.

Formerly special counsel to President Bill Clinton, Davis admits wholeheartedly to being a partisan and strongly supports Clinton against Obama.

So what happened on Tuesday night?

Davis, by his account, was invited to appear on the CNN panel in New York but declined because of a family commitment — his son’s baseball practice in Maryland. Instead, he opted to participate by remote from the network’s D.C. studio.

He was instructed to arrive around 8:30 p.m., he said, in order to take over the pro-Clinton position once Paul Begala left. So Davis left the baseball practice early in order to arrive at the studio on time, but he didn’t make it on air until almost 10 p.m.

A CNN spokesperson said that Davis was scheduled to go on-air at 9pm, but CNN didn't go to him or any commentator during Sen. Obama's speech in the 9pm hour, just as no commentators were on-air during Sen. Clinton's speech later the same night.

Davis said he told a producer several times before getting on-air that he wanted to offer a counterpoint to CNN’s panel, which he thinks is too pro-Obama.

Regarding the panel's make-up, Davis said that he believes Gloria Borger, David Gergen, Donna Brazile and Carl Bernstein are all tougher on Clinton than on her rival. And he maintains that Roland Martin is definitely a “partisan for Obama.” (Martin has not official endorsed Obama and is not labeled as such on the network,)

According to a post found via Protein Wisdom and Hot Air, Martin is apparently quite a partisan for Reverend Wright, in any case.

More from Davis:

Regarding CNN’s competitors, Davis said that MSNBC is “shameless about their bias toward Obama,” and Fox has been the fairest — which is saying a lot coming from a self-described member of the Democratic Party’s left wing.

“Fox, no matter how much you might criticize an ideological bent, in this campaign, they have been religiously middle-of-the-road, point-counterpoint,” Davis said.

And that’s what Davis said he expects from CNN, the network where he’s had “the longest history, best friends, and most respect.”

And that's the rub, isn't it? Like most in old media or who orbit closest to it, they don't object that it's partisan anymore--they're merely upset when it's stacked against their politician.

This could make for one of those cheesy guilty pleasure National Enquirer-type surveys:

Choice of Hillary Metaphor

Reveals Your Inner Personality!

Is Hillary:

• Norma Desmond?
• Your psycho ex-girlfriend?
• Richard Nixon?
• Don Corleone?
• Big Brother?
• Or is she simply everything you hate about yourself?

You make the call!

Update: This one arrived too late to make the initial cut: Is Hillary Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction?

More: This was inevitable, and in highly questionable taste, to be honest

Travis Kavulla notes that last night, "Apparently a laser light show – or, rather, a piece of 'illumination art' – was projected onto the National Cathedral" in Washington, DC:

Last night, [Gerry Hofstetter, a 45-year-old artist from Zurich] ran a series of glass plates through a 6,000-volt projector and said artisty things like "Light is hope, fire is energy. These colors mean hope and energy."

Light is hope? I only wish more in the artistic class still believed that.

James Taranto writes:

For all the hype about Barack Obama being some new kind of politician, in one respect he is very similar to recent Democratic presidential nominees: He takes criticism very badly, responding to it by getting both defensive and nasty. It is a most unattractive quality.

And remember, he's the optimistic one in the family:

Michelle Obama: …working in some of the toughest neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago, worked for years in neighborhoods where people had a reason to give up hope, because their jobs had been lost, steel mills shut down, living in brown fields left by those closed steel plants, unsafe streets, schools deteriorating, grandparents raising grandkids. Barack spent years working with churches, busing single mothers down to City Hall to help them find their voice, building the kind of operations on the ground, just like he’s doing in this race, block by block, person by person. Now you tell me whether there’s anybody in this race who can claim to have made the same choice with their lives. You tell me. But I think that Barack Obama is the only person that can claim that kind of choice…so trust me, we’ve seen it all. Barack has seen it all.

Hugh Hewitt: Mark Steyn?

Mark Steyn: (laughing) Well, you know, that’s…I don’t know…Chicago doesn’t sound like part of America. It sounds like we need to fly in some U.N. relief agency. They should all pull out of Burma and fly into these derelict parts of Chicago. The fact is, community organizer is a bogus term. She ought to knock it off. Real people…one of the most pathetic aspects of this race is that somehow, a guy like Mitt Romney, who runs successful companies, he’s regarded as Mr. Bloated Plutocrat like the guy in the top hat on the Monopoly board. A guy like that actually makes a contribution to people’s lives, to generating the great wealth in corporate America that pays for everything else. And a community organizer, which most functioning communities in the United States don’t have the need for, is an entirely bogus term. She is becoming, I miss Teresa Heinz Kerry.

HH: (laughing)

MS: God bless here. I used to love going to John Kerry events, and John Kerry would be droning I say to George Bush, bring it on, and Teresa used to stand there next to him looking board out of her skull. God bless her. She was a, you know, she’s a genuine, a very genuine woman. And Michelle Obama by contrast seems to have all the condescension of Teresa Heinz Kerry, plus this weird bitterness and anger. I think she’s a very strange woman.

Ascending towards the eschaton, one is always likely to get the vapors.

From Peggy Noonan's fingers to this terrific video on YouTube:

Operation Chaos: the gift that keeps on giving. At least until it doesn't.

Good question. Let's ask Bill Ayers next time we see him, or any of these folks.

(H/T: IP)

On Wednesday night, as I was mixing down the elements for this week's PJM Political (which you can listen to here--and yes, I did get far too silly writing the headline)--I listened to some of the audio from Rush Limbaugh, the first time I had done so in a while. As a result of Operation Chaos, he's clearly having more fun than he's had in quite some time and this essay in Slate by Jack Shafer is one of the many inadvertent byproducts of it:

My intention here is less to light a candle for the Clinton candidacy—which remains the long shot it was even after her Pennsylvania primary win in late April—than to give Russert and company the hot foot for their dramatic exuberance.

Whether covering politics, the stock market, or sports, television reporters live inside the moment, and the fundamental questions before them are always "who's winning, who's losing, and why" (which just happens to be the tag line of Slate's "Politics" department). If a TV reporter can peg a winner, he will. If no winners are in attendance, he'll identify a loser. If no winner or losers can be found, he'll drum up that somebody has "gained" momentum. The medium doesn't reward procrastinators or qualifiers.

Although TV reporters may expect thing X to happen while they're on the air, they plan for contingencies Y and Z. Before going on camera, they stuff their cheeks with a huge assortment of pithy insights so that, no matter what happens, they have something smart to mouth. The most excitable of the TV news chipmunks was usually Dan Rather, whose election night scripts—"Bush is sweeping through the South like a big wheel through a cotton field"—covered events that ultimately may have occurred only in parallel universes.

When Russert exclaimed the inevitability of Obama's nomination, it was an act of recall, not an act of cognition. At the moment he bestowed the nomination upon Obama, his network had yet to call Indiana for Clinton. Shuffling his mental notes and calculating the possibility of an Obama victory in Indiana, how could he resist speaking the words he had composed in his head two months ago?

Russert of course, a former aid to Mario Cuomo, came to NBC via the revolving door between Democrats and old media (See also: Stephanopoulos, George; and Matthews, Chris). Jeff Jarvis and James Wolcott, who have each openly declared for Hillary, have also recently clung bitterly to similar opinions. I don't know if Shafer is a Hillary or an Obama man (perhaps he's a McCain backer, but I would tend to doubt it, based on where he's writing), but when the above could have been written for National Review Online, or Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, (including its subsidiary, Newsbusters), it's been fascinating to watch the center-left turn on their own mass media, as a result of this extended primary season.

Mark Hemmingway asks, "How bad are things in the newspaper industry? See prayingforpapers.com."

I know there are no atheists in fox holes and unemployment lines, but I wonder what these people would say about that site?

They call it witchcraft...Or the reality party, depending upon who you talk to.

"The way the Japanese could tell they were losing WWII was that the great victories reported by their media were getting closer and closer to home. Our media problem is like a fun-house mirror version of this - the way we can tell we are winning is that our crushing defeats are happening less often and to different enemies."

Elsewhere, Cindy Crawford discovers her inner General Jack D. Ripper:

According to Crawford and the “Thirsty for Change” Web site, Americans use 50 billion water bottles a year.

“Fifty billion in America and only 50 percent are recycled,” Crawford said. “So that’s like 38 billion that aren’t recycled.”

The Exurban League explores the new math:

Let's see... 50 Billion x 50% = 25 Billion, subtract the loss factor, add in the safety margin, carry the missing supermodel brain cells... yep, 38 billion!

Do we know if Cindy has any thoughts on fluoridation?

(And don't even ask her about toilet paper...)

Update: Liberty Peak Lodge crosses the streams: check out the caption on the photo above this post.

With his rapidly becoming infamous quote Tuesday night on CNN that Democrats couldn't win in November with a coalition of “eggheads and African-Americans,” Paul Begala inadvertently reveals his inner-Stevenson.

But what would President Merkin Muffley Say?

Extreme Mortman has some thoughts on--to coin a phrase--democracy, whiskey, sexy:

Happy 60th birthday, Israel!

Democracy. Military might. Strong, reliable ally of America. Front-lines in the global war on terror.

But more important, as CNN put it, “Israel is hip, sexy, and fun.”

Or as P.J. O'Rourke once wrote:

"We're not being sexist here," my friend insisted. "It's not that looks matter per se. It's just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? n the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed."

All of which makes quite a contrast to the original No Fun League.

In the Atlantic, Ross Douthat writes, "the GOP is now a working-class party":

There are two important points to be made about these numbers, and the deeper reality they reflect. The first, which you hear around these parts a lot, is that the GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it's going to rebuild its shattered majority.

If the first half of that equation sounds familiar, it should: it's a theme that we wrote about four years ago when the GOP, and its incumbent president were riding high. After the midterms--and with more trouble potentially on the way--Douthat adds:

The second is that the GOP can't only be a working-class party; just as the famous Judis-Texeira emerging Democratic majority is built around the mass upper class and the poor but depends on winning some working-class votes to put it over the top, so any future "Party of Sam's Club" Republican majority is going to need to win back at least some of the mass-upper-class votes that the party has hemorrhaged during the Bush years.

Hopefully it won't take another Carter-esque extended economic malaise this time.

Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos", which featured voters from one party crossing over--perfectly legally--to vote in the other party's primary elections. The resultant furor from Democrats has led to unintentionally hilarious comparisons to"radio broadcasts that incited violence in Rwanda and Kenya". And journalists from the original Blue State chiming in (translation here). And even former presidential candidates saying stuff like this:

David Plouffe and a series of big gun endorsers are holding a conference call to stress the scale of last night's victory.

"He clearly did more than he had to and she did not achieve what she had to," said Senator John Kerry.

Both Plouffe and Kerry stressed the importance of the Limbaugh Effect.

"Rush Limbaugh was tampering with the primary," Kerry said "If it was not for Republicans taking Democratic ballots, he would have won," he said of Obama.

So we won't be reading any articles like this in 2012, right?

Of course we will. But the spittle-flecked hypocrisy generated this year when the Florsheim is on the other foot will be fun to look back on when we do.

Tim Graham looks at Tim Russert, spin-meister:

Drudge focused the World Wide Web on Tim Russert's arrogant "Arise, Sir Loin of Beef" declaration that the Democratic race is over and "no one's gonna dispute it." The first words out of Russert's mouth this morning on NBC were "I cannot find an objective Democrat who does not think this race is over."

Tim Russert is a Democrat, but not an "objective" one. This declaration is spin, not reality, especially when we know the Clinton Chutzpah Express can avoid the "reality" obstacles that cause every other political family to call it quits. I don't recall Russert telling the country that the Clinton presidency was "over" in 1998, and that only the Clintons didn't realize it, that "no one's gonna dispute it."

Regardless of where political reality lands, what people should see in that Drudge clip and the NBC clip this morning is Tim Russert asserting himself as President of the News. People should see that this is an intensely political press that calculates every word it says and every story it covers and every poll it commissions. Russert and his colleagues don't want to just observe. They want to run the country. They want to have the power to make and break presidents. They want to tell the people to follow their robotic orders and deeply drink of the "conventional wisdom" they manufacture. "Objective" is not an adjective to them; it is a noun. Their objective today is to clear the path and get the Democrats back in the White House.

Compare Russert's firm, Kent Brockman-like The Race Is Over statement with the endless interjections and biases from a fellow MSM'er when he couldn't believe the race was over in 2000.

"It's got to hurt when George McGovern says you can't win."

Update: Jim Geraghty waxes nostalgic for "the good old days when you could buy a politician, and they would stay bought":

Why does anybody trust George McGovern?

He just turned on Hillary, rescinded his endorsement of her, endorsed Obama, and called on her to leave the race.

And he does it after the Clinton family foundation gave $25,000 to support the McGovern Library and Center for Leadership and Public Service in Mitchell, South Dakota in early 2007.

Ingrate.

Heh.^TM

The Black Panthers and Weathermen (aka Weather Underground) were anarchistic paramilitary far left groups from the late 1960s, whose ties crossed at least once in 1970. They're resurfacing again though in a surprising place: each has been referenced via Barack Obama's presidential campaign, particlarly the latter group. Back in February, the Politico's Ben Smith noted:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district's influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they're better known nationally as two of the most notorious--and unrepentant--figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor."

Obama and Palmer "were both there," he said.

Obama's connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home--part of a campaign courtship--reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.

And Tom Maguire also uncovered another connection:

The Obama/Ayers soundbite is this: Obama and Ayers (a professor of education) worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for several years in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to reform Chicago's public schools. The extent of their relationship is not clear, since Obama has been opaque on this topic both in a televised debate and at his website. However, Ayers was instrumental in founding the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Obama was the group's first chairman, so there is something being concealed there.

And it's not like Hillary Clinton is without sin in this department, herself.

(Earlier Silicon Graffiti videos can be found here.)

One great thing about election years in the post-9/11 era: the MSM really isn't afraid to let it all hang out. As Kathryn-Jean Lopez noted last week:

CNN's "news" coverage on Sunday night went out of its way to be as unfair and unbalanced as possible. They aired Wright live. During the fiery speech, Wright plugged CNN "anchor and special correspondent" Soledad O'Brien and "long-term friend" CNN analyst Roland Martin. Both O'Brien and Martin appeared on-air after the event, discussing how funny and effective Wright was. As they explained to viewers how to understand Wright's infamous "God damn America" comment, evening anchor Rick Sanchez insisted viewers keep watching replay after replay and apology after apology for Wright. "I would imagine the people watching [on TV] would say, 'Wow, I didn't realize the guy had two masters degree and a Ph.D. I didn't realize he spoke five languages.'" And that changes "God damn America" for you, doesn't it? That appears to be CNN's hope. O'Brien continued raving about the speech, "It was very funny. It was hilarious at times." And in the morning, O'Brien was back, calling Sunday night a "homerun" for Wright.

Which you can watch here. As I wrote shortly afterwards, the media will have to go into backwards-reverse-somersault Olympic-level fip-flops to go from gushing over Wright to tossing him under the bus.

And here you go! The CNN anchor who interviewed O'Brien for her "home run" moment last Monday, is today telling Obama that his network is a "Wright Free Zone".

In the tank? Just a tad.

Late Update: You can see both O'Brien's "home run" moment and CNN anchor John Roberts' subsequent "Wright-free zone" line starting at about 6:50 into this edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog.

"1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us":

Just as Jack Torrance was trapped in the Overlook Hotel for all eternity, Stephen King appears to doomed to relive "Jon Carry's" gaffe from 2006.

Need to raise your blood pressure in a hurry? Just check out the photo that Marathon Pundit found of Bill Ayers--in whose home Obama launched his first political campaign in 1995--dancing on top of a crumpled American flag.

(Via Hot Air.)

From New York magazine comes a piece titled, "About That Crush on Obama: If Barack is out of touch with America, then the media must be too."

As Orrin Judd writes, "Holy Master of the Obvious, Batman!"

When Saturday Night Live is more in touch with reality than you are, it might be time to get out of midtown Manhattan a bit more often. Maybe visit an Outback Steakhouse, and have some red meat in a Red State, if only for anthropological research purposes.

Update: Dean Barnett writes--and this isn't breaking news anymore, of course--that " the old media are dying":

One of the things that is killing them is their dual pretense of objectivity and neutrality. If Dan Rather was fairer or more objective than the Huffington Post, he had me fooled.

So what will rise from the ashes of the old media castles? What we'll likely have is a Wild West of information where news consumers will have to seek out truth on their own. This isn't unprecedented. After the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone's two newspapers gave starkly different accounts of the affair, one championing the Earps and the other the Clanton/McLaury faction.

Horace Greeley ran for president at the tail end of his career and invented Andrew Jackson's most famous quote at the start of it ("John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"). Newsmen with an agenda are nothing new under the sun. And the market will reward those with a fidelity to the truth and punish those who demonstrate the opposite. Please see the pathetic Mr. Rather currently toiling away on something called HDNet for comforting evidence of that fact.

The prospect of not having a newspaper or news source of record may frighten some people since it would be new territory for the modern era. But far more frightening is a thankfully bygone era when a media powerhouse like Walter Cronkite could call the Vietnam War lost because he didn’t understand what had happened with the Tet Offensive. Worse still, so impeccable was his credibility that the country would believe him.

Better to have a nation of citizens actively engaged in finding the truth than assuming they're getting the truth from what's in fact an unreliable source.

Exactly.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

And then they hit the campaign trail. If somehow you've just woken up and tuned into the presidential election, here's how to get up to speed with what the lefthand side of the aisle has been up to in a brisk seven minute video from Slate:

(Via Ann Althouse.)

Dr. Helen checks out Julia Gorin's new book, Clintonisms:

I spent the morning reading a new book by conservative comedian Julie Gorin called, Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing, and Even Suspect Musing, of Billary. I generally don't go for these kinds of books that make fun of various presidents but this one was sort of catchy and funny--although if you like the Clintons, you may not see it that way.

In the introduction, Ms. Gorin states that we are faced with the real possibility of a second Clinton presidency and her book "attempts to preempt that reminder and at the same time examine the pressing issues and questions that may be revisited in the event of a second Clinton presidency..."

She notes that her book is not a scholarly work and is not meant to be fair or balanced. "It's a collection of anecdotes, reportage, jokes and first, second and third-party quotes from and about the Clintons." The anecdotes, jokes and quotes range from those "Defining the Clintons" to "With Peacekeepers like These..." which focuses on disturbing sayings from the Clinton's ideas of foreign policy. The hypocrisy of many of the musings is food for thought.

You can hear my interview with Julia in the latest edition of PJM Political--tune in here; she's about 15 minutes in, right after Bill Bradley's opening segment.

Last week, we mentioned the strange op-ed by Paul Auster that the New York Times published. The author of the Weekly Standard's Scrapbook column follows up with this:

Readers with long memories will recall the spectacle of Columbia undergraduates--children of privilege enrolled at a distinguished Ivy League institution founded when New York was still a British colony--invading classrooms and administrative offices, manhandling deans, professors, and fellow students, stealing and destroying books and documents, vandalizing chambers devoted to learning, roaming corridors in search of fodder to burn. The Columbia strike of 1968 made a temporary celebrity of a student named Mark Rudd, and publicized the episode's emblematic slogan: "Up against the wall, motherf--r!"

It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster:

Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence. .  .  . The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and so off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park. Much to my astonishment, I was with them. What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books? He was helping to tear down the fence. He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen -others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act.

One of the great parlor games of modern scholarship is pondering how the German people--citizens of the land of Bach, Kant, and Goethe--could find themselves marching in step behind Adolf Hitler. Well, Paul Auster and his Boomer companions at Columbia offer a clue. Here is as plain and startling a description of the mob mentality--together with the attendant hysteria and romanticized violence--as you are likely to find in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, nicely camouflaged in the language of nostalgia and social protest.

If, in this presidential election year, anyone wonders how the political left grew estranged from the American mainstream, yielding the politics of the past four decades, they need only read Paul Auster's tribute to the Columbia strike, written "alone in this room with a pen in my hand" as "I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

The writer of the Scrapbook adds that every now and then, he's "seized with the thought that the last, best hope of mankind--or at any rate, for our peace of mind--will be the death of the last surviving member of the Baby Boom generation."

Of course, he's far from alone in that department--and for those keeping score at home, just follow along with this easy-to-use toteboard!

Even as Obama attempts to covert the masses to what the Washington Post calls "his own vision of patriotism", Roger L. Simon notes that "According to Reuters, Obama is trying to wrest the 'Straight Talk' mantle from McCain."

With straight talking all-American mentors like Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright, and his own wife's punitive liberalism, all I can say is, good luck with that.

Update: Does Barack have a temper isssue as well?

Jeff Jarvis spots an interesting stat:

Pew said that in 2007, 53 million Americans “have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online.”

Only 50 million Americans now buy daily newspapers.

The writers are starting to outnumber the readers.

And the readers are reading something else. Pew says that in 2006, 57 million Americans read blogs, more than read newspapers.

More signposts on the road to 2014.

The Washington Post notes:

Somalia is a cautionary example for those who, like Barack Obama, favor rapidly withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq and managing any threat from al-Qaeda with an "over the horizon" strike force. Such forces indeed have the ability to target and kill leaders. They do nothing, however, to change the conditions under which al-Qaeda finds refuge and recruits. As Gen. David H. Petraeus is demonstrating in Iraq, successful counterterrorism requires providing security for the civilian population, economic reconstruction and the brokering of political accords — in other words, nation-building. That's as true in Somalia as it is in Iraq.

For another cautionary tale for those who favor withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, check out the above video. And speaking of Blair's Law, note the anchorman reporting on what his predecessor wrought in 1968, as it comes to pass seven years later.

Australia's Tim Blair has a theory that he calls, logically enough, Blair’s Law. He describes it “the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.” And in City Journal, John Murtagh writes that the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground were no exception in 1970:

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.

February 21st, 1970 was exactly five weeks after Leonard and Felicia Bernstein invited the Black Panthers up to his Park Avenue duplex for their fundraiser, along with some of his closest friends, including Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, Frank Stanton, musician Peter Duchin, and the wives of Harry Belafonte, Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet and Richard Avedon, as Tom Wolfe memorably described firsthand in Radical Chic.

(Via Hot Air, which has video of Murtaugh's appearance yesterday on Greta van Susteren's Fox News show.)

Update: And just to really bring things full circle...

Mark Steyn notes that with his speech this week on Reverend Wright, Senator Obama has revised and extended his remarks from his speech in Philadelphia. As Steyn notes, "great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on":

The [Philadelphia] speech was designed to take a very specific problem — the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years — and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Senator Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?

That’s an easy choice for the swooning bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Senator Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap — indeed, full-sized canyon — that’s opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That’s the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the Senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the Reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician… He does what politicians do.”

The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaeda and the government inventing AIDs to kill black people. In his belated “disowning” of Wright, Obama said, “What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that — that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the — the commonality in all people.”

Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it’s suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human. As he chugged on, the senator couldn’t find his groove and couldn’t prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: “If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough. That’s — that’s a show of disrespect to me.”

And we can’t have that, can we? In a shrewd analysis of Obama’s peculiarly petty objections to Rev. Wright, Scott Johnson of the Powerline website remarked on the senator’s “adolescent grandiosity.” There’s always been a whiff of that. When he tells his doting fans, “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” he means, of course, he is the change we’ve been waiting for.

“Do you personally feel that the Reverend betrayed your husband?” asked Meredith Vieira on The Today Show.

“You know what I think, Meredith?” replied Michelle Obama. “We’ve got to move forward. You know, this conversation doesn’t help my kids.”

Hang on. “My” kids? You’re supposed to say “It’s about the future of all our children,” not “It’s about the future of my children” — whose parents happen to have a base salary of half a million bucks a year. But even this bungled cliché nicely captures the campaign’s self-absorption: Talking about Obama’s pastor is a distraction from talking about Obama’s kids.

Which may be why Michael Barone asks, "Is the bottom falling out for Barack Obama? It’s too early to say that, but there are some disturbing signs."

Via Hot Air, comes this devastating snippet from the 1992 documentary on the Clintons' victory in 1992, The War Room. As Ed Morrissey writes:

And suddenly, Crackerquiddick is on the other foot. This looks like it came from The War Room, a documentary about the first Clinton presidential campaign, although I don’t recall the scene. Regardless, there can be little dispute about the people in the video being Carville, Stephanopolous, and Kantor.

What makes this worse is that Kantor gives that creepy, sotto voce whisper while saying this, knowing how bad it sounds but obviously unable to stop himself from saying it. Neither Carville nor Stephanopolous challenge Kantor, at least not in this clip. All three appear to agree that Indiana voters are worthless for Democrats even when they supported Clinton.

This isn’t quite as bad as Obama’s comments in San Francisco in a couple of respects. Hillary isn’t saying this, and it was 16 years ago, not six weeks ago. However, the disgust for the white working class comes through much more clearly in this video, and the fact that it comes from a former Clinton Cabinet official and current adviser makes it all the more compelling.

Indiana voters go to the polls in less than a week. Will they figure out which campaign despises them less?

Kantor counterclaims:

Mickey Kantor, who served as campaign chairman during Clinton's 1992 run for the White House and says he has offered help and advice to Sen. Clinton, insisted that the tape was a fraud and that he was exploring legal steps against the individual who posted it online.

"I've never used that word [the n-word] in my entire life, ever, under any circumstance, ever," an angry Kantor told The Huffington Post, citing his and his parent's work fighting for civil rights. "I have listened to [the video] and so have you. You can't tell what it is I'm saying in that second sentence, you can't decipher that."

But as Byron York notes, "I will agree that the n-word part in the second sentence is hard to make out on the video. But the "those people are s—t" part in the first sentence seems pretty clear."

The Internet Immortality Thesis comes into play once again, as someone clipped out this scene, captioned it, and uploaded it to YouTube--but it's obvious that Kantor knew that D.A. Pennebaker's documentary crew was filming him at the time.

Update: Doctored clip? Scroll to the bottom of Capt. Ed's post for updates.

More: Watching the longer version of the War Room clip that the above scene comes from, the audio of Kantor’s muffled whisper doesn’t sound at all different, so I don’t think the sound was doctored (fast-forward to about 4:35, when Kantor enters). But the caption is very likely a complete fabrication.

So, as Ed asks, who wrote it and uploaded the clip?

Last Update For Now: As you can see, the clip has been pulled. As Glenn Reynolds wryly notes, "I was hoping for change"; these sorts of dirty tricks aren't going to change the sentiments from those on the left who don't support "Mr. Getalong"--no matter which side this actually came from.

Hillary as Darth Vader? Bill Clinton as the Emperor? Barack Obama as Luke Skywalker*? Did Maureen Dowd write this?

Read More »

Perry de Havilland:

The prime motivation of government is...to be in government. Making the country a 'better place' comes a distant second.

Or as a Mr. E. Blair wrote 60 years ago:

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'

By the way, for a real "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" experience, check out the backwards-reverse-somersault Olympic-level fip-flops that Obama-worshiping journalists such as CNN's Soledad O'Brien (no relation, presumably to the fellow quoted above) performed between Sunday night and Tuesday, when new orders came in from the Ministry of Yes We Can.

Related: May Day 2008: A Day Of Remembrance Of The Victims Of Communism.

(H/T: IP)

If you missed it on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel today, the latest PJM Political is online, here.

(Two guesses as to the main subject matter this week.)

Update: Just changed the photo of Hillary--that photo of her in the sunglasses that Drudge currently has up is too much.

Maureen Dowd:

Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan.

Is she draining him of his precious bodily fluids?

So now Hillary is General Jack D. Ripper? Last week she was Michael Corleone.

Which ill-conceived boomer-nostalgic celluloid metaphor will Maureen choose next?

Steven Den Beste emails a link to the perfect bumper sticker for those who plan on celebrating Pangea Day next week.

The New Criterion, and their blog, ArmaVirumque (now with added pronunciation key!) have a spiffy new look. Stop on by, today.

Far left Denver-based DJ Jay Marvin (put your sunglasses on before visiting his blood red colored Website--it's that blinding a shade) has his buffer blown when he hears MSNBC's David Shuster sitting in for leftwing talker Ed Schultz:

First, let me start this off by saying this has nothing to do with Ed Schultz. This applies only to the format of talk radio and corespondents as their [sic] called by media outlets.

Yesterday on the way home from the station I punched up Ed to see what he was talking about. I always do.

Ed wasn't there he was out sick. So someone else was sitting in. OK, this happens so why not? As I drove I thought I had heard this guy's voice before, I just couldn't put it together.

Then it hit me it was MSNBC's David Schuster.

Since when does a newsman host a political talk show? I was taught a newsman was a newsman someone who was supposed to remain neutral and objective at all times.

To me this was the same as the flame out Tucker Carlson being labeled a "political" corespondent by MSNBC on Hardball or George Stephanopoulos, ABC's Washington correspondent, taking the William Ayers question from right-wing fringe talk show host Shawn [sic] Hannity and then asking Barak [sic] Obama about it on national TV during the last debate.

What happened to the wall of separation between news and views? Is it something I imagined? Was I taught wrong?

Someone help me out here.

Certainly--I'd be happy to.

In my inbox was spam for something called "Pangea Day", apparently happening on May 10th. Wikipedia describes it as:

On May 10, 2008 Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked to produce a 4-hour program of films, music and speakers. The program will be broadcast live at the same time across the world. According to the festival organizers, "Pangea Day plans to use the power of film to bring the world a little closer together."

Pangea Day was created in 2006 when documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize. Jehane wished to use film to bring the world together. May 10, 2008 will be the first Pangea Day event.

Seting aside the eternal right of return to 1968, I knew that big chunks of the anti-industrial left were hellbent on returning the planet to a near unpopulated state, or some other sort of Rousseauvian primitivism, but Pangea? Set the Wayback Machine way, way back, Mr. Peabody!

My recent Silicon Graffiti video described the rapid ascension of Barack Obama as this year's JFK stand-in; but who knew that he'd be standing alone so quickly, as the Wall Street Journal's Dan Henninger notes:

Brand-name Democrats, such as various members of the Kennedy aristocracy, went over, calculating it might be easier to push the party forward with Obama's lightness of being than the Clintons' boxcars of baggage.

The periodic ideals of young America we know about.

Even as they watched Barack win, pundits and reporters were agog that a one-term, black-American senator from Illinois could have such an effect. This pickup-team coalition of idealists and pols, led by a virtual Luke Skywalker, was on the brink of pushing the Clinton empire over the cliff. It made the Clintons crazy.

This week we learned the limit of a dream in American politics. At Barack Obama's darkest hour, not one prominent ally came forward to support him. Everyone abandoned Everyman.

No prominent black clergyman came forth to make even the simple point that Jeremiah Wright's notion of the "black church" is but one point on a spectrum of faith. Rev. Wright, now written off as a virtual nut case, got more support from black clergymen than did Obama.

Barack Obama was bleeding by Monday and needed cover. Where, when he could have used them, were Obama's oh-so-famous endorsers: Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Oprah, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Patrick Leahy, Tom Daschle, Amy Klobuchar, Claire McCaskill, Jay Rockefeller, John Lewis, Toni Morrison, Roger Wilkins, Eric Holder, Robert Reich, Ted Sorenson, Alice Walker, David Wilhelm, Cornel West, Clifford Alexander, Donald McHenry, Patricia Wald, Newton Minow?

Where were all the big-city mayors who went over to the Obama camp: Chicago's Richard Daley, Cleveland's Frank Jackson, Atlanta's Shirley Franklin, Washington's Adrian Fenty, Newark's Cory Booker, Baltimore's Sheila Dixon?

It isn't hard for big names to get on talk TV to make a point. Any major op-ed page would have stopped the presses to print a statement of support from Ted Kennedy or such for the senator. None appeared. Call it profiles in gopher-holing.

Blogs and Web sites are overflowing with how this meltdown is largely of Barack Obama's own making. What difference does that make? He is not running for class president; he's running for the presidency of the United States. Even at the crudest level of political calculation and cowardice, there's a point in a presidential race when a candidate's supporters are all in. We passed that point weeks ago. It's him or her.

Analysts and historians will spend years sorting through the lessons of this most bizarre of all presidential campaigns. The Obama desertion points in a few directions.

Not the least of which to the brutal internecine struggle that new media analyst and Hillary supporter Jeff Jarvis describes.

Related: Protein Wisdom describes "How the establishment media has smeared black churchgoers". Foreshadowing this week's events was Bill Moyers' interview with Wright, a topic that Brent Bozell explores in his latest op-ed.