While I appreciate the sentiments expressed below, I respectfully request any and all third party efforts should be focused on the true candidates of Hope, Change, and Mopar, Burge-Goldstein 2008:

(Pretty cool motion tracking though, which allows embedding anyone's name into zooming and panning video. Make your own, here!)

Since Wesley Clark, that MacArthur for the 21st century, is apparently fading away redeploying "over the event horizon", here's an ex-soldier who clearly has the gravitas and nuanced rhetorical skills to be Obama's vice presidential nominee. And look at the state his nomination would help Obama shore up!

Bill Schneider of CNN writes:

Spend a few days in western Europe talking about American politics and you discover that you are in deepest Obamaland. Not much different from Berkeley, California, or the South Side of Chicago.

Orrin Judd replies, in a post titled, "This Reads Like A GOP Press Release":

So Obamaland is Europe, Berzerkly and the South Side and Democrats can't figure out why they lose elections?

Indeed.^TM The euro-feel of Obamaland and its putative leader's campaign proposals isn't exactly a big surprise for anyone who's been paying the slightest bit of attention to the growing distance that voters in the Bluer alcoves of the American political map have been putting between themselves and their compatriots in the Red States post 9/11.

Jenifer Rubin asks Hollywood to put its carbon credits where its mouth is:

There is no group more susceptible to Obama’s vision and rhetoric than the Hollywood elite. And given their exalted status in our society, their influence on others if they take up the challenge to improve our country might be profound.

So in that spirit we offer a pledge, the Pledge We Can Believe In, which Obama can present to all of his Hollywood admirers. Indeed, he might inscribe the Pledge We Can Believe In on all financial donor forms and on all requests for tickets to his campaign events. The time for idle chatter is over and the fierce urgency of now demands that those who support Obama and his vision for a new America take the Pledge We Can Believe In:

I'm sure they'll sign--the minute this prominent Oscar-winning Hollywood documentarian signs off on the first draft of the pledge.

David Harsanyi writes:

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson writes that individuals are endowed with unalienable rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

There is nothing in there about state-sponsored "public" service and nothing about having to listen to politicians lecture us about what we "must" do to satisfy patriotic obligation. I checked.

Yet, a hobbyhorse of presidential hopefuls is government service. The duo is under the impression that public service trumps your own selfish existence. After all, you only make a living, give to charities of your choice, take care of your own children, buy your own junk and, hopefully, mind your own business.

"Loving your country shouldn't just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July," Barack Obama explained to a crowd in Colorado Springs this week. "Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it."

Yes. He said must.

Ironically, in most places, Americans are prohibited from lighting fireworks on Independence Day — naturally, we "must" not hurt ourselves. And there are increasingly more "musts" being handed down. (Reason Magazine recently named Chicago, Obama's hometown, the city with the least amount of individual freedom in the nation.)

What we definitely "must" be is selfless — like Obama, who often recounts his own righteous journey. Spurning high-paying gigs on Wall Street, Obama hit the Chicago pavement as a crusading community organizer . . . and then, in meticulous detail, wrote a book about his awesome sacrifice and raked in millions.

Obama claims this experience also opened his eyes to a "citizenship that was meaningful." (Unlike yours.) Imagine if everyone wanted a "meaningful" job? Who would support these quixotic crusaders? Doesn't someone need to produce wealth?

What---and ride the New Rochelle train every day?

Meanwhile, Roger Kimball notes that Obama's vision of public works turns JFK's aphorism on its head: "Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do to you:"

It’s a long way to Lent yet, but I guess I am going to have to start reading Barack Hussein Obama’s speeches. I caught his latest musings on “national service” thanks to Instapundit, but that came via Jonah Goldberg from PrestoPundit. How is he going to back away, triangulate, move to the center on this?

when I’m President, I will set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year. This means that by the time you graduate college, you’ll have done 17 weeks of service. We’ll reach this goal in several ways. At the middle and high school level, we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources to offer new service opportunities.

The real name for this, as PrestoPundit noted, is a return to serfdom, i.e., the intrusion of the coercive arm of the state into everyday life.

Properly defined by its original meaning, there's another name for it as well.

Recreate 1,000,068 B.C.! I had to laugh when a link to this advertisement started showing up this week in my Site Meter's banner ads:

Next month, you'll be able to meet more fossilized dinosaurs in Denver than Michael Crichton could have possibly ever imagined...

I try to avoid both of their shows like the plague, so it's fun to step back and be a neutral observer in this hilarious cat fight between Greta Van Susteren and Anderson Cooper that Newsbusters links to. On her blog at Fox News, Van Susteren writes:

“We’re a news program,” while Ms. Van Susteren’s show is “not a news program,” Mr. Doss told TVNewser on Tuesday. “It’s missing-person-of-the-day. There’s an audience for that, but it’s not what we do. We’re covering the world, not just covering who’s missing today.

Not a news program?

Now why is he picking a fight? and why is trying to make less of us at 10pm ? Is it because we consistently beat them and have for years?

This is silly that the CNN executive producer of Anderson Cooper is taking a swipe at our hard work but I am going to defend my staff from what is intended to pretend our show is not news.

Yes, now let me KEEP THEM HONEST:

Let’s take a look at this…I asked someone to get me some information (I am busy at 10pm so do not get to watch their show.) What CNN is doing at ten? And how do they conduct themselves? Credibility or not?

To paraphrase MS/NBC’s Keith Olbermann, yes many in the news industry behind the scenes - even my friends at CNN - laugh about the fact that CNN’s 10pm show has been a “marketing experiment.” It has been rumored that in one year they spent about 27 million dollars in advertising of Anderson Cooper in their experiment. No network has ever spent that kind of money just to market one person. By the way, the President of CNN told me that Anderson Cooper has a staff of nearly 60. We beat them with our staff…of about 12.

It's an army of Gretas! To whom, size matters not, as the Muppet-like president of the Dagobah Network News likes to tell his staff of young apprentices.

Don't miss the ridiculous T-shirt promoting Cooper that Van Susteren highlights at the end of her post, which illustrates a moment that sums up absolutely perfectly the swank and cutting-edge sophistication of the legacy media and its political party:

Neatly satirized by IowaHawk, Obama's week of pivots, flip-flops, and repositions call to mind an earlier American humorist. As Groucho Marx once quipped, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

Thank God for the American public that the journalists they rely upon to help them make informed decisions are a hard-bitten cynical lot, having seen it all a hundred times, never falling for the latest huckster trying to sell them a bill of goods, instead of those naive, easily fooled bloggers...

Update: Fortunately, not all in Big Media are as dewey-eyed as the Gray Lady's unseasoned young naifs.

Isolationism you can believe in: Obama/Smoot in '08!

"Behold, per Blake Dvorak, one of the first documented cases of McCain Derangement Syndrome."

The central thesis of James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution was that JFK's assassination was the key moment that caused a large portion of once sensible liberals to begin to tilt to the far, far left, and for lack of better word, become Unhinged.

Like this calm, rational fan of the New Frontier!

In the (admittedly totally tasteless) formulation of a friend of mine, the best thing that ever happened to civil rights in this country was the bullet through JFK's head.

Along the way, as I wrote three and half years ago on the after-effects of that sharp left turn:

You could make a pretty good argument (as I'm about to attempt) that "Radical Chic" was the most influential, or at least most significant, magazine article of the past forty years--and that it foreshadowed the next 34 years of American politics.

It helped that the timing of Wolfe's article and book was exquisite. 1970 was the apex between two key presidential election years: two years after far left anti-war protestors attempted to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and two years before its 1972 equivalent, where, as Ben Wattenberg said back then, "there won't be any riots in Miami because the people who tried to riot in Chicago are on the Platform Committee."

And these days, serving on charitable funds with future presidential candidates, while new, experimental improvisations on that staid, old, National Anthem are being invented in yet another attempt to recreate the perigee of the year that refuses to die.

(And speaking of the afore mentioned Wattenberg, my PJM Political interview with him is online here.)

Hillary's taking things away--such as YouTube clips and negative ads attacking Obama--for the common good of her rival's campaign:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has scrubbed all negative ads from her campaign Web site and YouTube page, leaving visitors with only the warm and fuzzy moments from her bid for the presidency.

Gone are the attack ads accusing Sen. Barack Obama of insulting Pennsylvanians, ducking debates and making misleading assertions about gas prices. In their place are some of the campaign's best and most positive ads and multiple "Hillary I Know" testimonials that have a shelf life should the former first lady ever run again.

The whitewashing took place quietly in the past few days as Mr. Obama cut his former rival a check to help relieve her campaign debt and as the Clinton family moved to fully embrace Mr. Obama as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

"She's no longer campaigning for president," said Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee. "She's focused on her work in the Senate, campaigning for Senator Obama and other Democrats."

Mr. Elleithee said the videos probably are archived.

We can only hope--or the sexist evil conservative MSM that's completely in the tank for Obama will have won!

Fortunately, between copies of the more outre clips downloaded and archived, and blog posts quoting them, it's quite likely that Hillary's brave, quixotic efforts during the Operation: Chaos-extended primary season will not have been in vain.

And it wouldn't be the first time that video evidence from an earlier internecine struggle in the primaries benefited the opposing party in the general election through a minor act of political jujitsu.

Wesley Clark steps in it, Ed Morrissey writes:

After decades in the news business, Bob Schieffer may have thought he’d heard it all — until yesterday on Face the Nation, when he interviewed Wesley Clark. Clark came as a surrogate for the Barack Obama campaign and attacked John McCain’s military service, saying that he was “untested and untried”. After Schieffer pointed out that McCain commanded the largest naval air squadron, had honorably endured over five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam, and had been on the Senate Armed Services committee since Obama was in college, Schieffer asked how Clark could claim that McCain was “untested and untried”. Clark stunned him with this answer:

Jim Geraghty notes that Clark's slur is one of eight attacks on McCain's military service by surrogates of the Obama campaign:

Is anyone else sensing a sharper edge to Team McCain since Wes Clark became Democrat Number Seven and Rand Beers became Democrat Number Eight in speaking critically of John McCain's service in Vietnam?

"Mr. Beers' remarks are part of a pattern of Obama supporters attacking John McCain's military service, and a reminder of why it's what Sen. Obama, his supporters and his campaign actually do that matters most," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers tells ABC News. "Sen. Obama speaking out against these attacks isn't really relevant — either his supporters aren't hearing him or they don't believe his words."

It's really nice that Obama said today that "no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign." It's also meaningless if everyone else in the Democratic party ignores him. Barack Obama doesn't have total control of the actions and words of every surrogate, but after the eighth instance, without any major consequence beyond a spokesman saying that Obama "rejects" the surrogate's statement, it starts to look like a deliberate and cynical good cop/bad cop routine. Let's see the candidate himself calling out his supporters by name. Let's see some heads rolling — was Samantha Power's declaration that Hillary was a "monster" really that much worse? (Team McCain ditched Cunningham over using Obama's middle name.)

As Orrin Judd noted on Sunday, "The poor Democrats still think John Kerry lost because his service to his country was attacked, rather than his disservice."

We looked at a few of the previous attacks on McCain's service in a mid-May edition of Silicon Graffiti:

In a related development, John Hinderaker spots a pair of attempts to make these attacks seem bipartisan:

Politico--and still more the anonymous Yahoo News headline writer!--know that attacks on McCain's service by the Obama campaign and other Democrats are poisonous and likely to backfire. So they are trying to give the Democrats cover by creating the misleading impression that these disgusting smears are somehow bipartisan.

Read the rest, complete with a screen capture of Yahoo's headline.

As the above quoted headline of his Wall Street Journal op-ed suggests, John Bolton is none-too-pleased with President Bush's declaration that North Korea is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism:

Maskirovka – the Soviet dark art of denial, deception and disguise – is alive and well in Pyongyang, years after the Soviet Union disappeared. Unfortunately, the Bush administration appears not to have gotten the word.

With much fanfare and choreography, but little substance, the administration has accepted a North Korean "declaration" about its nuclear program that is narrowly limited, incomplete and almost certainly dishonest in material respects. In exchange, President Bush personally declared that North Korea is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism or an enemy of the United States. In a final flourish, North Korea has undertaken a reverse Potemkin Village act, destroying the antiquated cooling tower of the antiquated Yongbyon reactor. In the waning days of American presidencies, this theater is the stuff of legacy.

North Korea has consecutively broken every major agreement with the U.S. since the North's creation. The Bush administration provides no reason why this one will not be added to that long list except the audacity of hope. Where have we heard that recently? Barack Obama and John Kerry both announced support for the deal, and Mr. Obama said he intended to apply Bush's policy to other rogue states, thus confirming the early start of the Obama administration.

The Feb. 13, 2007, agreement states explicitly that North Korea was to provide "a complete declaration of all nuclear programs" within 60 days. This it manifestly did not do, either in timing or substance. The declaration, more than 14 months overdue, and which is not yet public, has long been forecast not to include information on weaponization, uranium enrichment, or proliferation activities such as cloning the Yongbyon reactor in Syria. Although the North provided less than it agreed 16 months ago, we compensated by giving up more than we agreed, which is typical of decades of U.S. negotiation with the North.

Read the whole thing.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters asks, "Can a publisher, editor, and owner of magazines be any more biased than proudly admitting on national television that he's contributed to Barack Obama's campaign?"

While you ponder, consider that on Sunday, the publisher and editor of Rolling Stone -- who just so happens to also own Men's Journal and Us Weekly -- told CNN's Howard Kurtz that he's given money to the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee.

In fact, Jann Wenner did so without batting an eye in an interview aired on "Reliable Sources".

Noel seems suprised, but given the far left worldview of Wenner, reflected in his flagship publication since its inception, who couldn't see that one coming? But I actually think Wenner's admission is a very positive one. As I've written before, I'd much rather journalists--and their publishers--come clean on their biases than fall back on the mid-20th century model of feigned objectivity. At least it allows consumers to make an informed decision rather than have to guess at the worldview of a media source.

The Washington Times posits that the model for Obama's hope and change is the nation right next door.

If his Trudeaupian vision for America comes to pass, can we expect a similar stifling of free speech as has inflicted Canada? Yes we can!

Now that they have Jon Stewart's official permission to make sport of The Man Who Would Be King, readers of NRO's Media Blog have some fun captioning this week's messianic Obama photo on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Click here for some earlier thoughts on Obama And The Age Of Outrageous Credulity.

A member of the LinkedIn social networking Website spots some possible Obamabrushing going on:

"I was beginning to think LinkedIn was on to something, that is until this weekend.

The Obama ad that ran like a legitimate “Question” and members respond with “Answers”. That is the case in point. All was fine, until certain answers were removed when those answers didn’t agree with the Obama campaign positions.

I don’t care which side of the political isle one is on. Had McCain done the same thing, I would equally protest. That act proved to me that Obama is afraid of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution."

W. Strouse and I agree, K von Hopf

What are your thoughts? If you are running for the highest position in the land and representing all Americans, should you censor responses to your posted question? Or, are you just out to win the vote?

I guess they haven't gotten that memo that Obama's morphed from Mr. Hopenchange into a full-on Machiavellian electoral ninja. In any case, his campaign's Website administrator has been deleting Samizdat blogs left and right (err, actually left and more left, to be specific), so why not airbrush his LinkedIn page as well?

Rich Lowry writes, "I've been thinking lately that Bill Kristol should take a leave of absence for a couple of months and go help out on the McCain campaign":

McCain has been nothing if not energetic (giving a majorish speech almost every day). He has scored day-to-day tactical victories over Obama, as this Washington Post story noted. But the sum is less than the parts. Worse, McCain's political persona seems to be getting lost.

Take energy. There was another McCain conference call on it today. It was painful to listen to Sen. Lindsey Graham pound Obama for saying "no" to every energy proposal, then have to explain (kind of half-heartedly, I thought) why McCain says "no" to drilling on ANWR. If McCain was going to semi-flip on drilling, he probably should have gone all the way and done it in a big way (e.g., hold some sort of conference on energy, or spend a week touring ANWR and off-shore drilling platforms). Then, there was the matter of the contradiction between his new somewhat pro-drilling stance and his continued high-profile advocacy on global warming. I think if McCain could get his own house in order on this issue, he would really do serious damage to Obama.

But there's a sense you never know where McCain is going to be on any given day. Is he zigging toward the center, or zagging right? And on top of this, the campaign feels so defensive—all about not being Bush and not being Obama.

All of this is diminishing McCain, who is a serious, impressive guy for all his flaws. With every clever tactic and worthy small-bore proposal—whether it’s off-shore drilling or the battery prize—McCain loses a tiny bit more of his stature and his sense of who he is. He needs to be bigger than Obama to win the election, and he needs his political persona—as a patriotic fighter determined to fix Washington and win the war—to come out clearly and unmistakably.

I think some new blood—focused just on the big picture—would help the McCain team. My candidate would be Kristol. He obviously has a keen political mind; he's a McCain guy going way back (and as far as I know has a good relationship with McCain's key people); and he's a conservative who understands the need to move beyond the Bush administration without being panicked by every Bush association.

Anyway, that's my suggestion. Maybe someone else would make more sense. Or maybe this big-picture focus can be generated by folks already there. But here's hoping we see it one way or the other...

I'm not sure if Bill Kristol is the guy, but there's a lot of truth there. Obama had a mistake-filled week last week culminating most visibly with his faux-presidential seal, a huge touch of high camp, which though dropped, will be the gift that keeps on giving via Photoshop and YouTube. It's gotten to the point where even the media can't downplay all of Obama's gaffes, no matter how reverentially they treat him. And yet McCain doesn't seem at all poised to pounce his opponent's numerous unforced errors.

"Obama Moves to Reintroduce Himself to Voters", the Washington Post, notes, but check out the language of the opening paragraph:

In the opening weeks of the general-election campaign, Sen. Barack Obama has moved aggressively to shape his campaign and offered a clear road map for the kind of candidate he is likely to become in the months ahead: an ambitious gamer of the electoral map, a ruthless fundraiser and a scrupulous manager of his own biography in the face of persistent concerns about how he is perceived.

"Aggressive", "ambitious", "ruthless"--this sounds far more like the press at large is beginning to describe Obama using the David Brooks Machiavellian badass political samurai model, rather than the positive Hope! and Change! Yes We Can! new politics message that Obama began nationally with.

If the press continues to describe Obama in such terms, this could create a nifty opening for McCain to attack Obama on his cynicism and rote Chicago politics, much as Reagan deflated Carter in 1980 (who masked his own punitive opinions of America underneath a similar veneer of sunny optimism four years earlier) with his "Well, there you go again" line.

And on a related note, Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz notes, "It is weird how so many who claim to like Obama hope he is lying. Three examples come to mind immediately". Read the rest.

Update: Jennifer Rubin observes Obama as he loses "His Teflon Sheen".

Warner Todd Huston has a terrific roundup of photos documenting "Obama's Propagandistic Iconography: the Making of a Messiah". Regarding the latest example, Mickey Kaus asks if Obama's mocked-up pseudo-presidential seal was his Mission Accomplished moment. Both certainly pleased the base, while alienating the more skeptical.

And speaking of trips down memory lane, "And now, Barack Delano Obama"...

Related: While we're on the subject of messianic propagandistic iconography, did Obama personally tell a campaign volunteer to shut up about her Che Guevara Flag? He must have forgotten about this one, in any case.

Update: A voice of cool, dispassionate reason emerges as a strong counterforce, finally:

I think that we can take a lesson from the Republicans in the sense that we seem to be continually looking for the next Messiah. I think that’s a bad habit.

Oh wait, nevermind--that was Obama himself two years ago. It's not easy, but I guess a man can get used to rampantly overflowing hagiography pretty quickly if he has to.

Will Kim Jong Il endorse Sen. Barack Obama? Yes he can!

Castro we knew about, and Qaddafi chimed in just the other day, but Kim Jong Il?

I wasn’t expecting that.

Take me now, Lord. My life as a blogger is complete.

The Obamessiah must ask himself once again: Why do all these anti-American tyrants keep s…um, endorsing my candidacy?

Meanwhile, See Dubya also asks, "Come on, Osama, your turn…you know you’ve got one tape left in you…"

If he does, will Uncle Walter once again blame it on Karl Rove, as he did when Punxsutawney Osama emerged and saw his shadow during the last weekend of October in 2004?

James Taranto writes:

Could it be that Obama is planning to pivot? That is, what if he goes to Iraq and declares upon his return that he has been persuaded that the surge has made a difference, that things are going much better, and that he is now convinced victory is both possible and crucial?

On the downside, he would risk alienating those among his supporters who crave defeat in Iraq, either for ideological reasons or out of sheer hatred for George W. Bush.

But on the upside, it would show political courage and open-mindedness, two qualities his supporters are eager to ascribe to him but so far on the basis of evidence that is somewhere between scant and nonexistent. Those who do want America to win in Iraq would no longer have to vote against Obama for that reason. As for those who want defeat, where would they go? By their lights, John McCain is even worse; he voted for the war to begin with. So, oddly enough, did the Libertarian nominee. Unless you count Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader, Obama would still be the best "antiwar" candidate on the ballot.

We've long been skeptical of the Obama hype, but if he is smart and bold enough to adopt a sensible position on Iraq, we will have to admit there is more to him that we've given him credit for.

On the other hand, it would give his opposition a chance to remind voters of his party's original pivot:

"Politically correct is never a term one would apply to [Maureen] Dowd’s commentary", the New York Times ombudsperson Clark Hoyt writes. If you say so, though standard-issue East Coast establishment liberal boilerplate are all terms that readily come to mind.

In any case, as Hoyt's predecessor ombudsman wrote, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is." And now it's time to pay the piper:

Over the course of the campaign, I received complaints that Times coverage of Clinton included too much emphasis on her appearance, too many stereotypical words that appeared to put her down and dismiss a woman’s potential for leadership and too many snide references to her as cold or unlikable. When I pressed for details, the subject often boiled down to Dowd.

Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the editorial page, said it was unfair to hold a columnist accountable for perceptions of bias in news coverage. A columnist is supposed to present strong opinions, he said, and “a thorough reading of Maureen’s work shows that she does that without regard to gender, partisanship or ideology.”

Some complaints about Times news coverage seem justified. A “Political Memo” last fall analyzed “the Clinton Cackle” — a laugh, it was suggested, that she used to fend off political attacks or tough media attention. Cackle? That’s what witches do in fairy tales. Times editors express regret about using the word, though they defend the examination of the laugh. The Times never did a similar dissection of the way Rudolph Giuliani burst into odd gales of laughter under tough questioning.

But other complaints seemed to reflect a shoot-the-messenger anger at The Times. A reader from San Francisco railed against a litany of offending words that she said the paper had used, but most of the slights were imagined. (I can assure you that the word “skank” was never printed in an article about Clinton.)

I asked my assistant, Michael McElroy, to run a database search for some key words that might indicate sexism in The Times — “shrill,” “strident,” “pantsuit” and “giggle,” among them.

So please, all you sexist troglodytes, no giggling at the end of that last paragraph!

(Via Hot Air.)

When the levee breaks, Obama, you've got to move--and attempt to pin it on John McCain.

(Via Greg Pollowitz; Spike Lee could not be reached for comment.)

From the home office in Mos Eisley spaceport, Ace of Spades brings you the Star Wars Obama crawl!

Two guesses as to how this video ends:

(Back story here; lots more fun with Winnie and friends, here. And many more videos, here.)

Related: The original Dukakis in the tank ad from 1988 can be found here--judging by the nuanced headline written by the person who uploaded it, I don't think he was a fan of the ad's message.

Back in 2005, Howard Dean told the late Tim Russert, "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy." As the above clip illustrates, Dean's got his work cut out for him, particularly in his own party and its media.

Over at NRO's Media Blog, Stephen Spruiell explores the New Yorker's recent profile of Keith Olbermann:

I find it amusing that magazines like the New Yorker are just now figuring out that Olbermann is a lunatic. Alternatively, maybe they just found it harder to ignore once Olby started attacking Hillary Clinton with the same frothing intensity he usually reserved for Republicans. Here's Phil Griffin, the senior vice-president in charge of MSNBC, telling Boyer what that was like from his perspective:

But, just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network’s Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. “It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,” Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. “And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”

The New Yorker piece leaves you with the distinct impression that Griffin isn't just talking about Hillary supporters here. Olbermann's show is the only program on MSNBC that doesn't routinely get slaughtered by Fox News and CNN. Where else is Griffin going to go?

Meanwhile, as Larry Elder notes, "If 'The Media' Dislike Hillary, How Do They Feel About Those ----- Republicans?"

To paraphrase Anthony Burgess, old age makes a far better go of it than youth, at least when it comes to the White House.

Back in October of 2003, Howard Dean boldly went where no presidential candidate had gone before:

Dean declared himself a "metrosexual," the buzz phrase for straight men in touch with their feminine sides, as he touted his accomplishments in "equal justice" for gay and lesbian couples.

But then he waffled.

"I'm a square," Dean declared, after professing his metrosexuality to a Boulder breakfast audience with an anecdote about being called handsome by a gay man. "I like (rapper) Wyclef Jean and everybody thinks I'm very hip, but I am really a square, as my kids will tell you. I don't even get to watch television. I've heard the term (metrosexual), but I don't know what it means."

Perhaps it means this:

"In many ways, he really will be the first woman president," Megan Beyer of Virginia, a charter member of Women for Obama, told reporters. An op-ed essay in The New York Post headlined "Bam: Our 1st Woman Prez?" came to a similar conclusion, if a tad more snidely: "Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel."

No wonder Hillary's narrative never gained traction in the Democratic primaries!

(Incidentally, the author of the piece is feminist icon Susan Faludi. Was she a Hillary backer in the primaries? Because that's quite a poison pill she's dropped into Obama's lap if that "he really will be the first woman president" line she quotes goes viral in the general election.)

"Obama couldn’t have picked a better way to offend the world’s 325 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims."

(Meanwhile, consider the subtle porcine implications of this affiliation...)

Glenn Reynolds excerpts this passage by John Hinderaker of Power Line on Eric Holder, who's been tasked by the Obama campaign to the help in their veep search:

Holder is a legitimate target because of the Rich affair, I guess, but frankly I have little or no interest in who helps Obama choose a V-P. What bothers me most about these battles is the implicit assumption by some that just about any involvement in the business world is somehow suspect. . . . This is frankly stupid. Covington & Burling and O'Melveny & Myers are top-notch law firms that have represented a vast array of clients. The idea that there is something wrong with associations with companies like UBS, Exxon Mobil and Hewlitt Packard is absurd. If any connection with a top law firm or a large corporation is somehow taken as a black mark, pretty soon those who advise our Presidential candidates, or serve in their administrations, will be as inexperienced as, say, Barack Obama himself. That would be a sad outcome.

Indeed^TM, as Glenn would say; we should be happy that people are still willing to ride the train into Manhattan and other major cities every day, even if their candidate considers it a scary, going through the motions existence, while his wife is advising her husbands' supporters, "Don’t go into corporate America."

Or represent them in court, apparently.

As I wrote last week at the tail end of a post on Hillary's swan song:

Meanwhile, Larry Johnson feverishly awaits The Doomsday Machine--I'm sure it's being assembled, deep underground in this long secluded vault.

If you follow the links, it's obvious that Johnson is a man of the left, a Hillary campaign supporter, and as Michelle Malkin writes:

Many readers are wondering why I have not written a single word about the rumored Michelle Obama “whitey” video.

Simple: Larry Johnson, the main source of the rumors, is not, not, not to be trusted.

And these days, neither is much of the MSM, which is attempting to claim that the origin of Johnson's smear against Michelle Obama is not Johnson, but the conservative Blogosphere.

So who's going to be the first in the legacy media to walk that one back? ABC News, Bob Beckel, Time, AP, The Guardian or the Gray Lady?

As Tom Maguire notes, "Barack Obama channels his inner Sean Connery as he describes his approach to the upcoming campaign":

Barack Obama is warning supporters that the general election fight between him and John McCain may get ugly, but the Illinois senator is vowing not to back down.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

Maybe he could borrow this one.

(By the way, Obama does know that all of the gunfire in The Untouchables is just pretend, right?)

The Nashville Post's "Post Politics" blog notes that "Harold Ford, Jr. Throws Former Campaign Manager Under The Bus":

It was a long curious day for the Tennessee Democratic party yesterday. Divisions in the party were exacerbated when John Rodgers of the Nashville City Paper reported the words of Tennessee Democratic Party state executive committee member Fred Hobbs on Barack Obama:

“I don’t exactly approve of a lot of the things he stands for and I’m not sure we know enough about him,” Hobbs said when asked why he thought Davis wasn’t endorsing Obama. “He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.”

Adding insult to injury, Beecher Frasier, Chief of Staff to Democratic Congressman Lincoln Davis of Tennessee’s rural and conservative 4th District, was portrayed in the same article as saying he didn’t know for sure if Obama was “terrorist connected” but assumes he’s not.

The Tennessee Democratic Party almost immediately sent out a release rebuking Hobbs. Beecher Frasier, later in the day, released a statement setting the record straight asserting that “no one in their right mind, including me, believes Senator Obama has ties to terrorism.”

William Ayers could not be reached for comment.

Speaking of conspiracy junkies, here's one closer to home:

Asked what he thinks of McCain, Vidal calls him a “disaster,” then tells Deborah Solomon, “Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?”

Solomon replies: “Everyone knows he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.” To which Vidal responds: “That’s what he tells us.”

All merely a part of the master plan by the "fascist government ...which controls the media."

(And yet somehow, as the above interview with Deborah Solomon of the New York Times illustrates, it keeps quoting and publishing him without reprisal. Go figure.)

Glenn Reynolds quotes Gregg Easterbrook:

Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.

Well, yeah. Check out this recent doomsday riff from David Letterman, who, during the 1980s, despite the equally eeeeevil Reagan being in charge was far too cool and ironic to be this morose about life:

Guys talking about the President really can't do anything about the economy. I don't know if that's true or not, but let's give them that one, let's just say “okay, the President can't do anything about the economy.” Everything else has gone so lousy in the last eight years. I mean – and I'm a guy who doesn't pay attention to much, as long as I got wresting and a TV dinner I'm fine – but even I am perceiving now that things are horrible in ways they shouldn't be horrible. Now, we're not going to impeach the guy. Could we get our money back? Honest to God, what, I mean [audience applause], just at least something.

Dave's clinging bitterness is enough to make you change the channel...And if it's to ABC, you're confronted with more doomsday, as James Lileks notes:

"Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?

"According to many of the world's top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now."

They’re asking for readers to submit their own dystopian nightmares.

What is it with the pessimism of the overclass? If it wasn’t for doom and gloom, they wouldn’t have a reason to live. The latest example comes from ABC News, and suggests that this century may be the last one for civilization. Who says? Scientists! Ah, well, if it’s scientists, we’d best pay heed. Or perhaps you disagree; the century’s still fresh and young. It still has that new century smell. Warranty’s good for another few years, and besides, we haven’t dumped the trunk-junk accumulated in the previous century. We’ll figure something out. We always do.

But you don’t get publicity by suggesting this century might be better than its predecessor, or by asking people to envision how cool the future might be. There are dozens of websites and Flickr sets devoted to retrofuturism, to the art of describing what things might be like. If you grew up in the 60s, you’ll remember all the paintings of space – useful space full of gleaming silver ships. That all ended with “2001: A Space Odyssey” which suggested that the future of space was long, dull, and lonely, punctuated with homicidal computers, trippy FX and enormous wise space-fetuses. Great film, but from then on, something seemed different about the future. Did we really want to live there?

I'm not sure how much of a role Stanley Kubrick's opus played in causing liberalism's turn towards nihilism, but the timing is certainly right; as I noted a couple of years ago in a post titled, "1969: The Shattering of the Modernist Dream".

So is there reason to be optimistic today? Of course. But just don't expect much help in that department from the media, at least until November. They've got the double-whammy of their own industry in dire straits, and an economy to keep talking down, at least until--somehow, miraculously--it begins to turn on a dime the day after the election. (Provided the appropriate audacity and hope and change occurs, of course.)

As spotted by Jim Geraghty, David Mendell in Obama: From Promise to Power writes:

"[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn't want to be on one of those trains every day," said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. "The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions... that was scary to him."

And as scared as he is about the daily Metro-North commuter train, we know he's not very happy about commuters driving into work.

But Obama's not too crazy about people further out in the exurbs, either, as he mentioned in April when he was talking to, as Jean Kirkpatrick would say, San Francisco Democrats:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not