LATEST THREAT TO CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT: PASTEL COLORS ON MONEY

Every time I think I've fully absorbed the list of things right-wingers consider to be threats to Western civilization, another wingnut comes along and adds something new to the list.

This time it's Richard Poe, now of NewsMax and formerly of David Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine.com, a guy who collaborated with Horowitz on the book The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party (hmmm ... parts of that don't seem to be working out all that well these days). Poe thinks our moral fiber is being weakened by ... big purple numbers on our money. Hide the children!

HAVE YOU seen the new five-dollar bill? It looks like someone spilled grape juice on it. A violet stain obscures Abraham Lincoln's face. On the back, an oversized numeral five appears in purple. Enough is enough. We must stop the desecration of our currency.

... The fact is, we are being hoodwinked. The redesign of our currency has nothing to do with fighting counterfeiters or helping people with weak eyesight. It has everything to do with catering to the perverse canons of postmodernist art.

Yes, he's serious:

The U.S. Treasury has allowed a cabal of avant-garde designers to pull off one of the most audacious practical jokes in art history; the "subversion" and "deconstruction" of the U.S. dollar. We the taxpayers must demand an end to this cultural vandalism.

... For PoMo's apostles, art is a weapon of revolution. Its purpose is to mock, degrade and undermine the cherished beliefs of Western civilization....

Photographer Andres Serrano famously deconstructed Christianity in 1989 by snapping a picture of a crucifix submerged in Serrano's own urine. In 1999, the Brooklyn Museum showcased an image of the Virgin Mary which artist Chris Ofili had splattered with elephant dung.

And that's exactly like putting a large, hard-to-counterfeit pastel number in one corner of a $5 bill.

Meanwhile PoMo designers have been doing to national currencies what Serrano and Ofili did to Christianity.

Er, sniping ineffectually, but in an aesthetically arresting way?

Their first target was the Dutch guilder....

Poe goes into the story of Ootje Oxenaar, who redesigned Dutch banknotes from 1966 to 1985. Oxenaar does seem to have been a tad irreverent -- he replaced an admiral on the 100-guilder note with a seabird, and he embedded ex-girlfriends' names in the 250-guilder note. But here's the thing -- the bills he designed are kinda awesome:





Is this horrible, decadent, will-sapping, civilization-destroying play money, as Poe insists? If so, give me more -- if we have to put some color on our bills anyway, I wish we'd go all the way and do stuff like this. Yeah, I did like the old bills, with their rich webs of spidery lines, but I like these, too -- and I find that, somehow, I can look at them without deciding that there's no such thing as absolute truth and without concluding that bourgeois morality is a sham. I guess I'm just made of sterner stuff than Richard Poe.

****

(Links updated 10/14/09.)

BLOGROLL UPDATE

A few new additions to the blogroll (and I should have added them a long time ago): Comments from Left Field, distributorcap NY, Jack and Jill Politics, Ron Chusid's Liberal Values, The Reaction, and Whiskey Fire.

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, Newshoggers has moved and Fafblog is back....

HILLARY CLINTON, EVIL PRESCHOOLER

I find the Clintons exasperating right now, but it's still a fact that supposedly intelligent people turn themselves into gibbering idiots trying to describe how evil they are. Today we have Vanity Fair's Sally Bedell Smith with a piece in the Financial Times (also available here) that, among other things, demonstrates sick evil Hillary's sick twisted evilness by ... going back to her earliest years:

For decades Mrs Clinton has thought of herself as a woman of destiny. Even as a little girl she would stand "in a patch of sunlight" pretending "there were heavenly movie cameras watching my every move".

My God -- can you imagine? A very young child who fantasizes about being special? SHE MUST BE SATAN'S HELLSPAWN!!!!

(I guess all those times I played baseball as a kid with a play-by-play track running through my head were evidence of my evilness, too.)

And I also like this:

To reach her goals, she long ago learnt to embrace any tactic, however destructive. As her mother noted, Hillary does "everything she has to do to get along and get ahead".

Yes, I'm sure that when her own mother said she does "everything she has to do to get along and get ahead," that's how she meant it -- that she "embrace[s] any tactic, however destructive."

I THINK SOME PEOPLE ARE MISSING THE POINT

The New Republic's Jason Zengerle writes:

The back-and-forth between the Clinton camp and Bill Richardson over his Obama endorsement is getting pretty ridiculous. Here's the latest from Mark Halperin:

New Mexico Governor, in talks with both Clintons about his endorsement, is said to have been the one to argue that Obama did not have the experience necessary to beat McCain.

A Clinton associate reacts: “Bill Richardson is clearly embarrassed that he broke his promise to them.” Read full quote here.

New report comes in wake of ABC News report that Hillary Clinton told Richardson that Obama can’t win.

You'd have thought that the Clinton people would have wanted to downplay the Richardson's endorsement of Obama. And, if they hadn't sqwuaked so much, I bet it would have been a one- or two-day story. But here we are, nearly two weeks after Richardson did the deed, and the press is still talking about it--because the Clintons won't shut up about it. I don't see how this helps Hillary. Seriously, the Clinton people should just let it go....

Newsday's John Riley says the same thing:

...However justified the Clintons may be in feeling betrayed based on the actual dynamics of what happened, how do they do themselves any good by obsessing over it?

But the news in the current news cycle isn't what the Clintons are saying. It's what "a Clinton associate" (per Halperin) and "a source with direct knowledge of Richardson's conversations with the Clintons" (per ABC) are saying: that Richardson once agreed that Obama can't win. (Oh, and Greg Sargent of Talking Points Memo has been told the same thing by "a top Hillary adviser.")

The Clintons want this to stay in the press because they want to keep hammering home the Obama-can't-win meme. They want the story to be: The Clintons think he can't win, the sage political veteran Bill Richardson used to agree ... so isn't there a very good chance that it's true?

So this is just a continuation of the Clinton camp's attempted slow-motion fragging of Obama.

JANE FONDA SECRETLY TRYING TO HELP HILLARY?

I don't really believe this theory, but I'll throw it out there because I'm tired of taking this damn horserace seriously: You know (because it's rapidly becoming The Most Important Story In America, more important even than the candidates' skill at bowling) that, according to the L.A. Times, Jane Fonda has said she supports Barack Obama:

...Fonda was eating out last night and exited the restaurant, ignoring as celebrities often do the assembled press contingent.

But a video camera was rolling as she approached the street and someone, perhaps just trying to get her to turn around for a picture, shouted out at her back, "Who are you going to vote for?"

There was a moment of silence. Then, the actress did turn around toward the cameras, paused and with a smile said simply, "Obama!" Then she got into a car and drove away....

But what about this NewsMax article from 2005?

'Hanoi' Jane Fonda, whose anti-U.S. activities during the Vietnam war remain an anathema to most Americans, is helping to bankroll New York Sen. Hillary Clinton's reelection campaign.

The woman who sat behind a North Vietnamese gun installation and pretended to shoot down American pilots donated the maximum -- $2,000 -- to Hillary's campaign coffers, the New York Daily News reports in Wednesday's edition.

Earlier this year Fonda told Time magazine that she "hopes for a Hillary Clinton presidency." The politically radioactive actress had also been a sleepover guest at the Clinton White House....

(Yes, it's NewsMax, but that quote is accurate, and she was on the sleepover list.)

So does she really still support Hillary? Did she lie?

Why is this happening now -- just before a critical contest that's being treated in the press as essentially the Deer Hunter primary, one in which Hillary Clinton is trying to hold off Barack Obama with the help of pro-military working-class Democrats? Is that evil Jane Fonda -- using the L.A. Times, the hometown paper of the Clintons' beloved movie industry -- working hand in glove with the sinister Clintons to create bad press for Obama?

Er, I doubt it -- entertainers (left, center, or right) are rarely all that clever. I imagine she just changed her mind. But, hey, it's a theory.

THE POT MAKER SNEERS AT THE KETTLE

Apart from the blatant hypocrisy of criticizing Barack Obama for not wearing a flag lapel pin while not wearing one himself, Karl Rove, in his GQ interview, has a curious way of going on the attack:

Obama is coolly detached and very arrogant.... [He] doesn't do his homework....

Take a look at the footage. Turn the sound off and look at it. You can tell that he is arrogant, and you can tell that he's a little bit angry, and you can tell he's very dismissive. He takes his hands and he sort of, you know, waves his hand like, "I'm dismissing something." ...

Arrogant? Doesn't do homework? Angry? Dismissive?

Hey, Karl, you have the gall to criticize someone that way after you foisted George W. Bush on the world?

PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS, BY MAUREEN DOWD

No one, left, center, or right, has been nastier to Hillary Clinton than Maureen Dowd. This campaign season, in particular, Dowd has been relentless in attacking the senator. So at first I was surprised to read today's Dowd column. Why so admiring all of a sudden?

...Hillary is cruelly misunderstood, and she deserves more credit for her benevolence....

Without Hillary, [Barack Obama] never would have learned to be a good debater. He never would have understood how to robustly answer distorted and personal attacks. He never would have been warned about how harmful an unplugged spouse can be. He never would have realized how a luminous speech can be effective damage control.

...Besides coaching Obama, Hillary is also shielding him. If she had not fibbed about the Tuzla airport landing, and then fibbed to get out of a fib, the press would have stayed focused on Wright. She has been an invaluable lightning rod....

I tell myself this is snark, then I read on and realize that no, it really isn't. What's up? After all this time, has Maureen Dowd suddenly concluded that Hillary Clinton is benevolent?

This change of heart seems awfully familiar. And then I suddenly realize why.

It's the plot of every romantic novel and chick flick ever. The woman finds the man boorish, if not brutish; she tells everyone what a jerk (or even lunatic) he seems to be -- and then, at the end, she realizes he's The One, in part because of what she saw at first as boorish or brutish.

In this plot template, Maureen Dowd is the woman.

Hillary Clinton is the guy.

*****

Dowd is so confused about her unexpected attraction to the Hillary of her own imaginings, the saloon brawler Hillary, that she can't quite tell how the fights are going. She tells two different stories in two consecutive sentences, and doesn't seem to realize she's contradicting herself:

... the ultimate favor Hillary can do for the Illinois freshman is to fight him full-out until the finale and then gracefully release him so he can find happiness with another.

Hillary’s work is done only when she is done, because the best way for Obama to prove he's ready to stare down Ahmadinejad is by putting away someone even tougher.

So which is it, Maureen? Is Obama "putting [Hillary] away," or does the fight end only when Macho Man Hillary deigns to "gracefully release him"?

I think this is painful for Dowd either way. She wants Obama to be a two-fisted he-man, capable of "putting away" Hillary; if he does so, he'll be her dreamboat. But that will mean she's misjudged the current man of her dreams, Hillary -- he ain't so tough!

Of course, it's only a matter of time before Dowd starts crushing on John McCain, compared with whom either Obama or Clinton will be a big girl. Life will be simpler for Dowd then. But for now, her fantasy life is complicated -- and twisted.

YES, THE "OLD PEOPLE STRATEGY" CAN WORK

Matt Yglesias thinks John McCain's current personal-nostalgia tour is lousy strategy -- but then he shows signs that he's starting to grasp the point of it all:

What I'll say on behalf of this strategy is that it's the best way I can think of to try to take advantage of older people's potential discomfort with the idea of a woman or a black man in the White House that doesn't involve exploiting racism or sexism in a discreditable way. McCain's putting together an identity politics counter-narrative steeped in nostalgia; it didn't work [for Bob Dole in 1996] against a white southerner running on a very cautious agenda, but 2008 is going to see the Democrats nominating an unorthodox candidate running on a more liberal agenda.

That's absolutely right -- McCain's saying (without saying it) that he's a white male whose forbears represented an overwhelmingly white and male military tradition.

But there's much more to McCain's emphasis on biography. A presidential candidate has to make voters able to imagine him or her as part of a ruling elite, but (usually) without appearing like a member of the dreaded yuppie-scum caste. Republicans generally accomplish this by pulling on a pair of cowboy boots and turning themselves into members of a Southern or Western leadership class in which the leaders are seen as macho wild men. (Dole, it should be noted, never did this.) Bill Clinton, the one Democrat who's won a presidential election in recent years, didn't wear boots, but he did drop his g's and he loved greasy food, so we forgave him his hoity-toity education.

McCain, right now, is telling people he's part of three non-yuppie subgroups: Southerners, old men, and the military. So he's qualified to be a leader of the elite, but he's not a latte-swilling yuppie elitist.

One more thing: Matt sneers that McCain's people are running a "campaign emphasizing the idea that their candidate is genetically programmed to monger war through his jingoistic heritage (or something)" -- but what we hear from the media isn't that, it's this:

McCain, who has always described himself as an indifferent student who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, calls himself "a pretty rambunctious boy, with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder."

Translation: He's part of a hereditary military elite, but he rebelled against that elite. (And by the way, can you imagine circumstances under which Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would want to boast about doing poorly in school? It would be a sign that they were unworthy affirmative-action cases. McCain doesn't have to worry about anything like that.)

There's more: McCain's campaign, far from running away from the anger issue, is clearly making sure that the media knows he was known as "Punk" and "McNasty" at his high school -- and the press is lapping it up. ABC:

McCain the 'Punk' Goes Back to School

Once 'McNasty', Presumed Republican Nominee Praises Teacher's Influence

The New York Times:

'McNasty' Goes Back to School

Translation: He may look old and frail now, but he had manly animal vigor.

(Don't worry about the temper, though -- he jokes about it now, in a soft, mellow deadpan, which comes off as the exact opposite of a bad temper, so you're supposed to feel he won't fly off the handle now.)

Also see this morning's NPR story, which walks through everything I've just mentioned and says the result is: Being a punk rebel kid turned McCain into a bipartisan!

Sen. John McCain returns Wednesday to the Naval Academy, where he proudly graduated fifth from the bottom of his class. It doesn't seem to have hurt him any. After all, he's speaking as the Republican Party's presumptive nominee for the White House.

All this week, McCain is visiting old stomping grounds as a way to "reintroduce" himself to voters. On Tuesday, he was at Episcopal High School outside Washington, where in the 1950s he earned the nickname "Punk."

"I arrived here a pretty rambunctious boy, with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder," McCain said. "I was always the new kid and was accustomed to proving myself quickly at each new school as someone not to be challenged lightly."

McCain insisted that he has mellowed in the years since, although he joked that some detractors might not see it that way. As a lawmaker, McCain has shown a notable ability to work with colleagues from across the political spectrum....

That last leap is so breathtaking that you miss it if you blink. But these are powerful messages -- the press is falling for them and voters may fall for them as well. So be afraid. Be very afraid.

****

In the long post that inspired Matt's post, Ed Kilgore says,

Maybe this is all emphemeral, and at some point John McCain will abandon the biographical message to focus on policy issues.

Here's a simple answer to this stupid question: No, he won't. Not if he's smart, and his campaign so far suggests that he is.

Americans don't cast presidential votes based on policy issues (otherwise Democrats would regularly win) -- they cast presidential votes based on biography and gut reactions to the candidates and whatever horrible impressions of the evilness and weirdness of one (usually Democratic) candidate they've been bombarded with in the media. McCain is the candidate of the party that knows how to win under these conditions, the party that's won seven of the last ten times, so he's not going to run on issues. He and his people (and his party) simply know better.

And that brings us back to Matt:

To me, though, one primary issue in a McCain-Obama race is going to be how successful McCain can be at obscuring his enormous hostility to America's public sector retirement infrastructure. McCain's record, and that of his key economic advisors, is pretty clear -- these are people who want to gut Social Security and Medicare in order to clear budgetary space for an agenda of low taxes and many wars.

"[O]bscuring his enormous hostility to America's public sector retirement infrastructure"? Matt, stop dreaming -- Americans don't read position papers or voting records. They vote for the candidate who seems to stand for what they believe.

M.C. ROVE HAS COMPETITION

I wish this were an April Fool's joke, but it appears that the guy responsible for the painfully chirpy campaign song "Hillary4U&Me" is back, and probably making his kids cringe even more than before:

Gene Wang, a three-time Silicon Valley chief executive and musically inclined Hillary Clinton supporter, has penned another pro-Clinton ditty.... a jazzy rap tune called "Hillary in the House" (here's the MP3).

Wait, it gets worse.

It begins with the line, "Hey pretty mama, don't you vote for Obama."

Ouch.

Actually, the song lacks the insufferable peppiness of the first effort, which helps, but it's hip-hop as interpreted by a middle-aged guy who's clearly never actually listened to hip-hop for pleasure (and hasn't really heard any since, oh, about 1985). And the brief detour into deep-bass singing a la "12:45" in the Spinners' "Games People Play" is, well, just embarrassing.

Wang's an impressive guy -- he helped develop the C++ programming language, introduced virus protection "live update" at Symantec, and founded a company that developed surgical robots. As a musician, well, he's a great scientist. If you disagree, CD Baby has his CD (By the way, it has a pre-Hillary version of "Hillary4U&Me" called "MVP is H-O-T." Yes, you can actually pay to listen to that song.)

WE'RE NOT TRYING TO BE BRAVE, JONAH.
WE'RE JUST TRYING TO TELL YOUR POLITICAL ALLIES THAT THEY'RE FULL OF IT.

I thought I was familiar with the vast majority of right-wing indictments of us evil liberals, but until now I've somehow missed one that shows up in a Jonah Goldberg column in today's L.A. Times -- that the "Darwin fish" (a parody of the "Jesus fish") is both bigoted and cowardly:

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there's the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

I think what's being argued is that evolution itself is a more sophisticated creation story than the one in the Christian Bible. Is Goldberg arguing that it isn't? Is he arguing in favor of creationism and/or intelligent design? If he isn't -- if he believes Darwinism is solid science but thinks saying so out loud is bigotry -- then isn't he just being a cultural relativist? Isn't he arguing that everyone's version of the truth is equally valid and that "objective reality" doesn't exist? Rather odd, that, for a right-winger.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing random motorists that "hate is not a family value." But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. "Namely: It's acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with 'Shalom' written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with 'Usury' written inside the same symbol would be an outrage."

But a piece of paper with a Star of David accompanied by proselytizing words about Christianity wouldn't be an outrage -- it would be a Jews for Jesus flyer, and if you got one walking down the street and didn't agree with it, you'd just toss it out and forget about it instantly. Why is one item that uses the symbol of one belief system to proselytize for another an outrage, while the other is, at worst, a minor nuisance?

And is the Darwin fish really "Christian-baiting"? Back when I was a Catholic child, I was a Christian and a believer in evolution -- which my church didn't reject. And despite a nod or two to the creationists, the Catholic church still supports evolution -- as do the majority of mainline Christian denominations.

The people who don't accept evolution are a subset of Christians, who claim oppressed status while working to pack school boards with people who want to substitute dogma for science in everyone's public schools. So a defense of evolution is political.

The other meaning of the Darwin fish, of course, is a nonbeliever's rejection of the dominant strain of religious belief in America, i.e., Christianity. Goldberg, I guess, is arguing that Christians are an oppressed majority, under the thumb of a ruling minority caste of atheists. (You say a majority of Americans categorically reject the notion of an atheist president? That just proves our point! Your neck is oppressively planted under our foot!)

But the most annoying aspect of the Darwin fish is the false bravado it represents. It's a courageous pose without consequence. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap.

Jonah, it's not meant to be courageous. Plenty of political speech isn't courageous. Your column isn't. Your book isn't. This blog isn't. We engage in political speech because we have a constitutional right to do so, and because it's good to argue political points.

*****

All of this is in the service of a boilerplate right-wing argument I am familiar with, because I've heard it incessantly since 9/11: that liberals have a moral responsibility to tell Islamicists that they're poopyheads. Goldberg brings this up in the context of the Geert Wilders film "Fitna," which has inspired some death threats.

The Darwin fish ostensibly symbolizes the superiority of progressive-minded science over backward-looking faith. I think this is a false juxtaposition, but I would have a lot more respect for the folks who believe it if they aimed their brave contempt for religion at those who might behead them for it.

See, there's a war on, and for the duration we're not allowed to have a political argument with our fellow citizens, because attacking the ragheads is a much higher priority. (Right-wingers, however, are free to attack us without being accused of detracting from the war effort, an example being Goldberg's column.)

Ah, but I understand. All the scolding of Islamicists by right-wingers isn't working, but it would work if we lefties joined in, right? After all, even though we avoid church and have all that non-marital (and frequently non-heterosexual) sex and drink all that Chardonnay, jihadists are really, really sensitive to our opinions. Right?

DEPARTMENT OF UNFORTUNATE ANALOGIES

Hillary Clinton, in a speech she's giving today in Philadelphia, plays the card you just knew she was going to play in Pennsylvania if you gave it even the slightest thought:

...Now, this is one of the most important elections we've ever had. There is so much at stake. But just as it's getting time to vote here in Pennsylvania, Senator Obama says he’s getting tired of it. His supporters say they want it to end.

Well, could you imagine if Rocky Balboa had gotten half way up those Art Museum steps and said, "Well, I guess that's about far enough?" ...

OK, I didn't see any of the sequels. But in the first movie -- the one that made that scene famous -- wasn't the whole point that Rocky proved his mettle and became a hero by going fifteen rounds ... but he lost the fight?

OH CHRIST, NOT ANOTHER GEORGE WILL...

More on sports (see also my last post): I opened today's New York Times and discovered that David Brooks had devoted an entire column to The Mental ABC's of Pitching, a book by H.A. Dorfman.

Brooks praises the book for its "moral tone." No, really, he does.

This jumped out at me:

In Dorfman's description of pitching, batters barely exist. They are vague, generic abstractions that hover out there in the land beyond the pitcher's control. A pitcher shouldn't judge himself by how the batters hit his pitches, but instead by whether he threw the pitch he wanted to throw.

Hmmm ... doesn't this seem awfully similar to Bush's Iraq policy? The war didn't help smoke out bin Laden, didn't reduce the global influence of al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, didn't bring true freedom or democracy or stability to Iraq, didn't ensure a steady supply of energy from the Middle East, didn't create a "reverse domino effect" in favor of genial pro-U.S., pro-Israel democracies in the region, and, ultimately, didn't make anyone safer or more secure except al-Qaeda -- but it's OK because Bush threw the pitch he wanted to throw.

So what if the Evildoers hit it out of the ballpark?

*****

You read through the entire Brooks column and wonder what the hell he's getting at, then finally you come to The Moral Of The Story:

Not long ago, Americans saw the rise of a therapeutic culture that placed great emphasis on self-discovery, self-awareness and self-expression. But somehow the tide seems to have turned from the worship of self, and today's message is: transcend yourself in your job -- or get shelled.

Hunh? I thought we were supposed to be in an era of unprecedented wallowing in the sense of self, accompanied by relentless self-expression (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, yadda yadda yadda). You mean that's over already? I wish somebody would cc me on these memos.

*****

UPDATE: I just want to remind you that this isn't the first time Brooks has found morality in baseball instruction -- here he is in 2005 singing the praises of the yuppified youth baseball his son played ("Those of us involved in this sort of life can see why people object to the over-the-topness of it all: the $200 bats, the professional coaches... [but it] has turned them into remarkable young men"). And I imagine the junior Brooks really won't grow up to be a crack dealer -- instead, he'll be a well-groomed hack screwing things up somewhere in the administration of, say, President George P. Bush, or a pompous pundit apologist for the same.

ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN ATHLETIC SKILL AND PRESIDENTIAL SKILL

Really, all you need to know about whether you have to be a jock to be a good president is that George W. Bush is really, really good at throwing out ceremonial first pitches.

Yes, he's just terrific at that. Even as he was being booed at the Washington Nationals' opening-day game, Bush put some zip on the ball, and did so from the top of the mound, not the front like some other pols, as the announcers covering the game breathlessly noted ("There have been many presidents who have thrown out first pitches, but I don't know that anybody's done it any better than this particular president"). And the strike Bush threw from the mound at the 2001 World Series is legendary -- watch this mini-documentary* on the moment and learn just how seriously he took the assignment:

You know, I wanted to make sure that if I was going to throw out the ball, I was able to do so with a little zip. You know, I didn't want people to think that their president was incapable of finding the plate.

Now, I would have preferred a president who couldn't find the plate but could find bin Laden, but hey, that's just me.

The worst president of all time is probably the best first-pitch thrower of all time. So when Joe Scarborough and one of his guests say Barack Obama's a lousy bowler -- no, say he's a "dainty" bowler -- and say that "Americans want their president, if it's a man, to be a real man," I just have to ask when we start reaping all the foreign- and domestic-policy benefits of George W. Bush's manly throwing arm. Wake me, Joe, when Bush's arm finds bin Laden, or brings stability to Iraq, or rebuilds New Orleans, or gets us out of the subprime mess, or gets everyone affordable health care.

*UPDATE: That link no longer works -- try this one.

OUR GUYS

On NPR this morning, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro was reporting from Sadr City in Baghdad, and, well, this doesn't sound promising (my transcript of the audio):

... just so you realize a little bit of the complications here in Sadr City: We were escorted in to the Sadr office by a police vehicle, and as we were commenting on the roadside bomb that exploded, I said to one of the policemen, "Well, I hope you know where they are," and they laughed jovially and said, "Yes, we know where they all are. So don't worry, nothing will be targeting us," which, again, I think, gives you an idea of how the police inside Sadr City have been operating for the past six days of fighting.

As Iraqis stand up....

A SUDDEN TURNAROUND, MORE THAN A YEAR IN THE MAKING

If all you knew about Hillary Clinton's successful courting of ex-nemesis Richard Mellon Scaife was what you read in today's New York Times story, you'd surely conclude that this is a new development and an unexpected turnaround. It's neither -- and when Scaife himself said of Senator Clinton, in an article about their recent meeting, "Walking into our conference room, not knowing what to expect (or even, perhaps, expecting the worst), took courage and confidence," he was lying through his teeth.

This little dance has been going on for more a year.

New York Times, February 19, 2007:

... as Mrs. Clinton is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Scaife's checkbook is staying in his pocket.

Christopher Ruddy, who once worked full-time for Mr. Scaife investigating the Clintons and now runs a conservative online publication he co-owns with Mr. Scaife, said, "Both of us have had a rethinking."

"Clinton wasn't such a bad president," Mr. Ruddy said. "In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today."

As for the conservative response to Mrs. Clinton's campaign, Mr. Ruddy said, "The level of intensity and anger toward Hillary is not getting to the level that it was toward Bill Clinton when he was president." He added, "She has moderated and developed a separate image." ...

Newsweek, November 19, 2007:

Bill Clinton is never at a loss for company. When he's not globe-trotting or charming audiences for as much as $400,000 a speech, he's often schmoozing visitors in his suite of offices in Harlem. Last July, the former president sat down with a billionaire impressed with the William J. Clinton Foundation's campaign against AIDS in Africa. The two men chatted amiably over lunch for more than two hours, and the visitor pledged to write Clinton's foundation a generous check. But there was something unusual, if not plain weird, about the meeting. NEWSWEEK has learned that the billionaire so eager to endear himself to the former president was Richard Mellon Scaife....

Bill Clinton now finds himself the unlikeliest of Scaife heroes. Last month Ruddy posted a softball interview with Clinton on the Newsmax site (sample question: "What is the best thing about being an ex-president?"). A worshipful cover story followed in the current edition of the magazine. Clinton, it gushed, is "a political and cultural powerhouse" who is "part Merlin and part Midas -- a politician with a magical touch."

What is going on here? Scaife declined to comment, but Ruddy tells NEWSWEEK he and Scaife believe Clinton's life since leaving office has been "very laudable," and that he is doing "very important work representing the country when the U.S. is widely resented in the world." ...

The magazine story isn't online, but the interview is -- it's here, and yes, it's full of softballs (e.g., "How has your own religious faith played a role in your global work today?").

Mother Jones blogger Clara Jeffery speculated last fall that Scaife, in the midst of an ugly divorce and paying a tremendous amount of alimony (about $24,000 a day) after being caught cheating on his wife in a sleazy motel (The Washington Post has the dirt here), now has a deeper understanding of Bill and his cheatin' ways. I'm not sure I have a better theory -- unless the tax benefits of Scaife's gifts to Clinton's foundation are significantly improving his cash flow.

AMERICA MIGHT WANT A WAR HERO THIS TIME

On Friday, Matt Stoller argued that America's fondness for war-tested presidents is overstated:

...1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 all saw the candidate without military service elected over the candidate who had served, in several cases heroically.

... while the conservative myth is dominant in the political press, there's no just no evidence voters want a hero for President.... Or at any rate, since 1992, voters keep voting against the hero. So don't be lulled by McCain's narrative into thinking it's a sign that he's a tough candidate. That's what John Kerry thought when he took on George Bush. Bush might be President, but Kerry was a hero in Vietnam, and surely the American people would trust a hero with national security....

The obvious answer with regard to Kerry is that he was a Democrat, and the GOP and the press can always find a way to discredit a Democratic presidential candidate, however brave and honorable his service.

But what about the other years Stoller mentions, especially 1992 and 1996? Well, all those elections took place between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. More important, I think, in all four of the years Stoller mentions, the veteran was the candidate the press didn't want to have a beer with. The beer factor trumps a lot, even Bob Dole's significant impairment as a result of war wounds.

McCain suffered far more in war than Gore (who never saw combat), Kerry, Poppy Bush, or even Dole. McCain is the only one of these candidates apart from Kerry to try to market himself as a wounded warrior in a time of conflict -- and Kerry was both a Democrat (i.e., a member of a discredited party) and a man better known as a war opponent than a war hero.

And, most important, the press thinks McCain is beer-worthy, whereas the press found Clinton (twice) and George W. Bush (twice) more beer-suitable than the veterans they ran against.

I don't know how this election will work out. We'll have a rare beer-worthy charismatic Democratic candidate in the Clinton/JFK mold (the National Beer Wholesalers Association has already determined that the public vastly prefers Obama to either McCain or Clinton as a suds companion). But it's wartime, and McCain may be the press's preferred drinking partner. And his war suffering was on another level altogether. So this election year may be different from the last four.

****

And in today's New York Times, William Kristol also ticks off the last four elections and notes that "Democracies don't always elect the man who has done the most for his country."

Nice to know, now that it doesn't matter, that Kristol actually honors the service of Kerry and Gore, in both war and peace. But to his main point -- that McCain needs more than just biography to get elected -- I'd say: Yes, that's true, but he doesn't necessarily need what Kristol thinks he needs. He may not need "a broad reform agenda, including "an up-to-date, capitalism-friendly and transparency-requiring approach to regulating the credit markets." He may just need to keep buttering up the press.

STRAY THOUGHTS

With so many prominent Democrats proclaiming that the party is being hurt by the prolonged nomination fight, I can't help wondering: Would this be hurting the party less if there weren't so many prominent Democrats saying, for attribution, that it's hurting the party?

And since all these prominent Democrats seem to have the press's attention, either to prolong the intraparty battle or to wring their hands about how the prolonged intraparty battle deprives the party of the opportunity to send a nominee out to criticize John McCain, wouldn't it be a good idea for some of these Democrats to take advantage of the press attention they're getting by doing the criticizing of John McCain themselves?

Maybe, as a show of unity, the party could even send some of these prominent Democrats out in pairs -- one Obama person, one Clinton person -- to talk about the unacceptability of a McCain presidency. Imagine the pairings -- Bob Casey with John Murtha! Madeleine Albright with Bill Richardson! Howard Wolfson with David Axelrod! Hell, maybe even Geraldine Ferraro with Samantha Power! (Perhaps it's just because I was an Italian kid who grew up in an Irish city, Boston, but I could imagine those two actually bonding.)

Look, it would have to be an improvement over the party's current offering, the Everybody Fan Out and Alternately Bash and Wring Your Hands Tour.

WORKING THE REFS BEFORE THE REGULAR SEASON EVEN BEGINS

There are a lot of good, skeptical letters in today's New York Times in response to recent op-eds about John McCain. There's also this from Bernard Goldberg, the right-wing operative best-known for the book Bias:

To the Editor:

To the extent that Neal Gabler is right when he states that John McCain is "a darling of the news media," it's not so much because he shares their sense of irony. It's because he's a Republican who is not reliably conservative.

So here's a prediction from someone who’s been a full-time working journalist since 1967: The love affair will end as soon as soon as the general election begins (if not sooner). That's when every gaffe by Mr. McCain will be portrayed by the media as "evidence" that he's old -- really, really old. That's when every grimace will be "proof" that he’s got a hair-trigger temper.

When the Democrats stop beating each other over the head, and one of them starts running in earnest against John McCain, the media will no longer find their "darling" nearly as "ironic" -- or nearly as lovable.

From a media point of view, it's one thing when Senator McCain sticks a finger in a fellow Republican's eye, quite another when he's taking aim at a liberal Democrat.

Hey, Bernie -- here's a thousand bucks I can't afford, which I'll give to the charity of your choice, if an impartial monitor of campaign coverage says after November that anything like this actually happened. It's just not going to happen, and you know it. You're full of it.

But I know that, whether McCain wins or loses, you're going to write a tendentious book after the campaign (like hell you've been "a full-time working journalist since 1967" -- all you've done for years is write tendentious books) in which you'll whine that he was the victim of liberal media bias, even if there are only a handful of examples of harsh treatment of McCain in the mainstream press, or in blogs you're going to pretend are part of the mainstream press, or in comments sections of those same blogs. You're going to be a sore loser or a sore winner, and the truth about the coverage -- which I'm sure will be all too respectful of McCain, with maybe a few exceptions -- won't mean a damn thing to you.

I'm sure you won't read this, but I'm serious -- a thousand bucks. Bet?

ANOTHER POSSIBLE FAILED "CORONATION"?

This idea, floated by Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, is absurd in many ways:

Some Democrats terrified that their bloody primary campaign will doom them in November are floating a consolation prize for Hillary Clinton: governor of New York.

The travails of New York Gov. David Paterson have opened up a new potential career path for Clinton, according to well-informed Democratic Party insiders who refused to allow their names to be used when discussing contingencies. They want her to consider the option if she concludes after the April 22 Pennsylvania primary that she cannot overtake Barack Obama for the party's presidential nomination....

In the event that Paterson had to resign, the New York State Constitution calls for a gubernatorial election this November. Clinton would be the favorite in that contest if she were interested. Were a politically wounded Paterson to serve out Spitzer's term, which ends in 2010, Clinton would no doubt be a strong potential candidate to succeed him.

Under the scenario sketched out by the insiders, serving two years as governor would give Clinton the executive experience to become the prohibitive favorite for the 2012 Democratic presidential nomination....

First of all, we know Clinton won't go for this -- she's not giving up. Second, as far as I know, speculation about a Patterson resignation is just that -- speculation. The public here isn't particularly turned off by what he's revealed. He may well get down to business and be a strong candidate in 2010.

But more important, this "consolation prize" may not be the Democratic Party's to give. As Alter notes, yesterday's New York Post mentioned the possibility of a run by Rudy Giuliani. Humiliated as he may be after his presidential race, he still has a lot of fans in this state. Another possible candidate, not mentioned by Alter, is Mike Bloomberg, who's been talked about as a possible gubernatorial candidate for a long time. (He's term-limited as mayor and his second term ends on the last day of 2009.) Bloomberg, unlike Giuliani, hasn't suffered a recent wave of negative publicity and hasn't incurred the enmity of non-white voters (who thus might prefer him to Hillary after this year's primary season, especially if she's also seen as shoving aside a black governor). Plus, he's stinking rich. He could even run on a third-party line and win. So the party can't just hand her the office -- it could be yet another tough fight, and surely she knows that.

So pay no attention to this. It's not gonna happen.

ARE WE BACK TO DRAPE-MEASURING AGAIN?

Hey, I'm just tickled pink that Mark McKinnon, John McCain's chief media strategist, said in an interview that he won't stay with the McCain campaign if Barack Obama is the nominee -- he likes Obama and says he doesn't want to run negative ads against him, though I'm not sure how to square that with the fact that McCain is running an ad right now describing McCain as "the American president Americans have been waiting for" (as opposed, presumably, to that Muslim furriner Hussein Osama).

But then I go to The New Republic and read Noam Scheiber's response to the interview, and I just want to slap some sense into Scheiber. He writes:

It occurred to me while reading this Linda Douglass interview with McCain strategist Mark McKinnon how much McCain's fortunes are tied to momentum. I know this metaphor's pretty cliched, but his campaign really is like riding a bicycle: It's fine as long as it keeps moving along, but the second it stalls out, the whole thing could topple.

My thinking is that conservatives are generally going to keep their mouths shut as long as McCain has a decent shot at winning, because they know the GOP has no business even being in the game. But the second it looks like his chances are dimming, I suspect all the conservative skeptics are going to pipe up and basically finish him off....

Hunh?

Scheiber's responding to a different part of the McKinnon interview -- a part in which McKinnon talks about McCain's concerns regarding global warming. Scheiber says: "a year ago it would have been very tough to imagine McCain as the nominee calling Bush out on global warming and not suffering serious conservative blowback as a result."

Why blowback? Does Scheiber think Republicans wouldn't circle the wagons and back their own nominee? Since when do Republicans do that kind of self-sabotage?

I have a big problem with Scheiber's notion that Republicans "know the GOP has no business even being in the game." I have an even bigger problem with his notion that Republicans think McCain's candidacy is a house of cards that's inevitably going to come crashing down.

First of all, despite the public's current disgust with the GOP, it was always clear that the GOP was going to run someone who could be sold to gullible swing voters as not really a Republican. Giuliani was a social moderate from the Northeast. Mitt Romney was an ex-social moderate from the Northeast. Fred Thompson was a Hollywood guy and a friend of, er, John McCain. Even the late-arriving top-tier candidate, Mike Huckabee, had a moderate streak. And the fifth A-lister was McCain. And why shouldn't they get away with this? They ran Bush as a centrist in 2000, for heaven's sake, and beat peace and prosperity (albeit on a technicality).

Second, the Republicans thought they were going to run against Hillary Clinton, or maybe John Edwards -- two candidates against whom they could turn to off-the-shelf character-assassination plans. Barack Obama's unexpected rise just made them work harder, but his name and race and pastor made their lives easier. They might not beat him, but they know they can rough him up, and they've known that all along. (They can pretty much rough anybody up.)

Third, they always knew they could describe any Democratic nominee as a tax-and-spend Brie-eating hippie America-hater. That always works. And the press always goes along.

Why does Scheiber think the Republicans are waiting for McCain's campaign to collapse? These guys don't quit. Even if Bush's approval rating were at zero, they'd find a way to make this competitive.

HEY, GEERT, THIS TOOK YOU SEVEN MONTHS?

Right-wingers are thrilled to report that bleached-blond Dutch provocateur Geert Wilders's Muslim-bashing film "Fitna" is now online. I won't waste bandwidth by embedding it, but you can watch the English-language version here, at LiveLeak -- if you want to waste sixteen minutes of your life.

"Fitna" begins with the words "Warning: This film contains shocking images." The hell it does -- it contains exactly the images (9/11, beheadings, charred corpses) you would have expected a right-winger to cherry-pick in order to make the case that Islam is intrinsically evil, interspersed with exactly the Quran quotes and Islamicists' bloviations you'd have expected as an accompaniment. If you're shocked by "Fitna," it's because you've never gone online to watch a right-wing Muslim-bashing video before.

According to a timeline on the film's Web site (which isn't loading right now, but the cached version is here), Wilders revealed that he was going to make this movie last August. It's March now, and if you can figure out why this took seven months, please explain it to me. "Fitna" the kind of video that wingnuts have been banging out over long weekends on a regular basis since before YouTube was launched -- hell, I was watching crude Flash-animation versions of the first minutes of "Fitna" years ago, except they were scored to Enya or Darryl Worley rather than Tchaikovsky and Grieg (whom Wilders picked, I assume, because the cliche high-class "elegiac" warhorse usually used for such purposes, Barber's "Adagio for Strings," is probably still under copyright in the EU).

Take the above-linked 9/11 montage videos, add a few bellicose Quran quotes from this home-brewed video, toss in some angry-jihadist shots like the ones in this one, upgrade the production values somewhat, and, voila, you've got "Fitna." Or just strip the headbanger music from this one.

Even Oceania's Two Minutes' Hates in 1984 were more imaginative:

...The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother....

I would have appreciated something trippy like that, but "Fitna" is just: Quran quote, carnage, carnage, Islamicist's bombast, carnage, carnage, Islamicist's bombast, Quran quote, carnage. Repeat ad nauseam.

Yes, I'm sure you could do a film like this out of the Bible -- I'd start here (especially here) or here for some juicy quotes. In fact, one atheist actually did a Bible video last year that's a bit like "Fitna" -- and he even scored it to Tchaikovsky (albeit a different piece). But I would very much like to see a dead-on Bible-based parody.

Oh, and I'm amused to learn that in all those months Wilder couldn't even manage to get all his propaganda points straight -- the guy who shows up as Theo van Gogh's murderer is actually someone else entirely -- a Dutch-Moroccan rapper. Oops.

*****

*UPDATE: Well, LiveLeak has pulled the video (a statement from LiveLeak has replaced the clip at the link). I lived through the era of Madonna's cross-burning Pepsi ad and "Erotica" and "Justify My Love" videos, and I'm sure Wilders, like Madonna back then, is quite pleased to be banned.

*****

UPDATE: Kids? Just Google it. It's there if you really need to see it.

*****

UPDATE: It's back at the original link. Go -- bore yourself silly.

WHAT A REMARKABLE CONFLUENCE OF EVENTS

A.O. Scott, reviewing the Iraq War movie Stop-Loss in today's New York Times:

...We have just marked the fifth anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq and the 4,000th American military death since the war began. The level of violence appears to be creeping up again, and troop levels are likely to stay where they are, at least until the next president’s inauguration.

So in some ways, there is a grim, accidental timeliness in the release of "Stop-Loss," which focuses on the ordeal of American soldiers in and out of combat....

"Accidental timeliness"?

OK, it wasn't foreseeable that this movie would come out just as we reached the 4,000 milestone, or during a particularly noteworthy uptick in the violence -- but Scott's implication seems to be that this movie wouldn't have been particularly timely under less headline-grabbing circumstances, i.e., a non-round death toll accompanied by the mere one-a-day rate of fatalities we had (more or less) in recent months before the violence increased. Tell that to the kids (young people are the movie's presumed target market -- it's distributed by MTV Films) who are still getting shipped over there.

Iraq may have faded from the headlines for a while, but the fighting and dying never stopped, and it's been clear to anyone who's been paying attention that it isn't going to stop as long as George W. Bush sits in the Oval Office. So surely it was obvious that releasing this movie around the fifth anniversary of the invasion (hardly an "accident") also meant releasing it while the bloodshed continued. That's timely.

UNIQUELY QUALIFIED

The job is filled, but, hey, if there's an opening, the New York Post informs us that Rudy is ready:

In the latest twist in New York politics, Rudy Giuliani is eyeing a run for governor in a special election this fall should Gov. Paterson be forced to resign, sources say....

It would happen in a year in which presidential nominee John McCain would be at the top of the GOP ticket....

New York's new governor has spent his brief time in office dropping one bombshell announcement after another. He admitted that both he and his wife had affairs during a rough patch in their marriage and that he abused drugs decades ago.

It appears, however, that those disclosures have raised little outrage....

What would his campaign slogan be? "Rudy: When I Commit Adultery, I'll Tell You Right Away"?

BUT BILL CLINTON CAN'T POSSIBLY WIN IN '92!

At The New York Observer, Steve Kornacki reminds us that even Democrats have been known to win presidential elections after tough nomination fights. Remember 1992?

... That year, Bill Clinton limped to the primary finish line with influential members of his party openly questioning the wisdom of nominating him.

... Instead of rallying around Clinton, large numbers of Democrats, many of them [Paul] Tsongas and [Jerry] Brown supporters, defected to Ross Perot, the billionaire Texan who was ramping up for a full-fledged independent campaign. In general-election match-ups, Clinton fell hopelessly behind both Perot and Bush -- a mid-May poll found him registering just 25 percent, to Bush's and Perot's 35 percent. And in the late Democratic primaries, Perot racked up write-in votes by the tens of thousands, finishing with around 15 percent in the late-May Oregon and Washington primaries (both estimated figures, since write-in votes weren't officially recorded). Nationally, Clinton's favorable/unfavorable rating stood at a poisonous 42/48 percent.

... As Clinton prepared to cross the magical delegate threshold in the final contests of June 2, The New York Times framed his as a Pyrrhic victory: "The man about to win the Democratic nomination, Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, is struggling to repair the damage he sustained in the getting of it." ...

Things weren't much better as Carter tried to wrap up the nomination in 1976:

... In the spring, two new candidates -- Idaho's Frank Church and California's Brown -- suddenly jumped in the race. And they started winning. Church took Nebraska in early May, then Montana, Idaho and Oregon. Brown grabbed Maryland, then Nevada, California, New Jersey and Rhode Island ("uncommitted" slates aligned with Brown actually won the latter two). When the primary process concluded in early June, it was obvious that there were widespread concerns with Carter among Democrats.

You recall how those elections turned out.

Yes, but what about the Democrats' primary-season slugfests in 1980 and 1984? Kornacki's answer: When "the fundamental ingredients for a Democratic victory are in place," an ugly nomination fight doesn't deal a mortal blow. When Democrats are in trouble anyway (as in those years), a loss can follow an intraparty slugfest, but the slugfest wasn't the cause.

The question, though, is: Which kind of year is this?

Kornacki assumes it's another '76 or '92. In each of those years we had "a feeble economy, a politically clumsy incumbent, and widespread fatigue with the Republican label"; for the Democrats, this year is like both '92 and '76 because "the likely Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, possesses the natural skills to capitalize on" GOP weakness.

I hope Kornacki's analysis is right -- but one way this year differs from '92 is that the Republican everyone blames for the current mess isn't the Republican on the ballot. McCain is more like Gerald Ford in that way -- he's not George W. Bush just as Ford wasn't Richard Nixon, and Ford almost won.

And I continue to worry, as I have all along, that with the demonization of the Democrats as dirty hippie gay abortionist tree-hugging multiculti tax-and-spend America-haters now in its third (fourth?) decade, the acceptability bar for a Democratic nominee is higher than it was for Clinton or Carter.

But I just don't know. And I think Kornacki's main point is right -- a big nomination fight is not going to be what sabotages Democrats this year, if anything does.

HILLARY CLINTON, PRE-TARNISHED

I don't have much to add to what everyone else is already telling you about the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, which shows that Obama isn't slipping much (even post-Wright, 60 percent of all voters think he could unite the country, which puts him 12 points ahead of McCain and 14 points ahead of Clinton, and he's 2 points ahead of McCain in a head-to-head matchup, while Clinton is 2 behind) -- but I am struck by the slippage in Clinton's favorable rating. It's down to 37%.

A little perspective: According to the PDF of the poll's results, George W. Bush's approval rating is only 4 points lower -- 33%.

I guess, by 21st-century standards, that makes her more "presidential."

*****

By the way, Jeralyn Merritt, discussing the poll's results on the nomination matchup, has this wrong:

The new NBC/WSJ poll (pdf) out today has Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tied at 45%. The margin of error is 3.7%. The poll was of all registered voters, not just Democrats.

Well, yes, Jeralyn, the overall poll was of all voters, but the nomination-fight matchup question is clearly labeled:

(ASK ONLY OF RESPONDENTS WHO SAY THEY ARE A DEMOCRAT IN Q.4a OR THAT THEY WOULD VOTE OR HAVE VOTED IN THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY IN Q.4c OR Q.4d.)

So these numbers are legit.

EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG

So it's March and Democratic voters are responding to a bruising nomination fight by threatening to defect to the other party. We're doomed, right?

Well, no. As Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com notes, a March 2000 Pew poll showed similar results -- about George W. Bush and his bruising battle with John McCain. From the Pew survey write-up:

The presidential primary season may prove to be a decisive factor in Campaign 2000, not only for who won, but for the way the winners emerged from the process in the eyes of the voters. Al Gore was clearly helped, and George W. Bush was just as clearly hurt. The vice president has improved his personal image, while making gains among two key groups whose support had eluded him last year, independents and men. In contrast, many people have come to dislike Bush personally, especially former supporters of John McCain. As a consequence, the Texas governor now trails Gore for the first time in a nationwide Pew Research Center survey, by 49%-43%....

We know how that turned out. And as Brian Schaffner of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies notes, the threatened defection rate was worse for Bush than it is for the Democrats now:

What is notable is not that Gallup finds [now] that some Clinton and Obama supporters currently say that they may vote for McCain if their candidate loses, but that the number is so low compared to what it was for McCain ... supporters in 2000. Only 28% of Clinton supporters (and 19% of Obama supporters) say they'd defect if their candidate lost, whereas half of McCain supporters were saying the same thing after he lost his bid for the 2000 Republican nomination.

That mass defection threat didn't pan out. It's far from inevitable that this one will, either.

****

By the way, please note what Pew survey respondents were saying in March 2000: They didn't like Bush's personality. More evidence that his kinda-sorta win in November wasn't because the public wanted to have a beer with him, but, rather, because the press did, and persuaded a good chunk of the public of his beer-worthiness.

Also note this, from Pew:

...while the public has more confidence in the vice president on most issues, it thinks Bush could do a better job of controlling the price of gasoline....

Oops.

*****

(Via Memeorandum and Andrew Sullivan.)

SICK WINGNUTS

I have my problems with Hillary Clinton, but you've got to be some kind of sick individual to be amused by this:



(Click to enlarge. Probably not suitable for work. Apologies if it's upsetting.)

I'm not too fond of this one or this one, either.

Anti-Obama merch, so far, mostly seems to be along predictable lines, though I challenge anyone to explain what the hell this is all about.

DEFECTING TO THE CANDIDATE WITHOUT FLAWS OR A PARTY AFFILIATION

Well, of course Gallup's pollsters are finding that many Democrats would choose McCain over whichever Democrat they don't like -- most Democrats (most Americans) have never heard or read a single negative word about McCain, and most Americans are certain that he's not really a Republican or a conservative. Every day we hear about the flaws of Clinton and Obama; McCain, according to every mainstream press story I read and all the channels on my cable system, doesn't have any flaws, except that Rush and his pals don't think he's crazily right-wing enough. What not-especially-well-informed swing-voting Democrat wouldn't be tempted to believe that sounds like a good deal? If I thought it resembled reality in any way, hell, I might feel the same way, too.

We're seven months from Election Day, so I think there's still plenty of time to reverse this -- which doesn't mean I think it will be reversed; the Democrats aren't very good at tarnishing haloes and the press doesn't want McCain's tarnished. Nevertheless, it can still happen, even after a prolonged nomination fight -- though maybe it's time for the Democratic Party to stop whining about not having a nominee yet and just begin a serious campaign against McCain right now, one that the nominee will simply have to join in progress.

THE INCREDIBLE SELF-REBUTTING NEW YORK TIMES

Jacques Steinberg has a page-one story in today's New York Times in which he writes about the decline in the number of print publications assigning reporters to ride campaign buses and planes. Steinberg struggles to list the reasons why this is a bad thing. Among them:

In the past, one advantage for those reporters who committed to spend as many as two years on the campaign trail was that they were often vaulted into the White House press room; many of those assigned to cover the next president will not have had the benefit of such seasoning, or exposure to the new president's advisers.

Yes -- now they might have to report campaign news without this excellent extended opportunity to cozy up to political insiders, and that's a bad thing, you see, because when one of the candidates eventually becomes president and is making terrible decisions about, say, war or the economy, we want to get our news from reporters who are really, really chummy with the people urging the president to make those bad decisions. Right. Got it.

Also:

"What you have lost," [Mark Z. Barabak of the Los Angeles Times] said, panning the other seats and seeing few faces from previous campaigns, "is the benefit of getting 6, 12, 15 different perspectives."

"Now you may get three or four," he said....

Never mind the fact that the 6, 12, 15 all reflected the same groupthink -- it was really much better, because they used different words to express it!

But today's Times has a neat auto-rebut function: On the op-ed page, Neal Gabler describes what we actually get from the boys on the bus in the case of John McCain. First, the 2000 version:

... Over the years, reporter after reporter has remarked upon his seemingly unguarded frankness. In 1999, William Greider wrote in Rolling Stone that, "While McCain continues examining his flaws, the reporters on the bus are getting a bit edgy. Will somebody tell this guy to shut up before he self-destructs?"

Imagine, reporters protecting a candidate from himself! But, then again, since the reporters on the bus liked Mr. McCain too much to report on his gaffes, he really didn't need protection. His candor was without consequence. It was another blandishment to the press....

And now the 2008 variant:

...Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency -- the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy.

... On the bus, Mr. McCain openly talks about his press gambits. According to [Ryan] Lizza [of The New Yorker], Mr. McCain proudly brandished an index card with a "gotcha" quote from Mitt Romney that the senator had given Tim Russert of "Meet the Press," a journalist few would expect to need help in finding candidates' gaffes. In exposing his two-way relationship with the press this way, he reveals the absurdity of the political process as a big game. He also reveals his own gleeful cynicism about it.

... If in the past he flattered the press by posing as its friend, he is now flattering it by posing as its conspirator, a secret sharer of its cynicism. He is the guy who "gets it." He sees what the press sees. Michael Scherer, a blogger for Time, called him the "coolest kid in school."

... the reporters, so quick in general to jump on hypocrisy, seem to find his insincerity a virtue....

In other words, this time around McCain is running the bus charm offensive like a new-style marketing campaign aimed at hipster youths who think they're above being manipulated by marketing campaigns. As is often the case with hip marketing, the telegraphing of the manipulation makes the manipulation more effective.

But the overall problem, eight years ago and today, is that the press cares too damn much about its own relationship with the candidates. We know what happened in 2000 when McCain dropped out: George W. Bush ran an even more successful charm offensive with the press, Al Gore didn't, and we got the worst presidency ever. That's why we're better off when more reporters report from off the bus.

D'OH!

I'm sure John McCain was saving this up, looking for the perfect moment to deploy it. I'm guessing he actually thought it was a good idea to choose the moment of the 4,000th U.S. fatality in Iraq to demand that Hillary Clinton apologize for criticizing General Petraeus and the surge last fall. (Video at the link, from Blogs for John McCain.)

But, of course, he's doing this just at the moment when there's Basra's burning, fighting has spread to Baghdad, the Green Zone is under attack, and the Sadrists' cease-fire may be ending. Oops!

Then again, I'm sure it'll be a matter of minutes before we're told by the press that the renewed fighting in Iraq is very, very good politically for McCain.

JOHN LOTT: I KNOW OBAMA IS ONE OF THOSE ANGRY BLACK GUYS BECAUSE HE DIDN'T LIKE CHATTING WITH ME

John Lott, the ethically challenged right-wing academic best known for that mantra-turned-monograph More Guns, Less Crime (gee, John, how's that working out these days?), has posted an opinion piece on the Fox News Web site that accuses Barack Obama of being one of those scary angry radical Negroes -- all because Lott and Obama didn't have nice chat-ups when they were colleagues at the University of Chicago.

Lott knows all about scary angry black people because (he tells us) he just read about them in a book -- Stupid Black Men by the African-American right-wing pundit Larry Elder. Now Lott is an instant expert. He tells us (in a "critique" of the book that reads rather like a press release) that Elder

rips into the festering sore of what passes as discussions these days about race. Elder confronts the "I-am-a-victim" attitude that corrupts people's sense of self-confidence and causes them to interpret the everyday difficulties people face in life through a prism of racial animosity....

People get so wrapped up in past traumas of what they are owed that they can't focus on the opportunities available....

These days everything from the higher default rates of blacks on mortgages to the supposedly high rate that blacks receive the death penalty are attributed to discrimination. But, Elder seems to be right that "racism provides a convenient way of avoiding serious examination of issues."

The sad thing that Elder discusses is how locked into this cycle of victimhood blacks are....

This is all, of course, a vast Democratic Party conspiracy:

...Elder says that Democrats need black people to be angry and constantly feel aggrieved to keep 90 percent of them voting for Democrats.

Republicans are actually more in-sync with black views on issues from vouchers for schooling, crime, abortion, illegal immigration, but many blacks would never vote for Republicans because of their perception of rampant racism by Republicans.

Which brings us to Angry Barack Obama:

... As someone who knew Obama for a little while -- we were both at the University of Chicago -- it has been hard to recognize the person that I knew from the one portrayed in the campaign. The person that I knew was not one who sought to build bridges with those he disagreed.

Academia is overwhelmingly filled with liberals and many even to the left of that, but most liberal academics enjoy arguing with those whom they disagree with. Debate and discussion over lunch and in the halls is what makes academia a fun place to be.

But Obama was not like that.

Possibly it was his anger over our differences over the gun issue or a broader anger with those with whom he disagreed, but attempts to engage in discussions ended with a stern looks and a turned back. That was true whether I met him at school or someplace else. There was anger there.

Like Larry Elder’s family, many blacks can point to experiences that they could let consume them with anger, real or imagined, but that obsession only harms themselves and those blacks who are trying to make their lives better. Hopefully, Elder’s book can get across the message that the vast majority of people really want them to succeed.

So there you go. After having known Obama "for a little while," Lott thoroughly understands his psyche, and Obama, he concludes definitively, is angry -- the sole bit of evidence being the fact that Obama didn't choose to shoot the breeze with Lott, a monomaniacal right-wing partisan.

And, to judge from the last paragraph, apparently the whole stereotype applies -- Obama is full of rage and blames the world for his problems, which is just the kind of thing that keeps black people down. If that's true, I'm not sure how Obama got through Columbia, Harvard Law, several career changes, the writing of two best-selling books, and a presidential nominating contest in which he's on the verge of an upset victory over one of the toughest competitors in the business. Maybe Lott will explain it all in his next Fox op-ed.

HOW MANY LIMBAUGHNISTAS ARE REGISTERING AS DEMOCRATS IN PA.?

Mark Halperin is flagging a Philadelphia Inquirer story about the large number of Pennsylvanians registering as Democrats to beat last night's deadline.

Over at Free Republic, there's no doubt about what's going on:

Operation Chaos in full force.

****

Go Rush. Operation Chaos Continues.


*****

...Rush's "street members of Operation Chaos" are out in full force, I'm glad to see. :)...

Limbaugh isn't just pushing "Operation Chaos" as a crusade -- hell, he's selling bumper stickers, hats, and T-shirts:



(By the way, please commit the last line of the shirt to memory, because I'm sure you'll be told, based on remarks Limbaugh made weeks ago, that he doesn't want McCain to win. Yes, he does.)

I'm not saying that all of this is Limbaugh's doing. But I'm struck by the fact that, according to the Inquirer, twice as many people switched to the Democrats between March 10 and 17 than registered Democrat for the first time. I'm also struck by the fact that the age group with the most activity is aged 45-54. I suppose that could be Hillary's crowd -- but I fear it's Rush's.

BUT ISN'T HE JUST LIKE US? AND DON'T WE SUCK?

In today's New York Times, Robin Toner projects the mainstream press's GOP-induced liberal self-hate onto Barack Obama:

Obama's Test: Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?

WASHINGTON — At the core of Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority.

To achieve the change the country wants, he says, "we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done."

But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can such a majority be built and led by Mr. Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year? ...

Read the article. Toner isn't really asking whether Obama is up to the task (which is a legitimate question) -- she's clearly asking whether it's even theoretically possible for the country to rally around a liberal, any liberal.

One name goes completely unmentioned in Toner's piece: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Presumably, FDR's success in uniting the country is considered irrelevant because it's ancient history -- or perhaps because Toner doesn't regard him as a liberal. Nor does Toner acknowledge that Ronald Reagan was an unabashed ideologue who was widely conceded to have united the country -- he was a right-winger, so I guess we're supposed to think that's not so surprising. (Or perhaps he's also considered ancient history; I remember the ideological battles of the 1980s and I really don't understand Toner's assertion that our politics became highly partisan only 15 years ago.)

Toner does presehnt the Obama campaign's argument -- that the public has an underreported leaning to the left on a lot of issues, and that a president who make a real effort at outreach can succeed. But she keeps coming back to the question of liberalism (the much-disputed National Journal ranking of Obama is mentioned three times). Obama is contrasted with Hillary Clinton, whose voting record, we're told, is very similar to his, but who doesn't promise a new kind of politics -- the implication being that she wisely recognizes that she's a lefty and therefore knows she couldn't possibly unite the country without curbing her horribly divisive liberalism.

I can't help reading this as a variant on the story the press's view of itself over the past couple of decades: The Republicans are right -- we're biased liberals incapable of objectivity. No wonder we're losing readers. No matter how hard we try, we're doomed to fail.

WHY DO WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO ALL THIS WHINING ABOUT "RACISM" ALL THE TIME?

Er, maybe because of ignorant crap like this, which could be coming to an e-mail in-box near you?



As Snopes notes, some of the people in this photo are, in fact, members of Barack Obama's extended family on his father's side. The caption, needless to say, is a product of the imagination of -- I'm making an educated guess here -- a member of my extremely civil and decidedly non-angry race, and is a fine example of our profoundly non-angry civility.

(Via Too Sense by way of Racialicious and Rachel's Tavern.)

CLUMSY PARTISAN HACKERY FROM JOHN YOO

I know Republicans are feeling their oats right now as they watch Democrats battle, but I wasn't quite expecting torture enabler John Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor and American Enterprise Institute "visiting scholar," to try to put the boot in. It's not that I don't think of him as a shameless partisan apparatchik -- I just thought that penning Democrat-baiting op-eds was a subspecies of partisan hackery that didn't play to his strengths.

But here he is, on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, with just such an op-ed. And as it turns out, I was right -- he's not very good at this. Try to follow the tortured logic as he attempts to convert the Democrats' intraparty battle into a full-blown constitutional crisis:

... there are a total of 795 superdelegates, none of whom are required to honor the will of the voters of their state at the party's convention.

Sound undemocratic? It is....

Unelected delegates ... have more than twice the votes of the richest state prize, California.

So much for unfiltered democracy. In truth, the Democratic Party runs by rules that are the epitome of the smoke-filled room and ensure, in essence, that congressional incumbents exercise a veto power over the nomination.

This delegate dissonance wasn't anything the Framers of the U.S. Constitution dreamed up. They believed that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea. Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become a mere servant of the legislature....

Press reports indicate that the Framers were right to worry. The Clinton and Obama campaigns are now competing hard to win superdelegates. Members of Congress no doubt will cut deals for themselves and their constituents. A water project here, some pet legislation there -- surely such details are worth the nomination.... As we close in on the Democratic convention, the demand for superdelegates will escalate, with the choice of the nominee becoming increasingly the work of political intrigue, inside deals, and power struggles among special interest groups -- just as the Framers feared....

Is your head spinning yet?

Let's review how far we've deviated from reality:

* Not all superdelegates are members of Congress, or even current officeholders of any kind.

* It's far from certain that superdelegates' choices will be made in smoke-filled rooms -- the nominating process is probably much too public, and a good thing, too. There's a very good chance that superdelegates will recognize the damage they'd do to the party if they neutralize the outcomes of primaries and caucuses.

* Even if you accept the notion that the superdelegate process will be sleazy, corrupt, and undemocratic, the Constitution says nothing about how parties pick candidates. We're still going to have a democratic general election, no? So how would the choice of one party nominee by superdelegates, some of whom are members of Congress, be equivalent to "letting Congress choose the president"?

* And, er, who says "direct election by the people" was the Framers' vision of how we should choose a president? If the Framers had wanted direct election, they wouldn't have put the Electoral College process in the Constitution -- a process that doesn't even require electors to vote the way citizens of their states vote.

Hackery. Absolute hackery. Try again, John.

IS THERE ANYTHING MORE TO McCAIN'S "ECLECTICISM" THAN ANGER?

Elisabeth Bumiller's article about John McCain's moments of rebellion against the GOP reminds us just how much these moments had to do with anger, far more than ideology. In particular, McCain's flirtation with the idea of switching parties in 2001 and his then-opposition to the Bush tax cuts were, it seems, nearly all pique.

So swing voters who think a McCain presidency would be an eclectic mix of conservatism and moderation need to take note: The moderation came when he was ticked off at Bush and other Republicans. Right now, by contrast, there's no powerful right-wing force in the party thwarting him. He's the GOP Alpha Dog. So what reason is there to believe he's going to deviate from his usual right-wing orthodoxy in the future?

From the article:

... In the spring of 2001, Mr. McCain was by most accounts still angry about the smear campaign that had been run against him when he was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in the South Carolina primary the previous year. He had long blamed the Bush campaign for spreading rumors in the state that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock, which Bush aides denied. Mr. McCain was also upset that the new White House had shut the door on hiring so many of his aides.

"Very few, if any, of John's people made it into the administration," Mr. Daschle later wrote in his book "Like No Other Time." "John didn't think that was right, that his staff should be penalized like that."

Mr. McCain had begun to ally himself with the Democrats on a number of issues, and had told Mr. Daschle that he planned to vote against the Bush tax cuts, a centerpiece of the new president's domestic agenda. Mr. McCain often made "disparaging comments" about Mr. Bush on the floor of the Senate, Mr. Daschle recalled.

...[There were] weeks of conversations that April between Mr. McCain and the leading Democrats ... about the possibility of Mr. McCain's leaving his party. One factor driving Mr. McCain, [Democratic congressman Thomas] Downey said, was his bad relations with the Republican caucus.

"They had booed him once when he came in," Mr. Downey said. "It was bad stuff in the caucus. He didn't see his future with these guys." ...

It all seems to be rebellion for the sake of rebellion, rather than a core ideological eclecticism.

McCain's willingness to entertain the possibility of being John Kerry's running mate in '04 is a bit more mysterious, though it's clear it wasn't rooted in deep-seated ideological conviction -- after all, it was mere months after entertaining the Kerry offer that McCain wrapped Bush in a bear hug at the Republican convention. My theory: a love-hate relationship with Bush. But the object of these strong emotions is leaving the scene.

Within his party, McCain spent a brief period as a gadfly. But ever since that hug, he's been a suckup -- sucking up to Bush, sucking up to the religious right. Even his most significant deviation from correct right-wing thinking in recent years, his support for immigration reform, was very much in sync with Bush and Rove's notions that immigration reform was good for business and likely to draw Hispanic voters away from the Democrats.

So where's the deviation from orthodoxy going to come from in the future?