The Clinton Cocktail Hour- Never Surrender!

Mark Twain once said, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Actually, that’s a pretty funny quote when you think about it. Is it possible to exaggerate the report of a death? You’re either dead or not dead. It’s no exaggeration to say one or the other. Or are the “reports” greatly exaggerated? Were there an excess number of reports of Twain’s non-death? And if so, why were so many people anxious to report that he’d “bought the farm”, joined the choir invisible, become an ex-humorist?

Likewise, we’ve heard a lot about Hillary’s imminent demise although Peggy Noonan is simultaneously complaining in the Wall Street Journal that Hillary stubbornly refuses to eat her poison mushrooms and stay dead. Even bloggers on our own side are keeping a death watch and counting the delegates to the point where they can pull the sheet up over her campaign’s still warm phone banking lists. She’s like the guy slung over the back of the Holy Grail’s Bring Out Your Dead plague scene. His claims of “I’m not dead yet” and “I’m feeling better. I think I’ll take a walk” are met with “Don’t be such a baby” and a wink and a nod to the cart pusher to put the guy out of our misery.

Well, she’s not dead yet. She’s very much alive and leading in the big states that are left. And as we’ve seen in several states where she’s been slightly behind, the undecideds make up their minds as they pull the voting booth curtain closed. And she usually gets their votes because they know her brand name. It’s got the quality seal of approval.

So, let’s dedicate this Cocktail Hour to a vigorous and lively primary season. Put away your malice and mallets. Buy your friends and enemies a round and let’s celebrate. Everyone is welcome. To the left of the door is Rico, our bartender with flair! Tonight’s featured cocktail is a *Lust for Life*, but you can order anything you like.

Our singer tonight used to sing with her cousins, the Pips, but these days, Gladys Knight is delving into the rich repetoire of the first female jazz singers. Her new CD, Before Me , can be found at iTunes or amazon.com. Here’s a cut from that CD that I think goes particularly well with tonight’s theme:

Trigger words have been known to get in the way of scintillating conversation, so feel free to leave them with our lovely check room attendant, Florence. The waiters will be circulating in a minute with some piggy back dates, baba ganouj topped baby new potatoes and lobster ravioli.

Please drink responsibly and top your wait staff generously.

By the way:  If you don’t have time to share a drink right now, Taylor Marsh has graciously offered to host the party at her site tonight at 5pm PST (8pm EST).

Webby Goodness

Here are some yummy posts that deserve some attention:

• eriposte explains why many of us are Hillary Clinton supporters and happily so in Fighting the Good Fight. Amen, sibling!
• Tom Watson comments on how the Obama campaign is once again reaching for the smelling salts, this time over why byzantine DNC convention rules should not apply to it in Vapors on the Left.
• Christy Hardin Smith upacks the superdelegate issue further at FireDogLake in Poking Holes in the Superdelegate SuperFrenzy. As a sidenote, see another fine product from Scarecrow where he fans the tiny flame of Democratic courage in House Democrats Call the President’s FISA bluff. Now, if they can close their ears to the screeching GOP wurlitzer, maybe we can turn this ship around. Stay tuned on this. Maybe Pelosi is finally feeling her ovaries.
• And finally, some reminders. I’ve read a lot around the web about intimidation of lefty women bloggers from the Obamaphiles and I was cited as an example. I’d just like to say that I could have gone away and felt all terrible about the way I was treated at DailyKos and how vicious I think the Obamaphiles and even some frontpagers are, but I just decided to create my own playground instead of having to ask permission to play in someone else’s. To be quite honest, I felt rather liberated when I was closed out of my DailyKos account. And here’s why I’m not desperately trying to claw my way back in:
  • They’re only pixels on a screen. They can’t hurt you. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” So what if KagroX, that petty dicktator doesn’t like me? Am I going to let his attempts to make me feel unwanted and unpopular destroy my self-esteem? Did he think that by making me feel like a red-headed stepchild that I would rethink my candidate of choice like so many others have just so I’ll find favor in his eyes?  Not bloody likely. He means nothing to me but a collection of little black dots. Don’t let them get to you, ladies. They WANT to drive you away. This may be a little outpost compared to DKos but I’m still here and there are a lot more like me and we’re not leaving. You are in good company.

  More givens:

  • No matter who the nominee is, Karl has a dossier on him/her.
  • No matter who the nominee is, the GOP is going to pound them relentlessly.
  • No matter how good our candidate is, the media Beltway insiders are going to make fun of him/her and act like the 10th grade popular clique.
  • No matter how much the public is disgusted by Republicans, the Republicans will find some wedge issue that panders to self-interest.
  • No matter how much the public wants to vote for our nominee, the game has been carefully rigged to prevent those votes from counting.

  Just so we’re clear, there is a long uphill battle ahead of us. The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight and if they can’t win the White House, they will be busy trying to keep their stranglehold in the senate. Gird your loins.

The Pensieve

These silvery threads form some sort of pattern:

• DailyKos is now asking non-Obamaphiles to pre-admit their guilt (for supporting someone other than Obama) and check a box agreeing that their previous post was Muslim-baiting or racist or some other damn thing, before they are allowed to continue posting. I swear to God, when I went to YearlyKos06, none of this $%#^ was in evidence. It was like one big family reunion. That started to change at YearlyKos07 when Edwards started rolling out the big guns against Clinton. I understand why he did it. It was nothing personal. Just politics. He got caught unprepared when the Obama juggernaut started up ao he went after the base with hard hitting and not always fair anti-Hillary screed. She was the biggest corportaist, triangulating, establishment loving, lobbyist ass-kissing senator that ever lived. That’s when he thought Clinton was his biggest threat. If he had more clearly seen the threat from his right, all of these accusations would have been hurled at Obama, with slight variations, and it would have been a lot more accurate. But nevermind, his supporters were genuine, maybe a little too pure but their hearts were in the right place. Many Edwardians are still struggling and that’s OK. Give them a little breathing room. But Obamaphiles are a completely different breed altogether. So, Kos isn’t even pretending there is anything approaching objectivity with the frontpagers. I think we can be pretty certain that KagroX is the grand poo-bah of Obamamania. (Yeah, I never liked you either, KX) DailyKos is in the grip of something transforming. And not in a good way. At one point, it was taken seriously, presidential candidates spoke to it, Kos was featured on PBS Frontline specials, we gave David Brooks fits. Not anymore. Now it has become the parody that Brooks once claimed it was. It is full of rabid lambs- feckless foaming at the mouth fanatics. How the mighty have fallen. Kos may think we will come back after the primaries but that would be like hanging out with people who now run with a different crowd. One that does some pretty hard #$%^ and drive recklessly and don’t do their homework anymore and are in danger of dropping out of school to work as itinerant gas station attendants. There but for the grace of God go I.
• The same weirdly annoying thing is happening to Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo. Today, he has a piece up about John Lewis retracting his support of Hillary as if this is an earth shattering event instead of further evidence of Barack Obama’s solidification as an African-American candidate. He has now successfully cornered that 15% of the population. His campaign strategy is to try to win large urban areas of the remaining states. Jeez, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what’s going on here. If anything, Lewis’s defection is more evidence of Clinton’s strength as a candidate. Then, there is the title of another piece, “Top Hillary Advisors Repeatedly *Griped* about MSNBC’s Matthews” but if you click on the original post at The Horse’s Mouth, Greg Sargent uses the word “complained”, not “griped”. Complain is something we as consumers do when we want to report a problem. Gripe is what we do around friends and family and sounds a lot like “bellyachin'”. Surely Josh knows these words connote two different things, one more legitimate than the other. Now, I ask you, is this the way a mature, soon to be father of two should behave? As if the news is somehow malleable and can be molded to shape you preconceptions? I thought that was what the mainstream media was all about. Who can you trust anymore if you can’t trust TPM?
• Oddly enough, DailyKos is not in FireDogLake’s blogroll anymore. Yep, and neither is TPM. I can’t hardly say I blame Jane, Christy et al. They got dissed by the big boys even though their coverage of the Libby trial puts them in a class by themselves. They’ve also taken great pains to be objective journalists. That doesn’t mean they haven’t been passionate or that they haven’t made mistakes. But in their coverage of the primaries, they appear to be holding the candisates to higher standards and are avoiding the hagiographic tributes to one over the other. Classy!

One other thing: In the month that The Confluence has been in existence after my tragic exile from Dailykos (Narf!), we have had over 10,000 hits. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I’d have so many people reading anything I’ve written. If I’d known this would happen, I would have taken more writing classes and paid more attention to sentence structure and editing. But you guys put up with my mismatched subjects and verbs and I thank you for that. I hope that in the NEXT month, a few of you readers will take me up on my offer to collaborate. RonK is a fantastic writer and his posts are very informative so I hope he finishes his touch-ups on the ones he has planned. But there is always more to do. There is a void that needs to be filled and I can’t do it all by myself. So, let me know if you think you would be a good fit here, where politics meets, philosophopsychofeminadatamixology.

Cocktails on V-day: Poetry Slam

The first Valentine was a martyr. I’ll bet there are a lot of us who can identify with that guy when it comes to love.

But what *is* love? The dictionary says that the words love and belief have the same root. That root has something to do with what is ‘dear’ to us. Why do we love? Is it because as a species we know that it is the small acts of goodness and selflessness, outweighing the acts of destruction that keeps civilization from descending into chaotic violent narcissism? That on this swiftly tilting blue planet, shooting through space to destination uknown, we cling to each other for comfort? To know that we are ephemerons, our delicate lifespans briefer than a blink of God’s eye, full of intense beauty and bleak desolation, craving the union of another’s mind and body and spirit, to share the gray mists of morning on dewy grass or the dark quiet of the night until that final endless night.

Love, belief, union. These are things we hold dear.

Lift a glass of champagne to your nearest and dearest. Forgive your enemies. Love one another.

Here are the two poems that the BFF and I exchanged on our first Valentine’s day. Can you guess which was mine and which was his? Add your own in the comments.

anyone lived in a pretty how town

by E. E. Cummings

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

Cascando

by Samuel Beckett

Cascando

1

why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2

saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending

I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3

unless they love you

DFA conscripted to work for Obama- Update

This is just wrong.

Two days ago, I got a call from Democracy for America (DFA) for a pledge of support. They wanted $120.00. When I joined DFA two years ago, it was in the service of helping Democrats take back congress and I worked for Linda Stender. Back then, DFA wasn’t in anyone’s pocket. We were all on the same side- againt the Republicans.

But this appeal to sign a petition to influence the Superdelegates is an outrage. First of all, the reason superdelegates exist is so that wildfire movements don’t end up nominating someone who supported by a bunch of overzealous maniacs in caucus states but not the faithful Democrats in the big states. You’d think that the Big D states should have a big influence but if they don’t, through some quirk of dumb planning or a party leader putting his thumb on the scales with all of his might, then the superdelegates step in to moderate the situation. That’s why they should be left alone. It’s one thing for a candidate to petition them for support but to insist that they give up their moderating power because the wildfire movement doesn’t like the role they play, that’s just wrong. If they vote in favor of the biggest most populated states, they have served their purpose.

Second, DFA is supposed to be a group dedicated to getting out the vote and this petition clearly shows that they are trying to GOTV for Obama. I expect them to be neutral and just a resource center for anyone who wants to work for any candidate. For Jim Dean to put the organization in the service of one candidate at the expense of another is an embarrassment and an outrage. Is it DFA who is behind all of the recent caucus stuff? Are they the ones getting the Obamaphiles to turn out and intimidate the regular Democratic voters?

It looks like the Dean brothers are putting all of their efforts to overturning the will of the Biggest D states in NY, NJ, CA, FL, MI, AZ and it has to stop. There’s People Powered Politics and then there’s Mob Rule. When the Unholy Alliance between the GOTV arm of the DNC is put into service to overturn the will of the people in our most densely populated states and they do by riding the relentlessly misogynistic bleatings of the media, they have become the Establishment that they purport to hate. There is nothing about Hillary Clinton that would make her a bad Democratic president. There is no reason to want to squash her candidacy except that the Deans and their friends want to be the kingmakers, over the dead bodies, if necessary. of the Democrats who have supported the party for years.

There are a couple things we can do about this. One, send letters to your state party chairman protesting the tipping of the scales. Two, register at DFA and shore up the Clinton GOTV efforts (if they exist) or create some in OH, WI and TX. Three, spread the word in every blog you can that the Deans are out of control. And finally, DON’T COBTRIBUTE TO DFA UNTIL THEY REMOVE THE SUPERDELEGATE PETITION. And by this, I don’t mean whenever the petition period ends. I mean, they have to take it down and retract the whole damn thing.

Update: We’ve had a comment from Ilya Sheyman of DFA. Oooo, that was quick. We must have struck a nerve. I’ll repeat what I told her in the comments. When DFA has a similar petition asking that the Florida delegation be seated, NOW, and that Michigan have a do-ever mail in primary instead of a caucus. we’ll call it even. Until then, DFA is using its GOTV power on behalf of Obama in order to stifle the superdelegates and they are misrepresenting the role of the superdelegates hoping no one will notice. I advise anyone who is a Hillary supporter to think carefully before they respond to a DFA fundraising drive since these funds appear to be directed to assisting Obama’s campaign at Hillary’s expense.

Very sad. I used to identify with these people but they’re not my peeps anymore if they are jumping on this bandwagon and expect all the rest of us in the reality based community to join them without question. That shit’s gotta stop.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Send Hillary a Dozen

I gotta confess, there’s nothing better on Valentine’s day than having the FedEx guy show up at the door.  I love the long box and the ribbons and the tissue paper and the unopened red buds all cool and fresh surrounded by snowy baby’s breath and glossy deep green foliage…  BFF is not a rose sender.  😦  He must think this is not important.  He is wrong.

Very, very wrong.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yeah!  I’m sure we could flood Hillary’s office with roses like we did Barbara Boxer’s a couple years ago:

But I’ll bet a dozen George Washington’s would go better with her smile.  And it’s a very affordable Valentine’s gift, don’t you agree?  $12.00 is a mere trifle really.  But if there are a lot of us sending her dozens and dozens, it would be a Valentine’s day to remember.  Hey, even two dozen is a bargain.

I know it’s the thought that counts but the actual gift would be put to better use.  Think about it.

Send Hillary a Dozen

Fix the Michigan and Florida double standard

Turkana at The Left Coaster has a good post up today about the way that Florida and Michigan are getting the shaft. And let’s make no mistake about this: if they were included in the totals, Clinton wouldn’t look like she’s on the ropes right now and the media would have been forced to cover Florida as a genuine win- and a big one- for Hillary. Instead, they barely mentioned it while they overhyped Obama’s win in South Carolina.

What the absence of MI and FL does is nullify the votes of those of us in the Big D states who voted on SuperTuesday. Our votes combined with MI and FL should have given Hillary more of a boost but they seem to be dangled out there like they don’t count and without their critical mass, we are in virtual dead heat with no one getting a decisive lead and with one candidate benefitting from a deceptive media narrative.

Now, I think maybe Michigan should hold its primary again. It’s only fair since Obama and Edwards were not on the ballot. If it’s too expensive to do a primary and caucuses are *clearly* out of the question because the rabid Obamaphiles are the ones who show up to them and there is no secret ballot, why not have a primary by mail like Oregon has for their general elections? How hard would that be? It takes virtually no time to send out a ballot fo everyone registered and give them until *name a date* to send the sucker back. It’s quick, it’s private and it’s cheap compared to setting up voting precincts and calibrating voting machines. Before you know it, Michigan could seat some valid delegates. No muss, no fuss.

Florida on the other hand, *did* feature multiple candidates on its ballot and more than a million voters turned out to vote. I think Florida’s primary must be taken seriously. In fact, the voters did it without much campaigning on any candidate’s part which, to me, is more important. Except for the cable ad buys that Obama’s camp did and the few fundraising events by Clinton, the voter’s were relatively untainted and could evaluate the candidates based on nationally televised debates. It sounds legit. What good would be served by doing it all over except that due to the momentum that Obama has in the past week or so, the numbers would change in his favor?

Then there’s this: it turns out that South Carolina, NH and Iowa all violate the stated DNC primary timing rules, but they are let off the hook because of tradition. Only Michigan and Florida are punished. From a Left Coaster thread, a commenter notes:

Rule 11.A specifically set the date for the primaries & caucuses for those three states as ,“no earlier than 22 days before the first Tuesday in February” (Iowa), “no earlier than 14 days before the first Tuesday in February” (New Hampshire), and “no earlier than 7 days before the first Tuesday in February” (South Carolina).Iowa held their caucuses on January 3rd. That’s more than 22 days before the first Tuesday in February. New Hampshire held their primary on January 8th. That’s more than 17 days before the first Tuesday in February. And South Carolina held their primary on January 26th. That’s more than 7 days before the first Tuesday in February.

The fact is that, using your words, “the rules of the game” were changed to continue to give Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina preferential treatment in the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination process. Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, all violated Rule 11.A., but only Florida and Michigan were punished for it.If you’re going to enforce the rules, then the rules need to be applied equally and fairly. They weren’t, and as far as I’m concerned, the 2008 Delegate Selection Rules for the Democratic National Convention aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

Now, I’m not the kind of person who approves of changing the rules of the game while in progress, but when there are three states that started out with a handicap and they are relatively small states, why should they have the power to nullify the votes of more than a million voters from two other states? In fact, I don’t think the number of voters of IA, NH and SC combined exceed the number of primary voters in Florida alone. It looks like we are *still* being held hostage by the same stupid little states as before. IA and SC have made the decision for us in spite of SuperTuesday and more than a million disenfranchised voters in 2 states.

Howard better fix this fast because I am losing my patience. My state’s vote in NJ had better carry some weight and if Florida isn’t included, it most likely won’t.

Do Republicans argue badly or is it just me?

More bad argumentation on the health care issue. A commenter writes:

The high healthcare costs in the U.S. are the product of the current regulations. U.S. tax law, combined with the idea that employer-sponsored health-care is “a good thing”, have combined to create a situation where health-insurance is not insurance at all. Instead, it covers every little expenditure — like a managed account. From this root, springs the fact that a huge bureacracy is required to monitor these managed spending accounts.

Here’s a good article on the history of health-care costs.

The bottom line is that universal health-care will benefit some and hurt others. Similarly, if one increased taxes a little, and used the money to raise unemployment payouts, you would benefit some and hurt others. The essential issue is the immorality of having the government force people to be altruistic. Redistributing my income? No thank you!

Where to start:
“The essential issue is the immorality of having the government force people to be altruistic.”

You must be a libertarian, Republican or a very stupid Democrat. The government is already forcing you to be altruistic. You pay a hidden tax to cover the costs of the uninsured. These uninsureds are either low paid workers whose companies do not provide healthcare or small biz owners who can’t afford to buy healthcare for their workers or self-employed who would rather keep the cash or dumb twenty somethings who think they’re never going to get sick. You might be a contractor who falls into one of these categories. So, when you get sick, as you will during your lifetime or just before you die, you will have to pay for treatment or we, the taxpayers, will have to cough up the bucks in the form of compensation to the hospitals that are stuck with the bill that you owe and can’t pay because you waited until your condition got to be serious enough to require hospitalization.

You’re *already* being forced to be nice to people because we as a society generally think it’s a bad thing for sick people to go without treatment or have their bloated corpses lying around. Of course, Republicans have been trying to get Americans to not feel so strongly about this so they will feel less guilty about letting poor people drown and die in New Orleans, for example. But it hasn’t been very successful because even the non-New Orleans native knows that there but for the grace of God go they.

I’m just curious, why is it that altruism towards the less fortunate is frowned upon but bailing out millionaire investors on bad real estate deals is perfectly OK? THAT kind of altruism Republicans can’t get enough of and they rob the hardworking taxpayers of NJ to pay their business buddies in Iraq with no bid contracts too and this does not trouble their consciences. And for some reason, we hard working slobs have it in our heads that we are being unreasonable to insist on affordable healthcare for everyone. WE feel guilty about asking everyone to pitch in so that people will not die or go bankrupt unnecessarily. The bastards in charge have been pretty good at messing with our heads when they get us to passively accept our fate as somehow not deserving of “charity” while we lavish government bailouts on *their* friends as if they’ve met with some catastrophic fate instead of a loss in their portfolios.

There seems to be no limit to the altruism heaped on those people with our tax dollars. But pay for a insulin pump for a diabetic child or a mammogram for a self-employed woman or an MRI for a guy with stomach pains, that’s where we draw the line. That’s just stealing from people like you. But stealing from me to cover Merril-Lynch’s bad investment gambles, that’s OK?

Go haunt a Norquist blog and drown someone else’s government in a bathtub.

Wednesday Morning- Hunkering Down

Alright, there’s no reason to belabor the point. Yeah, yeah, courtesy of intense media fluffing Obama is ahead. But it’s not over yet. One good debate should put everything back in perspective.

Anyway, there’s more stuff for me to do today. What do these people want from me, a cure for cancer?!?! Er, Ok, I’ll try. (NOTE: I happen to be the luckiest person in the world when it comes to work. I have a job I love and I work for a woman who I admire greatly. She is fair, collaborative, professional and the best mentor I have ever had. So, I’m just kidding about the work thing. It’s actually quite fun.) In the meantime, enjoy these fine selections from around the web:

• Terry Gross does it again with another great interview comparing the healthcare plans of the candidates. Political scientist Jonathan Oberlander is her guest. Highly recommended.
• ghost2 pointed me to a speech that Obama gave in 2006 where we can get an idea of the roll of religion in his America:
  

  Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait. At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that – regardless of our personal beliefs – constitutional principles tie our hands. At worst, some liberals dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word “Christian” describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.Such strategies of avoidance may work for progressives when the opponent is Alan Keyes. But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people, and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

  (snip)

  This is why, if we truly hope to speak to people where they’re at – to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own – we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse. …

  Senator Barack Obama
  

  I don’t know about you but I don’t particularly like the idea that my presidential candidate assumes that religion is an essential part of our lives and I don’t care which religion he’s referring to. If the religious want to talk amongst themselves about the value of religion in their lives, that’s just ticketyboo but must the rest of us be subjected to it? I happen to have a faith but my adolescent decided at the tender age of nine that she doesn’t believe in God. I don’t recall her saying she didn’t believe in good moral behavior and values. It was just the whole God part she had trouble swallowing. Obama gives me the impression that she’s somehow unfulfilled because she’s not a religious person, as if her moral maturity level is stunted and it would behoove her to hear about the religious values and dogmas of others. This is one of the many reasons I can’t support Obama. I don’t hear any tolerance from him regarding non-believers. Instead of telling the faithful to back off and let others have some breathing room, he takes pains to chastise his own side for daring to dissent on the necessity of faith itself. The pluralistic society he refers to contains not just many faiths but sometimes NO faith. He seems to run from unpopular faiths like Islam and he fails to acknowledge the full citizenship of the atheist. That’s just wrong, IMHO.

• I never liked Howard Dean. There, I said it. When the whole world was going crazy for him in 2004, he just didn’t do it for me. The hype around him seemed artificial, sort of like Obama today. And whatever his message was, it didn’t resonate with me. It had nothing to do with the scream. I felt this way about Dean before the scream. He projected something that just bounced off of me. Wes Clark was more my style. But the netroots like Howard and I think the failure to get him nominated in 2004 has a lot to do with their zealous frenzy to push Obama down our throats in 2008: it makes them feel important. But it’s sort of like being rebels without a cause. Many of them know that Obama is not ready or doesn’t have their best interests at heart. That’s not the point. The point is they are not going to be told what to do. They are the new generation, blah, blah, blah. Like the rest of us are geezers. Anyway, back to Howard. If anyone is responsible for the mess that the nomination process is in right now, it’s Howard. My theory, and you can disagree if you’d like, is that Howard is an Idea Rat. In Dilbert cartoons, the Idea Rat is the one who comes to meetings and says stuff like “We need to restructure our core compentencies and maximize our values to become a worldclass organization!” And everyone says what a great idea that is (it could be something much more worthy than bizspeak, but you get the point) and they turn to him and say, “Go do it” and he says, “Oh, I can’t do it. I’m just an Idea Rat.” This is Howard. He’s got a lot of great ideas but implementation is a problem. He’s not quite sure how to pull that off. So, yes, it is a great idea that the big Democratic states finally got a say in the primary system after letting NH and Iowa pick our candidates. But it sucks that now that I’ve gotten to cast my ballot for my candidate of choice in NJ, along with my likeminded friends in NY, CA, MA, MI and FL, *our* preferences will be essentially negated by Howard’s not-very-well-thought-through decision to not seat the Florida and Michigan delegations. The disenfranchisement of a good portion of the Democratic electorate by the elimination of Florida is summed up in the following cartoon. Thanks Howard.

An Unholy Alliance

Tom Watson writes a deliciously snarky piece about the meeting of the minds of Bill Kristol and DailyKos. {{shudder}}

I hate to see it come to this but I think he is on to something. That is not to say that everyone at DailyKos is being assimilated. There are still quite a few loyal Kossacks and lurkers who are valiantly holding out for the rest of the site to return to sanity.

Actually, Tom brings up a point I have been wondering about for some time now: What is it about Clinton that drives otherwise perfectly rational people absolutely crazy? (Kristol is excluded from this because he started out nuts) Why is it SO important to crush The House of Clinton?

In some respects, the last few months of anti-Clinton frenzy is reminiscent of the lead up to the Iraq War. Those who are virulently anti-Hillary act as though they’ve seen some secret intelligence document that spells out how dangerous and Un-American she is. But all I ever see are doctored satellite photographs of some trailers used for agricultural research.

PLEASE Mr. Kristol,. Frank Rich, Peggy Noonan, tell us what you know. If there is a deep dark awful secret about Hillary, like there’s medical proof that she’s really a paranoid evangelical with the IQ of a table lamp who has megalomania and messianic delusions of grandeur, it is your sacred duty for the sake of our great nation to tell us without delay so we don’t elect someone who’s going to lead us into a pointless, endless, expensive, destructive war or violate our civil liberties or torture people or ruin the economy or a city. I mean surely, SURELY these brave pundits would have told us if we were ever in danger of electing someone that nuts, a person capable of destroying the middle class. Surely they will warn us that we are making a big mistake by nominating a neophyte whom they will take great joy in levelling with the brutality of their poison pens.

I’m sure that Kos has his reasons for loathing Clinton. It probably has nothing to do with the fact that he doesn’t like her campaign people because, hey, who doesn’t loathe campaign people? David Axelrod makes my skin crawl and Joe Trippi makes me want to take a bath. If it were just a matter of Clinton people not trying out new campaign techniques, I’m sure Kos would have been happy to make suggestions to Hillary. No, it’s got to be something even worse than the House of Bush that has him thinking like Kristol that the worst thing in the world would be Hillary 44.

If only they would tell us I could stop being so skeptical. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. I just couldn’t swallow the Iraq War stories and I just can’t swallow this one either. Oh, woe is me, cursed to be always out of step with my peers.

And always right in retrospect.