Dear Columnists, it’s very simple

You either need to embrace The Big Orange, sign on to kicking the libs all the way to November and acknowledge that there may come a moment in the upcoming debates when he pelvic thrusts the  well padded trousers of his tailored suits OR you can stop dehumanizing Hillary for fun and profit.

Really, it’s that simple.

Also, the more you put Creamsicle on your front page, the more legitimacy as a candidate he gets. It’s not just for entertainment value anymore.

Finally, I have tried to stay away from mentioning Maureen Dowd on this blog for a very long time but I think it’s time she got some therapy before she’s allowed to unleash any more of her word salad on the Op/Ed page of the NY Times anymore. As someone who is as much of a throwback to the white gloved Catholic girl meme and who accepted her Mean Girl role in journalism without achieving any further self-actualization, MoDo is the last person in the world who should be lecturing (or just raving, let’s face it) anyone on feminism.

Speaking of the NY Times, what kind of sick joke is this is the weekly line up of regular columnists. You know, the ones with the 401Ks and pension plans. Not the freelancers and contractors, the second class columnists, where you throw in a few more women:

• David Brooks Tu, F

   Frank Bruni Su, W

• Roger Cohen Tu, F

• Gail Collins Th, Sa

• Ross Douthat Su

• Maureen Dowd Su

• Thomas L. Friedman W

• Nicholas Kristof Su, Th

• Paul Krugman M, F

No one at the NY Times should go off on an unhinged tangent about feminism until this egregious lack of women’s voices is rectified.

Quinn Bee, Drones and Hillary

Ezra Klein tweeted a shocking revelation the other day from the Vox account. He posted the results of a study showing how negatively/positively the candidates had been portrayed by the media and found:

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I find this surprising. Coverage of Trump feels *overwhelmingly* negative to me, much more so than of Clinton:

Ezra is confused. Coverage of Trump falls into the train wreck observer category. Even the Political Gabfest Trio sound like they’re watching a tsunami from a different country and have that “Oh, those poor souls, someone should do something” attitude. They make references to Hitler and Mussolini but in a detached way. It’s nothing personal.

With Hillary, it is. She’s just not exciting. Oh, sure, she’s competent and everything but can we trust her?

Nobody wants to say anything nice about her. EVER.

That graph up above shows the kind of candidate the media prefers. Kasich presents as a kinder, gentler, less radical Republican. We know he’s nothing of the sort. He’s just better at being not in your face about his radicalism.

And then there is Bernie, who is attracting all of the creative class people, to which class the media types cling desperately so they don’t lose their youth and beauty.

Even Vox, after looking the evidence in the face tosses it off as just a manifestation of the media going after the perceived frontrunner. Except, we know that’s only partially true. In 2008, Hillary was the frontrunner early in the primary and she was hammered relentlessly. Then when the party refused to credit her Florida and Michigan delegates, that made Obama look like the frontrunner. But as David Plotz admitted a couple of weeks ago, the media treated him with kid gloves because they were “totally in the tank for him”.

So, frontrunner syndrome is not equally applied and Clintonistas have known this for a long time. Decades, in fact.

What happened decades ago that would have made the Clintons so incredibly unpopular with the press? From what we can tell, it all started when uber narcissist Sally Quinn, self-appointed Queen Bee of Washington establishment and party set, condescended to invite new first lady Hillary Clinton to Georgetown to meet the other DC ladies who lunch. Here’s how Hillary’s welcome to DC went according to Harry Jaffe who wrote a scathing piece called “The Not So Mighty Quinn”:

All of this reporting and writing prepared Quinn for her true calling: being a hostess and party girl. “She would go to the opening of an envelope,” says one socialite. She positioned herself as the Perle Mesta of the 1990s. She reveled in inviting the usual suspects in the political and media world to her Georgetown manse, then leaking gossip from the parties to reporters at the Post. It was a cozy relationship that depended on Quinn’s ability to reel in big-name guests, especially the biggest of all, the first couple — which brings us to the root of Sally’s beef with Hillary.

According to society sources, Sally invited Hillary to a luncheon when the Clintons came to town in 1993. Sally stocked her guest list with her best buddies and prepared to usher the first lady into the capital’s social whirl. Apparently, Hillary didn’t accept. Miffed, Sally wrote a catty piece in the Post about Mrs. Clinton. Hillary made sure that Quinn rarely made it into the White House dinners or social events.

In return, Sally started talking trash about Hillary to her buddies, and her animus became a staple of the social scene. “There’s just something about her that pisses people off,” Quinn is quoted as saying in a New Yorker article about Hillary.

Quinn’s antipathy to Hillary became the subject of a New York Observer piece in 1996 that turned the spotlight on Sally, now 56. “No longer a journalistic star, Ms. Quinn seems restless and unsatisfied,” wrote Mary Jacoby, “despite her wealth and prominence and her Georgetown mansion with swimming pool and tennis court, not to mention her house in the Hamptons.” Wondering about the roots of Quinn’s spat with Mrs. Clinton, a younger and more powerful woman, Jacoby wondered if Quinn was “frightened” that her good looks were fading and “bitter because she’s no longer on center stage.”

[…}

“There’s a very incestuous relationship between the New York-Washington journalistic elite,” says Washington columnist Chuck Conconi, who edited Quinn at the Post. “They take care of each other. It shows.”

To summarize, Sally Quinn, is the Queen Bee of Washington. The ultimate Mean Girl, she is, like all narcissists, insanely envious of people who have something that she has not. Now, what would Sally Quinn, who has “friends” and influence in DC, homes in Washington, Maryland and The Hamptons, possibly be envious about? Let’s see, Hillary is a smart and academically accomplished lawyer. Sally majored in drama at Smith College and wrote a party column in the Washington Post. Hillary was a trusted advisor to her husband, a president. Sally was originally her husband’s mistress before he reluctantly married her. Hillary plans policy with her husband. Sally plans guest lists. Who knows if Ben Bradlee had any input into that. He probably left it to Quinn as it was her little hobby.

Come to think of it, Sally was probably better off NOT having Hillary attend her soirees so many years ago before the animosity started. Hillary would have attracted a lot more attention from her other guests while Sally would have been relegated to refreshing the drinks. Here we see a sharp divide in generations. Sally is only 6 years older than Hillary but she represents a generation with a different set of expectations for men and women. Sally wanted what Hillary had: a growing respect from policy makers for her intellect, but she couldn’t make the leap from party girl and wife. So, Sally unleashed the only weapon she had available to her to take out her rage at potentially being ignored: ostracism. Better to nip it in the bud early and make sure Hillary was persona non grata than to suffer the ignominy of realizing that DC entertainer was just not that interesting to the people who came to her cocktail parties. Sally had to be the center of attention so Hillary had to be excluded. Thus began Sally’s smear campaign against Hillary.

Maybe Sally’s notorious injury from Hillary turning down lunch with her was calculated. Knowing there was no way to compete with Hillary, did Sally set her up? Did Sally pick an inconvenient day, like the time when she scheduled her son’s wedding to conflict with her husband’s granddaughter’s wedding on the same day so that wedding guests would have to choose? Did Hillary think lunch with a bunch of society doyennes was not the best use of her time because she was moving into the White House and supervising staff?  Who knows? But narcissists are really good at setting themselves up to look like victims and then making sure that everyone hears about how they were slighted. They can hold a grudge forever. Note Jaffe’s comment that there is an incestuous relationship between DC and NYC media and Maureen Dowd’s viciousness towards Hillary makes sense.

But wait! There’s more. Remember Ken Starr, the independent counsel who was appointed to dog the Clintons for years without end and distract them from doing the things they were elected to do? Jaffe writes:

There’s also a reason why Sally Quinn is an apologist for independent counsel Kenneth Starr. “In some way,” she said on “Meet the Press,” “Ken Starr has become to Clinton what the evil empire, what the Soviet Union was to Ronald Reagan.” What she doesn’t say is that Ben Bradlee is indebted to Starr, then a judge, for ruling that the Post was not guilty of libel in a celebrated case in the 1980s.

There you go.

But, you say, what does that have to do with today? All that stuff happened 20+ years ago. Neil Gabler recently wrote about how it all filters down to the present day in The Media Have a Hillary Story and They’re Sticking to It. He also references the slight that Hillary dealt Sally and notes how Sally’s character assassination of Hillary has taken on a life of its own:

Still, false or not, once the virus was loose, every reporter caught it, fancying himself a would-be Woodstein. Remember Travelgate? Of course you don’t. Or the scandal over the Rose legal files? I rather doubt it. Or the Vince Foster suicide? Maybe you still think Bill Clinton pulled the trigger, which is an oldie-but-goodie being shilled to this day on righ-wing sites.

Whatever you may think of the Clintons, the scandals didn’t create the meme of untrustworthiness about them. The meme of untrustworthiness created the scandals.

All, in the final analysis, were non-stories, some of them cooked up by partisans and spread by the press to accomplish exactly what the Republicans wanted to accomplish: to create a vague nimbus of guilt around the Clintons.

The operative word is “vague.” The press should have been a firewall against these allegations. Instead, they were an accelerant, not only because they didn’t like the cornpone Clintons, but because they knew the truth was likely to be far less interesting than the suspicions of wrongdoing. The media, after all, are in the reader business, not the truth business.

The bigger point is this: whatever you may think of the Clintons, the scandals didn’t create the meme of untrustworthiness about them. The meme of untrustworthiness created the scandals. The media just kept hunting for those scandals as confirmation of what they had already determined. That is how so many in the MSM work — backwards from presumption to incident. It also happens to be the surest path to career advancement for journalistic opportunists.

[…]

No, Hillary Clinton isn’t without sin. No candidate is. But she has been deliberately and unfairly abused by the press for years, her motives always impugned, her gaffes blown out of proportion, her missteps always attributed not to miscalculations or ordinary human foible but to deep character flaws. (Just Google “Hillary Clinton” and “character.”)

To be fair, the press are usually cynical about everyone — theirbrief Marco Rubio obsession notwithstanding. That is the new cool. And they would be cynical about Bernie Sanders, too, if they thought he mattered, which they clearly don’t. But the Clintons, who they do think matter, got on the wrong side of the press long ago — not haute enough for the Sally Quinns of this world — and they can never get on the right side. And besides, the idea of their nefarious misdeeds makes such good copy that any reporter would really hate to give them the benefit of the doubt.

So, there you have it, Ezra. The reason why the negativity bar goes off the chart for Clinton is because the media is relentlessly negative on her but also unaware of this tendency in themselves. It’s been conventional wisdom for 20+ years that if you want to succeed in journalism, you need to be mean to Bill and Hillary. It all started with Sally’s fit of narcissistic rage and it has ballooned into robotic bashing to the point where no one knows where assassination of character intersects with the real thing anymore. Hillary has become completely dehumanized by the media.

One thing is for sure. If Hillary ever does make it to the White House, it’s going to be difficult for her to forget how the media has treated her all these years. It will take a person of extraordinary character to treat them fairly. The media has given her no reason to trust it. You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

But I look forward to Sally Quinn getting what’s coming to her for letting a contrived slight to her fragile inner self unleash a distracting legal firestorm that strengthened the radical right and brought misery on millions of regular Americans.

When Hillary takes office, maybe we can look forward to something like this from Sally, the drama queen:

 

 

The NYTimes editorial fearmongering women for Obama

Maureen Dowd, one of only two females out of 12 op/ed columnists at the NYTimes

I guess the ladies will have to rescue Obama after all.  Today’s NYTimes editorial is all about those meanie Republicans who want to reinstate the Mexico City Rule and take away all our reproductive rights.

First, it should be noted that if you don’t want to lose your reproductive rights, don’t vote for downticket Republicans.  Oh, sure, there are pain in the ass anti-choice Democrats who should NEVER get another term but there are far, far more Republicans who are adamantly anti-choice.  And anti-labor.  And anti-consumer protections. And pro-neo-feudalism. And pro-war and authoritarianism.  And anti-Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  By the way, did you know that Medicare only got passed in the 60s when the number of Republicans in Congress was decreased to such an extent that they didn’t have the critical mass to obstruct it?  Yep, you can look it up.  Here’s a BBC-4 Witness segment on the birth of medicare and what it took to get it passed.

In short, just about everything Americans like had to be passed when Republicans were down for the count.  Otherwise, their method is obstruct, obstruct, obstruct.  It’s what they do.  So, if you vote for a downticket Republican or a Tea Party Republican, that’s what you’re going to get.  They’re into austerity and redistributing wealth –upwards.

Does that mean you should vote always for the Democrat?  Well, until there are more third party downticket candidates, yeah, probably.  I don’t like it either.  But for sure, voting for a downticket Republican is going to mean more austerity for YOU and not for their rich friends.  You can choose to ignore the evidence and history if you want but them’s the facts.

Second, who is in the White House makes absolutely no difference this year.  I know Democrats say that it does but there’s no evidence of that.  We’ve had 4 years of Obama and he unmasked himself during the first debate.  He doesn’t fight for Americans.  He capitulates to Republicans.  He doesn’t exercise his veto pen enough and he was quite happy to leave the Bush Conscience Rule on the books.  Oh, sure, he tweaked it but he didn’t remove it.  And in my opinion, removing it is significant.  As long as the Bush Conscience Rule is around, women will never be sure that their reproductive decisions can’t be overridden by someone else.

Now, I understand why the NYTimes would be carrying Obama’s water.  It’s not that the Times is particularly liberal.  But the paper of record does tend to put a socially forward face on it’s wealth protection policies.  It doesn’t like to think of itself as backwards like the Republican bible-thumpers and who could blame it?  It’s gauche and stupid and deliberately ignorant to be a Republican supporter these days.  Sorry, Republicans, but that’s the truth.  Of course, none of that matters if you win, right?  Then you can shove your ignorance on everyone else and make them eat it and that will make you feel better.  But it means that you WILL impose austerity on everyone, including yourselves, if you vote for downticket Republicans.

But at the top of the ticket?  Makes not a damn bit of difference.  And the reason it particularly makes no difference to women is because no one has to take women seriously.  They can scream about reproductive rights until their blue in the face.  Without someone taking you seriously, you get nowhere. And in the past four years, no one has been taking women seriously.  And a lot of the blame for that can be attributed to the Democratic leadership.  They allowed a pattern of sexism to develop since 2008 that has been unprecedented.

Let’s just put aside the 2008 primaries where Obama routinely attempted to diminish his opponent by saying things like,” periodically when she’s feeling blue“* Hillary goes negative, it was Obama’s intention when he took office to make sure the jobs programs were tailored for men because he was concerned that they would feel bad if they were encouraged to go into pink professions like nursing (It’s in Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men).  And he also made the White House a “hostile working environment for women” (Anita Dunn said this in Suskind’s book)  He also ignored the advice of Christine Romer, Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren, each one of whom had to go through Tim Geithner to get anything done.  Tim Geithner, if I recall correctly, was one of the guys who piled on Brooksley Born, the head of the CFTC back at the end of the Clinton years who wanted to regulate derivatives.

Obama was the guy who hired Larry Summers who once famously said that women didn’t have the same intellectual capacity in math and science as men. (guys, don’t try to sugar coat this.  I’ve read the transcript and he sure as hell said that and meant exactly what he said.)

The whole atmosphere in the past four years has changed towards women.  Tell me, ladies, am I just imagining that?  Are men more likely to act like you don’t have a brain, treat you dismissively and cut you off in conversations?  I’m talking about just conversations on the phone not in person where they can’t see whether you are too old to pay attention to.  It’s gotten to the point where I’m already prepared to battle when I place a phone call.  I’ve seen it happen to women at work and just casually.  We have lost whatever mojo we fought so hard to get over the past 50 years.  No wonder the Republicans think they can run over our reproductive rights.  We don’t count anymore and there are very few champions in the Democratic party who are powerful or interested enough to stick up for us.  It would be nice if we had more women running for Congress this year as Democrats but even that is hard to find.  The Democratic leadership in Maine decided it would put their money behind a guy who wasn’t even in their party rather than run a woman from their side for the Senate seat that Olympia Snowe is vacating.

We can’t even get above 17% representation in Congress, which is one of the lowest female government representations in the developed world.  It shouldn’t be any wonder why nothing that is important to us gets passed.  We can’t get economic reforms we like, the jobs programs we like, the wars we hate to stop or protection of our social insurance programs.  No one takes anything we want seriously because we don’t have the critical mass in Congress to change anything.

We have fewer women in government than Pakistan

Voting for Obama isn’t going to change that.  In fact, the only thing that will change that is running more women for office and in order to do that, we need to get more authority. And in order to do that we need to have a greater voice in the opinion pages of the countries papers and online news sources.

And if that’s going to happen, maybe it should start with the New York Times, which has a male to female ratio of op/ed writers of 10:2.  That means that men are 5 times more likely to have their concerns represented on the New York Times editorial page every week than women.  And one of those women is Maureen Dowd whose schtick has been to pile on the women that the guys hate.  That seems to be a survival strategy. (And how did that work out, Maureen?)  I can’t think of one unambiguously feminist voice on the pages of the Washington Post or New York Times on a regular basis nor do I see any parity at all when it comes to representation.

So, if the New York Times feels so strongly about the fate of women’s reproductive rights, now would be a good time to add more women to its editorial lineup.  May I suggest dumping Douthat or Brooks?  Or both?  Then, hire someone like Digby. I’m a little tired of the Ezra Kleins, Kevin Drums and Matt Yglesias types getting all the peach positions.  It’s time for the New York Times to practice what it preaches and hire some women.

Otherwise, I can’t take it seriously.

*You know the level of sexism is bad when Andrea Mitchell notices.

Monday: Makeover Madness still bugging Maureen Le Fey

The jig is up, media.  The voters are are on to you.  It’s because you’ve gotten lazy.  You don’t even try anymore to mix it up.  It’s the same patterns.  Does Maureen Dowd just phone it in these days?  In 2004, she wrote that John Kerry was the elitist snowboarding, boy toy to a rich heiress.  This year it’s John McCain.  And I can’t believe she is suggesting that Sarah Palin go to Penney’s to buy her campaign wardrobe.

By the way, Maureen, I LOVE your Georgetown home. That custom colored Benjamin-Moore pink paint is gorgeous.   Maureen, you are an inspiration to bloggers everywhere.  Maybe if I cut back on my snarky posts to twice a week, I too can live in such swank surroundings.

$150,000 on clothes is a drop in the bucket compared to the obscene amounts of money that the Obama campaign has been spending on advertisment.  The Obama campaign raked in $150 million in campaign contributions in September and *still* I get half a dozen requests for money in my email box every single day.  Obama bought his own channel on DiSH.  Yep, if I go to channel 73, I can see non-stop Obama 24/7.

The funny thing is, I don’t think it’s working.  If you want to avoid Obama ads, you use your DVR and never go near channel 73.  Just fast forward through all of the hopey changey stuff. Ad time is expensive but I think it’s getting to be less and less effective.  Republicans, on the other hand, have taken a decidedly low tech, inexpensive approach that’s pretty hard to miss.  They have plastered McCain/Palin signs all over my route to work in the morning.  The sheer number is breathtaking.  They must be very busy at night.  I don’t see as many Obama signs.  Or should I say “OBAMA biden” signs.

Well, I guess that’s what you’re stuck with when you opt for public financing.  That lousy $84 billion doesn’t go as far as the $500 million and counting that Obama has spent.  (By the way, where is all that money coming from???)  You’d think you could get more impact with that much filthy lucre.  Like, in a year when the Democrat could. not. possibly. lose. $500 million should put Obama so far out in front that McCain/Palin *could* have just shopped at Penney’s for all the good it would have done them.  But this race is still well within their reach.

Well, you know what they say:

Wednesday: Maelstrom

The last time woman took charge

The atmosphere is pretty charged lately, isn’t it? Are you hanging in there? It’s going to get increasingly stormy as immovable object meets irresistable force. The party is so determined to install Obama that is willing to tear itself to shreds before our very eyes to do it. And all this self destruction for what purpose? So Hillary Clinton will never be president? What’s that all about anyway? Will we ever understand why the powers that be want to squash her?

MoDo wrote a column this morning that I did not read because I couldn’t get past the blurb on the opinion page:

Hillary Clinton feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Barack Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain.

Ladies, putting aside the lie that Hillary is putting us up to this (she has absolutely nothing to do with our movement), is there something familiar about that sentence? Did it strike a bell deep in the corner of your mind where you have stored an unpleasantry? From personal experience, I can say that without exception, I have never met a man who did not behave as if his reason for being was more important than mine. No matter how supportive they were, when push came to shove, it was always my life that more easily sacrificed and compromised. My wishes and aspirations were a little less lofty. My gifts and talents a little less meaningful and worthy of praise. Nothing short of my winning a Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer and a humanitarian award would be acknowledged as sufficient for a life changing decision to go in my favor. Maybe even that wouldn’t be enough. When push comes to shove, where a man lives, what he does with his time, what career he pursues and what dreams he has will always come first. The only power women have in most relationships, ultimately, is the power to walk away from them. That is, if she wants to be judged a person in her own right.

This is what MoDo’s blurb is saying to me. Hillary Clinton, one of the most accomplished women this country has ever produced, a woman gifted by intelligence, tenacity, fortitude and perserverence, who has more qualifications and experience than either of her rivals, is expected to graciously step aside so her presence doesn’t mess up her less qualified male counterpart’s fading chances of victory. Maureen Dowd *enjoys* reinforcing this notion. She makes her living doing it.

When Hillary made her suspension speech, she said that women hadn’t broken through that glass ceiling yet. What is happening before our eyes right now is the final step to finally breaking through: asserting the right to be acknowledged as a person worthy of equal respect and not backing down in the face of overwhelming odds. If it messes up Barack’s life, who the f$^* cares? Why should she care more about his aspirations than her own, especially when it is *his* actions that are tearing the party apart? I have never seen a party so committed to ruining itself, its reputation, its very chances of survival, all for the sake of an ambitious, unprepared and unscrupulous man like Barack Obama. To watch this happen is like watching someone in the midst of Darwin Award winning behavior. It is both fascinating and horrifying.

We are witnessing the Democratic party, run by a bunch of white males, like Dean, Kerry, Kennedy, Carter, McGovern, Edwards, etc, telling this woman that she is less worthy. Incredible.

On a similar note: Anglachel has started posting again after an unbearably long absence. Today she has a piece that looks at what the Republicans are likely to make of the Democratic party’s decision to ditch its more deserving candidate for its weaker male standard bearer. I mentioned months ago that affirmative action would be our Achilles heel that the GOP would zero in on. Anglachel seems to have the same idea in Barking Up the Wrong Tree. Here is the money quote:

Obama is the candidate against whom this argument [affirmative action] can be deployed most effectively. You Obamacans can scream bloody murder at me all you want, but it is simply a fact. His race makes the argument easier to make, but it is his muddy personal history, his razor thin resume, and his questionable electoral wins that make him vulnerable. As Somerby pointed out, the squalls of “Racism! Racism!” do nothing but play into their hands as well because the Republican argument isn’t about race. It may appeal to racists, but affirmative action can be defeated even in California (in a way that gay marriage probably will not) because it is, at base, about economic competition and rules that deliberately confer advantage to a less formally qualified contestant. When Obama defenders can’t get out of primary campaign mode and reckless accusations of racism (because some well-off white liberals really can be shamed into voting for someone just because he is Black), they do nothing but reinforce the Republican charge against affirmative action; that it is merely promotion of race, it is not about potential or character or disadvantage (In what world is Barack Obama “disadvantaged”?), but about pushing qualified students and job applicants out of the way for lazy non-whites. It is simple for them to work in xenophobia and jingosim, too, by talking about promotion of “illegals” over “citizens”.

The dog whistle here is on behalf of McCain. He’s earned this job and he will make sure that you get what you have earned, unlike these effete Democrats (sorry, that’s always going to be part of the argument) who let themselves be bullied into placating interest groups and handing out unearned rewards. St. John the Maverick will give you straight-talk and an honest deal. On another day, I’ll get a bit more into the “high-minded ways” that Somerby mentions because that, too, is part of the attack on affirmative action, one the Obamacans of Whole Foods Nation seem incapable of understanding.

Just go read it. It’s excellent.

One final note. It seems that we have a resident poet. JohninCA writes many of his comments in verse and I thought I’d put a few of my favorite beauties on the front page today. I’m thinking that we need a poet laureate:

Benjamin Franklin’s opinion was sought
About what his peers in Philadelphia wrought.
“A republic, if you can keep it,” he said,
But which, without vigilance, soon would be dead.
There was no political party back then,
The vote was for whites, and only for men.
The franchise didn’t exist for the rest,
Outside those circles the right was suppressed.

Now there’s one party that plays loose and fast
With the primary votes that were cast,
Four delegates for one man it seized,
Fabricating the results as it pleased.
The price for its perfidy it must now pay,
As insurrection carries the day
Now is the time to be buried for good
Imposture and treachery for which it stood.

****
Down with dissembling, down the the lies
Down with the party with no other guise
To offer disquieted voters this fall,
Down with cabals where deception is all.
Down with the standard bearer and hack
Who lacking a teleprompter can’t back
Campaign themes of increasing duplicity,
While the nation prays that it soon spared will be.

****
Denver’s the city– there is the place
Where the party which has well earned its disgrace
Which dissembled with voters, and overreached
And the faith of its loyal activists breached
Must stare aggrieved voters clear in the face
The penalty for its behavior to face
The piper it paid; now it must hear the tune
And face the storm to erupt at high noon.

****
If I were a Democrat, my heart would break,
For arrogance this man must take the cake,
By fiat, four delegates he’s able to pull,

Now that they’re his, their state votes in full.
With dubious tactics securing the win,
Competition seems to be the only sin,
The thing that’s important, as Joe Stalin notes,
Is not the voters but who counts the votes.

****
Ludacris opened his mouth all too soon
His lyrics were more than inopportune
His words are the most unfortunate progeny
Of profane hatred, if not misogyny
Their tenor can end in no other result
Than undermining his candidate’s very own cult
While helping the backlash which, in the fall
Might just help McCain to go and win it all.

****
It’s hardly a reason for much surprise,
That D registration is not on the rise.
The party that put a knife in our back
Now finds that its base is beginning to crack.
It counted on victory in the fall,
But shouldn’t be sanguine about it at all,
The hare and the tortoise, that old fashioned tale
Suggests, in November, McCain will prevail

Hunter gets his knickers in a twist and other amusements

Ahh, must catch breath and wipe tears of mirth from eyes. No, I’m not providing a link. Let’s just say that Hunter thinks we are rude for being happy that Clinton won a state last night. Ok, Ok, I’ll wipe the smile from my face.

mwhahahahahahaahaaah!

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

And then there’s MoDo. (Sorry, no link for that one either) who is so incensed that she is channeling Marvin K. Mooney. I think someone should alert the Suess estate about a possible copyright violation. But she’s simply channeling the editorial that we referenced earlier. They desperately want to get rid of Clinton but she’s like that lady in the bathtub. They think they drowned her but the minute they turn their back, she’s jumped out of the tub and is lunging for them again.

Dear media, give it up. No one is listening to you anymore. You can try and try and try to make her look like the most vicious harpy in the world but for some reason, voters don’t believe it. They think she’s a mensch. And she did it with much less money. Oh, you can try your coordinated attack against her. Yes, the coordination is obvious. You’re all saying how relentlessly negative she was. But it isn’t working. She’s going to take this fight all the way to the convention if she has to and we’ll be behind her every step of the way. The bloom is off of Obama’s rose. You did the best you could. If you insist on yelling your heads off about her, you too Big Boyz, more and more the public is going to think you’re not tethered to reality. The damn voters will do as the damn well please.

One other thing: It bears repeating because we often forget when one of them starts acting rational but:

The media is not out friend.

When it is convenient for them, Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough, Lou Dobbs, fill_in_the_blank, will do what their bosses tell them to do. Do not be lulled into a false sense of security. We have to be on our toes and on our guard for their next sneaky attack. And I have no doubt that they have one all planned out.

Maureen Le Fey Conjures Again

RonK made a reference to Maureen Le Fey’s latest column today in his ponderables but I thought I’d expand upon it because I *get* Maureen, even if I don’t particularly like her. No one can mix metaphors better than MoDo, expect maybe me on Vanilla Absolut.

In today’s incantation, er, column, Maureen continues to reinforce the themes that Hillary is an arrogant, prevaricating Ice queen and Obama is possessed of a skittish and delicate constitution. Let’s go to the text:

Their relations have been frosty and fraught ever since the young Chicago prince challenged Queen Hillary’s royal proclamation that it was her turn to rule.

Last winter, after news broke that he was thinking of running, he winked at her and took her elbow on the Senate floor to say hi, in his customary languid, friendly way, and she coldly brushed him off.

Wow, I’d say mine was a fairly straightforward interpretation. But wait! There’s more. A couple of weeks ago, Maureen made reference to Hillary’s Daisy Buchanan like voice. Gatsby said it was “full of money”. This week, Maureen is referencing Gone With the Wind and comparing Hillary’s SOTU appearance in red to the “Who shot the drapes scene?” from the movie where Scarlett shows up wearing green velvet with heavy bullion fringe. One almost hears Hillary pining on about Ashley. Or was it Rhett by that scene? Where was I? Was there a point?

Oh, yes, it was MoDo subtlely alerting us to Hillary’s humiliation at losing South Carolina to a young upstart who happened to grab Edward Kennedy’s endorsement. Well, what could be worse than that? I mean, other than standing in a field, shaking a radish at the sky vowing to “never be in the position to need anything from Ted Kennedy again!”.

Obama’s camp must be in stitches about the drape scene reference, no pun intended. Ha-Ha-Ha! But MoDo is an equal opportunity curse thrower. I’ll bet the laughter stopped when they read *this*:

But the fact that he didn’t do so shows that Obama cannot hide how much the Clintons rattle him, and that he is still taking the race very personally.

or this:

Knowing that it helped her when Obama seemed to be surly with her during the New Hampshire debate, telling her without looking up from his notes that she was “likable enough” — another instance of Obama not being able to hide his bruised feelings — Hillary went on ABC News last night to insinuate that he was rude Monday.

and this:

But Obama is the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style, and the not-blinded-by-testosterone ability to object to a phony war.

Oh, brother, now that the Breck Girl has dropped out, MoDo turns her emasculating gaze on the only male candidate left on the Democratic side, because the male Democratic candidate is always the bottom, doncha know. It’s well known conventional wisdom. You can ask the Villagers who probably put her up to this little bit of faux literati idiocy.

Jeez, Maureen, you’re really showing your age. We on the other side of the generational divide know that Sensitive New Age Guys can at times be the same pricks they’ve always been and we know plenty of women who can swing their own while being friendly and well-respected managers. So she wears red. So he’s good at the mock outrage. Either one of them has more intelligence and strength than any of the doddering old men on the Republican side.

Get a new spell book, Maureen. Yours is sadly out of date.

PS to the Cocktail Kossacks: You guys are doing a great job in my absence. I might do a nightcap tonight here but I think the Clinton Cocktail Hour at DailyKos is in excellent hands. 😉

RonK Ponderables

• BREAKING NEWS: MoDo doesn’t like Hillary. again. Doesn’t buy “the snub”. Wonder where she’s phoning that in from?

• In other ponderings, SC would have been a much tighter contest with Edwards out. Exit polls suggest JRE’s drew heavily from voters reacting negatively to both sides of the race race, but more heavily against Obama’s side … and his demographics were closer to Hillary.From what we can suss out statistically and anecdotally, Hillary is the second choice of more Edwards voters nationwide (as opposed to Edwards activists nationwide).The two person is good favors Hill. It amplifies the big-state delegate margins she’ll roll up Feb 5. perhaps more importantly, it makes all subsequent debate appearance head-to-head confrontations, as we try to pin down Obama on which of the infinitely-many possible paths of change he has in mind.
• Good news, everyone — Workhorse Sen. Patty Murray endorses HRC!

  Sen. Murray is the “mom in tennis shoes”, one of seven kids of a multiple sclerosis affected veteran father, who rose from preschool teacher to workhorse deputy chair of Senate Appropriations and highest ranking woman Senator ever in her party’s (or any party’s) leadership as Senate Democratic Conference Secretary?

  Patty knows what the “levers of power” can do for the little guy when they’re used right, and what they can do to the little guy when they’re neglected or misuse

Feb 5 and forward, one rival comes out of each state with a clear majority of its delegates. This is good.

Bill Clinton vs. $250 Million GOP Ad campaign

Maureen “Le Fey” Dowd has apparently taken up Obama’s cause to fight the Clinton tag team. This follows on the heels of the nauseating softball interview that Good Morning America did for Obama on Monday.

As the Big Dawg said recently, “Give me a break”. Did Obama think he was just going to skate to the nomination without a fight? Especially after he dogwhistled to the independents and moderate Republicans by whispering sweet nothings about Ronald Reagan?

Let’s get this clear: Obama is running to the right of all of the other Democratic candidates. But his supporters are throwing their own flavor onto what is essentially a Tofu Candidate and they are seeing things that are not there. Somehow, they’ve gotten into their heads that he is more progressive than Hillary, which is absurd for so many reasons, not least of which is her voting record. He disses Bill Clinton, the best Democratic president that we’ve had in decades because the Big Dawg couldn’t get the Gingrich’s Movement Conservatives to become liberals.

Is Clinton just supposed to sit back and let it happen? If she has a secret weapon who can make her seem like she’s in two places at once so she can challenge Obama on core Democratic principles, is she supposed to take a handicap and tell Bill to STFU?

Let’s put it this way, when the GOP rolls out its massive PR campaign on Obama, do you think that Maureen “Le Fey” Dowd is going to cut him a break because it seems like they’re coming at him from all sides?

In. Your. Dreams. She’s already weakening Obama with her nasty little spells, making it look like the Big Dawg is “roughing up Obama so much that Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina suggested that he might want to “chill.”” And quoting Obama as saying, ” “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes,” he snapped at Hillary, obviously entrapped and pysched-out by the Clinton duo.” Notice the use of the words “Psyched out” and “entrapped”. With friends like Maureen, who needs enemies?

She’s up to her usual incantations and this time she thinks she can take out two at once. But the two are Obama and Bill. Well, that just leaves Hillary by herself, doesn’t it, Maureen? Ok, if you must.