Sadly, No!

Wow:

I got really emotional about it before I realized that I would vote McCain and a straight top to bottom GOP lineup if Hillary isn’t the nominee and leave the party if Florida isn’t counted.

Its not about winning anymore. Its about whether the Democratic party and its anti democracy is worth defending or if the most liberal GOP presidential candidate in decade is a better use of my vote.

Wow again:

We’re not backing down! The fight has just begun!!!! Pennsylvania is around the corner and a large victory is excepted. Polls in West Virginia also strongly favor her. Polls in North Carolina that have favored Obama are now virtually tied. There will be big surprises in North Carolina.

It’s not over. And I might also point out how inaccurate the Politico article that you quoted/linked to really is. If the superdelegates support Clinton there will be “a backlash of historic proportions”!?!? THEY WOULD BE DOING THE JOB THEY WERE CREATED FOR, JOSH. The superdelegates weren’t created to add fluff to the popular vote, but to make the educated decision that voters sometimes can’t. They’re there for the same reason the electoral college is. For example, picking a glorified motivational speaker over an experienced leader (good example, eh?).

Well good.

I hope you guys enjoy four more years of war and a fucked-up economy.

Selfish assholes.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I’m not picking on all HRC supporters here. I have pro-Obama friends who have told me they won’t vote for Hillary if she wins the nomination, and I have similarly reamed them out.

Because even if you don’t like Hillary’s instincts on, say, foreign policy (which I don’t), the presidency is about much more than one person – it’s about appointing a cabinet. I cannot stand the thought of four more years of Gonzo-style shenanigans at the Justice Department, nor can I stomach having another labor secretary that doesn’t give a shit about labor rights. Even if you don’t personally like Clinton or Obama all that much, realize that they will appoint drastically better personnel to key positions of power than any Republican.

UPDATE II: And just to prove I’m being fair, I think Mr. Drum is right here:

So fine: Hillary’s chances are slim and maybe it’s time to withdraw. But how do we hop from there to an out-of-the-blue factual assertion that Hillary would just as soon see Obama lose in November? That’s crazy. There’s just no evidence that anyone in the Clinton campaign actually thinks this way. It’s like the 90s all over again and it’s driving me nuts.

My fellow Obama supporters need to get a grip. I know that resistance to CDS seems futile these days, but resist anyway! Hillary has a long, long history as a partisan animal. She’d no more root for a McCain victory than she would for another attack by al-Qaeda. What’s more, on the level of pure political tactics, she knows perfectly well — and so should we — that if she loses neither she nor Bill will control anything and she’ll have no future presidential prospects in 2012 or any other year. It’s either 2008 or nothing for Hillary.

And if she gave even a hint of not supporting Obama wholeheartedly during the fall campaign? Not only would she have no future presidential prospects, she’d be lucky to escape being tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail. She’d be the most reviled Democrat on Capitol Hill. She knows that too.

Yeppers.

Hillary knows she’s hated by the Republicans. She knows she can’t be hated by the Democrats as well. C’mon dudes, you may not like Hillary, but she’s not insane/stupid/evil.

Spin, Spin, Spin: DKos and Joshua Michah Ezekiah Boutros-Boutros Marshall Whine That Rev. Wright’s Comments Are No Biggie, Really

(doing that “W” with my fingers from Clueless)

We’ll see if the American people agree. I’m not sure the general public’s appetite for angry anti-American hate-whitey burn-this-fucker-down rhetoric is as robust as Mssrs. Marshall and KosKid imagine.

Bla-bla, whatever. This is old by now but, the Josh Marshall post he mentions makes a point that I’ve been thinking about for awhile, and for which I’m now fortunately off the hook in terms of having to phrase it myself:

Last week, Obama, who has denounced various of Wright’s statements, told a Jewish audience, Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.” Watch it yourself and make your own judgments. For myself, when watching something like this, it is often difficult to distinguish between what I actually find offensive myself and what it is ingrained in me to believe others will find offensive.

What I’ve been suspecting is that most people base their judgments most of the time on what they think other people must be thinking.

For instance, it’s long been a hypothesis of mine that nobody has ever really liked or been interested in Paris Hilton, but millions were convinced — and dozens remain convinced — that everybody else thinks she’s important. (Another example: the alleged charisma of actor David Caruso.) What creates celebrity, in cases like these, is an avalanche of false assumptions of celebrity.

In a different direction, most of the public’s judgments (and to an even greater extent, as Atrios always points out incredulously, the media’s judgments) on public figures and public issues seem, at core, to be nothing more complex than ever-shifting junior-high-school status assessments — irrational and highly manipulable impressions of which group is ‘up’ and which is ‘down,’ who’s ‘popular’ and who should be notionally fled from because they have cooties. Does this seem so? Because like Josh Marshall, I have a hard distinguishing the parts of Wright’s ‘inflammatory’ rhetoric that seem objectively inflammatory, and those that merely touch on things that bourgeois Americans aren’t supposed to say or think for fear of social sanction.

Isn’t that what guys like Ace are trying to exploit — the old, die-hard bourgeois horror of unacceptable speech and ideas, of losing social status through being found out as an undesirable? In other words, might not the screaming about Wright really be, at root, not a racial issue, but one of class? Because after all, one thing the poor and the rich have in common in America is that they’re not expecting to go anywhere, down or up, and don’t especially care what you think of them.

* Cf.

May the link stand alone, for what adornment can grace it?

EXPELLED!

Can Clinton Win The Popular Vote?

• I insist that Obama supporters endorse whatever plan I concoct that will help Hillary Clinton win the nomination, lest they be shown to have an unseemly contempt for the voters.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Its time for the funny!

Let’s see if we can get this format down.

Ahem.

[roll camera]

“Unknown employees at the State Department have reportedly been accessing Barack Obama’s passport files.”

[arch pause]

“They couldn’t figure out why he was taking skiing trips to Swaziland!”

[cut camera, 2-person crew of pudgy guys with Wingnut Face Mullets¹ cracks up laughing]

“…Because it’s a whole different country in Africa, and it sounds like ‘Switzerland’ — doesn’t it? Africa is where black people originally come from. Okay wait, is the camera stopped? Ha ha! No, it’s fine, let’s move on to the next one…”

[roll camera]

“Hillary Clinton…”

[cut camera, 2-person crew of pudgy guys with Wingnut Face Mullets cracks up laughing]

“Ha ha! Because it sounds like ‘Switzerland,’ doesn’t it? No, it’s totally a real country; someone checked.”

¹ Cf.

Now that both Hillary and Obama have been beaten to pulps in the press, and now that St. BBQ has gotten nothing but glowing coverage, do you think we’re completely screwed? I do. Check this out:

The lengthy Democratic primary contest bodes well for Republican chances of holding the White House, a new poll suggests.

As Democratic Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York slug it out for the nomination, many of their supporters — at least in Pennsylvania, site of the next major primary — aren’t committed to the party’s ticket in November, according to a Franklin & Marshall College Poll.

Among Obama supporters, 20 percent said they would vote for Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, if Clinton beats their candidate for the nomination. Among Clinton supporters, 19 percent said they would support McCain in November if Obama is the Democratic nominee.

And:

Frieda Andersen and Ted Skup are both white, both live in northwestern Indiana, and both plan to vote in their state’s Democratic presidential primary in May.

But ask them to reflect on the incendiary views of Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, and the ensuing controversy that has engulfed the presidential race over the past week, and you get vastly different impressions.

Andersen, an 82-year-old retired business manager, said Obama’s two-decade-long association with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who is under fire for his harsh sermons condemning America and white racism, has pushed her firmly into Senator Hillary Clinton’s camp.

“Twenty years he put up with that?” she said of Obama. “He was softening me up. He was kind of even with Hillary. This cinched it.”

What makes this so goddamn depressing to me is that this primary isn’t revolving around policy disputes: it’s all about identity politics, and it’s becoming a nightmare that is likely to launch St. BBQ into the White House.

I’m really depressed now.

ABOVE: Michael Graham, The Blue Boy

---

If you were a graduate of Oral “Donate or God Will Kill Me” Roberts University, had been caught impersonating an INS officer, and had been fired from WMAL for being to much of a kook even for that station, then perhaps you might have more sense than to get tangled up in the Obama-Wright nonsense. But then you wouldn’t be Michael Graham:

Obama … admitted that he had in fact been in church for some comments that “could be considered controversial – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagree.”

Uh, no.

As a graduate of Oral Roberts University who grew up attending church five times a week – including tent revivals, healing services and the handling of less-than-friendly reptiles – I can honestly say that I never attended a service where the minister preached race hatred, anti-Israel paranoia or used the phrase “ridin’ dirty” in a theological context.

Well, of course, Graham didn’t hear that because the only thing he heard the ministers say, at least when they weren’t speaking in tongues, was “Whoa, son, be careful, that there snake’s about to bite you!”

America is still a nation suffused with racism, Obama insisted. To paraphrase the Disney movie “The Incredibles,” “If everybody’s racist, then nobody is.”

Okay, Michael, I know that we’re dealing with a tag line in a cartoon, which means that it’s a concept that may well be considerably too complex for you to grasp, but you can’t just substitute any word for “special” in that sentence from the cartoon and still have it make make sense. If everyone is green, for example, then everyone is, well, green.

This is not the first time that Graham has bollixed up the line in question. In a hilarious column in which he flounces around over a Wikipedia entry that said he was gay (and what would ever have given anyone that idea?), he said this:

If everybody’s final Jeopardy answer is right, then nobody’s is.

If everybody thinks Michael Graham is a blithering idiot, then nobody thinks he’s a blithering idiot. Sadly, of course, no.

Note from the Sadly, No! midtown Manhattan law firm: “Michael Graham is not gay and never has been gay, notwithstanding that he looks exactly like Lindsey Graham after a second face lift.”

Above: Conservatives imagine ‘a new dialogue on race’

---

Wheels McDouchebag:

Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: “There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?”

But that is not the question. The question is why didn’t he leave that church? Why didn’t he leave — why doesn’t he leave even today — a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) “God damn America”?

Why? Why didn’t Obama rip out his hair and gnash his teeth at the sound of un-jingoism? Why didn’t he demand satisfaction by way of a duel at dawn with the foul villain who dared besmirch the honor of his country? Why didn’t his servos seize up and his positronic neural mesh start firing ‘ERROR’ messages in a feedback loop when the First Law of Wingbotics was violated so plainly? Why? Why, God, why? Why why why whywhywhywhywhy?!?!?!?!

Ahem.

Obama’s 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction. …

This contextual analysis of Wright’s venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It’s the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance.

Is there a journalist working in America today who possesses Krauthammer’s ability to erect ball-achingly wrong strawmen and then fail to knock them down? If it’s possible to get getting it wrong, wrong — he somehow pulls it off. Here he was in 2005, that glorious year when democracy flowered in Iraq, toppling corrupt regimes throughout the Middle East like dominoes as our troops returned home and George W. Bush was feted as the philosopher-king who ushered in the Arab Enlightenment:

But we do know one thing: Those who claimed, with great certainty, that Arabs are an exception to the human tendency toward freedom, that they live in a stunted and distorted culture that makes them love their chains — and that the notion the United States could help trigger a democratic revolution by militarily deposing their oppressors was a fantasy — have been proved wrong.

As an advocate of that notion of democratic revolution, I am not surprised that the opposing view was proved false. I am surprised only that it was proved false so quickly …

Off topic, but I’m looking for investors in a little bondage shop I’m hoping to open in Fallujah. I hear from all the anti-war cognoscenti that the Arabs are extremely kinky with the chains. E-mail me at [email protected].

Toodles!

Above: Conservatives imagine ‘a new dialogue on race’

---

Not at all late to the party comes Wing Nut Daily, with a shocking exposé even more shocking than the shock of when the vocal group, Exposé, was nominated for a 1988 Soul Train Award for Best New Artist, and lost to Miki Howard:

Obama church published Hamas terror manifesto
Compares charter calling for murder of Jews to Declaration of Independence
By Aaron Klein

JERUSALEM – Sen. Barack Obama’s Chicago church reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group’s official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America’s Declaration of Independence.

Now, our man Klein is sort of a weird figure: Recently — in fact until just now, with this clinker — he’s been Mr. Fashion-forward in crafting ingenious guilt-by-association smears of Obama. But his main thing has been conducting face-to-face interviews with Islamic terrorists and/or Middle-Eastern nobodies with beards who can be described as Islamic terrorists, and then writing unflattering articles about them in the right-wing press — articles whose real purpose is to reflect discredit upon liberal political figures in the US.

“But oh,” you say, “You’re in the habit of making fun of right-wing commentators. Surely Klein can’t in real life be running as zany a racket as that?” Ah, we’re glad you asked that this week, instead of a few weeks ago — because here’s CBS News from last Friday:

Another key purveyor of the smear campaign is Aaron Klein, an Orthodox Jew who is Jerusalem correspondent for WorldNetDaily. WND is notoriously disreputable, a sort of National Enquirer for the right (typical headline: “Sleaze Charge: ‘I Took Drugs, Had Homo Sex With Obama'”). Klein made a name for himself by getting terrorists to say nice things about Democrats and allying himself with extremist elements of the Israeli right, whom he frequently quotes as sources in his articles – when he bothers to quote anyone at all. Klein originally called Hillary Clinton the “jihadist choice for president,” but when Clinton stumbled, he turned his fire to Obama, attempting to expose his so-called “terrorist connections.”

The really interesting thing is how Klein (inter alia, an American from Philadelphia), keeps up his cordial relations with the alleged bloodthirsty, AK-waving Jihadis to whom he keeps running back and forth for quotes. How does he keep escaping with his life? We honestly can’t imagine.

Anyway, here he is again:
Read the rest of this entry »

The lesson of Asian Americans for blacks: there are more important things than basketball and victimhood

• Dear Black America: Why can’t you be more like the nice folks who launder my seriously-outdated suits?

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.