Sadly, No!

Don’t listen to this song unless you have titanium testicles.

UPDATE: I shall respond to this rap with one of my own at some point. Capt. Trollypants has no skillz. Me? I got ’em. Mad ones, no less.

Before Cheney comes on, a bunch of CPAC dignitaries are introduced. Who gets the biggest applause? Wayne LaPierre, the human bulldozer of the National Rifle Association. The only person of color on the panel, Niger Innis of the race-baiting Congress for Racial Equality, actually draws boos. This is officially the only time in my life I have actually felt sorry for Niger Innis. (Note: I’ve got photos, but I’ll have to wait until I’m back in the hotel to post them — I left the connecting cable for my digital camera there in a slick fog of opiatic decay.) It’s a real cross-section of the American privileged class, the rich and angry from A to B.

People are clapping rhythmically – well, as rhythmically as this crowd is ever going to get – for Cheney. For Cheney! I keep expecting them to start chanting “WE WANT THE SHOW” like they’re waiting for the Blues Brothers, the presence of whom would color up the crowd considerably. Wyoming senator John Barrasso introduces the fiend of the hour: “The C in CPAC should stand for Cheney!” The C in CPAC should stand for cocksucker, how about that?, I think, as the combination of drugs and fear turn me into a surly 15-year-old. Cheney is damned lucky I don’t have a roll of toilet paper, that’s all I can say. The crowd gives Dick a standing o, and, as a gang of bull-veined dudes in front of me start chanting “FOUR MORE YEARS!”, I get the sensation for the first time all day that I’m at something that could easily turn into a fascist rally. When the applause finally quells, Dick chuckles evilly. Can that be done? Is a chuckle even feasible as the delivery vector for evil? If it is, Dick Cheney is the man capable of pulling it off with finesse. I have to admit, the guy has a certain degree of charm, but it’s the same kind of charm that you might find in Stalin or Dracula: the easy charisma of a man who knows he can, with a wave of his hand, have you ground into paste.

The first part of Cheney’s speech is right at the wheelhouse of the CPAC crowd: lower taxes, lower taxes, lower taxes. “Lower taxes are always good for this economy,” he says. Which economy is he talking about? The economy in general, or the economy of the people in this room? Any program that gets cut is inevitably referred to as “wasteful”, “bloated” or “special interest”, without any details as to what’s being disappeared. Oddly enough, “wasteful”, “bloated” and “special interest” is language perfectly suited to describe almost every penny being spent in Iraq, but Cheney doesn’t have anything to say about that.

National security, though, that’s another matter: he gets another standing ovation for “The absence of another 9/11 is not an accident, it’s an achievement”. (The presence of the first 9/11, apparently, was and accident.) A laundry list of constitutional butt-wipes get standing ovations from about half of the crowd: an expansion of FISA, the torture of terror suspects, and the financial protection of any big corporation who might theoretically have allowed illegal wiretapping to take place. The telecoms, says Cheney, shouldn’t be “hassled” for acting in “good faith”, which usage of the phrase is unfamiliar to me. Terror, terror, terror: it’s the Dick Cheney boilerplate. (Bonus homosexual innuendo, Dick Cheney edition: describing the President’s term in office, he says “We’ve done hard things and done them well.”) Weirdly enough – or maybe not so much – his defense of torture gets a standing ovation, but his praising of our fighting men in uniform does not. It takes a man to fight, but it takes a train to waterboard.

Defense, security, prosperity. America is a country of good: thus stated, it need not be defended or explained. It’s nothing we haven’t heard before, but somehow hearing it in person, in the presence of true believers, it leaves a haze in the air, a strange absence of rhetoric: it seems less like a speech that has been delivered and more like a series of directives that have been issued. Cheney leaves the building (his last appearance here as vice-president, Keene notes with a lick of the lips, but not his last appearance here) to thunderous applause, having gone out with a workingman’s damn and told us all that the nation will be safer and more prosperous for having had Bush as president for eight years. It is not an assurance: it is an order.

The Omni Shoreham hotel, Regency Ballroom, Washington, DC, Thursday morning. After a moment of panic early this morning on an empty stomach and a poisoned bloodstream, during which I decided that I’d be happier just staying in my hotel room and listening to old Lee Morgan records all weekend, I gutted up, donned my Wal-Mart vines, popped a few more opiates for the road, and slid down the banister towards the Ninth Circle. Here’s a description of Hell they never give you: a huge room full of all the people you hate most, and they’re all having a wonderful time.

Yes, it’s all smiles and sunshine here at CPAC: lively young ladies with skillfully applied layers of makeup are here to greet you at every turn and correct your every confusion. Hopelessly earnest collegiate nerds hand out Mitt Romney stickers and hope against hope that John McCain has some sort of campaign trail meltdown: perhaps it will occur to him that the last 30 years have all been a fever-dream brought on by bad fish paste, that he is still in some VC labor camp wearing a tin can around his head, and he will savagely turn on his campaign manager with a broken bottle while at a Kiwanis breakfast. High school kids with bad moustaches pal around in hopes that toadying up to the rich kids will be their ticket to an easy future. On the walls are banners for the dregs of conservative thinksmanship: Town Hall, the ACU, Human Events, the YAF. (The National Review is conspicuous in their absence; they probably think CPAC takes much-needed revenue away from their Cruise the Caribbean with Rich Lowry promotion.) And up front, where no one can touch them – their natural state, as the Market intended, are the big men. Up there, in the first few rows, are the bosses, the people for whom America is shitbox and change drawer, the living embodiments of The Man.

On the way in, bracing the driveway entries to the Omni but kept far from the entrance by irritated-looking cops, were the abortion protesters. Their color posters of mangled fetuses were held up proud and loud in fear that the throngs of right-wingers inside might be paying a little too much attention to lining their pockets and not enough to their pet topic, the atomic holocaust of tomorrow’s Christians. My cab driver, a scarred-up vet who confesses solidarity with the protesters on the abortion issue but is also a lifelong democrat, shrugs in an almost embarrassed way – as if his earlier self-identification as a pro-lifer places him humiliatingly in the company of these fanatics. Once I check in, the atmosphere of gregarious paranoia only increases: there are cops and security people everywhere you look, and long lines through metal detectors and pat-downs by mean young cops and ment with earpieces, who all seem to have only recently graduated from high school. I have another moment of panic as they paw through my briefcase, turning all my electronics on an off and opening all the containers: I do, after all, have a lot of pills in there. But God bless the lobbyists for the pharma industry: every goddamn one of them is at least putatively legal, and who’s to say I don’t actually have prescription? Other than me, of course, and I’m not talking. At least not after my next round loosens all the muscles in my tongue.

All your questions about America’s premier gathering of authoritarian ideologues answered: what does Bob Novak look like in person? Steak-fed, self-satisfied, near death. What is the range of hairstyles on display? Surprisingly diverse, yet boring (men only: the women almost all sport hair that seems flattened with an iron, chasing away any suggestions of ethnicity), including the classic combover and the perennial flat-top, but also ranging into the pony-tail, the fauxhawk, and the who knows what it is because they’re wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat. How many flags are there at the speaker’s table? So many, they must know what’s best for the country. Do yarmulkes outnumber black people here in the Regency Ballroom? Yes, but an almost 3-1 ratio. Who do the official photographers take pictures of? All the young girls with their steam-ironed hair. What sort of music do conservative organizers pump over the PA while waiting for the speakers to come on? Characterless light jazz. Who is sitting near me as I type this? A gaggle of college frosh. A rail-thin brunette in the row in front of my tests my cover for the first time; my improv skills may be shaky because I’m light-headed and panicky, but I must do my best for site and country.

“Hi! Are these seats taken?”

“Only by these free CPAC Special issues of Townhall magazine. Help yourself.”

“Oh, thanks, sir!” Sir. So much for getting laid. “I’m Namela Redactednoff from the University of Small Midwestern State’s Conservative Student Alliance.”

“Leonard Pierce, American Milk Solids Council.”

“I’m sorry? What is that?”

“It’s an industry group for milk solids manufacturers. We lobby Washington lawmakers to lessen regulations on the export of milk solids. The problem is that the government blames us for the incompetence of African mothers.”

“That is so unfair.”

“Tell me about it.”

She goes back to chatting with a thick-necked linebacker about how Barack Obama is nothing but a smile and a haircut. But then, the lights dim and David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union, takes the stage. Bad news: the President will not be here at the scheduled time. (He has to go frown convincingly over the bodies of hapless tornado victims. Presumably Trent Lott’s house is safe this time around.) Good news: he’s coming anyway, at 7AM tomorrow (“magnetometers will open two hours before that, Keene says to great laughs; there aren’t nearly enough good magnetometer jokes out there for my taste). After a brief moment where he urges that we all be respectful to everyone at the conference, “even the liberals” (I look around nervously), he introduces the Cannons (father-son authors of the most recent hagiography of Ronald Wilson Reagan), Bob Novak, and Al Regnery for what will be an hour of relentless bukkake on the corpse of RWR.

Al Regnery is a stunted little man who acts as the bursar for a lot of the wingnut welfare recipients in attendance. Bob Novak, of course, is the devil. Just look at those unnaturally straight teeth! Surely that is the dentistry of Satan himself. I’m convinced that Novak is sharing a withered soul with Henry Kissinger and that’s the only reason he’s sitting up there chatting so amiably about nation-building. “Ronald Reagan is everyone’s favorite president,” says Bob to wild applause. I wonder who was consulted in that poll. The topic of the moment: would Reagan have invaded Iraq? Novak has all sorts of giggle sport with the Cannons about how bad Bush has muffed up the entire process, and just when it’s getting interesting – will God allow that dwarfish sack of shit to reach stratospheric new heights of human hypocrisy, or will he strike him down with bolts of righteous lightning? – Keene interrupts the panel to report that Vice-President Cheney has arrived early. I brace myself: I am about the be a few yards away from the worst man in America…

Larry Kudlow picks up on the L.C. Mope Theory of Markets:

Probing the Primary Plunge

It’s very curious that the stock market has plunged on either the day of, or the day after, the four or five recent primary election contests. While there may be no direct causality, one can’t help but wonder whether the investor class hasn’t been disappointed with the shape of this election battle.

Ah, the investor class. Powerful stock market juju when they’re upset. One can’t help but suspect whether one’s fellow board members aren’t undone by election rhetoric that’s not terribly long on affected employment of the indefinite personal pronoun nor unsparing in not eschewing the negative construction in no uncertain terms.

Democrats are trashing rich people.

Sell!

They want to raise tax rates.

Sell!

Meanwhile, Republicans have been skirting around this issue.

Put!

While some decent tax-cut plans are out there …

Buy!

… there really has been no direct connection to investors.

For the love of God, man! Sell, sell, sell!

Remember, investors make up about 65 percent of the voting electorate.

Um, backdate a futures hedge on options derivatives for non-GAAP M&A impairment guidance? Larry?

Again, there might not be any causality between the market plunges and the primaries. But rest assured that a good number of people have been disappointed by the shape of this election battle. Nobody in either party has been reaching out to the investor class.

So true. I mean, what sort of ‘reaching out’ is a bipartisan economic stimulus package to the tune of $145 billion? It’s more like a big ‘fuck you’ to investors from the rabble-rousers who run our business-hostile political duopoly.

As far as last night’s primary results are concerned, one thing was made official: Mac is back. Sen. McCain is moving right along toward securing the GOP nomination.

Fuck him! Now, you listen to me! I want trading reopened right now. Get those brokers back in here! Turn those machines back on!

He is also developing some solid pro-growth tax reforms. This includes slashing the onerously high corporate tax rate and extending the Bush investor tax cuts on dividends and capital gains. This is good.

Turn those machines back on!

ABOVE: Amanda “Bo Peep” Carpenter

---

Amanda Carpenter, who divides her time between struggling with the English language and sniffing out Hillary Clinton scandals, is over at Clown Hall swooning over the latest alleged proof of the perfidy of Hillary Clinton:

Apparently, Hillary is considering using some of her own money to finance her campaign. If she does, I can guarantee there’ll be questions about the millions in foreign money Bill Clinton has racked up in speaking fees that’s [sic] likely stashed in their joint checking account.

Since leaving the White House, Clinton has earned more than $20 million in speaking fees from foreign sources in places like the People’s Republic of China and Dubai, according to her [sic] Senate financial disclosure forms. They also share a joint checking account according to those same forms.

If Hillary uses that foreign money to finance her campaign she will have successfully exploited a loophole in campaign finance rules that forbids [sic] the use of foreign money in U.S. elections.

The campaign finance rules also forbid corporate contributions to campaigns. Does that mean that if I’m paid by a corporation, I can’t contribute to a federal candidate? And is Ms. Carpenter checking to see whether Mitt Romney worked for any foreign clients while at Bain & Company or Bain Capital?

There’s silly, there’s imbecilic and then there’s Amanda.

This is, I must begrudgingly admit, not a great town for hydrocodone. At least, not from where I’m sitting. Which is currently in the back of a taxicab (driven by a resentful Turk, silent as the Teskilat-i Mahsusa) wheeling at reckless speeds through the taxpayer-funded parks of Washington Northwest. The dangerous urban velocity, the jogging lobbyists, the metropolitan greenery – so tempting as a dumping ground for talkative interns – it’s all conducive to a heightened sense of paranoia. Which is my natural state; the last time I was in the capitol, just a month after 9/11, I was walking on glass, set off by every bad look, assuming that everywhere I tread there was the red dot of a laser sight accompanying the back of my head. That’s the way I like it, baby; I don’t want to live forever. But the artificial narcotic calm that comes from my new white chalky pals in the plastic bottle is upsetting: here I am in the lights of Leviathan, his terrible teeth all ‘round about, attempting to open the doors of his face, and all I can think is “I wonder if it’s too late to get room service?”

Indeed, I’m beginning to understand the appeal of prescription drugs for the denizens of this town. Government largesse is strewn everywhere, on the very skyline (paid for, as the license plates remind me, by taxation without representation), but no one comes here to crusade, no one stands up and thanks their bloody luck that they live in a country rich without precedent and capable of shaping such a city. Misbegotten Mark Antonys without number flock here to claim that they come not to praise Government, but to bury it: but they’re really just here to game the system, to play a big session of Nomic that will result not in the drying up of Washington’s revenue stream, but only the redirecting of it into the right pockets. It’s not really a question of starving the beast; it’s a question of starving the people who might just happen to need the beast. The right drugs can help you pretend that it’s all just larks, with no consequences to the people driving your cab or bringing you your dry cleaning.

Lesson learned: when I arrive at the hotel, two Young Americans for Freedom are trying to check in using a credit card not belonging to them. Rules, of course, are for poor people, and they seem to think that if they berate the poor West African guy working the front desk, they’ll get what they want eventually. They may be wrong, but God damn it, no late-shift immigrant is going to tell them that. Modern Washington, the Washington of Bush and CPAC, was built to keep people like him from telling people like them what to do. I breeze in past them, a solid citizen with my own plastic, and take my place on the fifth floor just in time to replenish the opioids in my system: the flight in took me right over the Pentagon, and every time I fly that route, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s the last thing a bunch of people ever saw. It rattles me, rattles me like I was a Cameroonian hotel management student getting berated by some short-con trust fund kids. Things are already going badly and I haven’t even set foot in a CPAC event: it’s far too early to be wondering “what in God’s name am I doing here?”. Steady on, man: think of your colleagues at the American Milk Solids Council, who are counting on you to rub the right elbows and ensure that we can sell baby formula to Botswana without some meddlesome paper-peddler going on and on about necrotizing enterocolitis.

What I am doing here is to separate bad from worse. The convention will be attended, largely, by two groups of people: the mainline Republican rump who think George W. Bush was, and is, doing a Brownian heck of a job, and the radical right who think that the problem with Jolly George is that he’s not heartlessly conservative enough (whether socially or economically is a matter for a whole ‘nother fistfight). To put it another way, here we have the people who look at the wreckage of the American 2000s and pronounce it a wonderful thing, and the people who look at it and say “Yeah, it’s pretty awful, but if we tried, we could make it a whole lot worse”.

Meanwhile, China quietly rounds up dissidents in preparation for the spectacle of the Olympics. Someday they may show up and collect for all those wonderful, worthless weapons that allowed us to humble their Russian neighbors, but like every other bill the Republicans rack up, that’s for someone else to worry about. In the elevator up to my floor, two men in golf hats (golf hats? At 8PM?) talk about how high taxes will make people leave the country and stop producing if Hillary gets into office. (They’re apparently laboring under the misapprehension that Americans still produce things.) This is a real threat in the world of CPAC, while things like massive health care shortages, an increasingly ill-educated population, dependence on dwindling natural resources, and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor are the stuff of fairy tales.

I’ve arrived too late for the pre-CPAC Diamond Reception and too early for the expensive hookers to start roaming the halls. The soda machine costs a buck and a quarter for a can, so I decide to just wait for the boy to bring my bottle of gin. Then, before the pills kick in, a moment of imperialist panic: What if there is no boy? What if there is no gin?

Houston’s airport – Bush International. I’m flying out of Bush and into Reagan, moving eastward in space and backwards in time: soon I will face the Beast, but before I do, I’m killing time and brain cells in an airport named after his father, after which I will fly into one named after the Patron Saint of Modern Conservativism. By the time I get there time will have moved forward, but the names of the airports serve to remind me that I will be spending the next few days in the company of those who want it to move backward. Back to the 1980s when Reagan first began to rid us of those troublesome layabout unions, back to the 1950s with a stop along the way to annihilate the dread specter of the Sick Sick Sixties, back to the 1920s before That Man nearly ruined America with his confiscatory helpfulness, back to the 1890s with their gilded edges and men of high finance who knew the world was put there for them alone. Soon I will fly through the names of the presidents and mingle with men and women who are using the technology of the 21st century to repeal the 20th.

I break my pre-flight fast with a quick meal at McDonald’s: quick, easy, and consequence free, the very spirit and image of consumer capitalism. No two countries have ever fought a war that both operated a McDonald’s franchise, they tell me, which must be why all the employees look so cheerful and fulfilled in their jobs. They know they’re helping to usher in a new age of global peace. Fuck it, I think to myself as I perform the nutritional operation of consuming a Quarter Pounder with cheese: if I’m going to do this, I might as well do it right. No mouthing off or hipster showboating this trip. My bag is different this time: a raw and ideologically pure dive into the FDA-approved dyes of the red states. For eight years I have been lectured about the pure moral good of the heartland and the values it is said to embrace, contra my own apparently horrid set of cultural preferences. And this time, I will listen. I will shed my pretentious, intellectually hostile beliefs and attend the Conservative Political Action Conference as the paragon of red-state values I am forever urged to become.

In preparation for the trip, I do not take either of my Cassini suits to the dry-cleaners. Instead, I stop at my local Wal-Mart, the blue and white gleaming savior of American retail power, and choose from the many tasteful offerings by Puritan and George. Surely none of the Washington conservative elite will sneer at my $50-suit and Chinese shoes! After all, clothes-snobbery is a signifier of the blue-state urbanite, with his poisonous moral relativism and insatiable latte-lust. Likewise, I am not fool enough to think that I can get through four days of hobnobbing with the likes of Richard Viguerie and Ben Shapiro without some kind of chemical enhancement. But I will forsake the trailer-park speed, that low sign of the white-trash enterprenuer, and the carefully smuggled tin of chocolate Thai: such indulgence, with its natural provenance and tendency towards sloth and mockery, marks me as a liberal at best or a hippie at worst. No, this trip, it will be strictly legal alcohol, as much of it as I can possibly stomach, and good old under-the-counter pills, fistfuls at a time. My muscles will be relaxed, my pain relieved, my sleep aided, and my brain fogged by 100% pharmaceutical-grade pills, designed by corporate chemists and sold by gigantic drug concerns. I will experience CPAC the way the rest of the attendees will, blitzed out only on their own sense of self-righteousness and semi-legitimate drugs benevolently provided by an American God the way the market intended. Best of all, some nefarious Californian has engaged in shenanigans with my check card and the bank has cancelled it in expectation of issuing me a new one, so I’m living on credit the entire weekend. Thus I will do as I am urged by our most perfect of all systems: spend like mad, don’t save, buy everything on easy credit, and leave open the possibility of a massive default that the taxpayers will have to bail you out of. If it worked for the ‘fiscally conservative’ Reagan Administration, then it ought to work for me.

Fully embracing my new role as a man who’s attending a convention of right-wing crazies with the idea that their maddened, self-serving efforts to run the country into the ground are actually a good thing, I’ve even crafted an alternate identity for myself. Gone is Mister Leonard Pierce, a freelance writer and small-time criminal who is fond of Scandinavian social democracy, gangsta rap and the writings of Terry Southern. In his place is the modestly dressed, all-American Leonard Pierce, lobbyist for the Texas-based American Milk Solids Council, who only reads books with the word “management” or “Bible” in the title and wants nothing more out of his politicians than that they lower his taxes at any cost, allow him to do business any way the market will allow, and maybe if there’s enough time keep the homo queers from marrying each other. It is through the ruthless management of this façade that I will survive a weekend with a group for whom 1968 is something that happened to other people. My mantra for the next four days: pills, populism, and participatory journalism.

I take a quick trip to the bathroom and, occupying a stall previously vetted for me by one of our fine young men in the Navy, prepare a quick pre-flight cocktail of Vicodin, Percodan, Darvocet, Lortab, and something my “doctor” assured me were codeine pills, and before I remember how to blink, my flight is boarding. See, our capitalist system can make time move forward as well as backward! All hail the market, I say, possibly out loud. I merge seamlessly with the crowd of pants-suits and Oxford shirts, feeling at peace with the world as I shuffle past the obvious blue-state snobs in First Class. If only those liberal jerks (fascists to a man, I’m sure of it – Jonah Goldberg will not be in attendance at CPAC to teach us all how even a slight deviation from the gospels of Sts. Reagan and Rand leads inexorably down the path of Mussolinity, nor will Ann Coulter, unexpectedly bumped from the schedule to make room for someone less prone to bad publicity, but Dick Cheney will be in the house, which is enough concentrated evil for any thrillseeker) knew the joys of sitting back in coach with your fellow (R)-voting prole! Let them have their leg room, their comfortable seats, their complimentary cocktails. I’m back here with the real Americans, not wearing a tie for the last time all weekend, with my Wal-Mart shoes and my Eli Lilly bloodstream, and the knowledge that I am what America is all about…

All I wanted was a TV crime drama series where computers didn’t chime, ‘dididididit,’ whenever text scrolled on the screen or somebody typed something.

…And they wouldn’t give it to me!

Above: “Just one Pepsi…”

Okay, honestly now. Why do producers and arbiters of film and TV, domestically and abroad, suppose that computers must be so unfamiliar, so futuristic to the viewer, that they’re compelled to dub in this ubiquitous ‘dididididit’ sound (it’s almost always the same sound) in order to telegraph that data is being, as it were, computered?

It’s like we’re in the 1930s, and the popular cinema is all about the Futuristic Power of the Internal Combustion Engine, which, as we know, always goes ‘Vroom! Ah-oogah!’ every time you look at one.

I mean, God.

Note: Gavin will be back to normal pretty soon.

The Washington Post shows why the decision to hire William Kristol wasn’t the stupidest thing an op-ed page could do. Writing about le Président Bush, he writes:

Between 2000 and 2004, the president increased his total vote by 23 percent.

Before we move any further, we’ll start with: You may remember this non-argument from such columns as August 17, 2007:

From 2000 to 2004, this approach excited conservative enthusiasm; boosted President Bush’s support among Hispanics, Asian Americans, Catholics and women; and increased his popular vote total in his reelection bid by 23 percent.

In case you’re wondering how a pretty unpopular President managed such an impressive increase in support, well, it turns out that he didn’t. Popular vote total, of course, is the kind of thing we were told doesn’t matter because the electoral college votes are what matters. And there’s a great deal of irony in having a guy whose President lost the popular vote in 2000 draw attention to that particular statistic. But the more disturbing (disturbing means dumb in this case) thing is that comparing total votes without adjusting for the size of the voting population is like comparing prices without adjusting for inflation. Which is to say:

In 2000, 105.4 million votes were cast for a presidential candidate. Bush received 48% of those, aka 50,456,169.
In 2004, 122.3 million votes were cast for a presidential candidate. Bush received 51% of those, aka 62,040,606.

So while it’s true that Bush “increased his total vote by 23 percent,” it should have been obvious that given the total number of votes cast itself increased by a healthy 16%, making Bush’s gain not quite that impressive. 48% + 7% = 51%, but that isn’t quite as sexy, is it? (Did you know that Kerry did better than Bush’s 2000 total vote by 16%?)

Digby nails it like a Nazarene in his mid-20s:

That’s what I see when I talk to actual Democrats, particularly those who don’t spend all their time on the Internet. Not only do Democrats like both candidates, not only do they think they are going to get to vote FOR someone instead of AGAINST the Republican this year, but the primary is improving that view.

For the record, I voted for Obama (in The City, in The State), but I could just has easily have pulled the lever for Clinton. Interesting that, because back in ’92, I voted Green rather than sink to backing Diane Feinstein, who is quite possibly to the left of Hillary. It’s funny what having kids and holding down a regular job does to your pragmatism vis-a-vis politics.

Anyway, the point being, I’d be happy with either Obama or Clinton winning the nomination. And it’s been very eye-opening to see Hillary up her game in terms of optimism and inclusiveness in the face of serious competition from a man who owns those rhetorical categories. I liken it to playing pick-up basketball, where an average player can rise to level of better players much of the time.

All of which is to say, I’m pretty giddy about our November prospects at the moment.

UPDATE: What dday said. Not digby. doh!