Month: January 2008

Josh:

We seem to be at the point where there are now two credible possibilities. One is that the Clinton campaign is intentionally pursuing a strategy of using surrogates to hit Obama with racially-charged language or with charges that while not directly tied to race nonetheless play to stereotypes about black men. The other possibility is that the Clinton campaign is extraordinarily unlucky and continually finds its surrogates stumbling on to racially-charged or denigrating language when discussing Obama.

I think the Clintons have looked at Obama’s growing black support and made a simple calculation. If they can ratchet up their white votes by a constant drum-beat of Obama drug references, and they can ratchet up their female votes by portraying Clinton as a victim of male bullying in the media, then they can eke out a victory. A close victory – you know, the kind of margin Karl Rove prefers. Small, tilted to your base, and with your opponent slimed for good.

Pure partisan-jousting. Which may be the point, I guess:

The purpose of having Kristol on the op-ed page is to inoculate the paper against charges of lefty bias. To that end, it’s more effective to have a pure party-line propagandist without a shred of honesty in him than an actual independent-thinking person of somewhat conservative tendencies. Plus, it runs less risk of accidentally convincing one’s readership of anything; they read Kristol’s tripe, they get angry and hurl down their bagels in disgust, they say "How can the Times actually be printing this crap?" and they go off to vote for Obama or Hillary.

Matt Yglesias tries to figure out why Clinton is attacking Obama on Iraq. Because it’s his strength – and attacking someone’s core strength directly is a classic campaign tactic. Well, classic if you take the advice of this guy.

"We evangelicals must rethink our engagement with politics. The place to start is by remembering that the church is not a branch of a political party and that its distinctive identity and mission must be protected, both for the sake of the church and for the sake of our culture and the world," – David P. Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University and president of Evangelicals for Human Rights.

It’s hard to disagree with this:

"When you listen to that tone and the inflection, he was not talking about community organizing. It seems to me very clear what he was implying."

Bill Clinton cannot really defend it. But tries.

Obama’s campaign has a memo detailing all the racially unfortunate statements of the Clintons recently.

Eli Lake suggests a change from "Islamo-fascists." I think it’s a way to elide the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites. The question is: who wants to do this and why?

They’re hurting, and now suing PornoTube. You can see the dilemma:

"Two or three minutes — that’s all you need," Hirsch says. "After watching two or three minutes of hard-core sex, you’re not going to go and buy the full movie."

Natural selection keeps you glued to the web:

We evolved to get high whenever we learn something.