Category: The Dish

Yesterday was towel day. In honor of which:
 

(Hat tip: John Cole)

David Carr today:

Even as we celebrate generations of American soldiers past, the women and men who are making that sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan receive less attention every day. There’s plenty of blame to go around: battle fatigue at home, failing media resolve and a government intent on controlling information from the battlefield.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September…

The tactical success of the surge should not be misconstrued as making Iraq a safer place for American soldiers. Last year was the bloodiest in the five-year history of the conflict, with more than 900 dead, and last month, 52 perished, making it the bloodiest month of the year so far. So far in May, 18 have died.

(A worn US flag sits infront of a grave marker for the Memorial Day weekend on May 23, 2008 at the Historic Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC. The US honors its military forces on the Memorial Day holiday 26 May. By Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"Clinton was the PC; Obama was a Mac."

No, No, No! Obama is more akin to Open Source, Linux, iGoogle, network PC, napster, limewire….

Mac is a double dip into the corporate world’s lock on hardware and software. Hillary is definitely a Mac, she takes care of everything, makes fun of the other guy (probably McCain, currently Obama), but her jokes rely on ignorance more than fact. In the Mac world you move from hardware gadget to hardware gadget, or with Hillary, from slogan to slogan, each replacing the last next best thing.

In Open Source, you expand, improve, shine, polish, integrate, mashup, a well designed soft product. The software runs on PCs and Macs, on Big Iron Sun and IBM mainframes, stitched together into a massively parallel supercomputer… all wired together.

My column this week looked at Obama’s web-based insurgency. Ambinder’s article in the current Atlantic considers how Obama’s internet model might apply to governing:

Obama clearly intends to use the Web, if he is elected president, to transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning. Notably, he has spoken of conducting “online fireside chats” as president. And when one imagines how Obama’s political army, presumably intact, might be mobilized to lobby for major legislation with just a few keystrokes, it becomes possible, for a moment at least, to imagine that he might change the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it.

In his column today he suggests that two Clinton "gaffes" are inventions of the media and/or the Obama campaign. Only when wrested from context is that in any way plausible. In context, the response to what the Clintons were saying both times is perfectly understandable – and the Clinton implication ugly. The reason the RFK remark was so tone-deaf, the reason it didn’t resonate in the same way the two times that Clinton said it before … is that, at this late stage in a six month primary process, the only way for Clinton to win is for something quite dramatic to take Obama out of the race. It’s in that context that mentioning an assassination is so offensive – and triply so because of longstanding genuine fear for Obama’s safety which no one wants to give oxygen to, for fear that some nutcase might feel empowered. Now, even if all this was completely unintentional – and we should see this as just a very unfortunate slip of the tongue – the apology made it an issue. She owed an apology to Obama but more so to Michelle Obama, a woman who has to live with this fear all the time. And yet Clinton could only apologize to the Kennedys. This tells us a great deal about someone’s character. Clinton has no class and no grace and a narcissist’s understanding of others’ pain.

And the second issue: Clinton’s earlier invocation of Lyndon Johnson in order to minimize Obama’s potential as an MLK figure.

Again, Krugman doesn’t get it. What was offensive about this is not that Johnson wasn’t essential. It was the condescension it implied. First, why is Clinton the senior figure here – the Senator against the activist? Both she and Obama are Senators, both junior ones in their respective states. Obama is not running as an activist; he’s running to be Johnson. By putting Obama in the MLK box and herself in the Johnson box, Clinton is doing what so many whites do with black rivals: assume a reflexive ownership of power and responsibility. Why shouldn’t Obama be both a King and a Johnson? Or Clinton be both for that matter? The model etched in Clinton’s head – and it is part and parcel of her entire worldview with respect to minorities – is: you vote for us, we’ll take care of you. And "we" is always white and straight and connected. Obama represents an end to those categories, which is why Clinton gets her strongest support from those most resistant to any diminution in established (i.e. white) power. Pat Buchanan gets what she appeals to, even if Krugman doesn’t.

I’ve been open to an Obama-Clinton ticket; but the more you see of the Clintons, the more you realize that getting rid of them – and the assumptions they represent – is part of what this entire campaign has come to be about.

The Democratic candidates’ enormous finance reports are straining FEC computers.

Maybe Obama would not be the first.

A Memorial Day treat: Malcolm Muggeridge explaining why he’s a conservative of the left to William F Buckley Jr. I love his English Valentine to Goldwater:

A reader dissents:

Your huffing and puffing about Chuck Hagel being a good pick to be Obama’s VP has inspired me to write as few other topics on your (often controversial) blog have.  There could be, in my view, few more poor choices for Obama.  First of all, your "Team of Rivals" analogy isn’t really borne out by reality; Salmon Chase, William Seward, Edwin Stanton, Edward Bates were all rivals of Lincoln’s within the Republican Party. Lincoln’s "team of rivals" was not composed of members of the opposing political party (unless you make the tortured argument that some of the men in his cabinet had ties to the then-dying American Whig Party). 

You are suggesting that Barack Obama balance out his liberalism by picking a conservative, but as an Obama supporter myself, and one whose support is based on the issues, not intellectual-historical fascination or cult-of-identity politics, I would be livid if Obama picked someone like Hagel as his VP.  Post-partisan is not the same as non-partisan. Obama still has positions on the issues, and those positions are radically different in many ways from the views of Chuck Hagel.  Just because Hagel is handsome, has served in the military, and is criticial of Bush, McCain, and the war, does not make him a good pick.  One glance at Hagel’s positions on the issues will reveal that far from being a proper political replacement for Obama should tragedy befall him in office, a President Hagel’s politics would amount to a reversal of any/all accomplishments that an Obama presidency will have made.

Another adds:

For years now Chuck Hagel has been my favorite Republican in the Senate. He’s the real McCain: he has all of the virtues associated with the presumed GOP nominee but without the extreme narcissistic phoniness, or, in George Will’s term, "moral vanity." And for many reasons I’d welcome Hagel onto the Democratic ticket with Obama, as it would send a clear message about the future, shore up a few of Obama’s political weaknesses, and goose the Democrats’ odds in the electoral college. 

The sticking point, of course, is choice: Hagel has never offered even an inch of wiggle room on the Grail Of All Social Issues, so I can’t imagine the party would accept him as the VP, one heart beat away from the presidency, despite the reservoir of good will he’s accumulated from voters on my side of the political spectrum. The problem really isn’t Roe v.Wade per se; it’s that for a generation choice has loomed over both parties as the defining tribal credential, the way of signaling that "you’re really one of us." Which is why McCain was ultimately acceptable to the bulk of the Republican base and Giuliani was not.

Hagel could give a speech saying he’d support President Obama’s picks for the Supreme Court a la Justices Ginsburg and Souter but I doubt that would be enough. There are plenty of pro-choice Republicans and plenty of pro-life Democrats (like, say, Bob Casey). But this issue festers at the heart of our partisan culture; and I can’t believe Obama could embrace a running mate, even such a worthy one, whose policy positions are so far from his own.

Derbyshire on the only signs of life in American politics:

P. J. O’Rourke says that if you want to latch on to a consequential, going-places political movement fired by real passion, follow the babes. Where there are pretty young women cheering and clapping in droves, there is politics with a future. By this standard, this campaign has offered us two inspirational political futures: Barack Obama’s, and Ron Paul’s.