Category: The Dish

The Cuban hardliners were "electrified."

Fox News cannot help itself:

Another bout of self-pity:

"She is winning the general election today and he is not, according to all the evidence," Clinton said. "And I have never seen anything like it. I have never seen a candidate treated so disrespectfully just for running. Her only position was, "Look, if I lose I’ll be a good team player. We will all try to win but let’s let everybody vote and count every vote.’"

Please. No one in the Obama camp has called on her to pull out if she doesn’t want to. Jeez: even I haven’t urged her to quit. She’s just lost the race already, on the rules agreed to in advance. And notice the paranoia:

"She will win the general election if you nominate her. They’re just trying to make sure you don’t."

Who on earth is "they"? Here "they" are again:

"And they’re trying to get her to cry uncle before the Democratic Party has to decide what to do in Florida and Michigan because they are claiming that it only takes 2029 votes on the first ballot to win, and it takes a lot more than that if you put Florida and Michigan back in."

That was the same paranoia in the Hillary RFK-assassination interview. They’re acting as if it’s bizarre to expect someone who has lost the pledged delegate race, has lost most states, is behind in the super-delegate count, and is mathematically unable to win without a massive wave of defections, to concede the race. It’s not bizarre. The Clintons used exactly the same arguments in 1992. What’s bizarre is the sense of entitlement the Clintons have; and the lengths they will go before their egos relent to reality.

Dave Weigel has been live-blogging the Libertarian Convention – and Bob Barr is the nominee. Read his blog, not the AP:

"Barr beat research scientist Mary Ruwart, who was the party’s presidential nominee in 1983 and vice presidential candidate in 1992." That would have been impressive, if it wasn’t totally false.

Dave has a good summary of it all here.

Dutch artist Benjamin Verdonck made a nest on the side of a skyscraper in Rotterdam. He’s staying in it for a week.   

Mori Dinauer attacks Jindal’s record:

On social issues, Jindal has a record only James Dobson could love. He strongly and openly opposes abortion (without exception, even in cases of rape and incest), supports teaching intelligent design in public schools, has proposed bans on both stem-cell research and flag burning, and voted for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman. McCain, on the other hand, has flip-flopped on all these issues except flag burning.

On McCain’s biggest problem with the conservative base, immigration, Jindal would be an effective counterbalance: He has consistently been an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration, and voted in favor of building a border fence. His economic record is a bit less dogmatic. He tends to vote against free trade agreements like CAFTA but consistently sides with energy interests over environmentalists. For example, he favored a motion to lift the moratorium on offshore gas drilling, one of many votes that led the League of Conservation Voters to give him a rating of just 7 percent.

Crowley isn’t having it.

Reihan argues that Obama should pick Webb. His bottom line:

The question is no longer whether Barack Obama should select Jim Webb as his nominee. It is whether he can justify not doing so. Even if Webb murdered someone in an alleyway in a fit of pique or been paid vast sums by the Chinese Politburo for detailed intelligence about American naval vessels, he would still be a far stronger and more appealing vice presidential nominee than Hillary Clinton.

Ambinder’s shortlists for Obama and McCain are here. I’m increasingly leaning toward Hagel. Why? Because the one way the GOP can defeat Obama is by painting him into a box of alien, leftwing, radical, Wright-loving Democratic partisan. Obama has suffered in this campaign from a diminution of his post-partisan appeal. He needs foreign policy credibility against McCain; he needs a man who can rival McCain’s veteran experience and who can make the case for a break from neoconservatism – as a conservative option. Obama needs no more liberal enthusiasm. He needs conservative ballast. And if you are going to go the Team Of Rivals route, picking a Republican as a vice-president would be ground-breaking.

Bartlett, Illinois, 8 pm.

A few paragraphs from Randall Kennedy’s 2002 article on interracial marriage:   

The de-stigmatization in this country of interracial intimacy is profoundly encouraging. Against the tragic backdrop of American history, it is a sign that Frederick Douglass may have been right when he prophesied, even before the abolition of slavery, that eventually "the white and colored people of this country [can] be blended into a common nationality, and enjoy together … the inestimable blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The great but altogether predictable irony is that just as white opposition to white-black intimacy finally lessened, during the last third of the twentieth century, black opposition became vocal and aggressive. In college classrooms today, when discussions about the ethics of interracial dating and marriage arise, black students are frequently the ones most likely to voice disapproval.

It seems to me that Obama’s potential as president is not really that he will be the first black president but that he will be the first president who is both black and white. When you consider the history of race in America – especially when you remember how central the phobia of miscegenation was to all of it – the "audacity of hope" is only the half of it.

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/Getty.)