Category: The Dish

Michael Goldfarb gets all catty about Barack Obama.

Poulos wades into some thickets:

A conservative equipped with Bramwell’s Weberian rulebook, then, is left utterly out in the cold when legitimate institutions fail. A conservative — or anyone else — bumbling along with one of Matt Yglesias’ fig leaves, however, can at least take refuge among the shards convention, hoping to shore them up against our ruin. The coalition of the willing that invaded Iraq, the NATO coalition that bombed Serbia, and Lincoln’s Grand Army of the Republic all advanced an interpretation of legitimacy, which had its logic to it under the circumstances but also fell significantly short of ‘real’ legitimacy. The real argument about all three of these military bodies, and the wars they fought, is whether, in the absence of true legitimacy, they were justified by power or by authority.

One favorite Oakeshott anecdote: at a National Review confab where Oakeshott was unfortunate enough to speak, his address received utter bewilderment from the muckety-mucks and Buckley proteges in the crowd. In the end, one of them mustered a question: "Excuse me, Mr Professor. But what does any of this have to do with the power of the president of the United States?" "Oh," Oakeshott reportedly replied. "The president of the United States has no power. He has authority."

Of all the offensive things to be said about marriage rights, this somehow manages to get under my skin:

In issuing its ruling the California court appealed to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The basic logic is that gays have a right to be treated like everyone else. But just like everyone else, gays do have the right to marry. They have the right to marry adult members of the opposite sex!

Does Dinesh think it’s a good thing for gay men to marry straight women, to lie to them, corrupt their marriages, undermine the integrity of their bond and eventually, as so often happens, leave their wives with a sense of betrayal and loss? Does he really think this is a good idea? Would he like it, for that matter, if I told him he only had a right to marry another man? Would he not be offended? The sad thing is that this exact argument was used by those opposed to inter-racial marriage. Blacks can marry, they said. They just have to marry another colored person. And if those people had had their way, Dinesh’s own inter-racial marriage would have been illegal. How soon they kick the ladder from beneath them.

The simple untruths at National Review’s Corner about the Obama campaign keep mounting. We’re told Obama didn’t campaign in Kentucky, and now we’re offered this:

If you look carefully, he isn’t winning anything more than upscale social liberals and blacks.

Of the 17 million votes Obama has already won – far, far, far more than McCain – large swathes of every segment of society have voted for him. Is his vote tilted toward social liberals and African-Americans? Sure, but his appeal is obviously much wider and deeper than that. He’s beating McCain in Pennsylvania, after all.

I guess this was inevitable – a fusion of urinals and video games:

The Place to Pee’ booth is designed for two users at a time and offers two games – blowing up aliens in outer space or skiing down a virtual slope.

Gamers hit their target by aiming at sensors positioned on either side of the urinal.

Hat tip: Jax Rant.

Almost a mirror image of Kentucky tonight: currently a 60 – 40 Obama win. Obama won those earning less than $50,000 by 52 percent to 46 percent. He wins independents 65 – 32. Exit polls here. If the current margin holds up, it will be above most expectations.

A reader writes:

From my limited perspective – my dad grew up in the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia; my mom’s family for five generations has lived in the Blue Ridge in Virginia; I grew up in the Blue Ridge and lived as an adult for a year in West Virginia – there is in mountain culture a wariness or suspicion of outsiders. People I’ve known all my life, who’ve lived in my hometown for 40 years, are still known as "not from here" (though after 40 years they’re well enough liked or tolerated, depending on the person, nonetheless). If you apply this dynamic alone to the primary results in Appalachia so far, it goes a long way toward explaining the results.

 

Hillary, by virtue of the 1990s, is simply far better known than Obama.

She’s "Hillary," of "Bill and Hillary" fame, while he’s this younger black man from Chicago with the funny name. And she has other traits that almost amount to cultural ties: primarily here I’m thinking about a troubled marriage with sordid moments, to which she has nonetheless adhered, no doubt with often gritted teeth.  She has at times, whether or not she deserves it, an air of having toughed it out. In a gestalt sort of way, she can sometimes come off like a scarred but resilient matriarch. In a lot of places in Appalachia, that counts for a whole lot more than soaring rhetoric.

A reader writes:

When will Hillary ever speak out against how horrible, how evil it is to vote against a black man — because he’s a black man? Seriously. I saw the same exit polls tonight and started to feel sick. 20% in Kentucky had no problem telling a total stranger they proudly voted against a black man?

But then I got angry because you know Hillary saw the exact same exit polls and passed up a chance to speak out against them. It would have been a mildly redeeming moment, too. After speaking fondly of Ted Kennedy, she could have brought up his civil rights record and then pivoted to how America is better than this. But no, she still selfishly and repulsively continues to drive her race and gender wedges for personal gain.

The Clintons have only one principle: their own power. Minorities are there to serve their purposes. If not, not. I saw this very vividly in the 1990s. They haven’t changed. It’s always only about them.

I’ve been watching the cable news tonight and no one I saw has actually raised the race issue in Kentucky.  But the exit poll shows that one in five voters openly declared that race was a factor – and 81 percent of them voted for the Clintons. So one fifth proudly said they voted against a black man. How many more did so but didn’t admit it? The AP reports:

Only three in 10 whites who said race was a factor said they would vote for Obama should he oppose McCain in November. Nearly four in 10 said they would back McCain, while the rest said they wouldn’t vote.

We’re discovering that a core of less educated white voters in the Appalachias will do anything to stop a black man being president of the United States. Good to know.

(Update: I hear from a reader that Chris Matthews raised the question. Good for him.)

CNN just called it. For the Clintons to regain power in the Democratic party, they now have to persuade the super-delegates to reverse the decision of the delegates selected by primaries and caucuses under the rules agreed to by all parties in advance. Of course, we know that rules don’t apply to Clintons.