Category: The Dish

Jonathan Martin notices a convenient dynamic in the North Carolina ad flap.

Rove let the cat out of the bag: it’s Michigan, stupid:

While all eyes were locked on Pennsylvania for the last six weeks, Clinton was quietly amassing delegates in the Wolverine State. And she was rewarded this past weekend with a significant victory at the district conventions…

Buoyed by party elder support, Clinton seems likely to capture more than 60 percent of the state’s 128 pledged delegates, according to an analysis by the Michigan Information & Research Service. Including the 28 superdelegates, which lean heavily in the New York senator’s favor, she could win upward of 70 percent of delegates, provided that they’re seated with full voting power…

It’s becoming apparent that Obama should have consented to a revote here. He certainly wouldn’t have lost by 15 percentage points or more; polls have pegged the pair in a dead heat. But Obama seemed spooked that Clintonites put forth the plan and the money, so he quashed the do-over last month.

Now Obama is paying the price in delegates, starting with the Michigan Democratic Party’s 15 district conventions on Saturday. The Clinton battle plan was flawlessly executed with an eye toward a contested convention. Their delegate roster is crammed with big names like former Gov. Jim Blanchard and Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero.

This is going all the way to Denver.

Michael Burleigh makes the case:

…as President Bush recently acknowledged, the US needs Iran to leave Iraq in a long-term stable condition. It is currently Iran that is not turning up to the offer of meetings. One scenario I’ve heard about is the Finnish solution. At the end of WWII, the US and USSR agreed that while Finland would be a democracy based on liberal capitalism, it would not join NATO and major decisions would be subject to Soviet veto. Although the prospect seems unlikely, Iran is terrified of a revival of Sunni dominance and a renewal of the war which cost a million Iranian dead in the 1980s. The US is also adamant that Iraq’s oil will not fall under Iranian suasion. One solution is therefore for Iraq to become a latterday Finland. Independent, but incapable of menacing its neighbours. That would also assuage Saudi fears about a Shia dominated northern neighbour.

Something like this will be inevitable, if only because, like Finland and the USSR, the geographical proximity and regional pull of Iran on Shia-run Iraq is irresistible – and certainly more powerful than any distant hyper-power’s influence. A more normal Iraq in a few years’ time – and that’s the best possible scenario right now – will be a major advance for Shia Iran. We will have succeeded in moving the faultline between Shia and Sunni a few hundred miles West. In the end, that’s what 4,000 military deaths, probably close to 200,000 civilian deaths, and $3 trillion will have accomplished. If we’re lucky.

Jason is surely right: the only rationale for the GOP to run their race-based ad against Obama in North Carolina now rather than later is to help Clinton. Yes, it’s officially directed against locals. But that’s obviously a fig-leaf. What we’re currently seeing is a strong and building alliance between the Republican party and the Clinton machine to prevent Obama from becoming president.

In this passage, he sounds like Lanny Davis:

In fact, on Tuesday night she actually grabbed the popular vote lead: If you include the Michigan and Florida primary results, Mrs. Clinton now leads the popular vote by a slim 113,000 votes out of 29,914,356 cast.

Mr. Obama will argue he wasn’t on the ballot in Michigan and didn’t campaign in Florida. But don’t Democrats want to count all the votes in all the contests? After all, Mr. Obama took his name off the Michigan ballot; it isn’t something he was forced to do. And while he didn’t campaign in Florida, neither did she.

My italics. The Michigan angle is now the core element of the Clinton struggle – which is why Rove endorsed it this morning.

The great clarifier of this primary season has been the in-gathering of most of the most toxic, cynical forces in American politics – Democrat and Republican – to extinguish the Obama campaign. In the end, Rove and Clinton are in the same party (Washington, Inc.) and play by the same rules (whatever they can say they are at any given moment). But they’re losing. And this head-game is pretty much their last gambit.

"You were the first ones to call it for Hillary Clinton. Fair and balanced Fox. You beat them all," – Terry McAuliffe.

A reader writes:

I don’t know how you know that Bill Kristol doesn’t really believe Obama is a commie since you have to take Bill’s word for it just as you take Barack’s word that he is a Christian.  I firmly believe that Obama is a typical Ivy League atheist who plays at Christianity in a cynical way to get elected to public office.  I don’t believe he is a communist – I suspect he is – but it has not formed into a full belief yet.  Let him speak extemporaneously for the next two weeks leading up to my neighboring state, Indiana, and things may crystallize.

Go Hillary!

The merging of the memes of the far right and the Clinton campaign is one of the most remarkable aspects of this campaign. I can actually envisage Pat Buchanan endorsing Clinton against McCain this fall. Anything to stop the black commie elitist. And it turns out that many Clinton Democrats now echo Buchanan! If you live long enough …

A spiritually numbing and uplifting series of portraits taken of the terminally ill in the days before and just after their deaths. This photograph is a posthumous one of Roswitha Pacholleck, 47. Money quote:

“It’s absurd really. It’s only now that I have cancer that, for the first time ever, I really want to live,” Roswitha told me on one of my visits, a few weeks after she had been admitted to the hospice. “They’re really good people here,” she said. “I enjoy every day that I’m still here. Before this my life wasn’t a happy one.”

Hat tip: Peter Rollins.

This is the latest from Michael Savage whom Hugh Hewitt believes is to the right what Chris Matthews is to the left:

"Look who we inherited in this country, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Hussein Obama, in one generation. A war hero to — a war hero who commanded the Allied operations against Nazi Germany was running for the presidency then. Now we have an unknown stealth candidate who went to a madrassas in Indonesia and, in fact, was a Muslim despite what Straw Hair will tell you on "Softball." Yes, check it out."

Is Obama a Muslim? Does it matter any more? We are in world of McTruthyism. In that world, Obama is an atheist, a Muslim, a black liberation theologian and a Marxist. Since the truth is irrelevant, they can all be true!

A reader writes:

This morning I saw an excerpt from Obama’s concession speech in Indiana where he said the following:

"Or this time, we can build on the movement we’ve started in this campaign – a movement that’s united Democrats, Independents, and Republicans; a movement of young and old, rich and poor; white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, gay and straight."

I have two comments about this:

First, I cannot recall a politician ever speaking after a loss, proclaiming that he wants to bring together gays and straights. That is amazing. Can you imagine Hillary ever saying anything like that to a national audience, especially after a defeat?

Second, the "gay and straight" portion is not included in the text of the speech on Obama’s website.  This means either 1) the campaign removed those words from the edited transcript or 2) (more likely) Obama’s inclusion of "gay and straight" was impromptu.  It wasn’t included by the speech writers, but he included it at the spur of the moment.  If this is true, how amazing it is that there is a politician who is willing to stand up for us gay Americans who have been ignored for so long.  I hope Obama knows how much those three small words that he included in his speech mean to us.

I noticed it too. Unimaginable coming from a Clinton. And it will, of course, be regarded by the Steyn-Hewitt types as more evidence that Obama is an extreme communist terrorist. But it will be regarded by the next generation as more evidence that Obama is the candidate of the future. He is. Quite how far into the future is what we are finding out.