Category: The Dish

Women And Clinton

Slippage in Pennsylvania? Her campaign has become worse than even I expected, and people aren’t stupid. This cross-eyed boozing on a Saturday night, the bragging about varmint-hunting, talking of church-going (and then refusing to answer how often she goes to church): is she aware that all of this is actually much more condescending than anything Obama has said? As one reader puts it:

I love how all the media people speak as if they know the small town people when in reality they have no fucking clue who we are except that we are zombies that will do anything that they say or follow whatever they report on.

Seriously, now Clinton is handing out bumper stickers saying "Im not bitter". Me thinks my head is going to explode!! Anyone, ANYONE who is not "bitter" right now about where this country is at needs to get their brain examined.

All this will do in the long run is help Obama as the Wright issue did and other hiccups. It will prove that multi-millionaire Hillary is out of touch even more. Because frankly, we in small towns are getting pretty fed-up with this Clinton crap.

We’ll see, won’t we? I didn’t grow up in America and so can miss some of these nuances. But my sense is that Americans know that the stakes in this election are too deep to vote on the basis of class and cultural affinity.

Quote For The Day

"You know, he [Bush] wants to divide us over race. I’m from the South. I understand this. This quota deal they’re gonna pull in the next election is the same old scam they’ve been pulling on us for decade after decade after decade. When their economic policies fail, when the country’s coming apart rather than coming together, what do they do? They find the most economically insecure white men and scare the living daylights out of them. They know if they can keep us looking at each other across a racial divide, if I can look at Bobby Rush and think, Bobby wants my job, my promotion, then neither of us can look at George Bush and say, ‘What happened to everybody’s job? What happened to everybody’s income? What … have … you … done … to … our … country?’" – Bill Clinton, 1991.

The Same Old Clinton

"In A Woman in Charge, I wrote about [Senator Clinton’s] ability to evolve, observable especially in the years before she met Bill Clinton and in the Senate: to learn from her mistakes. Events have proven me wrong on that count. The 2008 Clinton campaign, in fact, has been an exercise in devolution, back to the angry, demonizing, accusatory Hillary Clinton of the worst days of the Clinton presidency, flailing, and furtive, and disingenuous; and, as in the White House years, putting forth programs and ideas worthy of respect and deserving of the kind of substantive debate she claims she wants her race against Barack Obama to be based upon," – Carl Bernstein, AC360.

Douthat vs Kagan

A point worth making:

If America is by its very nature prone to foreign misadventures – and I think [Bob] Kagan somewhat overstates this case, but for the sake of argument let’s concede the point – then surely the task of policymakers and intellectuals, in the wake of one such misadventure, is to draw lessons from What Went Wrong that might be profitably applied to future debates and crises, and that might strengthen the (weak) hand of the anti-interventionist camp the next time war fever grips the nation.

I find the idea that non-interventionism has a permanently weak hand in American politics an odd one. Until the second Iraq war, my entire adult lifetime in America was defined in part by the "Vietnam Syndrome." And you can’t understand American foreign policy since 1974 without seeing the "Powell Doctrine" front and center. America, moreover, has not attempted an actual, permanent empire in the Arab Middle East until now. If any region can cure a great power of the imperial temptation, it is Arabia.