Category: The Dish

Not militaristic enough for Andy McCarthy. Too pro-Muslim for John Derbyshire.

From a blog made up entirely of actual IM conversations:

A: A few of us were playing ‘F**k, Friend or Throw off a Cliff’
A: You ever played this?
B: No
A: I’ll explain
A: I was given the names Ernie, Elmo and Oscar the Grouch, and I had to choose which one I’d f**k, which one I’d want as a friend, and which one I’d throw off a cliff
B: Oscar was the friend, I assume.

The rest here.

Where everyone stands:

In the month of February, McCain raised just under $11 million, compared to $34 million for Clinton and $55 million for Obama.The numbers get worse when you look at the whole election cycle: in total, McCain has raised just $64 million, less than half of Clinton’s $170 million, and a third of Obama’s $193 million.

But what’s most striking is the debt. The Clinton campaign has amassed a staggering $8.7 million worth, double McCain’s $4.3 million. Obama, on the other hand, owes only $625,000. By campaign standards, he’s debt free.

Not by planes anyway:

"Yeah, so, no evasive maneuver. I gotta tell ya, I will give it to the commander of Air Base Eagle. He had that place – you know, not only were there no bullets flying around, there wasn’t a bumblebee flying around," – Retired Colonel William "Goose" Changose, the pilot who flew Clinton to Bosnia.

This was Clinton’s version of her Tuzla trip in 1999:

"You know, I went to Bosnia shortly after the peace accords were signed, when it was safe enough to go to our base in Tuzla, but not very safe to go anywhere else. I couldn’t get into Sarajevo. But I was able to fly out of Tuzla into two base camps — Camp Alicia and Camp Bedrock — to visit with the men and women who were there on the front lines of Americas peace-keeping efforts."

A reader writes:

Ack — I can’t take it anymore — I don’t care that much about Wright and it doesn’t affect my support for Obama, but you and these other "scholars" have to stop pissing on our heads and telling us it’s raining!  There’s no way to excuse Wright’s poisoning of children’s minds with his AIDS conspiracy crap no matter how long he was a marine or how much better he was compared to other black preachers of his era. Bullshit. 

The man is part of the problem, not part of the solution and if African-Americans can’t grow up enough to treat him as such then I’m leaving the table.  I’ll acknowledge Wright’s good works, but the Bible teaches us that good works towards some do not excuse sins towards others.  Your constant "I don’t condone his statements but…" won’t cut it.

The latest CBS NBC poll is fascinating. Chuck Todd:

As expected, one of the two major Democratic candidates saw a downturn in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, but it’s not the candidate that you think. Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37% positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.

The Wright issue is not over for Obama, but he actually seems to have come off less scathed by the process than Clinton, in this poll at least. Most of the damage has been among Republicans; he still is far stronger among Independents than Clinton.

Some perspective on those Gallup numbers, showing a large proportion of Obama and Clinton voters prepared to vote for the GOP in the fall if their candidate loses.

The history of the yellow book:

In 1906, Jews in Trenton threatened to boycott Bell over a resort listing’s promise, "Free From Hebrews and Tuberculosis Patients." Temperance groups in the North agitated to ban brewery ads from directories, while some Southern directories segregated into separate sections for "white" and "colored" numbers. Women’s directory struggles are still within living memory: NYNEX’s first listings for birth-control counseling only appeared in 1967, while Bell fought well into the late 1970s to deny women equal billing alongside their husbands in household listings, claiming it required too much extra paper and ink.

And why they won’t go away:

Ask anyone under 30 about phone books, though, and you might as well inquire about Victrola needles. The Yellow Pages Association claims that even young households use them when the occasion—a wedding, for instance—demands reliable listings. But printed phone books are a maturing industry, with only about six in 10 businesses and individuals still regularly relying on them. Yet even as directories hemorrhage content to the Web and to unlisted cell numbers, enough oldsters—those, say, who still recall physically dialing numbers in a rotary motion—continue using them enough to keep profits rolling in.

A big heart; a gracious piece. Some believe that in the Obama candidacy, there is more at stake than others do. Like Marty, I am still open to supporting McCain this fall, primarily because of character and decency. Hagee and Falwell should not be ignored; but nor should they be dispositive. Iraq is in a terrible, near-impenetrable flux and how McCain and Obama respond to its shifting levels of crisis in the coming months will tell us a lot about the enormous burden of the presidency in the wake of the Bush-Cheney disaster. And how they respond to the economic clouds will be fascinating too.

But like Marty, I find something deeply rotten in the state of the Clintons, and know in advance that they cannot be trusted and will not respond genuinely to events or candidly to democracy. Like Marty also, I am not prepared to dismiss all that Obama is and represents because of the ugly intemperance of a preacher whose context is wide and complex, some of whose statements are simply indefensible, and many have been sincere and prophetic.

This election, I feel, is less and less about ideology. It is more and more about conscience and judgment. Keep examining yours and I will try to keep examining mine. There is a long way to go.