Category: The Dish

A reader offers:

We’ve all heard about the politics of personal destruction. Clinton is practicing the politics of Party destruction.

I have to say it makes me feel reassured that my old boss and friend has taken the position that he has in this election, however much that might tick off Matt. It’s odd that I don’t feel queasy about Obama the way I do about someone like Jimmy Carter or Tony Lake or even Madeleine Albright. After the last few years, the prospect of real diplomacy should not be ignored. But Obama is not, I think, a naive dreamer. Back to Marty:

A case can be made for sitting down with our enemies — as long as we understand that they are our enemies.

So Barack Obama’s belief in the power of speech worries me in the realm of foreign affairs. But otherwise he has won my confidence. Unlike the isolationists in the guise of idealists, or the cheerleaders for violence who pretend to be pacifists and populists, Mr. Obama is a patriot of the old cadence and the old convictions, and not easily pushed around. If he is elected president, he will disappoint many of his supporters, and surprise many of his detractors.

I have the same hunch.

Apparently not. This seems to be becoming a bigger clusterfuck with every passing day.

David Corn:

How can the Clintonites justify tossing questions about Rezko at Obama but decrying his questions about her tax returns, equating his queries with Ken Starr’s inquisition into Whitewater and Monicagate?

A better question: How can David still be asking "how can?" of the Clintons.

Matt Cooper’s two cents:

Hope is a great message. Math isn’t. Whining’s even worse.

My view is still that Obama should not go negative. His surrogates and supporters should – especially those of us who remember the Clintons’ sleazy, polarizing past. But he does need to become more aggressive and more direct. I should add: asking for the Clintons to release their tax returns is not negative. Pointing out that Clinton has very little experience in foreign policy is also not negative. It’s simply true. One way of not going negative while being aggressive would be to explain, along the lines of this post, why the Clintons represent the past and the Washington establishment; why they actually mean a third term of Rovism. He has to stop hoping that his veiled references to Rove-Morris politics somehow sink in with people, without spelling it out. He needs not just to resist the Clintons’ tactics, but to expose them. And show them as the bankrupt, irrelevant diversion that they are.

And then remind us whey we long to get past them; and why he alone can do it.

It’s Friday. It’s the Atlantic library. And Reihan’s head explodes:

Psychologist Ellen Ladowsky examines why Hillary Clinton remains so creepy to so many. I prefer Hitch’s formulation: the kind of person who never wants the meeting to end. If you’ve ever been on a condo board, you know the type.

A fantastic column, in my view. She’s one of the few conservatives with her eyes wide open. This was particularly good:

[Clinton] is hardy, resilient, tough. She is a train on a track, an Iron Horse. But we must not become carried away with generosity. The very qualities that impress us are the qualities that will make her a painful president. She does not care what you think, she will have what she wants, she will not do the feints, pivots and backoffs that presidents must. She is neither nimble nor agile, and she knows best. She will wear a great nation down.

Jon Chait on the fratricidal maniac that is Hillary Clinton. Money quote:

Pennsylvania is a swing state that Democrats will almost certainly need to win in November, and Clinton will spend seven weeks and millions of dollars there making the case that Obama is unfit to set foot in the White House. You couldn’t create a more damaging scenario if you tried.

If she cannot win the White House, she wants McCain to beat Obama. She is clearing the ground for him. A reader points out what the Clintons’ next move would be as McCain takes office:

She and her numerous supporters will view this as a repudiation of Obama, not Clinton. If he loses the general election as a result of this, it will prove her right all along—that the only way to further the Democratic agenda is to beat the Republicans at their game. New politics will have been a sham. If the victors write the history books, then the triumph of cynicism will not be cause for despair, but rather cause for celebration of the one cynic who saw all this, and tried to save us hopemongers from ourselves.

This is the Golden Rule about the Clintons – and take it from someone like me who actually endorsed the guy in 1992 and came to see what lies beneath: it’s always, always, always about them.

We’re beginning to understand why the Clintons refuse to release their tax returns:

Mr. Clinton had gotten the nonpublicly traded stock from Accoona Corp. back in 2004 as a gift for giving a speech at a company event. He landed the windfall by selling the 200,000 shares to an undisclosed buyer in May 2006, commanding $3.50 a share at a time when the company was reporting millions of dollars of losses, according to interviews.

This is just the beginning. But the Clintons – and their media lackeys – refuse to abide by the most basic rules of campaign transparency.