Category: The Dish

A Kossite laments:

Shakespeare couldn’t write this tragedy but she is living it. And I know she is so much better than this.

I think Bill Clinton has now officially lost it.

Huckabee relates the key prudential principle of Christianism. Yes: it’s vertical. When addressing what a polity needs, you just need to ask God. And then we obey. At least now no one will hide it. This dog whistle is loud and public and audible by anyone:

"When we become believers, it’s as if we have signed up to be part of God’s Army, to be soldiers for Christ… When you give yourself to Christ, some relationships have to go. It’s no longer your life; you’ve signed it over."

His sermon/speech in New Hampshire is an almost text-book study of the fundamentalist psyche I outline in the first chapter of "The Conservative Soul." If you want Bush’s fundamentalism and big government liberalism taken to the next level, vote Huckabee. The two of them threaten to purge the GOP of its traditional conservatism.

I gagged when I read Bill Kristol warning of Obama’s "nanny-state" impulses. This from a Bush-supporter! I’m sorry but Kristol has no standing to defend a conservatism he largely ignored or trashed while he was close to the levers of power under Bush and Rove. Bruce Bartlett gets it right:

I think the standard answer to every objection to Obama by Republicans should be this:  He can’t be worse than Bush.

From a conservative perspective, on spending, debt, big government, regulation, which Democrat could be worse?
 

Fallows skewers Kristol’s first column:

A single cliched phrase, like the last sentence of the first paragraph, can be effective. A whole string of cliches, like the second paragraph, is effective only in raising questions about the author’s skill and quality of thought.

Jim Douglas, Republican governor of neighboring Vermont, endorses him.

His time is now:

From a Clinton campaign email list:

The Iowa caucus  process  is a broken and flawed process. It was designed to allow for the active party Dems generally known to one another to assign delegates and was not designed to handle a flood of students and independents. It was a system designed to give more power to Dem party loyalists. In the tension over whether the candidates should be chosen by the party or by the general public, the Iowa caucus was designed to give the party the advantage. For this reason, the Iowa system failed on Thursday.

Translation: we couldn’t control it. So it sucks.

Jon Favreau (not the "Swingers" dude) heads the small team:

Favreau and Obama rapidly found a relatively direct way to work with one another. "What I do is to sit with him for half an hour," Favreau explains. "He talks and I type everything he says. I reshape it, I write. He writes, he reshapes it. That’s how we get a finished product."

A reader writes:

Your reader is really onto something. Obama, in embracing hope, has reinvigorated a sense of patriotism, or even nationalism, on the American left. Such sentiments have tended to be shunned these past few years, not because leftists aren’t patriotic or proud of their country, but because they — like you, I suspect — aren’t particularly proud of what their country represents at the moment.  But Obama invites us to believe in the possibility of transcending this moment, in a way that no other candidate really does.  I think all the candidates have their virtues: Edwards has real passion, and Clinton has a true dedication to her work and her beliefs.  But I don’t think any of the candidates have as deep a love of, or as fierce a belief in, America. And he alone makes the fresh renewal of that idea by a new generation seem possible, attainable. 

He makes the weight of the Bush years seem less heavy, and lets us see beyond what these depressing times make seem like the limits of our own potential. And as a lefty, I can tell you that that’s where the America we know — the America that inspires in us not just pride, but fierce patriotism — resides.