The Dish

Matthew Franck thinks appointing Clinton to SCOTUS would be a gift to Republicans:

Miller misses the most obvious blunder such a move would commit.  Promising the Democratic Party that he would appoint Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court would put Barack Obama on record as committed to the proposition that the Court is just another political institution like any other.  Its vacancies would be viewed as political chips, to be wagered in a presidential campaign without regard to legal or constitutional categories of thought.

It’s working in reducing flows of illegal immigrants. But the more successful it is, the more the opposition to it grows.

 

Chuck Todd explains.

"If she’s consciously lying, it’s a shockingly cynical move. I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s so convinced of her own morality and historical importance that she can whip herself into a moralistic fervor to support nearly any position that might benefit her, however crass and sleazy. It’s not just that she’s convinced herself it’s okay to try to steal the nomination, she has also appropriated the most sacred legacies of liberalism for her effort to do so. She is proving herself temperamentally unfit for the presidency," – Jon Chait.

Seriously, guys:

Desperate to get attention for her cause to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”

“We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe," Clinton explained. "Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people,” Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida.

Can someone get her help?

A reader writes:

I’m a longtime daily reader who hasn’t written you much, if ever, but I wanted to make two quick points about this post:

Yes, there was definitely a sharper partisan message when he talked about McCain in Iowa yesterday.  And yes, that’s exactly the type of thing he’s promised to avoid, thus attracting a lot of independents such as yourself to his candidacy. But for those of us who are Democrats, who held their noses and voted for Kerry in 2004, you have to realize how unbelievably refreshing it is to hear the Democratic candidate speak the way he did last night.  You’ve touched on it before – he doesn’t respond to attacks from a defensive position, he punches right back. He believes that his arguments are the better arguments, not that his position can be framed in a way that will appease 51% of the electorate.

And secondly, a lot of Obama’s supporters did support Bill and Hillary in the 1990s (sorry, Andrew, but this is the Democratic party). And while we’ve been appalled and ashamed over the last year and a half as the Clintons’ true character (or lack thereof) revealed itself in so many ways, it’s never felt completely right to view the Clintons as the enemy (not that it stopped us). To be finally able to put the intra-party squabbling behind us and focus our attention on a candidate that supports the Iraq War, supported the Military Commissions Act, favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, and is beholden to a chorus of socially backward special interests just by virtue of his party affiliation – it’s refreshing like you wouldn’t believe.

Timothy Egan considers the myopic media coverage on race:

In 2000, George Bush won West Virginia 52 to 46 percent.  Four years later, he’d increased his margin to 56-43. In Kentucky, Bush won 57-41 in 2000, and padded that to 60-40 four years later.

Appalachia, we now know, is Clinton’s heartland – but it does not resemble the Democratic landscape. If these are Democratic states, there’s some strange serum in the local brew at party headquarters.

This quote from Kentucky from George Packer’s new piece on American conservatism is helpful context:

“He’s a Muslim, isn’t he?” an aging mine electrician asked. “I won’t vote for a colored man. He’ll put too many coloreds in jobs. Colored are O.K.—they’ve done well, good for them, look where they came from. But radical coloreds, no—like that Farrakhan, or that senator from New York, Rangel. There’d be riots in the streets, like the sixties.”

The California court had a more direct response:

It is sophistic to suggest that this conclusion is avoidable by reason of the circumstance that the marriage statutes permit a gay man or a lesbian to marry someone of the opposite sex, because making such a choice would require the negation of the person’s sexual orientation.

Of course, the negation of gay people’s sexual orientation is the goal of D’Souza. We do not exist, as far as he is concerned.

A blogger laments:

Reihan’s struggle against Comcast is every person’s struggle. Or at least every blogger in the DC area’s.

Some day, I plan to write a full-length, filmed musical about one man’s struggle to defeat Comcast. Hopefully, it will end with our hero triumphant, a beautiful lady in his arms while he downloads a movie to his new Netflix box, which has triumphed in the video-on-demand market and become a benevolent monopolist.

A reader writes:

I just listened to Webb’s Fresh Air interview–thanks for the link. If Obama does not pick Webb for VP, he’s not half as smart as I think he is.

Besides all his personal qualifications, besides all the obvious political benefits, Webb could do something for Obama that only he could do, and that would fit perfectly with Obama’s larger goals–indeed, complete them: he could bind up the internal wounds that have plagued the Democratic Party since the anti-war days of the 60’s and 70’s, and through that healing, begin to heal the larger American body politic–that great Boomer schism you have talked about at length. Who else could serve that function? Not Edwards, not Strickland, good as they might be in other ways. Internally, Webb’s experience as a citizen soldier, coupled with his early and adamant opposition to the Iraq war, could bring the two sides of the Democratic Party together; externally, Webb is the only one with the experience and the personality to take on McCain and the neo-cons. This interview–and what I’ve learned about Webb recently–have sold me on the guy. He’s as smart as they come, he’s got the creds, and he’s a thoughtful, progressive force.