The Dish

A reader writes:

The wife and I were talking about this last week. She believes that Hillary Clinton really is crazy, and is living in a state of denial, and has no plans for the future beyond the election. I tend towards the view that she is pretending to be crazy, as a way to try to scare others into giving her what she wants.

Thoughts?

A little of both, perhaps. When it comes to Mrs Clinton, one under-estimated factor is the nature of her ambition. As her life has progressed from those salad days at Wellesley, her own long march through the institutions has been fraught with awful moral compromise. In this campaign alone, the pacts she has made with various devils to keep ahead of the pretender to her throne have been particularly brutal. Somewhere in her head, she justifies all the principles she has trashed over the years, all the enemies she has allied with, all the racists she has won over, all the abused women she has smeared … on the grounds that if she becomes president, the good she can do will outweigh it all. These are the sacrifices all people who seek power for the good must undergo, she tells herself. To have it all taken away from her at the last minute – by someone who hasn’t made as many compromises – is therefore unimaginably cruel. She cannot accept it – because her life’s work is at stake. So she struggles on. Her private life, her marriage, is fused with her public life. So she has nowhere else to go. Which is why she stays. This is all there is for her.

Is that crazy? I don’t know. But it is immeasurably sad. Not sad enough for pity. She did this all herself. But sad nonetheless.

Roger Altman wants Clinton to quit soon. But she’s not listening to anyone:

"The campaign has broken down to those who drink the Kool-Aid that Hillary can still win, and those who don’t, and are considering their options," one operative said.

It makes a difference.

The sexual marketing of seat belts.

Start smoking in the hospital, dudes. He’s cured cancer now:

A group is trying to create quasi-sovereign, libertarian ocean communities on strange looking platforms.

British Tory leader David Cameron gave a speech yesterday that outlined his approach to taxing and spending. Peter Hoskin reviews it here. It’s McCain before he committed to the permanence of the Bush tax cuts:

After a decade of reckless spending under Labour, Britain needs good housekeeping from the Conservatives.  We need to start living within our means. Why?  Because in the decades ahead there will be pressure to spend more on the essentials – whether that’s care for the older generation, equipment for our armed forces, or more prisons and police to keep us safe. At the same time, we have reached the limits of acceptable taxation and borrowing. With the rising cost of living, taxpayers can’t take any more pain indeed they want a government that can give them the prospect of relief. And our economy can’t take any more pain without losing jobs to lower tax competitors.

So how are we going to square the circle?

How are we going to spend more on the essentials without putting taxes up – and over time, creating the space for cutting tax, as we have promised to do?  Our overall method and aim are clear: we will share the proceeds of economic growth. Sharing the proceeds of economic growth is what living with our means, actually means. Not spending everything we have. Not borrowing to spend beyond our means. But ensuring that, over time, the economy grows faster than the state, so spending falls as a share of national income and we can reduce taxes and borrowing.

Those who criticise sharing the proceeds of growth have sometimes not appreciated that if a government actually did this, either taxes, or borrowing, or both would have to fall over an economic cycle.  I stress: have to fall.

And to reduce spending, he proposes welfare reform, pro-family policies, long-term waste reduction, and an overhaul of top-down public services. It matches Labour’s spending plans but promises to make them more efficient and more accountable. Like Hoskin, I have my qualms. But it’s a start toward restoring conservatism’s brand as a careful custodian of public finances.

A young girl affected by cyclone Nargis poses near a monastery where she and her family found shelter near Kyauktan in the delta region south of Rangoon on May 16, 2008.

Hitchens compliments McCain’s proposal to go before both houses for questions:

…[McCain] has made a rather generous and intelligent offer. He probably thinks that it is in keeping with his expressed commitment to that chimera known as "bipartisanship." He would soon find out that nothing intensified political rancor more than a good old-fashioned Question Time, but no doubt the idea was well-meant, and I was sorry to see that discussion of it was mostly lost in the general sneering.

Weigel counters Goldfarb:

Where does a lot Barr’s potential base come from? Embittered white conservatives who will not vote for McCain but could never vote for Obama. Some of these people are racists (or people who put too much faith in the e-mails their cousins forward them); most, hopefully, will be talk radio listeners who consider McCain a quisling on immigration, taxes, free speech, etc and etc. They’ve spent the primaries casting protest votes for Paul or Huckabee, or putting on Operation Chaos fatigues and voting for Clinton. I’m a huge skeptic about the salience of the immigration issue, but with a Republican base this depressed and angry, immigration can be effective wedge for Barr. He doesn’t have to finesse his position very much to attack the guy talk radio calls "Juan Amnesty McCain."

The effect this will have on the election, of course, isn’t just a zero-sum vote-for-vote effect. It has the potential to box in McCain the way Ralph Nader boxed in Al Gore. How much can McCain brag about his immigration reform cred in public, to Hispanic voters, without Barr rallying the talk radio vote? How much time or money does Barr make McCain waste in a gimme state like Georgia or Alaska, the way Nader made Gore waste time in Oregon and Minnesota? Republicans are avidly hoping that Paul does not rent his donor list to Barr (or Chuck Baldwin) because they see the potential here.