The Dish

Boulder, Colorado, 8.47 am.

There’s a kernel of truth in Victor Davis Hanson’s latest anti-Obama screed, and Charles Krauthammer’s bitter fury at Obama supporters. Obama was, I think, brought up and lived for a long time in an atmosphere in which occasional left-wing excess did not grate on his ears or his temperament as they would on people like, er, me. And his desire to connect to a black experience he never fully had himself also played a part in not distancing himself from some aspect of his pastor’s rhetoric or friends’ associations. But to go from this to the vicious attempt to portray Obama as a fraud, an actor, and another phony politician is a sign of the hard right’s nervousness. When you listen to Sean Hannity, you hear someone who looks at Obama and sees every racial fear he has ever had about black Democrats personified. The difficulty of making distinctions between, say, Sharpton, Jackson and Obama is just too much for him. They’re all black Democrats, aren’t they? They must all be traitors or far left anti-American hate-mongers. He doesn’t even hear the broader Obama message, the full Obama manifesto, the book, the countless speeches, and interviews and debates in which Obama’s broader post-racial, post-partisan appeal is exposed. One can only hope that most people will see the full picture. But the right-wing freak show machine will do all it can to prevent it.

VDH is also 80 percent right and 100 percent wrong on this:

[Obama’s supporters] despise George Bush, will do anything to prevent another Republican in the White House, are tired of the Clintons, and feel Obama offers them symbolic capital, making them liked abroad and free of guilt at home.

Well, yes. I don’t think Obama would be in anything like the position he is now in were it not for George W. Bush.

In fact, I think Bush has made Obama possible. Many of us are so disgusted, repelled and appalled by what has been done these past few years – massive spending, massive debt, a fantastically bungled war, the legalization of torture, the demonization of minorities, etc. – that we are prepared to look over some ideological and political differences to back the person who most represents a total repudiation of the Bush Republicans. That Obama also represents a repudiation of boomer culture warfare, transforms our racial politics and single-handedly rebrands America as a decent force in the world is, of course, hard to get across to those who still regard Bush as a great president.

So yes, this is in part about the toxins of the Bush years: a desire to flush them as emphatically as possible from the communal bloodstream. Of course, the Republican right can’t get it. But the polls on Bush’s disastrous presidency reveal how marginalized the Bush right now is.

Richard North attacks British baby boomers.

The London Spectator has all the goods on the Tory triumph in London and across England in local elections. Yes. they’re biased: he was their former editor. And yes, I’m biased. I’ve been a fan since college days – but never thought he’d be taken as seriously as this. And check out his Wiki page. A character with this much baggage would never survive the swift-boating in the US. Is he a harbinger of future Tory government? Peter Hoskin:

The Tories now have the perfect opportunity to be seen as the party of the low-income earner.

Led by an extremely wealthy Etonian. Well: if that isn’t the essence of Toryism, what is?

(Photo: William Wintercross/Getty._

Steven Simon argues that the surge has stalled top-down solutions:

The surge has changed the situation not by itself but only in conjunction with several other developments: the grim successes of ethnic cleansing, the tactical quiescence of the Shiite militias, and a series of deals between U.S. forces and Sunni tribes that constitute a new bottom-up approach to pacifying Iraq. The problem is that this strategy to reduce violence is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state. If anything, it has made such an outcome less likely, by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni Arab tribes and pitting them against the central government and against one another. In other words, the recent short-term gains have come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

Despite the current lull in violence, Washington needs to shift from a unilateral bottom-up surge strategy to a policy that promotes, rather than undermines, Iraq’s cohesion. That means establishing an effective multilateral process to spur top-down political reconciliation among the major Iraqi factions. And that, in turn, means stating firmly and clearly that most U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Iraq within two or three years. Otherwise, a strategy adopted for near-term advantage by a frustrated administration will only increase the likelihood of long-term debacle.

"I would not be here were it not for the fact that somebody, somewhere stood up for me. Because one person stood up, a few more stood up. Then a thousand stood up, and then a million stood up. That’s why Hillary Clinton can run for President.  That’s why I can run for President.

Because somebody stood up.

And the question now is: Will the Democratic Party stand up for the next generation? That’s my Patriotism. Those are my values. That’s what we’re fighting for in this election," – Barack Obama, Friday night.

How can we let this opportunity pass us by?

Another illegal club-drug turns out to have some genuine clinical use:

Ketamine, which can also cause feelings of detachment, could pave the way for new treatments for people suffering from depression, the researchers added.

Their study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found ketamine restores to normal the orbifrontal cortex, an area of the brain located above the eyes that is overactive in depressed people.

The area is believed to be responsible for feelings of guilt, dread, apprehension and physical reactions such as a racing heart, said Bill Deakin, who led the study.

"The study results have given us a completely novel way of treating depression and a new avenue of understanding depression," said Deakin, a neuroscientist at the University of Manchester.

Chemistry is chemisty, whatever our laws and pleasure-phobias say.

Al Giordano explains:

You can see that Clinton is in a staggering free-fall among African-American voters, her favorability is down 36 points while 17 percent view her more negatively than before, while Obama’s favorable and negative ratings among whites have paired at five point increases. You can even see the small dip – about two percentage points – in his popularity among whites that can be attributed to the news cycles about his ex-pastor, and see that it has leveled out and is now on a straight horizontal line (meanwhile, Clinton’s numbers among blacks continue on an extreme downward precipice). The greater context is that even including Obama’s slight dip, he’s more popular today among white voters than he ever was prior to February.

John McCain slipped up and strongly implied that the Iraq invasion was at least partly in defense of a secure oil supply for the West:

My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will – that will then prevent us – that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.

This, of course, is what Alan Greenspan argued not so long ago. The trouble is – while oil does make the region much more important for the West than, say the Congo – that was not the reason given nor the subsequent rationale provided for a pre-emptive war against Saddam. And so people have every reason to suspect some sleight of hand. We’re there for oil? We’re there for up to 100 years?

McCain’s not showing the kind of game a national candidate needs. Another reason the Clintons are hanging in.

Tomasky notices Clinton’s self-reinvention. This was worth noting: a union leader in North Carolina opined last week

that Hillary was the only thing that stood between the good and God-fearing people of North Carolina and the "Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centred, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle." Clinton, according to the report linked to here, "smiled sheepishly before breaking into a nervous laugh."

Whatever works … This was the woman who hired Dick Morris, remember?