Sid vs Obama

After once smearing Lewinsky as a liar, the Hugh Hewitt of the Clintons is still at it:

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications.  But they aren’t being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address.  Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs …

Whatever works, whatever works … to keep the Clinton machine in control of the Dems.

Looking To November

Daniel McCarthy on Obama’s slump:

The political environment that exists now…is nothing like the one that will exist in the summer, let alone November, when the Democrats will be fighting McCain instead of each other and the media glare will be upon the Arizonan as well as Obama. The present circumstances are — as several commentators, including me, have pointed out — the best that McCain is likely to enjoy for the rest of the season. I suspect present conditions are also nearly rock-bottom for Obama, though it’s a mistake ever to underestimate how much slime a Clinton can excrete. Nevertheless, barring new skeletons spilling out of Obama’s closest, the race is going to get better for him and worse for McCain.

Here’s hoping.

Death, Children, Victorians

A reader writes:

In regards to the Victorian post-mortem photographs, notice how very, very many of them are children.  Sometimes infants, sometimes toddlers or school-age kids, but children.  Not teenagers who might have been working (it was the Victorian era, after all), not young adults who might have died by violence that perhaps they might have been partially responsible for.  Children.  I’m an ICU physician in a busy pediatric intensive care unit.  I’ve seen enough children die to last me the rest of my or anybody else’s life.  I’m as aware as anyone what an awful, nearly-irrecoverable mess we in this country have made of the environment, of national and global politics, of the economy. 

But one thing tells me that there’s a chance for humanity – so many fewer dead children.  Almost any kid in this country can get a vaccine. Very few – not none, but few – children in this country grow up with unsanitary water.  If you show up in an ER with a serious infection, you’ll get treated.  Questions about money might come later, but the treatment will nearly always happen.  It’s not a perfect fix by any stretch.  But when a child dies now, it’s not a family photograph, it’s news.

Robert P. George To Head AEI?

That’s a rumor I just heard. George is by all accounts a charming fellow, good to his students, a wonderful teacher, and a civil, meticulous, if fanatical participant in the culture wars. But he is also one of the most extreme theocons around:

someone who believes that the government has a legitimate interest in knowing whether citizens masturbate in the privacy of their own homes (he has actually argued that wanking should be illegal in theory), a believer that the Constitution should ban all legal protections for gay couples, a strong supporter of the Schiavo intervention, and someone who believes that all abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. He was also an author of the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment which would have removed homosexuals from any recourse to equal treatment under the law. His passionate opposition to the civil equality and freedom of gay people is a core principle of his politics. I review his far-right views at length in The Conservative Soul.

If he were to become head of AEI, it would signal a moment in the evolution of the conservative movement: the end of secular pluralism, federalism and truly limited government as small-c conservative principles and the fusion of religious fundamentalism with foreign policy aggression.