The Dish

A commenter at TNR nails it:

For all of Hillary’s brand recognition, institutional advantages (including the ferocious support of a former president), fund-raising head start and inherent appeal to the party’s core constituency (working class white women), she finds herself on the ropes, in debt and having to go hugely negative just to stay alive. Does any sane Democrat really think that this is a viable alternative to Obama?

A symbiosis of sorts – and a return to their roots. A fascinating interview with Matt Stone.

Charlie Cook:

If this contest were still at the point where momentum, symbolism, and reading tea leaves mattered, Clinton would be in pretty good shape. Everything she has needed to happen is happening now. Obama is getting tougher press coverage and critical examination. He’s also getting rattled a bit, and he didn’t perform well in the recent debate in Philadelphia. Clinton is winning in big, important places, but it’s happening about three months too late.[…]

As long as Clinton is winning, she can’t quit. But even in victory, she isn’t getting any closer to securing the nomination. This political purgatory will continue if she manages to win Indiana but loses North Carolina—hard to drop out but harder to see winning the nomination. If she loses in both states, then her campaign’s donors and creditors, as well as superdelegates and party leaders, are likely to intervene. But that can’t happen as long as she continues to win.

Increasingly, I think this is going to the convention. The Clintons will use Michigan and Florida to argue that they have won the popular vote, that Obama cannot win the general, and that if he is the nominee, they will switch their support (unofficially, of course) to McCain and prepare for 2012. That’s who they are. They will never willingly relinquish their power.

Four random observations to counter the gloom that many of us are now feeling.

1) Even though we are witnessing a historically bitter and nasty and divisive fight for the Democratic nomination, both Clinton and Obama are currently competitive with McCain nationally. That has got to worry the GOP.

2) One explanation for the Clintons’ suicidal behavior (apart from the fact that we have two sociopaths on our hands) is that they believe that the real struggle for the White House is now. They believe that the GOP is doomed this fall and so the prize really is worth risking the implosion of the Democratic party, and alienating an entire generation and most African-Americans for the foreseeable future.

3) I wonder if many in the Rove wing of the GOP (those who supported Romney and Giuliani earlier in this cycle and who want a kind of authoritarian, Christianist conservative politics that McCain actually resists) wouldn’t actually prefer a Clinton presidency to a McCain White House. I mean: consider the two likeliest major legislative initiatives of McCain’s first year: immigration reform on the Bush model and climate change legislation. Both will drive the Limbaugh-Hewitt base nuts. But a Clinton presidency allows the GOP to regroup around Clinton hatred (they’ll get over their temporary love-affair once Obama is destroyed and she’s back in power), and unify around an even more extremist platform. 

4) It’s still very hard to see how Obama loses the nomination. In the end, the Clintons, with any luck, will both expose themselves for what they really are and thereby self-destruct. Know hope.

Megan says that I have misunderstood her:

I did not say that what the Bush administration has done is no different from what any other president has done. I said that what the Bush administration has done was not the result of choosing what Glenn Greenwald called an "aggressive" war in Iraq. (To be distinguished, presumably, from the peaceful, passive sorts of wars that other countries have.)

What the Bush administration has done has been a choice of the Bush administration. They did not have to make it, even after they had gone to Iraq. They could (and did) make those choices even before we went to war in Iraq; they didn’t stem from the fact this is a special, bad kind of war that requires torture in a way that other wars don’t. Torture is a tactic that works just as well (or as badly) in defensive wars as in other kinds. The decision to do it is not an inevitable outgrowth of invasion. Lots of defending peoples have committed atrocities against their invaders.

I am arguing that it is dangerous to attribute war crimes to the type of war you are waging, because the implication is that when you fight a "good" war, you won’t have war crimes. That tilts the calculus too heavily in favor of future wars.

She says that Larison has mistaken her as well:

I am not arguing that what the Bush administration did was inevitable, only that at the point when you decide to commit atrocities, the nation is almost never thinking of how the war started, but of the suffering that has come since. We did not firebomb Germany because "they started it"; we firebombed them because they’d killed a lot of people since then.

Larison responds here, while John Schwenkler outlines some of the passages open to misinterpretation.

Scott Adams on film:

As a rule, the quality of a movie is inversely correlated with how long it takes to explain the entire plot. That’s why I stay away from movies with titles like Volcano, Inferno, Titanic, and Snakes on a Plane. I feel I have a sense of where those plots are heading.

The award-winning film I just watched could be described as “A bad guy chases another bad guy and kills him.” There were other elements of the movie, but I’m pretty sure they were irrelevant. Admittedly, there was great artistry in this movie, on many levels. But I don’t think it is fair that no one warned me how it would make me feel.

He recommends adding a few elements to reviews. I still like an idea Mike Kinsley once had. Instead of the star system, or the thumb system, reviewers should simply calculate whether it was worth the price of the ticket. So a decent $9 movie would get a $9.50 rating. A fantastic movie would get a $20 rating. And some movies would be so bad you would actually have to be paid to watch them: – $6.

I’m not the only one to have been somewhat taken aback by the onslaught of the last few weeks, and trying to make sense of it. A reader writes:

When people tell me horror stories about American racism, I usually dismiss them as the product of the actions of a very small minority. See, I moved to Massachusetts from Latin America 8 years ago. I’m 30, married to a white woman who doesn’t think twice about my and my family’s race, and I’ve been able to work and study and make a good living in this country with exactly zero opposition or discrimination from any American of any race I’ve come across. For me, my ethnic background has been about as much of an issue as my shoe size in living a full and productive life in this country.

Then all the attacks on Obama’s religion, his pastor, his skin color, his culture, et cetera started coming out.

I mean, I’d heard O’Reilly and Limbaugh and Dobbs and Coulter stoke the fires of xenophobia and racial hatred in the past, but again, they always looked to me like rambling lunatics with no real credibility among people with IQ’s over 54. I guess I was proven wrong yesterday, when Hillary won the PA primary at least partially on a platform of deceit and innuendo about Obama’s race. Much to my amazement, it actually seems to have worked. That old white people so overwhelmingly came out to vote for her in PA can only be explained by the kind of racism that I’ve been dismissing for years from my progressive home state. What did she get, like 2/3 of white seniors?

I’ve learned a lot about Americans’ attitudes toward race in the last few weeks – in fact, it feels like I’ve been beaten with a learning stick. Today, for the first time in 8 years, I feel vulnerable about my own race and my standing in American society.

I think all of us who once dismissed the fashionable view around the world that a black man would have a real problem becoming an American president have had a learning experience these past few weeks. I don’t believe that racism explains all of it at all. To my mind, the kind of tactics deployed against someone like Obama were deployed against Kerry and Gore and Clinton. Class and gender and age also weighed in the balance. And the fear of another Carter has motivated some. But the insane hysteria over Wright, the racist incidents in Pennsylvania that are only now being aired fully, the "Hussein" and "Muslim" memes, the sense of white entitlement that is so embedded in the Clintons that they don’t even fully see it: you have to be blind not to see the impact of race. Imagine if John Edwards had achieved what Obama has achieved. Imagine if he had won more delegates, votes and states than Clinton. Would Clinton have ever offered him the veep slot? Of course, race has affected this campaign, if only because the white entitlement that infuses the Clintons is invisible to most.

I still believe a black president is possible in America. Within another generation, it is far more conceivable than it would have been a generation ago. But I also now understand better why it will be an almighty struggle. And why neither Republicans nor Democrats have completely clean hands in this.

(Photo: Jeff Swensen/Getty.)

Fort Collins, Colorado, 11.20 am.

The military experiments with communication via vibration. Pervs.