The Dish

Jason is surely right: the only rationale for the GOP to run their race-based ad against Obama in North Carolina now rather than later is to help Clinton. Yes, it’s officially directed against locals. But that’s obviously a fig-leaf. What we’re currently seeing is a strong and building alliance between the Republican party and the Clinton machine to prevent Obama from becoming president.

In this passage, he sounds like Lanny Davis:

In fact, on Tuesday night she actually grabbed the popular vote lead: If you include the Michigan and Florida primary results, Mrs. Clinton now leads the popular vote by a slim 113,000 votes out of 29,914,356 cast.

Mr. Obama will argue he wasn’t on the ballot in Michigan and didn’t campaign in Florida. But don’t Democrats want to count all the votes in all the contests? After all, Mr. Obama took his name off the Michigan ballot; it isn’t something he was forced to do. And while he didn’t campaign in Florida, neither did she.

My italics. The Michigan angle is now the core element of the Clinton struggle – which is why Rove endorsed it this morning.

The great clarifier of this primary season has been the in-gathering of most of the most toxic, cynical forces in American politics – Democrat and Republican – to extinguish the Obama campaign. In the end, Rove and Clinton are in the same party (Washington, Inc.) and play by the same rules (whatever they can say they are at any given moment). But they’re losing. And this head-game is pretty much their last gambit.

"You were the first ones to call it for Hillary Clinton. Fair and balanced Fox. You beat them all," – Terry McAuliffe.

A reader writes:

I don’t know how you know that Bill Kristol doesn’t really believe Obama is a commie since you have to take Bill’s word for it just as you take Barack’s word that he is a Christian.  I firmly believe that Obama is a typical Ivy League atheist who plays at Christianity in a cynical way to get elected to public office.  I don’t believe he is a communist – I suspect he is – but it has not formed into a full belief yet.  Let him speak extemporaneously for the next two weeks leading up to my neighboring state, Indiana, and things may crystallize.

Go Hillary!

The merging of the memes of the far right and the Clinton campaign is one of the most remarkable aspects of this campaign. I can actually envisage Pat Buchanan endorsing Clinton against McCain this fall. Anything to stop the black commie elitist. And it turns out that many Clinton Democrats now echo Buchanan! If you live long enough …

A spiritually numbing and uplifting series of portraits taken of the terminally ill in the days before and just after their deaths. This photograph is a posthumous one of Roswitha Pacholleck, 47. Money quote:

“It’s absurd really. It’s only now that I have cancer that, for the first time ever, I really want to live,” Roswitha told me on one of my visits, a few weeks after she had been admitted to the hospice. “They’re really good people here,” she said. “I enjoy every day that I’m still here. Before this my life wasn’t a happy one.”

Hat tip: Peter Rollins.

This is the latest from Michael Savage whom Hugh Hewitt believes is to the right what Chris Matthews is to the left:

"Look who we inherited in this country, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Hussein Obama, in one generation. A war hero to — a war hero who commanded the Allied operations against Nazi Germany was running for the presidency then. Now we have an unknown stealth candidate who went to a madrassas in Indonesia and, in fact, was a Muslim despite what Straw Hair will tell you on "Softball." Yes, check it out."

Is Obama a Muslim? Does it matter any more? We are in world of McTruthyism. In that world, Obama is an atheist, a Muslim, a black liberation theologian and a Marxist. Since the truth is irrelevant, they can all be true!

A reader writes:

This morning I saw an excerpt from Obama’s concession speech in Indiana where he said the following:

"Or this time, we can build on the movement we’ve started in this campaign – a movement that’s united Democrats, Independents, and Republicans; a movement of young and old, rich and poor; white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, gay and straight."

I have two comments about this:

First, I cannot recall a politician ever speaking after a loss, proclaiming that he wants to bring together gays and straights. That is amazing. Can you imagine Hillary ever saying anything like that to a national audience, especially after a defeat?

Second, the "gay and straight" portion is not included in the text of the speech on Obama’s website.  This means either 1) the campaign removed those words from the edited transcript or 2) (more likely) Obama’s inclusion of "gay and straight" was impromptu.  It wasn’t included by the speech writers, but he included it at the spur of the moment.  If this is true, how amazing it is that there is a politician who is willing to stand up for us gay Americans who have been ignored for so long.  I hope Obama knows how much those three small words that he included in his speech mean to us.

I noticed it too. Unimaginable coming from a Clinton. And it will, of course, be regarded by the Steyn-Hewitt types as more evidence that Obama is an extreme communist terrorist. But it will be regarded by the next generation as more evidence that Obama is the candidate of the future. He is. Quite how far into the future is what we are finding out.

Continuing the debate, Larison’s two cents:

Of course, it is true when you opt to bomb civilian centers, especially in an indiscriminate, fire-bombing way, that you have at that time chosen to commit war crimes, and it is also true that people who have reconciled themselves to the mass slaughter of civilians have chosen to justify pretty much anything in the name of fighting the enemy.  It does not follow that because you have gone to war against another state that you have therefore necessarily embarked on a course that requires you to engage in those war crimes.  The choice to commit those crimes comes later, and that choice becomes inevitable only if those crimes are absolutely necessary to achieve victory.  In fact, such crimes tend to stand out for just how utterly unnecessary and excessive they are.  If you accept the inhuman calculations of total war and unconditional surrender, you might say that war crimes are inevitable, but if you really accept the logic of total war you don’t believe that there is anything done in war that violates morality or law, because total war is the practical negation of both.

And in this war, the president decided to commit war crimes in advance. In fact, torture was, we now know, one of the central strategies of the war. Its rapid spread across every theater of war – and its emergence into the daylight – was not part of the original plan. But once you have sanctioned something at the very top, the limits on those at the bottom, always vulnerable, are just blown away.

This rings true to me:

Almost all working class folks have about the same knowledge of politics as you and I have about cars.  Which is to say, on one level, quite a lot, but it’s not what they devote their lives to understanding.  So, as we do in the case of cars, they turn to other mechanisms, such as brand loyalty, to make their decisions.

What they know about Clinton is that she was a part of the Administration that spent eight years talking about issues that were important to them and presiding over an era of peace and prosperity. So what they are going on here is familiarity and positive experiences, the same thing that I do when I buy only Japanese cars.  This is a perfectly reasonable way of going about doing things even if I might make a mistake and select a very high quality Japanese car (Hillary in this analogy) instead of a surprisingly better this year in spite of lack of experience American car (Obama).  They are not are suckers who are fooled by Hillary’s Crown Royal shot (perhaps if it had been JD) or whether Obama’s "bitter" comment represents the totality of his views any more than I am a sucker who is fooled (or influenced at all) by television advertisements for cars.

I found out that a friend supported Clinton last night. I was stunned. I asked him why. He said he liked the 1990s, they were good times, he’d like them back. That was it. He had no real feelings about Obama, but he knew the Clinton name and associated it with good times. I pushed further. That was it. He’s a man who isn’t too interested in politics but knew enough to back the familiar. It may be that simple.

Alexander Linklater profiles Hitchens:

As with other public polemicists, arguments for or against any issue become arguments for or against him. His starting point is always confrontation, his procedure to wrestle out contradiction, his endpoint a position of certainty. It’s that preternatural capacity for certainty, carried through the velocity and elegance of his writing, which has made him the most scintillating and disturbing British journalist of the ’68 generation. He is not exaggerating much when he says: "The world I live in is one where I have five quarrels a day, each with someone who really takes me on over something; and if I can’t get into an argument, I go looking for one, to make sure I trust my own arguments, to hone them."

I realize that my major difference with Hitch is less ideological or political – we have both mutated over the years in response to a changing world – than temperamental. I love arguing and I’m resigned to the fact that war is sometimes a necessary evil. But in the end, I like calm in my private life and would be only too happy to live in a world where conflict were less constant and in which the peaceful activities overtake the martial ones. I loved the 1990s. I didn’t see them as decadent or somehow amoral. Deep down, I’m anti-war. Deep down, I suspect Hitch isn’t. And that’s why neoconservatism, while analytically perceptive in the past, does not ultimately appeal to me. You have to love war to be a real neocon.