The Dish

Clinton plays the gender card:

In a conversation with two Democratic allies, she compared the situation to the "big boys" trying to bully a woman, according to interviews with them.

Callimachus at Done With Mirrors writes:

I was surprised that Obama’s race speech garnered such an intense negative reaction among so many educated Republicans who are well left of Pat Buchanan. A lot of that concentrated on the appearance of weaseling out of his church connection, or obscuring the depth of his debt to Rev. Wright, I suppose. And many who slammed those qualities took a line or two to praise the general tenor of his rhetoric when it was purely about race in America. And partly, too, they may fear him as a candidate.

But a lot of my peers also went after his word-painting as enshrining victimhoood, or worse things.

So I wonder how they will take to this?

"Black Americans were a founding population. Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding." As a result, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that."

That’s Condi Rice talking, in an interview with the Washington Times.

A mayor in Brazil runs out of room in the cemetery and tries to ban death. I’m surprised he didn’t try and tax it first.

(Hat tip: Appleyard).

Gorbachev claims he’s not a Christian, despite the hype.

John Freeman questions if reading about books has replaced the real thing:

In a way, pre-judgement is a necessary evil of criticism: there are far more books published than anyone could possibly read, busloads of awarded writers who aren’t actually worth reading. There’s no way to approach this forest gingerly. You need a buzz saw to clear some breathing room, gain a sightline, and criticism has to have enough teeth and ubiquitous availability to be that instrument.

Stepping away from the computer for just a day, though, it’s hard not to realise our habits create that crowded forest. In his book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the way that nations are socially constructed imaginary worlds, in spite of all their inconsistencies. The growth of the internet has created, I think, a new imagined community of readers – a group who overlap and intersect and read about one another’s cultures.

The fed complains that wiretapping is too expensive.

Danby, New York, 3.28 pm.

Zimbabwe holds elections this Saturday. From Samantha Power’s 2005 essay:

Zimbabwe is as broken as any country on the planet, it offers a testament not to some inherent African inability to govern but to a minority rule as oppressive and inconsiderate of the welfare of citizens as its ignominious white predecessor. The country’s economy in 1997 was the fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking. A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women.

How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent’s basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe, now seventy-nine, who by his actions has compiled something of a "how-to" manual for national destruction. Although many of his methods have been applied elsewhere, taken as a whole his ten-step approach is more radical and more comprehensive than that of other despots. The Zimbabwe case offers some important insights. It illustrates the prime importance of accountability as an antidote to idiocy and excess. It highlights the lasting effects of decolonization—limited Western influence on the continent and a reluctance by African leaders to criticize their own. And it offers a warning about how much damage one man can do, very quickly.

Not your everyday job:

I think that we experience thrill as a reward for the perseverance of human life. So, obviously, there’s an evolutionary driver – we evolved a sense of thrill because it helps us escape danger. But in modern life, things have become confused – we’re rarely in real danger, so we have to invent artificial situations in order to experience that reward. Extreme sports are quite obviously a replacement for running away from a lion, but it also becomes very psychologically complex with experiences such as bondage or other fetishes.

Not a single mention, so far as I can see, at the Corner of Bob Casey’s endorsement of Barack Obama aof now. Casey is a darling of NRO and a key socially conservative senator in the next critical primary. In fact, by a brief look at memeorandum, almost the entire far right blogosphere is AWOL. Nothing on Hewitt or Reynolds either. If I missed something, let me know. You’d think at least they’d try to grapple with a second pro-lifer’s endorsement of the hard-left stealth version of Louis Farrakhan, Senator Hussein from Illinois. Actually, you wouldn’t. Stanley Kurtz is still trying to argue that

Pre-Wright, it looked like an Obama nomination would avoid the refighting of the sixties Hillary would inevitably bring. Post-Wright, post-Dreams, etc. it looks as though Hillary and Bill were only the warm-up act for the great culture clash of 2008.

He can dream, can’t he? Either Kurtz is like one of those cliched Japanese soldiers who doesn’t realize the boomer war is over or Bob Casey is a fool.