The Dish

A one issue candidate.

The Weekly Standard reacts to the Washington Times article:

…let me just say to Ron Paul supporters everywhere, and on behalf of the New Right (by which I assume Paul means the Jew Right), get lost.

There should be plenty of room for the Paulnuts in Obama’s big tent. If Rev. Wright isn’t exactly a 9/11 Truther, at least he’s breathed new life into the Pearl Harbor Truther movement. Imagine a newsletter coauthored by the Reverend and Lew Rockwell–now that’s racial harmony.

They never disappoint, do they?

The latest Clinton spin on Michigan:

The pledge reads, in part, "I shall not campaign or participate (emphasis added) in any state which schedules a presidential election primary or caucus before Feb. 5, 2008, except for the states of Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina…"

Today, Clinton’s memo argues "Let’s remember that the point of the early state pledge was to protect the role of the four states that held early nominating contests. Well the contests in those states were protected and the people in Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada got a chance to vote… Senator Clinton signed the pledge and kept it… Senator Obama decided to go further and made a voluntary decision to remove his name from the Michigan ballot."

So the issue would seem to be, what does the word "participate" actually mean?

The surveillance state in Britain entertains a truly chilling idea.

The Green Republican meets the Green Tory. Money quote from Cameron:

“It was a fascinating and very productive meeting which covered a wide range of subjects including Iran, Iraq, the global economy and climate change.  Our conversation centred on Afghanistan where the Senator praised the incredible work being carried out by British troops.  We also discussed the need for greater co-ordination among the military and various authorities there.  The Senator and I also spent time discussing our shared interests and how we can broaden the appeal of moderate Conservatism.”

 

This isn’t all that surprising:

The Obama campaign is opposed to a Michigan re-vote mainly for reasons of politics. That’s a descriptive truth I arrived at from reporting and talking to numerous sources within the campaign. It may well be true that there are legitimate grievances and obstacles to a new primary that the campaign has found — indeed — there appear to be some. Pointing out that the main reason for the opposition is political has pushed some readers to conclude that I have a pro-Clinton bias. Think what you wish.

I would say this, wouldn’t I?, but Marc strikes me as one of the fairest reporters out there.
 

The veteran Clintonite writes on the Huffington Post:

1. If a white minister preached sermons to his congregation and had used the "N" word and used rhetoric and words similar to members of the KKK, would you support a Democratic presidential candidate who decided to continue to be a member of that congregation?

2. Would you support that candidate if, after knowing of or hearing those sermons, he or she still appointed that minister to serve on his or her "Religious Advisory Committee" of his or her presidential campaign?

His mistake:

If one of my mistakes was to trust men like August Hanning, another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush administration, not so much on matters of intelligence—faulty intelligence was a near-universal phenomenon—but on matters of basic competence. I will admit to a prejudice here: I believed—note the tense, please—that Republicans were by nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all, preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to lose a war. Which is what they have very nearly done.[…]

What the world is confronting five years after the invasion—the mess that Gen. David Petraeus is attempting to clean up today—was almost entirely preventable. It’s not only my encounters, inside Iraq and outside, with senior figures of the Bush administration that have convinced me of this; the investigations conducted by George Packer, Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward, and Michael Gordon, among others, have unearthed thousands—literally thousands—of mistakes made by this administration, most of which were avoidable.

McCain campaign advisor Lawrence Eagleburger unloads on the religious right:

On the Christian hard right, I live in Charlottesville now and I can’t tell you I’m surrounded by it," Eagleburger said. "I must tell you we fought it there, fought hard against it. There’s no question that in the Republican Party it is a serious problem…Among the hard-right conservatives in the Republican Party John McCain was, shall we say, less than enthusiastically received…What you see is what you get. You are not going to see him moving to assuage the concerns of these conservatives.

Paul Waldman discusses Code Pink’s absurd approach to ending the war:

…this week, which will see the fifth anniversary of the start of the war, Code Pink plans to "step up the pressure," as its leader Medea Benjamin said. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Code Pink has a full roster of activities planned for the week, including: yoga every morning at 8:30; organic potlucks every noon; nightly movies and popcorn; a bike ride around Berkeley on Tuesday; an open-mike musical jam on Wednesday; and a ‘send-off’ to the Marines on Friday, when protesters will bring suitcases and pink berets for traveling." How the Bush administration will be able to resist is anyone’s guess.

Any effective political movement has to engage its participants in a way that makes them feel their contributions are meaningful and redefines their sense of self. But if those contributions aren’t actually meaningful, if they amount to an extended series of circle jerks that accomplish nothing, then the movement will inevitably be confined to a small group of self-deluding members with a lot of time on their hands. There are tens of millions of Americans who want to end the war in Iraq. But how many of them see something like Code Pink protesting a Marine recruiting station and say to themselves, "I want to be a part of that"?