The Dish

It didn’t seem to work in Mississippi:

According to numbers shown on Fox News, Obama holds a solid 10 point lead over Hillary on who voters think is qualified to be "commander-in-chief," 53%-43%.

After her emotional meltdowns and absurd exaggeration of her role in Bosnia and Ireland and China, the risk of electing Hillary Clinton as commander-in-chief is beginning to sink in.

A twenty-point margin for Obama in Mississippi. I know it’s not a "big" state and we now know how seriously the Clintons take victories in heavily African-American primaries, but it is yet another state in which the freshman senator has taken on the might of the Clinton machine and won by a landslide. As usual, the classy Clinton congratulation call (this time, a written statement from Maggie Williams), and the inevitable mention of Pennsylvania. They always sink to the occasion, don’t they?

The racial polarization in the exit polls is depressing; but when you have Clinton surrogates like Geraldine Ferraro reveling in racist condescension and resentment, as she did today, I can understand a little. Then this:

Obama voters by and large would NOT be satisfied (55%) with Clinton as their nominee, while 7 and ten Clinton voters would NOT be satisfied (72%) with Obama as theirs.

So the candidate who has been in second place most of the race has supporters pickier than those of the candidate in first place. Entitlement, anyone? There is a great deal of anger toward Clinton among the Obama camp; but the contempt for Obama from the Clintonites is really something. This piece of Ferraro bile is particularly revealing:

Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world, you’re accused of being racist, so you have to shut up." 

Address reality? Like the Iraq war; and climate change; and healthcare? In what way is Obama not addressing reality in these areas? Or by reality does she mean the racist assumption that no black man can ever be a serious challenger for the presidency in America? Really, next time she should tell us how she really feels.

(Obama in Misissippi March 10 by Emmanuel Dunand/Getty.)

Or – much worse – Leslie or Marion. The good news:

“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”

A reader writes:

Why is astrology any less respectable than religious belief? Believers in both suspend reason to help explain the randomness of human existence. Saying you wouldn’t date someone who believes in astrology, while holding on to virgin births, heaven and hell, body and blood, omnipresent god and all the rest of it, is plainly hypocritical. I know you don’t want to have to face the inevitable here, but at some point someone of your critical faculties is going to have to deal with these internal inconsistencies and either accept that religion and ‘faith’ are meaningless, or stop criticizing others for the irrational things they believe. You just can’t have it both ways and expect to be taken seriously.   You never seem willing to address this fundamental contradiction – any chance of a response now?

Louis Vitton imprints itself on nature. Ugh. More here.

Regarding this post, a reader writes:

A fundamental difference between the Ron Paul faction of the Republican party and the Dean faction of the Democratic party was Ralph Nader.  There was a major wake up call amongst liberal activists that third party politics was going to do more harm than good in the long run.  That, in the long run, it was better to channel their energies within the party and change the party rather than overthrow it wholesale.  So when Dean came along, the energy that developed around him ended up getting transformed into a movement that was fixated on reforming the Democratic party.  The Dean Democrats are liberal, but at their core, deeply pragmatic about how you really get things done in politics.

To see this in action, go look at what’s said on DailyKos on a daily basis, arguably one of the epicenters of Dean democrat politics.  Yeah there’s a very strongly liberal bent, but at the end of the day it’s biggest emphasis is on practical electoral politics.  It’s about getting Democrats elected, and in the process, improving on the quality of those that do get elected.  While it’s liberal and progressive, there’s nothing very ideological about them.  They happily backed relatively conservative Democrats knowing that more Democrats meant a greater chance that a progressive message would survive the Washington meat grinder.

My sense is that the Ron Paul supporters aren’t going to have that same drive to work within the party.  That rather than being the Republican version of Howard Dean, Ron Paul’s movement is becoming the next generation of Larouchies.  While some of his supporters are the more reasonable and libertarian wing of the party, there’s a strong thread of radicalism amongst a lot of them.  Many of them drift past being libertarianism to almost being anarchists, believing, not in small government, but practically no government.  They emphasize rather extreme steps like eliminating the federal reserve, going back to the gold standard, shutting down the IRS, etc.

Say what you will about the Dean democrats, they are hardly a radical lot.  They were very enthusiastic, but deep down, Dean was not that radical except in how he was delivering his message.  He wasn’t calling for some extreme change in government, mostly just getting out of Iraq and reforming a few things like the health care system.  Because it was not an innately radical group, it could more readily merge into the larger party apparatus rather than become an active opposition to it. I just don’t see how the same thing could happen with the Paulites.

We can tolerate people who hold what we think are false beliefs. But can we respect them? Here’s an honest attempt to wrestle with the core issues of toleration by Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber. Money quote:

There is a gap between certainty of one’s own infallibility and very-close-to-certainty that one is right, and that gap is what makes respect possible.

Several readers have complained about Jeff Jacoby labeling both the sub-prime crisis and ethanol misadventures in big government. Clive makes this point about the mortgage crisis:

The US already has what must be the world’s most generous fiscal dispensation for mortgage borrowers – uncapped tax relief for owner-occupiers, plus colossal “government sponsored entities” to guarantee loans, implicitly subsidise mortgage rates and promote securitisation. This fiscal regime created an environment in which you felt a fool unless you borrowed to the hilt – not just to buy your house but to keep your equity in it to a minimum, so as to liberate cash for other purposes.

I know many environmentalists have criticized subsidies for corn ethanol and instead promoted cellulosic ethanol. But Tom Philpott argued just a few days ago that cellulosic ethanol isn’t likely to be viable. I’m not an expert in either of these fields, but Jeff Jacoby’s point about unintended consequences seems to me to hold water. 

A poignant Spitzer ad from 2006.