The Dish

Mexico City, Mexico, 11.58 am.

A reader writes:

Like you I’ve been down since Tuesday. A long time ABC (Anyone But Clinton) Democrat, I have decided that the best possible outcome of this horrible situation is if Clinton wins the nomination.

The Clinton’s hold on the Democratic Party will continue until they lose an election. Obama has had three shots, New Hampshire, California and now Texas to beat Clinton and he failed. Although he overcame large polling margins to make all three close, she still walked away as the popular vote winner.

He can’t beat her. He can maintain his delgate lead but what he needs is a large margin of victory in a key battleground state and all that’s left is Pennsylvania. With demographics similar to Ohio it’s unlikely he can acheive  a 5-10 point margin that he would need to stop the Clinton machine.

Let her win the nomination and go down in November. No one that can count believes she can take down McCain. She needs every single Democrat to vote for her and pick up a  number of independents to win. McCain doesn’t have to pander to his base if she’s the nominee. He can run as a moderate and let Rush, et al. bring back the 1990’s scadals update it with whatever it is they are hiding in this year’s tax returns.

Democrats are an unforgiving bunch when you lose a general election. Just ask Mondale and Kerry. Even Gore was treated badly after 2000 until Iraq sprialed out of control. When she loses in November, neither one of them will have any kind of standing in the party. Good. Only then can the Democrats move away from this toxic relationship.

A few excerpts from James Alison’s article:

How often have you ever been addressed by the word “you” in a Catholic publication? I don’t mean the word “you” in the weak sense as when advertisements ask “Have you considered a vocation to be a priest or sister?” Because those advertisements don’t really mean “you”. They really mean “someone who is like you in every way, but happens not to be gay, or at least is good at hiding it”. Normally whenever there is a discussion about matters gay in Catholic publications, the style very quickly becomes stiff, and a mysterious “they” appears. This “they” seems to inhabit another planet from the one you inhabit. Whoever is talking about “they” is, in fact, on another planet, one where a strange lack of oxygen makes it impossible to use the pronouns “I”, “you”, “we.” […]

I don’t want to pretend that being an openly gay Catholic is something easy or obvious. It isn’t. For a start, merely the fact of your wanting to read a letter like this at all is a sign of how many obstacles you must have overcome already. You may have faced hatred and discrimination in your own country, from family members, at school, at the hands of legislators eager for cheap votes, through shrieking newspaper headlines that sear your soul, and in the glare of which you are speechless in your own defence. And you’ve probably noticed that at the very best, the Church which calls itself, and is, your Holy Mother has kept silent about the hatred and the fear. While all too often its spokesmen will have lowered themselves to the level of second-rate politicians, lending voice to hate while claiming that they are standing up for love. The very fact that, through and in the midst of, and despite, all these hateful voices, you should have heard the voice of the Shepherd calling you into being of his flock is already a miracle far greater than you know, preparing you for a work more subtle and delicate than those voices could conceive.

A public art project.

A reader writes:

I’m seriously sick-and-tired of hearing that “no serious person takes the get out argument seriously.”

The very hallmark of Iraq is the unseriousness with which the “serious” have approached literally every aspect of the fiasco.  You note we sent too few troops “to prevent the disintegration of Iraq.”  Heck, Andrew, we failed to send enough troops to secure the weapons Saddam DID have much less the WMDs he didn’t have.

Along with that was the unseriousness with which we were promised that the entire effort would cost $60 billion and be paid back by Iraqi oil, and that we could afford to cut taxes during wartime for the first time in American history.  This ensured that the trillion-plus cost of our fiasco would be handed off to the same generation that’s inheriting our Social Security and Medicare D bills.

It takes a manifestly unserious person to declare that we must wreck our military in order to keep America safe, and bankrupt our nation in order to keep America strong.

So let me throw down the gantlet to all the “serious persons” out there.  How do you propose rebuilding our armed forces to sustain a long-term commitment in Iraq and still defend our shores?  How do you propose paying for your military rebuilding and occupation prescription?

When they propose raising taxes and instituting a draft, we’ll know who’s really serious.

Gian Gentile worries. Peter Mansoor dissents. The trouble is: it’s extremely hard to know exactly what the sequence of events was in the many sided Rubik’s cube of Iraq. But the two posts help flesh out the contours of the debate.

Does that help explain the Clintons’ shenanigans? Suzanne Garner:

This Clinton move should be familiar to any Democratic leaders who’ve been around awhile.  It’s the classic Clinton triangulation — and it’s a preview of what we’ll get if she is our President.  Her back is against the wall, so she takes a hard right and starts parroting a Republican viewpoint that goes against the Democratic platform (i.e., “tough” foreign policy) to try to drum up a little panic, and in the next breath talks about putting Obama on her ticket. She uses Republican talking points to smack the “liberal” wing of the Democratic party, polarizes the party into fierce factions, and then offers up the “compromise” — her on top of the ticket. 

And super-delegates feel like they might not like it, but it’s the best way to prevent the civil war that Clinton herself fomented.

That last sentence sums up most of their politics in the 1990s. Bush uses and foments polarization to dominate. The Clintons use and foment it to triangulate.

The glass house shatters a little:

In a May 2005 interview with the black weekly newspaper the New York Amsterdam News, the former president said that he supported the efforts of Louis Farrakhan and the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to organize a Million More March in the nation’s capital that fall…

"Jesse [Jackson], and Mr. [Louis] Farrakhan and Rev. [Al] Sharpton probably have internal domestic political differences," Clinton is quoted as saying, "but they’ve agreed on this, and I think it’s a good thing." …

Post-White House Clinton found no fault with Farrakhan’s leadership. There was no mention of Farrakhan’s "malice and division" during the interview.

Really, Churchill was an appeaser, by comparison:

A vote for Obama is a vote against O’Reillyism.

"A few weeks ago, I started to feel sorry for her. Oh Christ, let her win already…Who cares…It’s not worth it. There’s not that much difference between them. She can have it. Anything to avoid watching her descend into madness. So I switched. I started rooting for her. It wasn’t that hard. Compromise comes easy to me. I was on board.

   And then I saw the ad.

I watched, transfixed, as she took the 3 a.m. call…and I was afraid…very afraid. Suddenly, I realized the last thing this country needs is that woman anywhere near a phone. I don’t care if it’s 3 a.m. or 10 p.m. or any other time. I don’t want her talking to Putin, I don’t want her talking to Kim Jong Il, I don’t want her talking to my nephew. She needs a long rest. She needs to put on a sarong and some sun block and get away from things for a while, a nice beach somewhere — somewhere far away, where there are…no phones," – Larry David, HuffPuff. His audio is great.