Ambinder on the Clintons’ tax returns:
They will be released before the Pennsylvania primary on April 22. Probably on or about April 15.
I don’t get it. Why are Mississippians not allowed to know what the Clintons may be hiding? What is the explanation?
A strong statement from the show’s lead writers:
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
It’s the instinctive Clinton response when they don’t have an answer. They always rely on the anti-Republican rhetoric. All criticism of them is a Republican talking point. All resistance to their relentless pursuit of their own power is a function of the VRWC. And so we have Wolfson today:
"When Senator Obama was confronted with questions over whether he was ready to be Commander-in-Chief and steward of the economy, he chose not to address those questions, but to attack Senator Clinton. I for one do not believe that imitating Ken Starr is the way to win a Democratic primary election for president."
We also have another bought-and-paid-for partisan hack reiterating the same old lines:
"What we have heard ever since then from the Obama campaign is a series of personal attacks on Hillary Clinton, and frankly some of them echo Republican charges that have been raised and combated and have failed over the years,” said Ann Lewis, a senior adviser for the Clinton campaign.
How they desperately want to return to the old red-blue Rove-Morris politics. The only reason the Clintons are still in this campaign is because they have thrown enough dirt at Obama to stay alive. And yet they will gladly accuse Obama of being the dirt-dispenser, and then play the victim card. If you don’t remember the chutzpah and sleaze of the 1990s, then you’re getting a crash course.
"I’ll vow to raise $5 million for Hillary if she’ll drop out."
It does not surprise me, to put it mildly, that even after their negative barrage against Obama prevented an end to the Clinton candidacy, her staffers are still bickering with one another. As a reader reminded me
It’s all there: the internecine ugliness; the backbiting; the blame-shifting; the inability to speak openly and honestly to the person in charge; the out-of-control spouse who requires designated handlers for damage-control.
It’s Bush-Cheney all over again, but less disciplined, more narcissistic, more cynical. And this campaign, in retrospect, has exhibited all these patterns. The press is marveling at the Clintons’ near-death political experiences in this campaign. Doesn’t it all feel creepily familiar? It’s funny, isn’t it, how these two characters, long steeped in politics as a way of life, still manage to create psychodramas on a regular basis. They both live to nearly fail completely, treating any sort of stable success as some kind of invitation to more risk-taking, and then always relishing the last-minute, nail-biting self-rescue. Before too long, the entire story becomes about them, their ability to triumph through crisis, even though the crises are so often manufactured by themselves. We are reliving the patterns of the 1990s again. Because they are now directing the drama.
Remember: Bill Clinton could have settled the Paula Jones lawsuit easily years before he put the entire country through the wringer. Remember: Hillary Clinton could have killed what turned out to be the Whitewater non-story at the very outset by disclosing everything she could. Remember: the Clintons could have prepared for primaries and caucuses after February 5, as any careful candidate would. They chose not to do any of these things. Not because they are incompetent. But because they live to risk.
They need the drama of crisis. We are learning that they have not changed – despite the ludicrous idea that Hillary Clinton is somehow more stable and reliable than Barack Obama. The same desperate need for attention by unconsciously seeking out near-disaster is with us again.
At the core of this is their totally dysfunctional relationship. We – even those like me who really do believe in the privacy of public figures – learned over eight years that you cannot ignore this dynamic, because they have put it into the center of the public square. That is why you can confidently predict that the marital dramas will not be over either. If you think there is not another sex scandal to drop, to create another psychodrama, you are a more hopeful person than I am. The Clinton pattern is to gain some momentum in the polls or the campaign before triggering such a scandal themselves. As soon as they feel success in their wings, they self-sabotage, because they need that kind of drama to have meaning. And the story is so compelling to by-standers – we are all rubber-neckers in the face of the car wreck that is the Clintons’ story – that we will be yanked around indefinitely by this crap. I can’t believe we are flirting with going through all this again and again and again.
These are not the 1990s any more. We are at war. The economy is teetering. We are sinking in the quicksand of the Middle East. We are at constant risk of a major terror attack. And, if given a chance to bathe in the spotlight again, the Clintons will make it all about them once more. They will create the kind of drama that we have already seen in this campaign – a constant flirtation with political death in order to keep the soap opera going.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think we can afford another eight years of it.
(Photo: Mario Tama/Getty.)
Considering the cost of silicon, this is welcome news.
A list. I feel an American Idol theme coming on. No big surprises. The winner: Abba’s Dancing Queen. My favorite wasn’t even on the list. It’s the single best gay anthem ever, in my humble opinion.
In Texas, more Democrats turned out for the caucuses than the number of Republicans who voted for McCain.
There’s just too much going for the Democrats this year for the election not to remain eminently winnable no matter what happens (well, within reason) between here and the convention. Rather, the problem is that the party is losing a golden opportunity to try to put the race away early, the way Bill Clinton more or less did with Bob Dole in 1996 – by using their enormous fundraising advantage to rebrand John McCain as a Dole-style loser while he’s still struggling to get his money-raising operation up to par.
The Clintons don’t care. This is not about the interests of the Democratic party. It’s all about them.
This is staggering to me:
Six times a week, Harvard kicks all the guys out of the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center at the request of the Harvard Islamic Society. This is to accommodate those female Muslim students whose faith won’t let them work out in front of men.
They would never do that kind of thing for any other religion. If a religion refuses to allow men and women to work out together in public, then its adherents need to work out at home. What’s next? Removing all gay men from the locker-room? This is the West, guys. Get over yourselves.
