The Dish

… most annoying people on the plane. Seriously: ew.

No more waving of the paper in the air. Digital just isn’t that much fun.

Why they’re trees in the war and torture debates, when we need to be looking at forests.

Radley Balko writes what I’m too timid to say:

So here’s a crazy theory that occurred to me the other day, and that gets more plausible the more I think about it: Clinton’s comments were calculated, but they may have been more sinister than even the activist I met knows. Clinton – perhaps subconsciously – was sabotaging his wife’s campaign.

Not so crazy a theory. I’ve long believed that Bill Clinton is torn between two impulses – a desire to embellish his own record by seeing his wife get the presidency and a desire to embellish his own record by seeing his wife not get the presidency. He is certainly psychologically damaged and complex enough to torpedo his wife’s ambitions and equally damaged enough not even to be aware of it. Which makes it all the more Shakespearian. One huge reason not to put the Clintons back in the Oval Office is the lesson of the Bush years. Never under-estimate family rivalry. It fucks things up.

We have a winner.

For some people, everything is political.

Matt sums up the message:

My understanding, though, is that [Maine] doesn’t really count because it’s a small state, much as Utah doesn’t count because there aren’t many Democrats there, DC doesn’t count because there are too many black people, Washington doesn’t count because it’s a caucus, Illinois doesn’t count because Obama represents it in the Senate even though Hillary was born there, Hawaii won’t count because Obama was born there. I’m not sure why Delaware and Connecticut don’t count, but they definitely don’t.

Hilzoy points out another massive failure – not foreseeing a long campaign, not saving enough money, not planning adequately:

The Obama campaign arguably had more reason than the Clinton campaign to focus on the earliest contests and slight the later ones. Obama, after all, was coming from behind. He had to win some of the early contests. If he had lost every state through Super Tuesday, it would have been all over for him. He therefore had a pretty strong reason to put everything he had into those states, and hope that whatever momentum he got would carry him through in places like Maine and Nebraska. Clinton, by contrast, only had to anticipate that Obama might win enough states to keep going to know that she had to focus on the post-Super Tuesday states. She has a lot less excuse for making this misjudgment than Obama did. But she made it, and he did not. That tells me something.

It tells you that her spin of competence just isn’t true. This has been an incompetently run campaign. And it’s the best evidence we have of Clinton’s executive skills.

She’s supposed to have experience? Check this out:

Over the last seven years, Clinton had raised $175 million for her reelection and her presidential campaign. But Solis Doyle didn’t tell Clinton that there was next to no cash on hand until after the New Hampshire primary.

"We were lying about money," a source said. "The cash on hand was nothing."

In turn, Clinton didn’t tell Solis Doyle that she was lending her own money to keep the campaign afloat. Solis Doyle found out third-hand. And when she asked Clinton about it, the senator told her she couldn’t understand how the campaign had gotten to such a point.

Ambers has a similar story to tell. The reason underlings lie about things is because they’re scared and don’t want to upset the boss. Think Bush and Iraq. Or Bush and everything. You want another executive like that in the White House? The kind who does not want to hear bad news?