Face Of The Day

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A Kikuyu boy looks from behind a church bench in a monastery that hundreds of displaced are using as a camp high in the mountains some 10 km from the small central Kenyan town of Kepkelion 27 January 2008. Some 140 Kikuyu families sought refuge from ethnic post-election violence at the monastery and have had members of the Kalenji tribe attack them in the periphery of the monastery on several occasions. The men and women of the group sleep inside the church at night. More than 850 people have been killed, according to an AFP tally of police and hospital figures, since the disputed December 27 election touched off a wave of deadly rioting and ethnic killings. Some 260,000 people across the country have been forced to flee their homes. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty.

“Well, He’s Lying”

Romney blurts out the truth. For a change. But it remains true that he was never as enthusiastic/delusional a supporter of the surge as McCain. As Rich Lowry commented many moons ago:

[For Mitt Romney] to speak for 50 minutes or so and not to talk about the Iraq war before a conservative audience at a crucial moment in that war is bizarre and just wrong and almost offensive in my view. This doesn’t seem like an oversight. He went out of his way to check off every conservative box—except the one that is politically risky at the moment.

McCain’s biggest liability in the fall is his total embrace of a permanent Iraq occupation. Romney, as usual, gave himself some lee-way.

Evolution

A reader writes:

Several months ago, I found myself drifting away from your blog. I even pouted my way through your wedding and didn’t congratulate you (a risible, insulting diss from a WASP). It was hard. I’m not certain how I would have gotten through the Bush/ Cheney years without your blog. But I’d gotten so fed up with your Hillary obsession, I just couldn’t take it anymore.  Looking back, I realize I took it personally. I now accept that sometimes we women simply over-identify with Hillary.

But something essential shifted inside of me and in my 43 years, I have never experienced anything like it.  After 15 years of unflinching, Blumenthal-level Clintonista tendencies, I woke up one day and realized I hated them.

Not that I was severely uncomfortable with their attacks on Obama, although I was, not that the racially tinged lies were disgusting, although they were, not that Hillary’s candidacy is actually a disgrace to feminism, although it is, not that their path to winning is by killing hope, although it is. No, it was a gestalt really, more of a snowball effect that started the first day of the Penn-cocaine filth.  It really got some steam up post MLK/Johnson and exploded when Bill Clinton threw black people under the bus the first chance he got, blaming everyone but himself in the process.

All of those years of defending the Clinton’s against their enemies simply fell away.  The memories of Monica floated back up, I remembered how they threw her under the bus the first chance they got too.  Does anyone doubt Bill would have let Monica rot in jail had it come to that?

I’m trying to adjust to this new reality of mine, although the biggest surprise has been how natural it feels.  I can’t tell you how many people I know have gone through this same transformation.  The rift is irreparable, but that is OK.  I’m focusing solely on the future and feel much lighter for it.

Yes we can.