The Dish

Dept of the Bleeding Obvious, courtesy of Jon Chait. He has a nice point about Republicans and McCain. But it looks as if, once again, the Republicans will rescue victory from the pit of doom and overcome their own issues and the Democrats will throw away their most compelling candidate since Kennedy to protect a dynasty’s prerogatives. Hey, it’s not my party.

Someone has a book proposal:

I’m planning on writing a book called "Conservative Communism: The Collectivist Temptation from Mao Zedong to the Hoover Institute". Basically, the premise of the book is that even though people think that Communism is a phenomenon of the Left, it should be obvious to any serious scholar that Communists have more in common with today’s conservatives than they do today’s progressives. I mean, Lenin outlawed prostitution, and Focus on the Family wants to keep prostitution outlawed. Mao thought all businesses should be supported by the government, and modern conservatives think that the government should avoid taxing businesses and give them all kinds of grants and free money. You can see that they’re basically the same thing.

This pic is now lighting up the Internets, judging from the traffic. Worth a thousand words, I guess.

I’m committed to a night of Shakespeare, courtesy of my husband. So I won’t be able to live-blog it. But I’ll DVR it and write up the reax. So stay tuned.

Mitt Romney gets real with African-Americans. Cringe-athon:

“Hey buddy! How’s it going? What’s happening? You got some bling bling here!”

Yo, Willard. Please stop. Please. No, I’m serious. Please.

All criticism of Bill is a "right-wing talking point" – that’s Howard Wolfson. Ah, yes. Takes me back. The classic Clinton pivot. Any criticism of us is grist for the far right. Then this:

Pressed on whether there were any point at which Bill’s conduct would come to be seen by the campaign as a liability, and asked if there was any campaign discussion of this possibility, Wolfson replied. "A few more liabilities like New Hampshire and Nevada, and we’ll win the nomination," he said.

Mark Steyn is onto something:

I love the way all these worldly Democratic sophisticates – the ones who told us "everybody does it" – sound so sweetly naive at discovering that this time round "everybody" has done it to them. Better get used to a lot more of that.

Yeah, they’d better.

Marc Adams empathizes with Obama.

Fallows gives some institutional history behind the move. The NYT has a piece today on the Atlantic.com’s growing traffic.

Hilzoy:

We know about waterboarding. We know a lot of things. Apparently, policies condoning those things are OK with Clinton, since she says that whether or not she needs to change our policies depends on all those other, unknown interrogation techniques, not on the knowledge we already have.

If this is standing up forthrightly for Democratic values, then count me out.

Forget Democratic values. How about American values?

A reader writes:

I don’t know if you get any counter-emails, but count me as someone who hasn’t seen much  substance in any of the recent charges against candidate Clinton or spouse Clinton.  They all fall into one of two categories: tendentious-to-invented, and sour grapes. Clinton obviously knows how to run an American political campaign, whereas Obama doesn’t…which is hardly surprising, since he’s never had to, above the state senate level. There’s no shame in that, and it can certainly be spun as a point of moral superiority, but in the meantime he’s going to lose some primaries and caucuses.

Obama, in the end, is shaping up to be a fantastic candidate for people interested in “politics” in an abstract sense, whereas Clinton is scoring on either side of that concept: the daily grind of winning elections, and the daily grind (post-election) of trying to get good outcomes for people via the political system.  The middle is a super-noble place to be, but in an Olympian sense that requires a special and sustained set of circumstances to get you elected.  Clinton is the ideal foil for Obama (it’s hard to imagine he would have run against any other front-runner), and if he can’t kick her posterior up and down the length and breadth of the country, he can’t kick anyone.