The Dish

I’m inclined to agree with Jonathan Adler, especially this point:

1) Romney spent $4 million and 22 days in South Carolina, and still finished behind Fred. 2) Romney has not one any seriously contested constest.  Nevada? Wyoming?  Please.  Where Romney has made a major investment (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina) he has failed.  Michigan?  No other candidate made a comparable investment or effort to winning the state, so I’m not sure that helps the case.

With that amount of money, and that level of ability, there’s something deeply awry with the guy and his candidacy. Voters know it. On paper, Romney is the answer to the GOP’s problems. In reality, he palls.

While the Clinton campaign continues its hardball tactics, Obama gives a sermon, takes a few steps back and a deep breath:

For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man.  And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system. 

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean.  If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community. 

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community.  For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity. 

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for president, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

Notice his direct remonstration to a religious minority audience of the moral calling against anti-gay bigotry. Who else does that?

It isn’t over yet. The campaign has helped reveal the moral emptiness of the Clinton Restoration. And the desperate need for a new direction. If Obama is not offering something new, who is?

Because, when the Islamist nuke goes off, you want to look John Galliano level fabulous.

Patrick Hynes makes the case, and throws a sharp elbow in NRO’s direction:

I prefer serious analysis. And one place to find the good stuff is over at the American Spectator Blog where Jim Antle, Phil Klein, Jennifer Rubin and others provide daily—and even hourly—insights worthy of our attention (Matt Lewis’s coverage at Town Hall has been noteworthy, as well.)

What the Spectators point out (just keep scrolling) is that Sen. McCain won South Carolina by putting together a remarkably broad coalition of mainstream Republicans, evangelicals, seniors, veterans and Independents. Exit polling data show that McCain either won among these groups (seniors, veterans and independents) or was highly competitive among them (mainstream Republicans, conservatives) or sufficiently competitive among them (evangelicals).

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty.)

Watch Tom Palmer go for Lew Rockwell. This is either the dorkiest or the coolest thing I’ve posted in a long while. That’s always with the question with libertarians, isn’t it?

Matt Yglesias feels Hewitt’s pain:

This morning, Mitt Romney had more delegates than John McCain. Following today’s primaries, Romney’s lead has grown even larger because Nevada has more delegates than South Carolina and Romney won a larger proportion of the vote in NV than McCain got in South Carolina. Naturally, the press is declaring this a big win for McCain. I just saw Howard Fineman explain that "there is no longer any strong candidate in the race" to oppose McCain. Nobody but the guy who’s leading, that is.

Hewitt, meanwhile, in classic Stalinist fashion, refuses to acknowledge that Ron Paul actually exists.

Protein Wisdom’s resident red-blooded Red Stater takes stock after South Carolina:

What to do? Well, my first thought is to buy some remote land in Idaho and try to hole up for the next decade or so, learning to sustain myself with nothing but a Bowie knife and some animal pelts. And maybe Dish Network and a HD DVR receiver.

But why bother?

Why indeed. Yeah, they really do hate McCain that much.

A straight football fan sings a song about his man-crush on Tom Brady. Yeah, if Brady were gay …

Well it’s an online poll, so all the usual caveats. But it’s from a youth-oriented evangelical magazine, so it probably means something. The younger fundies are much more economically liberal than their elders, and much less hung up on sexual issues.