The Dish

Remember that tip story? It seemed funny to me at first. The story was on NPR, that obvious tool of the VRWC, and detailed how Clinton did not tip any of the waitresses at a diner she visited to highlight the plight of working women. Drudge ran with the story and the blogosphere understandably gobbled it up. Immediately, the Clinton campaign played hardball and called around news organizations to confirm that, in fact, a $100 tip had indeed been left:

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer wrote to NPR in an e-mail: "The campaign spent $157 and left a $100 tip at the Maid-Rite Restaurant. Wish you had checked in with us beforehand."

End of story, one supposes. The Clinton rapid-response site, The Fact Hub, gloated. The manager, Brad Crawford, initially backed the Clintons up:

The manager of the of the restaurant tells First Read the Clinton campaign did, in fact, tip. "They paid their bill, and they left a tip," said Brad Crawford, manager of the Maid Rite restaurant in Toledo, Iowa. "Everybody was satisfied. No question about it."

But guess what? The waitress is sticking by her story that she got no tip. Yep – back to NPR:

"Why would I lie about not getting a tip?" she told NPR. She also maintained that her co-workers at the restaurant had not received tips.

Crawford, meanwhile, has clarified his story:

"Where Hillary was sitting, there was no tip left," Crawford said.

Then this:

A Clinton campaign staffer called on Esterday at the restaurant Thursday after the story aired. The staff member apologized to her and gave her a $20 bill, according to Esterday. The Clinton campaign confirmed that visit. The campaign also produced photocopies of receipts showing $157.46 was paid to Maid-Rite on a VISA card on Oct. 8 for meals consumed by the candidate’s entourage. The tip was supposed to have been paid in cash, and the campaign insisted such a payment was made but has declined to make available a staff member who was present at Maid-Rite and left tip money.

Why not? And what’s with this weird $20 pay-off to Esterday? If they’d left $100, and knew it had been shared by the wait-staff, why would they need to add $20? Esterday says it was completely improbable that her fellow servers would have received a $100 tip and not shared it with her. I don’t know what to believe. I hope someone interviews the fellow servers and gets to the real bottom of this. Yes: it matters. We need to get the name of the staffer who allegedly left the $100 in cash. We need a name of the person who accepted that $100. It wasn’t Crawford, because surely he would have immediately told reporters that he had gotten $100 in cash for the wait-staff. It’s not something you forget. So who gave it and who received it? Let’s find out, shall we?

Why? It’s an absolutely trivial story – but its triviality is what’s telling.

It is simply unsurprising that a story like this pops up with the Clinton machine – especially that quintessential Clinton touch of the ready $20 pressed into Esterday’s hand the day after the story. A classic bribe to keep quiet perhaps? The kind of petty, cheesy sleaze that Clinton engaged in for decades, as he wove his way through every skirt in Arkansas and beyond.

I covered the Clintons for eight years. The one thing I learned about them is that they lie. It’s reflexive to them; after decades of the lying that tends to infect the households of addicts, they don’t have a normal person’s understanding of truth and falsehood. They have an average sociopath’s understanding of truth and falsehood. They lie about big things; they lie about small things; and they lie about things that are so trivial you can’t believe anyone would bother lying about them. But the Clintons do. They did for eight years. They put the entire country through a trauma because they have no sense of what’s true and false any more. Living in a relationship where lying has been integrated into its very essence will do that. They can’t help it. Lying is their entropic state of being – big lies, small lies, and everything in between.

You can’t trust a word from them. If that’s what you want in a war leader, go ahead and vote for her.

He’s always worth listening to, because, even when I disagree with him, I don’t doubt his integrity. It’s why he quit the Bush administration. This year, he’s backing Huckabee and Clinton – on explicitly Christianist grounds. Hat tip: Clive.

He really is deeply hostile to gay people’s dignity and right to be who they are.

A reader writes:

I just returned from a few days volunteering with the Obama campaign in Iowa.  To hear Dean Barnett characterize it as inept and ineffective shows you how skewed armchair analysis can really be.  The people on whose doors I knocked on universally described the candidate as thrilling, and the campaign as overpoweringly energized and effective. (I actually got one woman who admitted she felt like the last one on the bus since all her neighbors were now leaning Obama). While Obama may have been a hot topic among the political literati for a couple of years, he was to all purposes a complete unknown to the average Iowa voter until announcing his Presidential run in February. For him to now be tied in polls with a former first lady (a woman who has a fifteen year head-start in name recognition and is perhaps the most well-known senator in the country) and leading the former VP candidate who has campaigned basically nonstop in Iowa since 2004, is nothing short of phenomenal.

What really shines through in Barnett’s piece is the poverty of his worldview. For him and the rest of the knuckle-draggers over at Townhall.com, the concept of quiet strength is an oxymoron.  Strange, given the prevalence of swaggering cowboy iconography from George "Dead or Alive" Bush and his posse, that they have forgotten all the lessons of manly restraint that I remember being repeated endlessly by Western "alpha dogs" like Marshal Dillon and the Rifleman. Speak quietly but carry a big stick.

It is the man who doesn’t fight when he doesn’t have to that is truly strong. Self-control and kindness towards the weak are the hallmark of real power. Instead, their icons are now the town bully who keeps saying he is going to kick some ass, but always loses to the quiet stranger in the gunfight at the end.

The voters in Iowa certainly don’t seem to have forgotten these lessons. As the caucuses draw closer, more and more of them are gravitating back towards the character traits that we used to use to describe manhood – integrity, honor, truthfulness, courage. They see chest-thumping as a transparent failure of imagination. And more and more of them are beginning to think that a great American party that now supports torturing people to death without trial is evidence of our terrible, inexcusable descent into weakness.

Rosso, Mauritania, 6.30 am.

It behooves me to point out that the poll I cited yesterday is an outlier.

Good for him:

"I don’t know Mr. Kerik. I do know that I went to Baghdad shortly after the initial victory and met in Baghdad with (Ambassador Paul) Bremer and (Lt. Gen. Ricardo) Sanchez. And Kerik was there. Kerik was supposed to be there to help train the police force. He stayed two months and one day left, just up and left. That’s why I never would’ve supported him to be the head of homeland security because of his irresponsible act when he was over in Baghdad to try and help train the police. One of the reasons why we had so much trouble with the initial training of the police was because he came, didn’t do anything and then went out to the airport and left."

A reader writes:

The next person that tells me that the American people will not elect a black person to the Presidency will be asked to name five specific people – family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, co-workers, you name it –  who will not vote for Obama because he is black. I will then volunteer to contact those people to give them an opportunity to defend themselves against this tired, old, self-aggrandizing libel.

I seem to have more faith in the American people than some Democrats.

Eugene! A blogger on Obama’s real historical parallel.

Heh: