Death Wish

With Barack Obama winning the majority of elected delegates and with more and more superdelegates following the popular-vote results to support him, Hillary Clinton has once again demonstrated how pathetically frantic she is to head off his inexorable nomination.

Resisting calls to bow to the inevitable and drop out of the race, she told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader newspaper that back in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was also seen as the certain Democratic nominee - only to be killed at the height of his triumph. "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?" she asked. "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

Putting aside the fact that her memory of 1992 is somewhat faulty in that Bill Clinton actually clinched the nomination in early April, her RFK comment was like something out of a bad gangster movie. I can just see Clinton and her hired goons walking up to Barack Obama and sneering, "You wouldn't want anything bad to happen, would ya?"

It was pretty appalling, even for someone as seemingly hell-bent on political martyrdom as Clinton. She backtracked almost immediately, claiming she simply misspoke and she doesn't actually want Obama dead.

But it was no accident. She made pretty much the exact same statement to Time back in March:

We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.

She got away with it that time, so now that her only hope of winning the nomination is to convince the superdelegates to support her, she dragged it out again. The only difference is that this time around, she got caught.

In any event, she played right into the hands of all those loonies who claim she leaves a trail of corpses wherever she goes.

If this is really what she's been reduced to - raising the specter of something happening to Obama - then she's forfeited whatever support she may have once held. She used to be seen as a smart, savvy candidate who knew the ins and outs of Washington, but now she's been revealed as just another power-mad politician who is willing to do and say anything to win.

McCain's Medical Records

It sure looks like there's something in John McCain's medical records that he doesn't want people to see. After months of refusing to make them public, he will finally do so, except the circumstances do not exactly inspire confidence:

1. He will release them only to a select, handpicked group of reporters.
2. He is doing so tomorrow morning, on the Friday before a three-day weekend.
3. The invited reporters will be allowed to take notes but no photocopying will be allowed, nor will copies be distributed.

He released 1500 pages of medical and psychiatric records back in 1999 during his first presidential run, so what's different now? Does it have anything to do with his 2000 surgery to remove a malignant melanoma tumor? It is, after all, not unreasonable to expect the president to be healthy.

Will the media do their job tomorrow and adequately report on this event? Or will they allow the Straight Talk Express to run them over?

About Time

It sure took long enough, but John McCain finally realized that there is no upside to seeking out John Hagee's endorsement and publicly rejected it. With the megachurch pastor's constant sermons attacking Catholics, Jews, Muslims, gays, and indeed anyone not white and Protestant, any votes McCain won by sucking up to the Christian fundamentalist wing of the GOP were more than offset by votes lost from all the people whom Hagee offended.

The straw that finally broke the camel's back was the discovery of an audio recording in which Hagee proclaimed that Jews "specifically do not have living souls." And if that wasn't enough, he also insisted that in slaughtering the Jews of Europe, Hitler was actually following the will of God as a means of getting them to move to Israel:

"And they the hunters should hunt them," that will be the Jews. "From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks." If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the Holocaust, you can't see that.

Theodor Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said "I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel." So few went that Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust.

Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says - Jeremiah writing - "They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks," meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.

Even by his standards it was a bit much.

After the storm broke, an unapologetic Hagee claimed he was "intentionally mischaracterized" and refused to back off his earlier statements. That sure didn't work; McCain finally kicked him off the Straight Talk Express. (For his part, Hagee's PR firm sent out a press release saying he actually dumped McCain and not vice versa. You say potato, I say potahto.)

In for a penny, in for a pound: McCain also dumped Rod Parsley, who in some ways makes Hagee look like a Boy Scout:

• "America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed."
• "There are some, of course, who will say that the violence I cite is the exception and not the rule. I beg to differ. I will counter, respectfully, that what some call 'extremists' are instead mainstream believers who are drawing from the well at the very heart of Islam."
  
• Parsley's Center for Moral Clarity says adultery should be prosecuted as a felony.
• "You know who their [Planned Parenthood's] biggest fans must be, that must be the Ku Klux Klan, because the woman who founded this organization detested black people."

While jettisoning Hagee and Parsley is a welcome development, I should point out that McCain did so only after the mainstream media finally started paying attention to their raving bigotry. He was apparently just fine with it as long as it wasn't front-page news and Fox/CNN/etc were pounding on Jeremiah Wright, but once it became that, he got rid of them damn fast.

Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly put it succinctly: "[McCain] only cared when it showed up on network TV and became an embarrassment to him. So much for a different kind of politics."

Girl Gone Wild

As her hopes of winning the Democratic nomination slip further and further away, Hillary Clinton is poised to stage her very own Götterdämmerung, the apocalyptic destruction of Valhalla that wraps up Wagner's Ring Cycle. She is apparently determined to fight to the finish, no matter how pointless it might be nor how she may destroy the Democratic Party in the process. And in doing so, she is validating all those times the Republicans called her a Machiavellian figure who cares only for her own power and ambition.

Several examples of her recent actions throw this into sharp relief:

1. She cited analysis done by Karl Rove - Karl Rove! - supposedly proving her to be the stronger candidate in the fall election.
2. Months after publicly backing the Democratic National Committee's refusal to honor Michigan and Florida's primary results because the two states broke party rules on scheduling their primaries, she now says that the DNC's actions are on par with slavery, denying women the right to vote, and the stolen election in Zimbabwe.
3. She claims that Barack Obama won a majority of pledged delegates (that is, delegates chosen directly by primary and caucus voting) not because he is the better candidate but because male Democrats and everyone in the media are a bunch of sexist woman-haters.
4. After the Supreme Court declared George W. Bush to be president back in 2000, she supported the abolition of the Electoral College and making the presidential election a straight popular vote. However, she now wants Democratic superdelegates to disregard the popular vote - which she is losing unless you include Michigan (where Obama wasn't even on the ballot) and Florida - and support her in sufficient numbers to give her the nomination.
   

And so on. She certainly has every right to continue running even after it's become a lost cause, but her increasingly scorched-earth tactics, combined with her ever more hysterical rhetoric, are doing herself and the party more and more damage. Her latest antics have alienated most of her biggest supporters, especially in the high-profile liberal blogs, and it's only going to get worse.

She has to take a good long look at herself in the mirror and ask herself a tough question: is it worth it? Is it really worth tearing the Democratic Party apart just to get nominated for a fall election which she may very well lose anyway?

Only Hillary Clinton can really answer that question.

Next Up, Changing Water Into Wine

The GOP is desperate this year. I mean, really desperate. The party has lost three House special elections in a row, the last one in a Mississippi district that President Bush won easily in 2004 and where Vice President Cheney personally campaigned this year. The president is radioactive, and anyone who campaigns based on how close he or she is to the White House is asking for trouble. And that includes John McCain, who says that his administration will only continue Bush's disastrous policies.

So perhaps it's understandable that the Republicans are invoking something of a higher power.

At the convention during which the Georgia Republican Party officially designated their slate of delegates as supporting McCain, state party chair Sue Everhart made a rather surprising comparison: "John McCain is kind of like Jesus Christ on the cross. He never denounced God, either."

Now, I'm not expecting a fuss like back in 1966 when John Lennon said the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus," but it does raise eyebrows. I mean, comparing a political candidate to the Christian Messiah is a bit of a tall order.

Everhart realized that her statement might be seen as, well, tacky and backed off somewhat. "I'm not trying to compare John McCain to Jesus Christ," she backpedaled, claiming she was actually referring to when he was a POW in Vietnam and was pressured to denounce the United States. "I'm looking at the pain that was there."

That's not quite true, however. Granted, he did it under duress, but McCain did indeed "confess" in captivity: "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors."

In any event, that was forty years ago. More recently, given the free ride that McCain has largely received from the media (John Hagee, anyone? Rod Parsely? All the lobbyists running his campaign?) one can hardly claim that he's been in severe pain. Certainly not like back in 2000, when Karl Rove ran a loathsome whispering campaign among South Carolina Republicans, claiming that McCain's Bangladeshi-born daughter was actually the result of a tryst with a black prostitute. But that's ancient history.

So with McCain now being the anointed GOP candidate, I suppose we can look forward to seeing TV ads showing him walking on water, healing the sick and making the blind see. These guys are literally looking for a savior.

Don't Vote for the Black Guy!

Hillary Clinton said in USA Today a couple of weeks ago that she's winning "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans," and was rightly hammered for appealing to racial prejudice. I am therefore shocked, shocked, to find that some of the more bottom-feeding Republican pundits have embraced the racial theme wholeheartedly.

In her column last week, Kathleen Parker quoted approvingly a West Virginia voter who said he's supporting John McCain because he wants "someone who is a full-blooded American as president." The election, she says, is "about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots." Oh yes, and "there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice."

Throughout her column, she uses code words to say in no uncertain terms that only white people whose ancestors were born in America have any right to run for president, and that such Americans value our country differently than Americans of other colors or ancestral origins. It is a remarkably ugly conceit.

Of course, the phrase "full-blooded American" is utterly meaningless. As a magnet for people from all over the world, the United States is a wonderful mosaic of white, black, yellow, red and everything in between. Our children are both Asian by birth - our son came here from South Korea and our daughter from China - but they are as American as the next person, and I will tear anyone who says otherwise a new one. We teach them to be proud of their country and the ideals it represents.

Implicitly taking up the same "don't vote for the black guy" banner, Michael Medved claims in his latest column that there is something innate in "American DNA" (whatever that is) that enables Americans to take risks. And just to make sure the message gets across, he goes on:

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide - between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.

In other words, Medved is embracing the old racist stereotype of blacks as lazy, shiftless, and genetically inferior to whites. He implies that if we vote for one in November, we deserve what we get.

Parker, Medved, and the nativists to whose innate prejudice against "others" they are appealing, don't get it. They don't understand that skin color doesn't matter, but that it's what's inside that counts.

If the Republicans are really so bereft of ideas that they're actually using couched language to tell their supporters to vote McCain simply because Obama is black, then they're in deeper trouble than we thought.

Actually Helping Veterans Is Too Expensive

While the Pentagon and the Veterans' Administration have tried to reject it, cover it up, or define it out of existence, it can no longer be denied that American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are facing a mental-health crisis of staggering proportions. Huge numbers are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a crippling problem often resulting from a severe personal trauma. Since so many veterans are coming home with PTSD, the VA has come up with a truly Bush-like way of dealing with it: refuse to admit it exists and shaft its victims.

An E-mail message from March 20 of this year was leaked, and it is truly ugly to read. A VA hospital's PTSD program coordinator sent a message to various staffers, including psychologists, social workers, and a psychiatrist:

Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I'd like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out. Consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder, R/O [ruling out] PTSD.

The contempt is staggering. Deny suffering veterans the help they desperately need because it costs too much? Which heartless bean-counter wrote this? Why has he or she not been held accountable?

What will it take for these people to realize that the people they so callously used as cannon fodder are paying the price, and that to shortchange them in this way is simply obscene?

Bush, Obama and Hitler

Once upon a time, presidents left domestic politics "at the water's edge" when going overseas on official travel. As he has done so many times, President Bush took that fairly common-sense approach and tossed it out the window.

The Decider is currently in the Middle East to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Israel's independence. Speaking at the Knesset in Jerusalem today, Bush had this to say:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

This was, quite simply, a swipe at Barack Obama, who has repeatedly said that diplomacy is always preferable to knee-jerk military action and that war should be a last resort only. The Commander Guy obviously thinks that makes Obama some sort of yellow-bellied Nazi appeaser, and said so publicly. White House press secretary Dana Perino said he was not referring to Obama, but rather to anyone who is so obviously naive as to want talks with Iran and others on Bush's enemies list.

Yeah, right.

CNN almost immediately contradicted her, citing "White House aides" who admitted it was indeed an attack on Obama.

For a president who has said more than once that he wouldn't get involved in this year's campaign, it was a low blow. And he did it overseas on a supposedly nonpartisan trip. And he did it in Israel, the nation created after the Nazis wiped out millions of Jews while the world twiddled its thumbs.

Obama struck back quickly, releasing this statement:

It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's independence to launch a false political attack. It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally, Israel. Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all the elements of American power, including tough, principled and direct diplomacy to pressure countries like Iran and Syria.

This will, of course, make no impact on Bush. Convinced that he is right and that everyone else is wrong, he simply has no clue that his diplomacy-is-for-wimps approach is not only wrong, but disastrously so. His loathing of anything short of going in with guns blazing got us stuck with a quagmire in Iraq, a nuclear-armed North Korea and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

And, as Senator Joe Biden quickly pointed out, Bush's hatred of talking rather than shooting requires that he fire both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, both of whom openly support diplomacy with Iran.

Somehow, I don't see that happening. It's fine when Republicans do it, you see.

See, We All Sacrifice Somehow

For some unfathomable reason, President Bush is widely seen as being slightly out of touch with the reality of the world. Perhaps it's because of his refusal to admit that the Iraq War is a neocolonial disaster or that the economy is tanking for everyone not fortunate enough to have a few million bucks stashed away for a rainy day.

And perhaps it's because of things like this:

Mike Allen from Politico.com: "Mr. President, you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?"

Bush: "Yes, it really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as - to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

Allen: "Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?"

Bush: "No, I remember when [Sérgio Vieira] de Mello, who was at the U.N. [heading up the humanitarian mission in Iraq], got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life. And I was playing golf - I think I was in central Texas - and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it's just not worth it anymore to do."

That's his idea of sacrifice?

Let me get this straight: after five years of refusing to attend soldiers' funerals, refusing to raise taxes to pay for this war, refusing to support expanded educational benefits for veterans - after all that, the Decider claims he's given up golf out of some bizarre gesture of solidarity with those whose loved ones have been killed?

Is he really so shallow as to believe that surrendering the opportunity to make a hole in one at all compares with the agony of losing someone in his useless war halfway around the world?

Unfortunately, after almost eight years of this guy, I think we already know the answer.

Terror! Terror! Rah, Rah, Rah!

Last week, the Pentagon released a massive document dump of more than 8000 E-mails, memos and other files related to the "military analyst" propaganda scandal. While the mainstream media continues to ignore this wholesale (and very possibly illegal) scheme, bloggers across the country have been combing through the data looking for nuggets of gold. And they just struck a pure 24-karat one.

On December 12, 2006, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was about a week away from stepping down when he met with his squad of "message force multipliers" for a farewell lunch. During the lunch, Rumsfeld spoke on how the country had not suffered additional terrorist attacks since 2001 - and how the American people deserved another attack to punish them for voting Democrats into control of Congress the previous month:

We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack. And when that happens, then everyone gets energized for another [inaudible] and it's a shame we don't have the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats.

If anyone needed any additional evidence that Rumsfeld is a grade-A sociopath, this is it. The notion that public rejection of endless official fear-mongering shows a lack of "maturity" and requires the "correction" of more terror and death is simply obscene.

How many more horrors will be found in the documents?

Farewell, Sgt. Fluffy

Every time the White House tells anti-war dissidents to shut up and "support the troops," we find more and more evidence that they don't give a rat's patootie about supporting the troops. Soldiers, whether alive, wounded, or dead, are just more cannon fodder for their military war on the Iraqi people and their propaganda war on the American people.

This has taken many outrageous forms, including but by no means limited to:

• Donald Rumsfeld using an autopen to put his signature on condolence letters to families of dead soldiers instead of actually signing them himself.
• Wounded soldiers being left on their own at Walter Reed Hospital to cope with filth, neglect and an uncaring bureaucracy.
• The bodies of dead soldiers being shipped home as freight.
  
• The Veterans Administration covering up an epidemic of suicide attempts and other mental-health problems among veterans.

And so on. But once the bodies of men and women hailed as heroes for their sacrifice get home, they're treated with the respect they deserve, right?

Of course not.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday that about 200 American soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan were cremated at Friends Forever, a facility in Delaware which processes animals and the occasional human.

Yes, it's entirely possible that the remains of fallen soldiers were turned to ashes in chambers also used to cremate Fido and Whiskers.

The Pentagon was quick to claim that no humans were cremated in facilities used for animals, and the place would no longer be used for cremations anyway. Even assuming they're telling the truth - which is doubtful to say the least - it's kind of hard to get around the fact that the facility's billboard prominently announces it as a pet crematorium. Plus, the military literally does not know how many soldiers were cremated there.

All jokes about the troops being treated like animals aside, this is pretty darn awful. Even with all the lip service and empty "support the troops" rhetoric, one would at the very least expect the military to treat dead soldiers with more respect than this.

The Republicans Are On Drugs

For years, the Republicans have been the party of fear and smear, of divide and conquer. But after so long, the American people have finally woken up to this simple fact, and this fall are poised to give the GOP a shellacking of historic proportions at the ballot box. The party leadership is running scared, and are finally beginning to realize that using hate and paranoia to turn people against each other might not have been the smartest idea. So they hired a crack marketing and PR team to "rebrand" their image.

Well, we now have the results. Roll Call reported that the new GOP message is titled "Reasons to Believe" and is based on four core issues: the economy, energy, health care and security.

For example:

Next week, Republicans will premiere their energy policy, focused on boosting the supply of domestic production, bringing down gas prices and creating jobs, the memo states.

In following weeks, GOPers will roll out their visions for other issues:

• Health care - "Affordable, high-quality health care for every American by giving families greater choice and control, not through a massive expansion of government health care controlled by bureaucrats."
• The economy - "A stronger economy by stopping the largest tax increase in American history, cutting wasteful Washington spending, balancing the budget by 2012, passing serious entitlement reform and strengthening our housing sector."
• Security - "From threats our families face both at home and abroad by securing our borders once and for all, taking on the rising criminal threats in our communities and giving terrorists plotting new attacks no place to hide."

I'm curious - just how much were those PR guys paid? Whatever it was, it's too much; it's still the same fear-and-loathing agenda, just reworked with a smiley face.

But that's not the best part. The GOP memo to its members calls this lipstick-on-a-pig makeover "The Change You Deserve." If that sounds familiar, it should: the exact same slogan was used for an antidepressant medication called Effexor.

The pill's ad copy might as well be copied word for word into the Republican playbook:

The Change You Deserve™

Are these symptoms of depression interfering with your life?

• Not involved with family and friends the way you used to be?
• Low energy, fatigue?
• Not motivated to do the things you once looked forward to doing?
• Not feeling as good as you used to?

And it gets even better. The FDA went after Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, who make Effexor, because the ad quoted above "overstates the efficacy of Effexor XR, makes unsubstantiated superiority claims, in addition to other unsubstantiated claims, and minimizes the risks associated with the use of Effexor XR."

You can easily say the same thing about the Republican Party nowadays.

Whoops. Does this mean the GOP is really on drugs rather than just seeming that way? It would explain an awful lot.

Psst...Obama Hates Jews!

Since the Republican Party has made such a hash of everything over the last eight years and with no actual accomplishments to point to in this year's election, their only hope of holding onto the White House is to attack and destroy the Democratic nominee by any means necessary. And so with Barack Obama looking more and more like the inevitable GOP opponent, the Republican smear machine has shifted into overdrive. To wit, the guilt-by-association attacks on Obama based on his former pastor, his acquaintances, and others.

But now the GOP seems to have a new tactic to handle Obama - lie like hell and hope that someone believes it.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Obama discussed Israel, the terrorist group Hamas, and other matters in the Middle East. Wholeheartedly supporting that vibrant democracy, he said that the history of Israel "describes the history of overcoming great odds and a courage and a commitment to carving out a democracy and prosperity in the midst of hardscrabble land." For Hamas, he had sharp and unequivocal words: "since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements."

He also brought a note of realism to the interview, realizing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to understanding and constructing a viable foreign policy with regard to the Arab world. "This constant wound, that this constant sore," he said, "does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable."

Sounds pretty straightforward and common-sense, right? Well, surprise, surprise - the GOP promptly took his words and twisted them around.

House Minority Leader John Boehner attacked Obama for supposedly saying that Israel is a "constant sore." "Obama's latest remark, and his commitment to 'opening a dialogue' with sponsors of terrorism," Boehner went on, "echoes past statements by Jimmy Carter who once called Israel an 'apartheid state.'"

Of course, Obama said nothing of the sort. He was referring to the conflict as a "constant sore," not Israel. And his "opening a dialogue" quote was taken entirely out of context. What Obama actually said was:

When Israel invaded Lebanon two summers ago, I was in South Africa, a place where, obviously, when you get outside the United States, you can hear much more critical commentary about Israel's actions, and I was asked about this in a press conference, and that time, and for the entire summer, I was very adamant about Israel's right to defend itself. I said that there's not a nation-state on Earth that would tolerate having two of its soldiers kidnapped and just let it go. So I welcome the Muslim world's accurate perception that I am interested in opening up dialogue and interested in moving away from the unilateral policies of George Bush, but nobody should mistake that for a softer stance when it comes to terrorism or when it comes to protecting Israel's security or making sure that the alliance is strong and firm. You will not see, under my presidency, any slackening in commitment to Israel's security.

Seems pretty supportive of Israel to me.

But the utter desperation with which the GOP is attacking Obama, trying to drive a wedge between blacks and Jews (both core Democratic constituencies) is emblematic of their electoral panic this year. They know they're going to get the tar beaten out of them this fall, and so they are frantic to minimize the damage any way they can.

And if that involves smear attacks and playing to fears of black anti-Semitism, so be it.

Oh Lordy, Here We Go Again

Remember the whole string of Bill and Hillary Clinton "scandals" back in the 1990s that were all wrapped in the single name "Whitewater?" During eight turbulent years it careened from one alleged horrible offense to another, until it all melded together in the public imagination. I think everyone eventually decided that Bill was guilty of diddling Monica Lewinsky with one hand while firing the White House travel office staffers and fondling Kathleen Willey with the other. Meanwhile, Hillary killed Vince Foster and had sex with his corpse, then both Clintons molested Chelsea with cigars while secretly hiding then un-hiding Rose Law Firm papers in the White House.

Or something like that.

In any event, the Moonie-owned Washington Times still thinks there's gold in them thar hills, for they ran a big splashy "exclusive" on yesterday's front page. The article loudly trumpets the discovery of "once-secret memos" which supposedly prove that Hillary Clinton lied during the original Whitewater investigation an eon or two ago.

According to the paper, the memos - actually prosecutor's notes from more than a decade ago - suggest that Clinton lied under oath when she claimed that she never "earned a penny" in her legal work at the Rose Law Firm. (Of course, the article never says how much money the prosecutors thought she did earn, hinting that whatever it was, it wasn't much.)

Gripping stuff, I know.

Seriously, does anyone outside the hardcore GOP Clinton-haters even care about Whitewater anymore? In fifteen solid years of rumormongering and insinuation, wingnuts galore have claimed to have the Holy Grail of proof that Hillary is a corrupt adulterous lesbian murderer - and each time, that elusive goal has vanished into the mists.

But why is this supposed damning evidence being leaked now? Could it be that Hillary is doing such a good job of cozying up to the GOP that she could conceivably siphon off some votes from McCain in the fall election? And if that is indeed the case, perhaps the story is designed to remind Republican voters why she is so evil to begin with. Or perhaps it's yet another in a very long line of supposed silver bullets intended to knock Hillary out of the running once and for all.

It'll be interesting to see what Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, et al do with this one.

Hillary's Chaos

Rush Limbaugh, the man who virtually invented modern right-wing talk radio, is loudly taking the credit for Hillary Clinton's squeaker victory in Tuesday's Indiana primary. "The only reason Mrs. Clinton won Indiana," he bragged in yesterday's show with his usual lack of modesty, "was because of me and Operation Chaos."

Operation Chaos, for those who have not yet encountered this delightful little perversion of primary elections, was Limbaugh's plan to have lots and lots of nominal Republican voters cross party lines in states with nonpartisan primaries and cast their ballots for Clinton. This would hopefully swing the nomination to Clinton, thus allowing the GOP to rehash all the "Lady Macbeth" rhetoric with which they pilloried her in the 1990s. Barring that, the objectives (as quoted from the official T-shirt) are:

Crossover to vote in Democrat primaries
Prolong the Democrat primary battle
Allow the Clintons to bloody up Obama politically, since our side won't do it
Enjoy liberals tearing each other apart
Drain the DNC of campaign cash
Annoy the Drive-By Media...
And WIN IN NOVEMBER!

In so gleefully plotting the sabotage of a political opponent, Limbaugh seems to be channeling Richard Nixon's 1972 campaign organization, the Committee to Re-Elect the President. CREEP, as the group was popularly known, similarly torpedoed Ed Muskie's Democratic primary campaign with dirty tricks, clearing the way for the counter-cultural George McGovern to win the nomination and get creamed in November.

As odious as it may be to consider, Limbaugh's boast could possibly be right. With such very public fumbles as the Bosnia sniper fiasco, her "3AM" campaign ad, and her GOP-style pandering on a gas-tax holiday, she needed all the help she could get. His shenanigans may well have put her over the top.

With superdelegates jumping ship to support Obama and her staff leaving in droves, Clinton's campaign is imploding messily. And she just had to loan herself another $6.4 million to stay afloat, for a total self-financing of $11.4 million. This means that the big donors are either already maxed out to the legal limit or are unwilling to finance a losing battle and are thus keeping their wallets shut. This is even affecting Democratic Congressional candidates, who find that the ongoing primary contest is leaving them unable to raise funds.

It also doesn't help that Clinton has turned to waging a scorched-earth battle to the absolute bitter end, undercutting Obama every chance she gets and cozying up to potential McCain voters.

She is even using racial themes, telling USA Today that "Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me." (Translation: "Listen up white people! Don't vote for the black guy, vote for me because I'm white.") She's getting hammered for such blatant race-baiting, as she should be.

This may make for a good movie screenplay but the Republicans are drooling in anticipation of a badly damaged Democratic nominee limping into the general campaign.

If Clinton really has gotten to the point where she needs Rush Limbaugh's help to win a primary, then it's over. She's run a great campaign, but it's time to focus on the November election rather than her own advancement. It's time for her to drop out.

Indiana Saved From Fraudulent Voting Nuns!

Last week, the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana state law requiring all voters to present a government-issued photo ID such as a driver's license or a passport before they can be allowed to cast a ballot. The stated rationale behind the law, which was pushed through the state legislature by the Republican Party, was the prevention of voter fraud where someone shows up at a polling place claiming to be someone else.

Of course, the Court didn't care that this has literally never happened in Indiana. As Justice Stephen Breyer somewhat tartly observed in his dissent, "the State has not come across a single instance of in-person voter impersonation fraud in all of Indiana's history. Neither the District Court nor the Indiana General Assembly that passed the Voter ID Law was given any evidence whatsoever of in-person voter impersonation fraud in the State."

Even though the majority opinion agreed there were no substantiated cases of voter fraud in Indiana which would be deterred by the law, it was upheld anyway.

And now we're seeing the results. While trying to vote today in Indiana's primary election, a group of women from South Bend could not present the required form of ID and were thus turned away.

The women were all nuns in their 80s and 90s, none of whom drive.

Not only were elderly nuns prevented from voting, but a new bride was turned away because the name on her driver's license didn't match the one on her voter registration record, a college student was rejected because she had only a school ID card and an out-of-state driver's license, and so on.

Ratified in 1964, the 24th Amendment finally outlawed the poll tax that was used to prevent generations of blacks and poor Americans from voting. With the Court's action, a new, back-door poll tax - the cost of obtaining a driver's license or other official photo ID - has been declared entirely legal.

In upholding the Indiana law, the Supreme Court blithely said that "petitioners' premise that the voter-identification law might have imposed a special burden on some voters is irrelevant. The law should be upheld because its overall burden is minimal and justified." Of course, citizens who don't have driver's licenses are overwhelmingly likely to be poor, elderly, urban residents or young people - all reliably Democratic constituencies.

But holding down the Democratic vote by wholesale disenfranchisement wasn't the purpose of the law, right?

Right?

First Things First

When a country whose government you don't like is devastated by a huge natural disaster, one would think it's pretty bloody obvious that the right approach is to respond with help and compassion. You do not take advantage of the opportunity to hit them again. And yet that is just what the Bush Administration has done.

The Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar (formerly Burma) is reeling from a massive cyclone that has killed tens of thousands of people. The famously isolationist government reversed its policy of walling itself off from the world to request humanitarian assistance, and the world has responded. America has a golden opportunity to do some good while starting to rebuild our shattered international image, so of course the White House promptly flushed it down the toilet.

Yes, they sent the First Lady in front of the cameras yesterday to say briefly that "we're already acting to provide help," whereupon she turned to the real purpose of her statement - to give the Burmese government a stern tongue-lashing.

"The response to the cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta's failure to meet its people's basic needs," Laura Bush lectured, showing off what she learned from the John Bolton School of Diplomacy. "The regime has dismantled systems of agriculture, education and health care. This once wealthy nation now has the lowest per capita GDP in Southeast Asia."

On and on she went about the Burmese government's sins, grumbling about a national referendum which is still taking place (if the referendum were postponed, she would of course be going on about how they're "thwarting democracy") and the arrests of opposition leaders. Oh yes, and George has frozen the Burmese government's assets in American banks so they can't buy supplies.

Even from this White House, it was truly stunning. Here we have a country which has just experienced a major national disaster, and the Administration's response is to harangue them on all the ways they're not measuring up?

And whose bright idea was it to have Mrs. Bush castigate the Burmese government on their response to the cyclone? Does no one in the White House remember they did exactly the same thing three years ago, ignoring Hurricane Katrina until it was too late and then botching the rescue efforts afterwards? All it did was wipe out a significant portion of the Gulf Coast, not to mention a good-sized part of a major city, so even these clowns might recall it. Or maybe they just hoped that everyone else would forget.

Every time these morons on Pennsylvania Avenue make you think they've hit absolute rock bottom, they manage to outdo themselves. Heck of a job, Laura.

Burn Him At The Stake!

When I saw this story coming over the wires, I had to check my calendar to make sure that it really is 2008 and not somewhere in the Middle Ages.

A substitute teacher in Land O' Lakes, Florida (whose Wikipedia entry calls it the "Nudist Resort Capital of the World") named Jim Piculas needed to get his students' attention, so he did a little magic trick and made a toothpick disappear. (It's done with a piece of tape, and instructions on how to do the trick are freely available online.) The kids loved it and did a better job of paying attention to the lesson.

So what's the problem? The school district's substitute-teacher supervisor called Piculas and told him, "You've been accused of wizardry." A student was apparently so traumatized by the vanishing toothpick that his father complained. The school then took action and fired Piculas.

Wizardry? Are they serious?

Last time I checked, we're in the 21st century. Harry Potter book burnings aside, can anyone seriously believe that such "magic" is satanic or otherwise filled with the occult? It's all sleight of hand, misdirection and illusion, and has enjoyed a very long history on the stage.

Even if a kid or his parents take such a trick way too seriously, aren't school administrators supposed to deal with this sort of hysteria without returning to the Dark Ages? At the very least, they should do a better job than Sir Bedevere in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

It's a sad day for education when this nonsense is allowed to happen.

Pat Tillman, the Pentagon, and Propaganda

After the 9/11 attacks, Pat Tillman quit the Arizona Cardinals football team and joined the Army. He eventually served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, reaching the rank of Specialist. When he was killed in April 2004, the Army told his family he was advancing in the teeth of enemy fire and died protecting his fellow Army Rangers. A splashy public memorial service hailed him as a hero who gave his life to save his comrades.

And it was all a lie.

Over the last four years, details have been slowly and painfully dragged out of the Pentagon about the real circumstances in which Tillman died. He was not killed by enemy fire at all, but by friendly fire in a chaotic encounter with his own troops. Indeed, the upper echelons of the military knew almost immediately what really happened. But rather than tell the truth about a sad fact of war, they instituted a cover-up, keeping the true facts of Tillman's death secret for as long as they could. They might have justified it at first as sparing a grieving family, but what they did next was unforgivable.

The Pentagon turned Tillman into an iconic propaganda figure - the square-jawed football hero who voluntarily gave up his career to save America from terrorists, and valiantly gave up his life to save his fellow soldiers from the same enemy. They even awarded him a posthumous Silver Star for "gallantry in action against an armed enemy," fully aware that there was no actual "armed enemy" anywhere nearby. Not content to make him into a recruiting poster, the Pentagon also used him to distract attention from the then-breaking Abu Ghraib scandal.

As the cover-up unraveled, the Pentagon looked worse and worse. Tillman's parents have never stopped fighting to learn the real truth, most recently on CBS' 60 Minutes. How was he killed? Why did the military cover up the details of his death? How far up the chain of command did the lies go? And why was the memory of their son sacrificed on the altar of the White House's relentless PR machine, corrupted into something he was not, all to make the military look good?

Four years of lies and evasions is far more than enough. Tillman's family, and all America, deserve to know the whole truth.

Starve! And God Loves You

John Hagee's views can be politely described as out of the mainstream. He has less-than-charitable feelings towards anyone who isn't white, male and Protestant, but his ravings haven't garnered one-tenth as much media attention as those of Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor.

Well, we now have another chance for the media to redeem itself. Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks unearthed a clip of Hagee in full frothing-at-the-mouth mode:



Starve? People who can't find work should starve? Somehow, I can't reconcile that with the notion that religion is all about love and compassion. Hagee's version of Christianity seems to be awfully angry about everything all the time.

Maybe it's just me, but if Wright had his own nationally-broadcast TV show in which he tells people who can't find work to starve, and if the congregation follows that up with applause, the media would be screaming about it for weeks on end. But since Hagee is (a) white and (b) supporting a Republican, he's allowed to get away with it.

That's wrong, to say the least. Since Fox News et al have made it very clear that anything Wright says is fair game with which to attack Obama, anything Hagee says should be fair game as well.

Will the media finally take it seriously?

Mission Accomplished, Five Years Later

It seems like only yesterday that President Bush got gussied up in his Top Gun Halloween costume, flew to an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego, and manfully announced that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" as a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner hung from the Abraham Lincoln's superstructure behind him.

Five gory years have now passed since that day, and we are no closer to winning (whatever that means) the Iraq War than we were then. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, half a trillion dollars have been spent, and the world's post-9/11 goodwill towards America has been squandered.

And through it all, the White House has put a lot more effort into explaining away the massive arrogance behind that notorious banner than in actually winning the war, repeatedly blaming it on the ship's crew even though everyone knows the White House was responsible.

In January 2007, then press secretary Tony Snow channeled George Orwell and insisted that Bush actually said the complete opposite of what the banner proclaimed, no matter what we mere mortals might remember. "He cautioned people at the time," Snow claimed, "that there would be considerable continued violence in Iraq and that there would be continued operations for a long period of time." Of course, Bush said nothing of the kind, and Snow was apparently hoping no one would take the time to actually, oh, I don't know, look up the speech.

And just this week, current press secretary Dana Perino tried again, claiming the banner actually meant "Mission Accomplished For These Sailors Who Are On This Ship On Their Mission." We all just got it wrong, you see.

Indeed, the phrase "Mission Accomplished" has entered the popular vocabulary as shorthand for "we haven't actually accomplished a damn thing and we have no idea when, how or even if we'll really get the job done." The banner itself has become a symbol of the Bush Administration's arrogant certainty that the president is always right, everyone else is always wrong, and ideology trumps reality every time.

"Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained to occupy and exploit," Bush said five years ago. "Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home. And that is your direction tonight."

One wonders whether Bush actually believed what he was saying, or whether he was chortling inside at putting yet another one over on the American people. For all the talk about "troop drawdowns" and "return on success," Bush and his inner circle have no intention of leaving Iraq.

Ever.

Their plans are to turn that country, created in 1921 by British civil servants who drew arbitrary lines on a map, into a permanent gas station for the United States, ostensibly ruled by a puppet government that knows how to follow orders. And by purging the Pentagon's professional officer corps of all but the most dedicated ideologues and yes-men, they have ensured that the next president will have a devil of a time getting us out.

Maybe that's what Bush meant by "Mission Accomplished."