2008 Primaries Thread 2: THE QUICKENING

I think the buried message is that Howard Wolfson is pretty fucking sad at his job. Jesus Christ, man.

Yeah, that too. Seems a bit much that he's ready to just chuck in the rest of the primary elections just to favor whatever backroom arm-twisting they can pull off.

I wonder if he'll still be at his job in 4 weeks time.

he's probably just saying that to get off the sinking ship faster.

LOL @ Fox news' image names:

http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/021208_doomsday1.jpg
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http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/021208_doomsday5.jpg http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/021208_doomsday6.jpg http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/021208_doomsday8.jpg http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/021208_doomsday9.jpg http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/021208_doomsday10.jpg

yay layout

If Hillary doesn't win the popular vote, then she's not going to get the superdelegates she needs to swing it her way. Because everyone understands that if there's any perception that she played dirty to get the nomination, it would be a fatal blow to her GE chances.

she might actually prove to be a more divisive president than W, if that is even possible. Reaching across the isle would be finished. The so-called "culture war" would feel a pretty real "surge." And the government would be just as ugly, nasty, untrustworthy, and depressing as the last eight years. Shit, McCain can as least find the aisle.

why do you think this kenan? it's not a rare thing to think, i've just never understood why people think it

btw sy hersh came to speak at the university of tennessee recently and my parents went. they said he was shambling, absent-minded, hilarious and said basically anything that came into his mind

the two big points they came away with were these -

1) nobody -- not obama, not hillary -- is telling the truth about how fvucked america is in the middle east, about how it will be impossible to just withdraw anytime soon, regardless of how brilliant the plan is or how well executed, nor about how the recent drop in violence is real but based on strategies that don't work long-term

2) if there is a successful terrorist attack on american soil the republicans are going to win the election

nobody -- not obama, not hillary -- is telling the truth about how fvucked america is in the middle east

McCain isn't telling the whole truth, either, but I think he's trying to tell as much as he can without completely politically hamstringing himself. Trouble is, MAN can he ever be bad at this. He is bad at covering his ass and not so careful about talking off the top of his head, and neither does him any service. He also changes his mind sometimes. Oh noes can't do that, it crushes my mind grapes.

This "hundred million years" quote of his (or whatever the number is up to) is the kind of not-awfully-calculated thing to say that opponents on both sides can sink teeth into, both anti-war liberals and -- shit -- anti-war ANYBODY, and also isolationist conservatives. But wait a second ffs, he never said he wants bloody casualties forever and ever. He said specifically that he did not, in fact. He said, "We've been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That'd be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That's fine with me. I hope it will be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping, and motivating people every single day." And then he explained it again on a morning talk show. Maybe I need a new barometer or something, but that does not sound like a red-faced teeth-gnashing warmonger to me. It does sound like an inconvenient sound bite.

He's kinda good at those: then there's the thing he said about "more wars," which was (looked it up) "There's going to be other wars. ... I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars." I just don't know how hawkish that sounds, especially not from a dude who was a POW for five years. When he says he's sorry to tell you, I kinda get the impression he's actually sorry to tell you. Throwing in the phrase "we will never surrender" was a little half-hearted attempt to maybe let some of his more bloodthisrty base know that he's not going to be a pussy, either, but the tone of the statement was not aggro warcore. And then you read any coverage that cites that comment, and the blogs and the god-help-us pundits, and suddenly the exact quote reads "I am going to kill people. Oh yes. Mark my words. Mwahahahaha."

I hate to defend a guy who has voted against every reproductive right that has been challenged in his presence, I honestly do. I have problems with the man! BUT HE IS NOT INSANE.

"We've been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for 50 years or so."

What's kinda off-kilter to me about the reaction to this is that the hardcore isolationists, generally a bit insane in their own right, are the only ones who are reading the comment about "10,000 years" the way he meant it. They don't want us there not even to keep peace, not even a military base, nothing.

mccain said going into iraq was a good idea and he'd do it again, sounds pretty insane to me

"I hope it will be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping, and motivating people every single day."

this is, how you say, boooshit

He may not be insane, but it's duplicitous to bring up troops in Japan or South Korea. He's effectively saying "we can make Iraq peaceful like Japan" when in fact no one believes U.S. troops could be deployed in Iraq without the expectation of casualties any time soon, like not within a generation at least.

kenan you haven't answered my question about why you believe govt under a hillary clinton presidency will be "ugly, nasty, untrustworthy, and depressing".

izzit cause she's "polarizing" and "divisive"?

xxxpost Yeah, i can't quite figure his sudden saddam-was-satan thing that he found, the way bush found jesus, all of a suddenly. I don't think the guy is some kind of super awesome mensch, don't get me wrong, plz. But it does seem like a lot of the big talking points on both sides are based on misinformation that is itself based on willful misinterpretation. I don't want him as president, but some of the shit everyone's pulling up against him is just rong.

it's duplicitous to bring up troops in Japan or South Korea. He's effectively saying "we can make Iraq peaceful like Japan" when in fact no one believes U.S. troops could be deployed in Iraq without the expectation of casualties any time soon, like not within a generation at least.

Yeah. But as bad as what he actually said was taken, that would have been even worse.

kenan you haven't answered my question about why you believe govt under a hillary clinton presidency will be "ugly, nasty, untrustworthy, and depressing"

The short version is, I do not believe she shares my views on what the country needs to do next, I do not trust her to stick to even her own views, and as icing on that cake electing her would cause more fistfights outside of bars than the country really needs right now. Ugly. Depressing.

yeah but why? why don't you trust her to stick to her own views, why would her becoming presidents lead to fistfights outside of bars (!!), and what specifically about her differences from obama bother you?

I know, I get it, you want the truth! etc, and I'll think about it all the way to work. I realized the first time you asked, though, that that's the kind of question that I should not go off half-cocked on around here.

drudge:

RASMUSSEN National Poll at 11 AM: Obama Takes Double Digit Lead: Obama 49% to Clinton 37%; Obama leads among women 46% to 41%... Developing...

why don't you trust her to stick to her own views

is this a serious question??

George Will brings the lolz this morning. He hopes the Dems do the sensible thing and nominate Obama:

With metronomic regularity -- the rhythm may arise from some strangely shared metabolic urge, which may explain the mystery of their marriage -- the Clintons say things that remind voters of the aesthetic reason for recoiling from them. Aesthetic considerations even cause many Republicans -- a coarse commercial breed, they are notoriously insensitive to higher things, but they are not immune to the repulsive -- to hope, against three decades of evidence, that Democrats can be sufficiently sensible to nominate Barack Obama, even though Hillary Clinton would be more vulnerable to John McCain.

Last week, in his 10-thumbed attempt to prevent his wife's Louisiana loss, Bill Clinton said that Obama has made "an explicit argument that the '90s weren't much better than this decade." The phrase "explicit argument" was an exquisitely Clintonian touch, signaling to seasoned decoders of Clintonisms that, no matter how diligent the search, no such thought could be found, even implicitly, in anything Obama has ever said. In his preternatural neediness, Clinton, an overflowing caldron of narcissism and solipsism, is still smarting from Obama's banal observation, four weeks ago, that Ronald Reagan was a more transformative president than Clinton.

Then in Virginia on Sunday, his wife, true to the family tradition of "two for the price of one," contributed her own howler to the growing archive of Clintoniana. She said she is constantly being urged to unleash her inner Pericles: "People say to me all the time, 'You're so specific. . . . Why don't you just come and, you know, really just give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and then, you know, get everybody all whooped up?

m bison it was a serious question for kenan but if you'd like to answer i'm all ears. i really would love for people to spell these things out, i'm dumm and don't get cnn/comedy central/msnbc where i live!

i thought it was pretty much accepted wisdom at this point that whatever convictions she's had, she's been more than willing to jettison them if she thinks it would pay off dividends politically later (see: war vote, kyl-lieberman, land mines, etc). either that or she is more ideologically hawkish than i'd have thought. and either way is a problem for me. if the former, she's a coward who won't stand up for what she believes in the face of short-term political pressures. if the latter, she's genuinely into blowing shit up. i'm more inclined to believe the former is true.

"i thought it was pretty much accepted wisdom at this point"

meaning i'm not the only one who thinks this...?

the accepted wisdom on hillary clinton is so deep you need machinery just to shovel yourself out, which is why i asked the question (and why the responses keep seeming like "lady, if you have to ask...")

so thanks for specifics m bison -- the cluster bomb thing is disturbing

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,180 for "Hillary Clinton Is Tracy Flick"

arright, cool. i figured hrc had earned that reputation as a morally compromised type years ago, hence the 0_o.

she has had that reputation but i think it's questionable at best whether she's significantly "earned it" more than any other senator

s'ok its aaaall over now sit down try to relax

can you enlighten us on the real hillary tracer?

She likes reading by the fireplace on Sunday afternoons and always has a great filthy joke!

that describes pretty much anyone

i hear she eats lots of hot peppers

hey you guys i've got a pretty filthy joke about two old ladies digging potatos, do you want to hear it?

who knew she too was a pepperpot all along

only if you make one of them hillary

make Madeleine Albright the other

so hillary's digging potatos with madeleine albright and she lifts one up in her hand, admires it and says "you know, this one reminds me of my bill's balls!" madeleine albright goes "they're that big??" and hillary sort of smiles and goes "no, they're that dirty though"

screaming pimp lobster served with potato gonad au gratin

So I'm kinda grumpy that the media so eagerly bought the Clinton line of "the superdelegates are up for grabs!" in the past, since without that being the fixed frame no WAY would Wolfson have been able to get away with basically conceding the election 2 weeks before the TX primary. I guess it was just a side-effect of the horse-race focus, but ugh. I hope they at least start calling him Hillary's Katherine Harris.

yah ive said this before but the fact that news organizations are including super delegates in their count is just unconscionable. they can change their minds anytime - no one has any super delegates.

yea this is gonna get really ugly with the superdelegate race

I guess Obama faced a lose-lose choice once the Clinton camp put the superdelegates thing into play--either go after the delegates too, which concedes the point, don't go after them and decry Clinton's tactics, which means they could've ended up without any superdelegates, or decry while still going after them, which would've looked bad.

On the bright side, the media's also pushing the "Obama has the momentum" frame pretty hard, so maybe that will counteract it and the superdelegates will do what they're supposed to do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/us/politics/14senators.htm

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure more than $340 million worth of home-state projects in last year's spending bills, placing her among the top 10 Senate recipients of what are commonly known as earmarks, according to a new study by a nonpartisan budget watchdog group.

Working with her New York colleagues in nearly every case, Clinton supported almost four times as much spending on earmarked projects as her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), whose $91 million total placed him in the bottom quarter of senators who seek earmarks, the study showed.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the likely GOP presidential nominee, was one of five senators to reject earmarks entirely, part of his long-standing view that such measures prompt needless spending.

Has anybody in the Clinton camp said what you'd do with all the "undeclared" delegates from Michigan, if they were seated?

xpost see, this is why I want Hillary to stay my Senator...

oops -- that's the wrong link. here's the right one:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021303635.html

wow senators getting federal money for their state to spend on people, how corrupt!

the nytimes link has these great tidbits:

Examples of (Clinton and McCain's) mutual respect typically include a tale of holding a vodka-drinking contest in Estonia.

and this:

And no, (Obama's advisors) said, do not expect Mr. Obama to dust off the lyrics to a song he performed on March 11, 2006, when he appeared as a keynote speaker at the Gridiron Dinner in Washington. His words were written to the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain.”

“When a wide-eyed young idealist, confronts a seasoned realist, there’s bound to be some strain,” Mr. Obama sang perfectly on pitch. “With the game barely started, I’d be feeling less downhearted, if I only had McCain.”

ny still sends way more out than it gets back