Regulation and the Right

Posted on by

We all know righties are against government regulation. Well, except when they aren’t.

Background: Brody Mullins and Kris Maher of the Wall Street Journal today claim that Barack Obama won the support of the Teamster’s Union by privately pledging to end government oversight of the Union. Both the Teamsters and the Obama campaign deny there was a quid pro quo. The Obama campaign says Obama was on record in favor of ending the government oversight of the Teamsters back in 2004.

The Teamsters point out that Senator Clinton also had told them she was opposed to the oversight:

The union also noted that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, suggested that she might also support ending the union’s consent decree with the federal government when she spoke to the Teamsters’ general executive board last year.

“You can’t go around dragging the ball and the chain of the past,” Mrs. Clinton said on that occasion — the March 27, 2007, meeting of the board — according to an audio tape that the union made available. “And I think that’s true for anybody, any organization, any individual,” she continued. “And so I would be very open to looking at that, and to saying, ‘What are we trying to accomplish here?’ and see what the answers were. At some point, you turn the page and go on.”

Of course, the Clinton campaign now says Senator Clinton didn’t mean she was actually going to do anything about government oversight, and the Clintonistas have taken up right-wing talking points about the alleged Teamster quid pro quo to slam Obama.

BTW, I believe the oversight under discussion is a consent decree made between the Justice Department and the Teamsters back in 1989 that allows the feds to supervise the Union and Union elections. The Teamsters signed the decree to settle a civil racketeering lawsuit that federal prosecutors had brought against the Union, charging it with being controlled by mobsters.

We’re getting to the punch line — rightie blogger response to the Wall Street Journal story goes along the line of how dare anyone even think about not regulating unions! Here’s an example, from Townhall:

Today’s Wall Street Journal implies that Barack Obama may have offered the Teamsters a quid pro quo in order to win the endorsement. Making matters worse, his “deal” involves looking the other way on the issue of corruption. … Making back-room deals with the Teamsters — now that’s a “new brand of politics”!

In other words, reducing government supervision of the Teamsters is tantamount to “looking the other way on the issue of corruption.” The Teamsters were corrupt in the past; therefore, they will always be corrupt. They are corrupt by definition.

Funny Big Corporations and financial institutions are not held to the same standard, huh? Even as the nation’s economy is reeling from the mortgage crisis, the Right is hollering about unfair regulation of financial markets. Paul Krugman writes,

But while our out-of-control financial system has been bad for the country, it has been very good for wheeler-dealers, who collect huge fees when things seem to be going well, then get to walk away unscathed — indeed, often with large severance packages — when things go wrong. They don’t want regulations that would stabilize the economy but cramp their style.

And now that the financial clouds have lifted a bit, the pushback against sensible regulation is in full swing. Even the Fed’s very modest proposal to curb abusive mortgage lending with new standards is under fire, and there are worrying signs that the Fed may back down.

Here’s another little anomaly. Everybody knows righties are in favor of liberty and personal freedom, right? Well, except when they aren’t.

Art Brodsky writes in Huffington Post that the Right is fighting net neutrality:

Just in time for the House Telecommunications Subcommittee’s hearing tomorrow (May 6) on Net Neutrality legislation, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) and the American Spectator are out with new attacks on the simple idea that people should not have their Internet experiences subject to the whims of telephone and cable companies. …

… The April 28 [American Spectator] blog post, cleverly headlined, “Public Know Nothings,” — a play on Public Knowledge — read like a basic corporate hit job on Net Neutrality of the kind one might read at any number of blogs or by any columnists in the thrall of the corporate world. But the story, combined with Armey’s April 22 Washington Times headlined “Spare The Net,” raise the inevitable question — what is it about individual freedom that “conservatives” like the Spectator and Armey don’t like?

To be fair, the debate is larger than the Spectator and Armey. Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves.

Brodsky goes on to explain how the Right’s point of view is burdened by a “tragic misunderstanding of how telecommunications policy, markets and technology worked in the past and how they work today.” Know nothings, indeed. (For the record, I believe you probably can find some right-wing bloggers who do have a clue that if Net Neutrality goes, their blogging privileges might go with it.)

Distractions

Posted on by

Joan Vennochi writes in today’s Boston Globe:

THE REAL NEWS of April played second fiddle to the presidential campaign, the pope’s visit to America, and the Texas polygamy case.

The death toll for the US military in Iraq hit 49 in April, making it the deadliest month since September, according to the Associated Press. Around Iraq, at least 1,080 Iraqi civilians and security personnel were killed last month, an average of 36 a day, according to the AP tally. While that’s down from March’s total of 1,269, or an average of 41 per day, those casualties certainly don’t add up to a stable Iraq.

It’s not as if there is no news from Iraq, you know. Bradley Brooks reports for the Associated Press:

The US military fired guided missiles into the heart of Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City slum yesterday, leveling a building 55 yards away from a hospital and wounding nearly two dozen people.

Separately, the military said late yesterday that four Marines were killed on Thursday by a roadside bomb in Anbar Province. No other details were released, and the names of the Marines were withheld pending notification of their families.

The strike in Sadr City, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant command-control center, the US military said. The center was in the heart of the 8-square-mile neighborhood that is home to about 2.5 million people. Iraqi officials said at least 23 people were wounded, none of them patients in the hospital.

See Juan Cole for more details.

Similarly, awhle back John McCain came out with a health care “plan” that was such a bad joke it ought to have got him laughed out of the presidential race. It might have, had the American people heard anything resembling substantive discussion of it from news media. (See also Steve Benen.)

Instead, we get 24/7 coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. As Eugene Robinson said,

There’s something maddening about this presidential campaign. It has become irrelevant whether anything the candidates say actually makes sense. All that matters is how their words will “play” with voters who are presumed to be too stupid to realize that they’re the ones being played.

Bob Herbert, yesterday:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no doubt (and regrettably) a big issue in the presidential campaign. But what we’ve seen over the past week is major media overkill — Jeremiah Wright all day and all night. It’s like watching the clips of a car wreck again and again.

We’ve plotted the trend lines of his relationship with Barack Obama over the past two decades. What did Obama know and when did he know it? We’ve forced Barack and Michelle Obama, two decent, hard-working, law-abiding, family-oriented Americans, to sit for humiliating television interviews, reminiscent of Bill and Hillary Clinton on “60 Minutes” at the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

There’s something wrong with us.

Frank Rich points out in his column today that the alleged craziness of anything the Rev. Wright said pales in comparison to the utterances of one Rev. John Hagee, whose affiliations with John McCain seem to be an issue only among us leftie bloggers.

Here Rich gets to the heart of the matter:

Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell can blame America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right blinks and yawns. Some obscure who-is-this-guy-again? college professor named Ward Chamberlain blames America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right goes ballistic. Likewise, some redneck yahoos in Alabama get caught with an arsenal of explosives and weapons that included 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition, and it’s no big deal. But an exploding backpack in Las Vegas or, worse, the threat of homemade cherry bombs in Michigan causes Righties to beocme unglued if they suspect the perpetrator might be Muslim.

It’s all about fear. Righties base their political choices on what they fear. At the same time, they are drawn to what they fear; they obsess over what they fear. Because they are afraid of angry black men, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a big deal to them. He excites them because he vindicates them.

On the whole, the Left doesn’t react the same way to right-wing craziness. That’s partly because there’s so much of it, of course. We hear about a Republican politician associating with an extremist religious whackjob, and we think, What else is new? And news media, which has bought into the narrative that “religion” is something the Right holds a patent on, doesn’t ask questions about the religiosity of the Right. It’s only a “story” when it’s about the Left.

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign continues to degrade everything liberalism stands for by sucking up to the Right. But I’ll have to save that for another post.

Trials and Tribulations

Posted on by

It’s cold, dark and gloomy here in the New York City metro area, which pretty much matches my mood. Since it’s Kentucky Derby Day I thought I might just post some old Derby videos, but at the moment YouTube is offline. Naturally.

(Fortunately I’ll be spending most of the day rehearsing Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt with my community chorale. This will be our fourth rehearsal this week, which is one reason I haven’t been posting much. The performance is tomorrow. After that it’s back to regular daily blogging, I promise. But singing does cheer me up.)

Hillary Clinton is pushing her “gas tax holiday” plan for all it’s worth, convinced that Hoosiers are too stupid to realize that it’s not a serious proposal (and who’s an elitist now?). As Eugene Robinson wrote,

The House Democratic leadership opposes suspending the gas tax, so the whole thing is moot — except perhaps as a case study in political cynicism: Say any damn thing you think the voters want to hear, even if you know it’s a terrible idea and won’t happen anyway. Psssst, voters: McCain and Clinton think you’re too dumb to catch on.

Of course, Tuesday’s primaries are in states that solidly supported George Bush in 2004, so maybe they are that dumb. We’ll see.

Speaking of pain: For those of you who live with chronic pain, I have a three-part series about pain, suffering and Buddhism posted at the other blog. Posts are:

Pain and Suffering
Suffering and Attachment
Pain and Buddhism

Happy Mission Accomplished Day

Posted on by

Jill Serjeant and Bernard Woodall report for Reuters:

LOS ANGELES, May 1 (Reuters) – Ports along the U.S. West Coast, including the country’s busiest port complex in Los Angeles, shut down on Thursday as some 10,000 workers went on a one-day strike to protest the war in Iraq, port and union officials said.

“We are hearing there is no activity taking place up and down the West Coast,” said Steve Getzug, spokesman of the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents all 29 ports from San Diego to Washington state. “There is no unloading or loading.”

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union said some 10,000 workers joined the protest. The union says that many of the big shipping companies are profiting from the war.

“Longshore workers are standing down on the job and standing up for America,” said ILWU International President Bob McEllrath. “We’re supporting the troops and telling politicians in Washington that it’s time to end the war in Iraq.”

Well, at least somebody gives a bleep.

While American media were obsessing about the Rev. Wright, the April death toll in Iraq was the highest in eight months. Fifty U.S. soldiers were killed, bringing the total to 4,065 U.S. soldiers who didn’t live to see the Fifth Anniversary of Mission Accomplished Day.

Outright Barbarous

Jeff Feldman has a new book about to be published called Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy . I’ve seen an advance copy, and he does a great job calling out the Right on its recklessness and meanness. Jeff is having an online book launch party on Facebook today, so drop by andsay hi.

The Joke Post

Posted on by

Here’s a joke for you. Doug Feith has published a book called War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism . Must be a laugh riot.

Here’s another joke: John McCain’s health care plan. As near as I can make out, he wants to “lure” people away from employer-based health plans by eliminating tax incentives to employers to offer those plans. Instead, people will get a $5,000 “family tax credit” that will enable them to purchase private insurance, he says, even though the actual average cost of health insurance for a family is way more than double $5,000. And he has little idea what to do about people with a pre-existing condition who cannot purchase health insurance at any price.

Hilzoy takes the plan apart so I don’t have to.

Steve Benen says the plan “probably won’t receive much in the way of scrutiny.” From the press it won’t, no, but that’s why the Dems need to purchase lots of advertising time to scrutinize it. I think if the public were to hear the details, that by itself would be enough to sink McCain’s chances to win in November.

Lorita Doan, who made herself a punch line by pressuring General Services Administration employees to “help” Republican candidates, and who threatened to sanction anyone who cooperated with an investigation of her, has stepped down from her position as chief of GSA. She blames political pressure and bad grammar.

And last but not least, Tom Friedman explains why the Clinton-McCain gas tax plan is a joke.

Discouraged

Posted on by

Sorry I’ve been a bit absent. I’m very busy, and also very discouraged. The Democratic nomination process is still a mess. The situation in Iraq is deteriorating. Civil liberties are still eroding. George Bush is still President. What else is new?

The Rev. Wright story won’t go away. Apparently the Rev. has made some public appearances that made him look crazier and, by association, Senator Obama look worse. The wingnuts, the Clintonistas and the media generally are eating it up. Conventional wisdom is shaping up that Obama had better make another statement about Wright that puts more distance between them. I don’t have much else to say that Steve Benen didn’t say already.

While American media obsesses about the Wright non-issue, the rest of the world is still reeling from Hillary Clinton’s outrageously irresponsible threat to “totally obliterate” Iran if Iran attacked Israel. Bill Kristol reveals the GOP’s Dem nominee preference by praising Hillary Clinton. See also Gary Younge, “Hillary has cynically turned to the one argument she has left: race.”

Here is a terribly sad story in today’s New York Times. Right-wing bigots are doing everything they can to alienate Muslim Americans and push them toward becoming jihadists.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, critics of radical Islam focused largely on terrorism, scrutinizing Muslim-American charities or asserting links between Muslim organizations and violent groups like Hamas. But as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted their gaze to a new frontier, what they describe as law-abiding Muslim-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.

Mr. Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law.

The danger, Mr. Pipes says, is that the United States stands to become another England or France, a place where Muslims are balkanized and ultimately threaten to impose sharia.

So his answer to this is to balkanize and marginalize Muslim Americans and make them feel like strangers in their own country. Brilliant.

“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Mr. Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system — the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like — you can promote radical Islam.”

Mr. Pipes refers to this new enemy as the “lawful Islamists.”

First of all, this ought to demonstrate for the dittoheads why separation of church and state is important. As long as the establishment clause of the Constitution is in effect and extended (through the 14th Amendment) to apply to the states, “sharia law” could not be imposed on American citizens even if a Muslim majority were around to impose it. But since we’re talking about the same clueless wonders who think that “separation of church and state” is a liberal plot to destroy Jesus, I suppose we’re asking to much to get them to, you know, think.

This reminds me of an article by James Fallows in the September 2006 Atlantic, “Declaring Victory.” Fallows interviewed several antiterrorism experts, and some said one of the reasons there has been no serious acts of Islamic terrorism in the U.S. since 9/11 is that Muslim Americans are not, on the whole, interested.

The dispersed nature of the new al-Qaeda creates other difficulties for potential terrorists. For one, the recruitment of self-starter cells within the United States is thought to have failed so far. Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands are among the countries alarmed to find Islamic extremists among people whose families have lived in Europe for two or three generations. “The patriotism of the American Muslim community has been grossly underreported,” says Marc Sageman, who has studied the process by which people decide to join or leave terrorist networks. According to Daniel Benjamin, a former official on the National Security Council and coauthor of The Next Attack, Muslims in America “have been our first line of defense.” Even though many have been “unnerved by a law-enforcement approach that might have been inevitable but was still disturbing,” the community has been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus.”

Something about the Arab and Muslim immigrants who have come to America, or about their absorption here, has made them basically similar to other well-assimilated American ethnic groups–and basically different from the estranged Muslim underclass of much of Europe. Sageman points out that western European countries, taken together, have slightly more than twice as large a Muslim population as does the United States (roughly 6 million in the United States, versus 6 million in France, 3 million in Germany, 2 million in the United Kingdom, more than a million in Italy, and several million elsewhere). But most measures of Muslim disaffection or upheaval in Europe–arrests, riots, violence based on religion–show it to be ten to fifty times worse than here.

The median income of Muslims in France, Germany, and Britain is lower than that of people in those countries as a whole. The median income of Arab Americans (many of whom are Christians originally from Lebanon) is actually higher than the overall American one. So are their business-ownership rate and their possession of college and graduate degrees. The same is true of most other groups who have been here for several generations, a fact that in turn underscores the normality of the Arab and Muslim experience. The difference between the European and American assimilation of Muslims becomes most apparent in the second generation, when American Muslims are culturally and economically Americanized and many European Muslims often develop a sharper sense of alienation. “If you ask a second-generation American Muslim,” says Robert Leiken, author of Bearers of Global Jihad: Immigration and National Security After 9/11, “he will say, ‘I’m an American and a Muslim.’ A second-generation Turk in Germany is a Turk, and a French Moroccan doesn’t know what he is.”

However, leave it to the usual knuckleheads on the Right to do what al Qaeda couldn’t — turn Muslim Americans into jihadists.

See also “Obama Team Remains Unshaken.”

Truths and Fallacies

Posted on by

Patrick Healy writes in today’s New York Times (emphasis added),

In recent weeks, Clinton advisers have been challenging Mr. Obama’s electability in a general election, and her victories in Ohio and Pennsylvania are perhaps her best evidence yet to argue that she is better suited to build a coalition across income, education and racial lines in closely contested states.

But the Pennsylvania exit polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for five television networks and The Associated Press, underscore a point that political analysts made on Wednesday: that state primary results do not necessarily translate into general election victories.

“I think it differs state to state, and I think either Democrat will have a good chance of appealing to many Democrats who didn’t vote for them the first time,” said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster not affiliated with either campaign. “Take Michigan. It has a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, and many Democratic congressmen, so it’s probably going to be a pretty good state for the Democrats in a recession year.”

Mr. Hart, as well as Obama advisers, also say that Mr. Obama appears better poised than Mrs. Clinton to pick up states that Democrats struggle to carry, or rarely do, in a general election, like Colorado, Iowa, Missouri and Virginia, all of which he carried in the primaries. Obama advisers say their polling indicates he is more popular with independents, and far less divisive than Mrs. Clinton, in those states.

“Hillary goes deeper and stronger in the Democratic base than Obama, but her challenge is that she doesn’t go as wide,” Mr. Hart said. “Obama goes much further reaching into the independent and Republican vote, and has a greater chance of creating a new electoral map for the Democrats.”

Indeed, if Mr. Obama does become the first African-American nominee of a major party, the electoral landscape of the South could be transformed with the likelihood of strong turnout of black voters in Republican-leaning states like Georgia and Louisiana, which Mr. Obama carried this winter. (Mrs. Clinton has also argued that, given the Clinton roots, she could put at least Arkansas in play in the fall.)

Josh Marshall concurs:

As Patrick Healy explains, it is simply a fallacy to claim that winning a state’s Democratic primary means you’re more likely to win that state in the general election or that your opponent can’t win it. …

… And it’s really not a big mystery that the argument doesn’t hold up because it wasn’t devised or conceived as an electoral argument. It’s a political argument — one that only really came into operation at the point at which the Clinton campaign realized that it was far enough behind that it’s path to the nomination required making the argument to superdelegates that she’s elected and Obama is not.

In a nutshell, Senator Clinton does better in states that are either bound to go Dem in November no matter who the nominee is or Republican no matter who the nominee is. But Obama does better in states that could go either way.

More Jacksonian Than Jackson

Posted on by

I keep thinking about what Steve M. said of Pennsylvania Clinton voters:

I think the white working class has been sold a line of BS in virtually every presidential election since 1968: I’m just like you. Maybe they believe it every four years, or maybe they’re just flattered that rich, privileged guys would pretend to want to be just like them. But they generally buy one rich, privileged guy’s act, even if that guy is, say, a successful Hollywood actor or an old-money Connecticut preppie.

This year, one guy just can’t pretend to be just like them. He looks in the mirror and he knows that, so he rarely tries. And a lot of them react to that. Maybe it’s not that they don’t like the color of his skin; maybe it’s just that he can’t possibly convincingly sell them the BS they want to have sold to them. (The rich, privileged woman, on the other hand, can.)

So, yes, there’s a barrier there, and it’s racial. But maybe it’s not truly racist. These people don’t get much out of the political system — the most they get is completely phony imitation. But they want it. It’s a form of flattery.

I’m not interested in splitting hairs over racial and racist. Things are what they are, and choosing a label for them doesn’t always help us understand them better.

The bigger question is, why do white working-class, less-educated voters screw themselves by falling for this act election after election? You’d think after the George Bush debacle they would have wised up. I guess not.

Amy Chozick and Nick Timiraos write in today’s Wall Street Journal that Senator Clinton won votes by persuading white working-class Pennsylvanians that she is one of them. That she is so not one of them is beside the point; she knows how to act the part.

For some time my allegory for Senator Clinton has been Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. I voted to send her to the U.S. Senate in 2000 with great enthusiasm. Her win that year was one of the few bright points in an otherwise dreary election. She didn’t accomplish much, to tell the truth, but I was willing to give her the benefit of many doubts until the October 2002 vote that allowed Dubya to invade Iraq. That and her subsequent support for the war — and the fact that for a long time her efforts to cover Bush’s ass were surpassed only by Joe Lieberman’s — killed my enthusiasm for kicking the bleeping football.

Still, plenty of people, including people I had thought to be clear-eyed about politics, are lined up for another kick.

If she succeeds in becoming president, you know what difference she will make in the lives of white working-class voters? Is there a word for a measurement just below squat? As a TPM diarist, Dan K, wrote,

The best Clinton will be able to accomplish in office, then, through her customary secretive, insider-based, power-broker approach, is another set of very middle of the road, incremental legislative changes: half a loaf here and there that helps us feel just a little bit good about doing just a little bit, but nothing that really solves any of the huge problems facing the country.

Yet the very voters who most need real change turn out for her, as they have turned out for so many other politicians who somehow persuaded white, working-class voters that the best candidate for the office is the one they most want to have a beer with.

This was not always true. Certainly, presidential candidates since Andy Jackson have trotted out their born-in-a-log-cabin routine to woo voters. But there were limits. Franklin Roosevelt was patrician to the core and never pretended to be otherwise. Nor do I recall that John Kennedy had to prove he had working-class connections, and the working class voted for him, anyway.

For that matter, nobody wanted to have a beer with Richard Nixon. If ever there was a man uncomfortable in his own skin, as the pundits like to say, it was Tricky Dick. Yet he won two presidential elections.

How exactly did we get to the point at which packs of highly paid media and political elite use their positions at the top of the power/communication pyramid to lecture working class folks about Barack Obama’s alleged elitism? And that the only people who notice how bleeped up that is are a few of us bloggers?

Mass media has played a part in this, but you’d think that 50 years into the mass media age people would be a little more sophisticated about media packaging. I guess not.

Elsewhere — See Josh Marshall on how the Pennsylvania primary left us exactly where we were before the Pennsylvania primary; Simon Jenkins on America’s love affair with war; John Cole on Clinton’s “vanity campaign.”

Pessimissm

Posted on by

I would love to hope that today’s Pennsylvania primary will somehow put an end to the increasingly toxic nomination fight. However, poll numbers are all over the place. I fear we will have no clear resolution tonight, and the fight will go on.

I’ve got an incredibly busy day ahead, but will post tonight if I’m not too depressed.

Update: Sorry; I’m too depressed. I’ll post something tomorrow.

Update 2: Steve M. has some thoughts on why working-class white voters prefer privileged elitist Hillary Clinton, and it isn’t necessarily racism.

Update 3: Editorial in tomorrow’s New York Times, which endorsed Senator Clinton:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

Thank you.

Threshold of Hypocrisy

Posted on by

Remember when Senator Clinton was talking about the “commander in chief threshold” and how she and John McCain had crossed it but Barack Obama hadn’t?

Or when Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife, was praising John McCain to the heavens —

Mr. Clinton said all three major candidates remaining in the race are talented and special people.

He did not go into detail on Sen. Barack Obama, the Illinois Senator still locked in political combat with Sen. Clinton’s wife for the Democratic nomination. Their next battle takes place next month in Pennsylvania.

But McCain, who Mr. Clinton said is a “moderate”, “has given about all you can give for this country without dyin’ for it.”

He said McCain was on the right side of issues like being against torture of enemy combatants and global warming, which “just about crosses the bridge for them (Republicans).”

That last bit took place all of three weeks ago, so I realize why it might have sunk into the memory hole. Still, I had remembered it, and also remembered that the Obama campaign might have grumbled a bit but didn’t make a Big Bleeping Deal out of it.

Yesterday, Senator Obama said this:

“You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain,” Obama said to cheers from a rowdy crowd in central Pennsylvania. Then he said: “And all three of us would be better than George Bush.”

“But what you have to ask yourself is who has the chance to actually really change things in a fundamental way so that 10 years from now or 20 years from now you can look back and you can say boy we really moved in a new direction and we put the country on a better path,” Obama added as he wrapped up an event at Reading High School.

Obama was trying to argue that he is the better choice over Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton in Tuesday’s primary in Pennsylvania. But the Illinois senator ended up mixing in praise for McCain at the same time.

The comment threatened to undercut Obama’s efforts — and those of the entire Democratic Party — to portray the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting as nothing more than an extension of Bush’s unpopular tenure. At the very least, it provides fodder Republicans can use to prop up McCain.

Now, you and I could both argue that Obama shouldn’t have said that, although it used to be that candidates said complimentary things about their opponents on the stump, and this was considered gentlemanly, and no one took it seriously.

But today, Clinton supporters are going ballistic over what Obama said. The Clintons’ comments about what a strong leader McCain would be and how he is a moderate and not a wingnut Republican, however, were perfectly acceptable.

The mind, it is boggled.