Salutes

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Living in a time of war and economic collapse, what else do we have to talk about but middle fingers? I’ll let you judge whether Obama’s alleged gesture was intentional. Anyway, Republicans flip the bird so much better.

Meanwhile, Robert Reich and Sam Nunn have declared their support for Obama.

Polls are all the place now. I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going on in the Pennsylvania electorate.

Update: See John Whitesides of Reuters, “Obama keeps rolling as Clinton running out of time.”

“It doesn’t seem like she has the power to alter the dynamic of the race anymore,” said Simon Rosenberg, head of the Democratic advocacy group NDN.

Rosenberg said Clinton’s scenario for winning the Democratic nomination was no longer believable.

“In every way you can measure it, he’s won more delegates, he’s won more states, he’s raised more money, he has a better organization — all the metrics one has of how to evaluate the race indicate he is winning and she is losing,” he said.

Who’s Bitter?

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Not these guys.

Today George Will accuses Barack Obama of elitism, which is a bit like being called bloodthirsty by Hannibal Lecter.

Obama does fulfill liberalism’s transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

Will, of course, is a Man of the People because he writes about baseball. And he knows the simple natives are not frustrated and bitter. What could they possibly be frustrated and bitter about? Life is fine for George Will, after all.

See the artfully titled “Cracker-quiddick Fallout Continues To Haunt SnObama” (so clever, those Righties) at Lulu’s blog. A blogger named see -dubya breathlessly quotes such plebeians as Will, John Fund, James Lileks, and of course Little Lulu herself on the awfulness of Barack Obama’s elitism. And the blogger does this in wide-eyed innocence of the inherent irony he is wallowing in. It’s almost cute.

As E.J. Dionne says,

It has been sickening over the years to watch Republicans, who always rally to the aid of the country’s wealthiest citizens, successfully cast themselves as pork-rind-eating, NASCAR-watching, gun-toting populists. To have the current White House occupant (Yale, Harvard Business School, son of a president) run as a good old boy should have been the final straw.

But here are the two remaining Democratic candidates, Obama by speaking carelessly and Clinton by piling on shamelessly, doing all they can to make it easy for Republicans to pretend one more time that they are the salt of the earth.

Now we’re into the debate about the fallout. On the one hand, you can find commentary that says Obama’s political career is all but over and his poll numbers in Pennsylvania are tanking. And you can find other commentary that says there is remarkable little change in the poll numbers and that those small-town Pennsylvanians don’t seem to give a bleep about what Obama said. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between, but we’ll see.

I think the real test for both candidates will be the debate in Philadelphia tomorrow night. Bittergate will give Obama an opening to address blue-collar issues, which he needs to do. And I will be surprised if his wording will be as clumsy as it was in San Francisco. He’s not a man who makes the same mistake twice. Senator Clinton, on the other hand, never seems to know when to leave well enough alone. She may still be in Annie Oakley mode. Anything can happen.

While I don’t agree with every word, Richard Cohen’s column is, for once, worth reading. See The Politico on Obama’s counter-punching style. See also Bob Herbert.

Update: Eugene Robinson also is particularly good today.

Identity Crises

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That Bill Kristol is as hilarious as ever today. He is comparing Barack Obama to Karl Marx:

But it’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to … religion” out of economic frustration.

Note the “we.” Another member of the elite who doesn’t get it.

Obama in San Francisco does no courtesy to his fellow Americans. Look at the other claims he makes about those small-town voters.

Obama ascribes their anti-trade sentiment to economic frustration — as if there are no respectable arguments against more free-trade agreements. This is particularly cynical, since he himself has been making those arguments, exploiting and fanning this sentiment that he decries. Aren’t we then entitled to assume Obama’s opposition to Nafta and the Colombian trade pact is merely cynical pandering to frustrated Americans?

In Kristol’s world, the unwashed masses who live in those anonymous small towns are too dim to notice where their jobs went (which, if true, would make them almost as dim as Kristol) and wouldn’t be against “free trade” if demagogues would just leave the subject alone.

IMO Kristol shows us how really out of touch he is here:

He’s [Obama] disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America.

Either Kristol has no clue whatsoever about the real working-class folks of small town America, or he doesn’t know what bourgeois means. Or both. Either way, there is a huge class of Americans who are utterly invisible to Kristol.

This goes beyond just looking down on the simple peasants. Kristol doesn’t even know they exist. (See also fubar at Needlenose.)

Meanwhile, Obama is fighting back. ABC News reports:

“Shame on her,” Obama said, echoing one of Clinton’s own atacks on him. “Shame on her, she knows better.”

Obama said he was disappointed with her for her response and then launched into a new criticism of Clinton over her recent admission of being a hunter, and compared her sarcastically to Annie Oakley.

“She’s running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment, she’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley! Hillary Clinton’s out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday, she’s packin’ a six shooter! C’mon! She knows better. That’s some politics being played by Hillary Clinton. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blinds.”

Obama said he is amazed and surprised by this “dust-up” but admitted that his words were chosen badly. He said he deeply regretted … that his words were misinterpreted.

This is exactly the right response. He shouldn’t back down. I think it’s possible that, when the dust settles, this episode will have resolved in his favor. Senator Clinton is already having to answer questions about the last time she went to church or fired a gun.

Here’s what’s sad: If I had read this column by Carl Bernstein six months ago I would have said Carl had fallen victim to Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Now, I suspect it’s close to the truth.

Here are some really good “see alsos”: Kevin Hayden at American Street; Ron Beasley at Middle Earth Journal; RJ Eskow at Huffington Post; Oliver Willis.

Here’s a particularly excellent commentary by Gary Younge. And David Lightman of McClatchy Newspapers writes “A surge of new voters in Pennsylvania is likely to help Obama.”

Update: Robert Reich:

Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment — all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.

Read the whole thing.

Update 2: Quote du Jour from John Cole:

So, in case you are keeping score, yes, American voters are dumb enough to vote for Bush twice (and I include myself in that number, sadly). They are not, however, dumb enough to sit around and listen to an Ivy League educated lawyer who has spent all but two of the last 40 years living in a Governor’s mansion, the White House, and a NY mansion and who made 110 million over the past six years call someone else elitist.

Go figure.

Bittergate Backfire?

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Don’t miss this post by Josh Marshall, which says the Clintons have said things in private about the unwashed masses of small towns that were far less charitable than what Obama said publicly.

The Clinton campaign tried to capitalize on Bittergate by handing out “I’m not bitter” stickers. MSNBC reports that the Clintons tried to claim that the stickers were a spontaneous grassroots phenomenon, but later admitted that they, um, had them printed and passed them out.

I like this bit from the MSNBC story:

But the issue doesn’t seem to be sticking. Clinton himself has been silent on the issue. But at the first two events of the day, the campaign has sent one of Carolina’s hometown boys out to push the issue before Clinton takes the stage. Tom Hendrickson, a Clinton supporter and former Democratic Party chairman, included a reading of Obama’s comments in his introduction of Clinton.

“Senator Obama, don’t pity us and think that we’re bitter and frustrated,” he said in Winterville this morning. “We are hard-working family folks who are smart, and we get it. We don’t need pundits to tell us what to think.”

Hendrickson repeated the sentiment at a later stop in Winston, but dropped the direct mention of Obama as the source of the quote.

In both instances, Hendrickson’s speech evidenced little reaction from the crowd, which had been waiting for the main event for over an hour, and appeared to have little tolerance for a parade of surrogates.

By the third stop of the day in Goldsboro, Hendrickson did not even take the stage.

Maybe folks don’t need pundits to tell them what to think, but I take it folks also don’t need Clinton surrogates to tell them what they feel.

Elitism for Elites

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It always amuses me when upper-class people with power and privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media and blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in their lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter and frustrated.

This remark allegedly is an insult to working-class, small-town whites in Pennsylvania. I have a different perspective. Granted, my background is southern Missouri small-town working-class white, rather than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, and there are subtle cultural distinctions between the two. While I may have kinfolk in half the trailer parks in the Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over the past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through the shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.

In community after community, the old factory or mining jobs that sustained the local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages and benefits, and looked forward to all the trappings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now the bright young people move away to cities, and those who remain in the small towns sustain themselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart.

The only ones who aren’t bitter and frustrated are those too young or too dim to realize life was much better a couple of generations ago.

I concur with many of Obama’s critics that the place of guns and religion in American culture is older, deeper, and much more complex than Obama’s remarks reflected. But don’t tell me small-town, working-class white folks in America aren’t xenophobic. They are, deeply, and they have been going back generations. That’s just a plain fact. Believe me, you don’t know the half of it until you’ve lived among them.

What’s rich about the current flap is that the biggest reason small-town, working-class whites have tended to vote “conservative” in recent decades is that the Right has stoked that bitterness, frustration and xenophobia, election after election, and turned it on the Left. As Joe Bageant pointed out in his pretty-brilliant book Deer Hunting With Jesus, small-town, working-class whites learn everything they know about the outside world from highly paid media elites like the perpetually angry and xenophobic Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. Fear and anger are the bread and butter of right-wing politics; it keeps the rubes compliant.

Limbaugh, btw, may be from southeast Missouri, but his family had tons of money. True Redneckland would have been a place Limbaugh visited growing up, but he never had to live there.

And today you’ve got people like John “Power Tool” Hinderaker (highly paid lawyer; graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law) discussing Obama’s “bigoted opinion, common among urban liberals, of people who live in ‘small towns.” I don’t know why Hinderaker put quotes about “small towns”; maybe he thinks there are no such things.

Quoting Oliver Willis:

Apparently Fox, Drudge, and Politico are just tired of a slow news week and are looking for something – anything – to whip up a frenzy over, and of course the go-to people for quotes on this are the elite of elite cons like Grover Norquist and Karl Rove. I mean, when is the last time those guys had a conversation with someone making less than six figures– besides the help?

I’ve long believed you aren’t a real American until you find yourself in some rural Kentucky roadhouse at 1 a.m. singing “Rocky Top” with the rest of the drunks. I dare say this is an experience not many of Obama’s critics have had. I admit that I’m far enough removed from my own roots that I no longer remember the words to “Rocky Top” beyond most of the first verse and the refrain, but I used to could sing it all the way through. I suspect, however, that the small-town, working-class world I grew up in would be utterly alien to the likes of Hinderaker.

From a working-class perspective, the three presidential candidates represent different slices of the elitist pie. You’ve got Senator Hillary Clinton, who grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago and graduated from Yale law school; Senator John McCain, son of a four-star admiral and U.S. Naval Academy graduate; and Barack Obama, the biracial graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law.

American politicians going back to Andrew Jackson have emphasized the more common aspects of their biographies to appeal to voters. Failing that, one might get away with affecting folksiness as George W. Bush does. But politicians need to be careful when they presume to speak for the folks.

“It’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter; well, that’s not my experience,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience at Drexel University.

Does anyone besides me find that hysterically funny? Of course it’s not been her experience. The only time she speaks to small-town, working-class commoners is when they’re lined up to shake her hand at a photo cop. She’s never been one of them. Obama has never been one of them, either, but he’s not pretending to be. Senator Clinton may think she’s found a talking point that will help her keep the lead in Pennsylvania, but she might want to be careful about portraying those small-town, working-class folks as being happy and optimistic.

Oliver Willis makes another good point:

It’s intriguing that Dems are never supposed to voice any criticism of rural America (which isn’t what Sen. Obama did) but Republicans are allowed to insult San Francisco, Massachusetts, the coasts, etc. It’s like there’s a double standard or something.

It’s all part of the Right’s elitist program of selling snake-oil to the rubes.

Update: See also Ezra Klein and Marc Ambinder.

Update 2: See also Steve Benen, John Aravosis and John Cole.

Why Wingnuts Are Idiots, II

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Because, you know, whenever one “lib” says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be set free, then (wingnuts figure) all “libs” must want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be set free.

Idiots.

Hawkins has a couple more brain cells than many of the rest of his tribe, which is frightening. One wonders how they manage to dress themselves.

The real issue in the years to come is not what’s to be done with KSM. At this point he’s probably not capable of doing much but huddle in corners, hugging his knees and talking to his imaginary friends.

No, the real issue is going to be separating fact from fiction. After four years of detention and torture, KSM confessed to personally decapitating Daniel Pearl. I understand he confessed also to masterminding the September 11th attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and various other foiled attacks.

And maybe he did those things, or maybe he just said he did to stop the torture. We’ll probably never know, because cases grow colder as time marches on. And we’ll probably never be able to put KSM on trial.

Speaking as an eyewitness to the destruction of the World Trade Center, I would like to say that it is more important to me to find out who really was responsible than it was to pick a scapegoat that fits the Bush Administration’s propaganda du jour and torture him into confessing. KSM was a dangerous guy and (note this, Hawkins) I don’t advocate releasing him, but neither do I accept on faith anything the Bush Administration says.

ABC News reported yesterday that “enhanced” interrogation techniques were not just approved in the White House; they were choreographed in the White House.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

And anyone who doesn’t think Condi was keeping the President fully briefed on these meetings gets to sit in the corner wearing the dunce cap.

Rightie genius macsmind writes,

There is nothing inherently wrong with the President of the United States and his key advisors having such discussions on what to do with the tiny little fact the article misses that these were TERRORISTS that wanted to kill AMERICANS.

And we know that because the Bushies said so! Brilliant!

The phrase “war crimes” is being tossed about. I am skeptical the Gang of Six Plus One will ever be indicted in this country. However, their foreign travel opportunities may be severely limited in future.

Well, I’m sure the government of China can show them a good time. They have so much in common.

Scapegoats

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Today the Olympic torch, having been extinguished and re-lit several times in France, is in San Francisco. I haven’t yet heard what’s going on with it today, but protests are expected, and the IOC is considering scrapping the torch relay in the future.

You probably know that the government of China blames His Holiness the Dalai Lama for causing unrest in Tibet. You probably know this is bullshit. However, the people of China hear only the Chinese government’s side of the story, and they tend to support their government.

Here in the U.S. , wingnuts and the crackpots who lead them continue to promote the idea that either Iran, or al Qaeda (the original one), or both conflated together in John McCain’s addled brain, are the chief culprits behind the violence in Iraq. You probably knew this is bullshit, and if you don’t, Dilip Hiro and John Juan Cole explain it for you.

Republican presidential candidate and war hero John McCain continues to be confused about connections (unlikely) between al Qaeda and Sh’ia Iran. Michael Goldfarb thinks we’re all being picky.

This is getting beyond ridiculous. Sometimes people make mistakes, even liberals–like when Arianna Huffington, in the midst of attacking McCain for just such a gaffe, confused Iran with Syria. Does she really not know the difference between the two? Of course not.

Memo to Goldfarb: Arianna Huffington ain’t runnin’ for President. And McCain keeps making the same mistake.

Clinton supporters believe the Clinton campaign is struggling because media are mean to Clinton. The fact that Senator Clinton’s campaign keeps making big, fat, newsworthy mistakes is not, of course, a factor behind the negative press. Yes, there is some piling on, but she’s giving them so much to pile on about. (See also “Why the Clintons Held Onto Mark Penn.” Interesting read.)

And, as I remember, until the Clinton campaign started losing, the same press had built the Senator and her campaign team into the Most Awesome and Absolutely Unbeatable Political Juggernaut of All Time.

Ezra Klein writes that conservatives have a creative scapegoat for recent economic meltdown — liberals caused the subprime mortgage crisis:

The new line we’re hearing is that the financial meltdown was really the product of the Community Reinvestment Act, a piece of legislation from the late-70s that required federally-insured banks to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods, which were being systematically excluded from credit. The legislation, by all accounts, worked. Now, however, conservatives are trying to argue that it’s behind the crisis: If the CRA hadn’t been pushing these banks to make all these unsafe loans, then the birds would still sing and Alan Greenspan could still start each morning by being anointed with the oil of the purest, youngest, olives.

As Robert Gordon shows, however, this is crap.

Well, yes.

Anyway, is there anyone out there actually taking responsibility for something?