prizefighter

"Not long ago a woman handed me a photograph of her father as a young soldier. He was receiving the Medal of Honor from President Truman at the White House. During World War II, he had risked his life on a daring mission to drive back the enemy and protect his fellow soldiers. In the corner of that photo, in shaky handwriting, this American hero had simply written: "To Hillary Clinton, keep fighting for us." And that is what I'm going to do because America is worth fighting for. You are worth fighting for."

- Hillary Clinton, 4/22/08

I can't let this Maureen Dowd thing go

An Open Letter to Maureen:

Why are you being such a jerk to Sen. Clinton? Did she switch your Coke with a Pepsi or something? And if being a jerk is the only real qualification for your job (and it seems that way), can I have it? Because you're kind of a hack. In the writerly sense. You're also a total hack in the partisan sense, but that only puts you further into the "jerk" category. I wouldn't even bring it up, but I was volunteering for Hillary Clinton the other day and an Obama supporter called me trailer trash. Gotta be honest, it hit a little close to home. I used to live in a modular. But the point is that never in my entire life have I, merely for being a vocal supporter of a particular political figure, been subject to such an amount of just pure nastiness, and by fellow Democrats, at that. You know, they say over and over that Hillary's supporters are the ones planning to defect en masse to John McCain in the general should Sen. Obama become the nominee. I wouldn't put myself into that camp quite yet (I'm waiting for some son of a bitch to offer me a mayonnaise sandwich or a Guns n' Roses tee shirt), but I'd be lying if I said that people like yourself and my judgemental new friend (MODULAR) aren't slowly nudging me in that direction. I don't care who you support. You're not a journalist; you're a living, breathing version of the guy on The Simpsons who shits all over everything he doesn't like ("Worst...Hillary...Ever.") You're not the only professional sophist in the United States who fancies yourself some sort of political tastemaker, and you certainly aren't the only one I can think of who seems to pick your political stances the way most people pick out blue jeans. But there's no need to act as if by merely existing, Hillary Clinton somehow fucks you up personally. And if you do feel that way, which I can certainly understand, there's no need to act as if Hillary Clinton is the one dividing the party when the only thing that springs into your head when your fingertips hit keyboard is rancor.

Next, on MSNBC: HILLARY WINS PA BY 10 POINTS, CLOSES POPULAR VOTE MARGIN TO WITHIN 100K: HERE'S THE TOP TENS REASONS SHE SHOULD DROP OUT OF THE RACE!

Also, Maureen Dowd is a fucking irredeemable human being.




Personal note: You're gold, Pennsylvania. You made me work for it. I appreciate you.

Hey, Pennsylvania!

You're a bunch of provincial, gun slingin, rootin tootin, mexican hatin, corn fed, rural loser tards. Fuck poor people.

Oh, sorry, that's Barack speaking, not me.

Sen. Obama, in an attempt to level with his California donor base, painted rural Pennsylvanians as "bitter", saying that the loss of jobs in the area has led to an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment and a reliance upon traditional values, religion and gun culture.

Religion, how dare they.

Obama can say whatever he wants about rural Pennsylvania. As far as I'm concerned, the race is his to lose at this point. Not in Pennsylvania, but in general. The thing that chaps my ass is that you know if Hillary said something similarly condescending, they'd howl for her to leave the race. Obama, meanwhile, has been offered the chance to clarify his remarks and put them in context. That's right, Barack, dumb it down for me. Because I'm stupid! Thx.

Ickes to Penn: "[Expletive] you!"

Penn to Ickes: "[Expletive] you!"

Ickes to Penn: "[Expletive] you!"

(I'm with Ickes on this one)

The Angry Blogger Rides Again

From the "Who The Fuck Do You Think You Are, Anyways?" file, former Clinton supporter and donor Charles Pluckhahn (no, I don't know either) writes a guest op-ed in today's Seattle Times. Among the highlights:

"When combined with your rejection of Obama's qualifications to be commander in chief, and your husband's disrespect for Obama's effort, I see an ugly undercurrent...

"Woe betide the politician, and especially the Democratic politician, who makes a racist appeal, no matter how artfully they think they've constructed it.

"Sen. Clinton, you still have time to salvage your dignity and your reputation. Geraldine Ferraro's resignation from her fundraising role is a start, but it's only a start. You should fully apologize to Sen. Obama for the stream of insults that has come from your campaign, and then you should step aside. If you do that, then I'll know my money and my time were well spent."

The sheer entitlement amazes me. I respond at length (note how I crib from my own brief portfolio):

Sen. Obama's campaign has shown a dark and ugly undercurrent of its own in the way in which it misrepresents race-neutral and factually accurate statements from the Clinton press shop, surrogate and principal spokespeople, and from Sen. Clinton herself. A few examples:

- Pres. Clinton's characterization of Sen. Obama's stance on the Iraq war as a "fairy tale". Pres. Clinton used the phrase by way of pointing out that while Sen. Obama stood against the impending war in 2002, he shut up about it when he got his Senate seat and refused to take any meaningful leadership to end the war or to prevent it's further funding. He refused to state how he would have voted were he to have been in the Senate at the time the AUMF was passed, and declares his stance on the war to be identical to Pres. Bush's. Further, it's demonstrable that at every turn in the war, he has demonstrated the exact wrong kind of judgment --against it when the surge begins working, neutral or silent when it's going poorly. And then, he turned around and voted for increased funding! As an aside, this is the type of disingenuousness and duplicity that, for some reason, is credited almost solely to Sen. Clinton, who refuses to issue post-hoc justifications for her vote every time the war effort takes a turn. Somehow, this completely accurate (and race-neutral) statement was twisted to mean that Sen. Obama's candidacy (the unstated portion of that sentence being "...as a black man") is a fairy tale.

- When Bill Shaheen said that the Republicans would make an issue of of Sen. Obama's admitted used of cocaine, he got thrown off the campaign and stripped of his unpaid, ceremonial duties. Mark Penn brought it up again (or, rather, was forced to bring it up) in an interview and was roundly attacked for using Sen. Obama's name and the word "cocaine" in the same sentence. Flash forward--Erick Erickson, who writes for redstate.com, refers to Sen. Obama as a "'self-admitted former cokehead'."

It's only going to get worse from here.

Yes, Ms. Ferraro's comments were ill-advised. But were they untrue? Can we dispute that the elephant in the room that is Sen. Obama's ethnic heritage has benefited him immensely in that the issue is untouchable to almost everybody, and that those who dare to bring it up--especially if they're affiliated with Sen. Clinton's campaign--suffer for it? Mr. Pluckhahn calls for measures beyond Ms. Ferraro's resignation. I'm curious as to what he had in mind, beyond public humiliation.

And while we're holding candidates to strict account for every stupid word uttered by a supporter, let's call for the heads of Jeremiah Wright, Samantha Powers, Austan Goolsbee, Louis Farrakhan (in a big way), and Michele Obama herself, who apparently couldn't allow herself to feel a single twinge of pride in her country until her husband's star began to rise.

The audacity of hope!

Briefly (ha, ha), I also want to address Mr. Pluckhahn's calls for Hillary to step aside. Without going too deeply into it, and with most things being mostly equal, why is it incumbent upon Sen. Clinton to abandon the race? Her supporters are no less dedicated, no less passionate, and, arguably, represent a more sizable and dedicated portion of the Democratic party's base. And let's not forget that Michigan and Florida will be in play some how, soon, and that they're unlikely to abandon their support in terms of popular vote or delegate count. Frankly, I find it insulting that Mr. Pluckhahn presumes that the millions of Democrats who've cast their support behind Sen. Clinton would take that in stride. Even the phrase you use, "...deny him the nomination", smacks of the kind of entitlement that, until recently, was falsely attributed to Sen. Clinton and her supporters.

Also, Mr. Pluckhahn, what makes you think that Pennsylvania is in the bag for Obama?

It's clear to me, as a voter, that it is not Sen. Clinton's campaign that is playing the race card. The amount of distortion coming from the Obama press shop whenever a Clinton supporter dares to speak publicly is astounding and disturbing. It indicates that Sen. Obama is not practicing a new kind of politics, and that he's not above using the issue of race as a wedge to differentiate himself from Sen. Clinton. That, I feel, is the ultimate betrayal of the Obama candidacy--that it sell hope and change to its supporters while wallowing happily in the muck that lies just below. I'd like to remind Mr. Pluckhahn that identity politics is a two-way street, and because one side practices it better than the other is no reason to abandon the candidate who, until just recently, you were convinced would make the better President. The only thing more disappointing than Barack Obama's empty promises is the ease and comfort with which people flock to them.

No catharsis. I'm still the angry blogger.

Some mid-morning bullshit

Watch as I continue to cherry-pick news stories that confirm my opinions and preconceptions!

Politico's John Fortier writes:

"The rural and blue-collar voters of Ohio are likely to be more important swing voters than those Obama courts. Obama appeals to independents, but to young, educated and upscale independents. Picture the guy consulting on his MacBook Air in Starbucks, not the cable guy. Take California, for example, which Clinton won but where Obama won independents by more than 20 points. A recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California found that the state’s independent voters were younger and more educated, and favored Democrats over Republicans by 13 points. These independents are Obama voters, but most would likely vote for any Democrat in a general election.

On the other hand, rural and blue-collar voters are more up for grabs. Whether you call them Reagan Democrats, Perot voters, NASCAR dads or security moms, they are not completely at home with either party. In some instances, economic populism might incline them to vote for Democrats, while traditional morals, patriotism or distrust of government can pull them into the Republican camp. Most importantly, these voters are concentrated in key Midwestern battleground states."

Fortier points out that Obama has pulled impressive support among blue collar voters in Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota. This is true. However, it's important to note that union households and blue collar voters sans union make up less of those electorates than they do in key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. And, at the risk of jinxing whatever ticket emerges from the Democratic Fracas of 2008, the states Obama won (excepting, perhaps, Iowa) are reliably blue. The Democratic nominee can more or less count on winning Minnesota and Wisconsin, at any rate, and their best bets lie with the candidate that pulls in overwhelming blue collar support in the battlegrounds of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

In other news:

Calderone makes a funny, Keith Olbermann loves Hillary.

One more thing. While we're still all ruffled over Geraldine Ferraro's ill-advised, if arguable, statements on the nature of Barack Obama's candidacy and it's success, vis a vis race, Kathleen Parker writes in RCP:

"There are lots of reasons for Obama's success that have nothing to do with race. But there's also this: You can't separate race from who Obama is. He is the biracial man. Although he self-identifies as African-American, it is precisely his dual race -- and his own personal work toward identity integration and transcendence -- that allows him to speak effectively of racial reconciliation and national unity in ways that a white male, or another black male for that matter, could not."

Welcome to the land of the double standard. I work in politics, so I'm used to it. However, as I wrote, perhaps in vain, to the stridently prObama editor of somethingawful, the concept of the race card is a two lane street:

"...You don't preach at Dr. King's church and then turn around and say you're a post-racial candidate. You can't have it both ways. Well, I guess you can, if you're Barack.

[His campaign] has gone out of his way to characterize fairly innocuous statements by Clinton surrogates and supporters as racially tinged when they were making race-neutral statements of fact. Take, as one of several examples, Pres. Clinton's characterization of Barack's stance on the Iraq war as a "fairy tale". Pres. Clinton used the phrase by way of pointing out that while Sen. Obama stood against the impending war in 2002, he shut up about it when he got his Senate seat (as an aside--this is the type of disingenuousness and duplicity that, for some reason, is credited almost solely to Sen. Clinton, who voted for the AUMF and won't apologize for it, like a wheedling, finger-in-the-wind scumbag). And then, he turned around and voted for increased funding! Somehow, this completely accurate (and race-neutral) statement was twisted to mean that Sen. Obama's candidacy (the unstated portion of that sentence being "...as a black man") is a fairy tale. That's total bullshit.

And how about when Bill Shaheen said that the republicans would make an issue of of Sen. Obama's admitted used of cocaine? He got thrown off the campaign, stripped of his unpaid, ceremonial duties. Mark Penn brings it up again in an interview and is widely castigated by pundits. Read today's "headlines": Erick Erickson, who writes for redstate.com, refers to Barack as a "self-admitted former cokehead"."

It's only going to get worse from here. And I wrote that over two weeks ago.

Of course, Ms. Ferarro's statements were fairly unambiguous. She was pointing to the beneficial effects of politically correct speechifying with regards to Sen. Obama's candidacy. Perhaps factually accurate (arguably), but certainly not race neutral. But, I find it interesting that no one affiliated with the Clinton campaign is allowed to even mention the issue. Race seems to be the elephant in the room.