McCain’s feeble joke within his debate proposal:

McCain also suggested the two candidates fly together to the meetings, joking that that would save energy and money.

“I even suggested we travel to them together on the same plane, probably help out on energy savings,” he said to applause from an audience in Baton Rouge.

No problem, McSame: you can both commute on your wife’s private corporate jet–you know, the one you’ve been monopolizing to get around campaign finance laws, violating even your own self-set policies.

Funny how nobody in the Liberal Media™, which has been giving wide play to McCain’s ‘joke,’ has so much as mentioned the corporate jet, much less gone for this low-hanging fruit of a jab, something the media usually leaps at. Oh, wait–I know why: the media has completely failed to report on stories like McCain’s immersion in lobbyists or the corporate jet story, so no one would get the jibe if they used it.

This is a theme now in McCain’s campaign, and you have to hand it to him that he’s getting the upper hand on these things by beating Obama to the publicity punch. A while back, McCain made a “challenge” to Obama to commit to public financing–which would suit McCain great because Obama is a fundraising giant, with the added advantage of raising most of his money from citizens in small denominations, where McCain is more dependent on large donors and PACs. Obama would have to be stupid to give up that incredible advantage, but McCain scored points off the impression that somehow the challenge shows McCain is somehow more of a campaign-finance saint, when in fact McCain is immersed in lobbyists.

Then, a few days ago, McCain pulled a similar stunt on Iraq, pointing out that Obama had not been to Iraq in a long time, and “invited” Obama to go with McCain to Iraq. Never mind that McCain doesn’t seem to have even the most fundamental facts about Iraq down, such as whether or not we are or soon will be back to pre-surge levels; never mind that trips to Iraq are for PR purposes only and don’t do much to actually educate politicians about what is going on there. McCain was able to play the situation up to make it look like he’s the knowledgeable expert on Iraq–despite the fact that he’s made almost every wrong decision on Iraq, while Obama has made better ones from day one. For Obama to go to Iraq with McCain would be pointless–neither would really learn anything–and doing so would allow McCain to lord his “superior” status over Obama, acting like the teacher giving Obama lessons.

And now McCain is taking the initiative in the debate arena as well, calling for ten town-hall debates with Obama. Again, it makes it sound like McCain is being open and reasonable–but at the same time, it plays incredibly unevenly in McCain’s favor. McCain does terribly at podiums, while Obama does very well; the town hall, meanwhile, is McCain’s home-field advantage, coming across as more homey, while Obama is not as skilled in that venue–and you can bet that McCain’s campaign would play to the hilt the low-expectations game, touting Obama as the great orator so that when McCain does well in town halls, Obama will look all the worse. So many town hall meetings would also play to McCain’s financial advantage, as they would give McCain more visibility and exposure without having to pay for it. So Obama would not be wise to take McCain up on that, at least not in full.

Even before the results from Montana and South Dakota came in, the superdelegates finally decided that the time had come. More than two dozen suddenly announced their support for Obama; some have Obama now only a few delegates away from clinching the nomination. Apparently they want to be the ones who push Obama over the top, not the voters. Either way, Obama will without any doubt whatsoever get the nomination today. This while reports fly that Hillary is shutting down her campaign–or, as some have said, “suspending” it.

Finally.

The best that I can come up with in explaining what we see in the news is the idea that those Clinton supporters are the extremists, or perhaps the almost-extremists (the real extremists are the ones who, Scaife-like, claim that Obama was a drug-addicted murderer), and that most ardent Hillary supporters are not like the ones we usually see put forth in the media.

At the office where I work is a woman who fits the profile of a strong Hillary supporter–and older woman, a Democrat, a feminist and member of the civil rights generation. I asked her how she felt about the election. Her answer was instructive; not that I understood it fully, but it gave me a better idea of how some Hillary supporters feel.

Her primary reaction was anger at Obama. She surprised me by saying that the anger was for Obama just running against Hillary in the first place. But not for the reasons you might assume. My own thinking had been that Hillary supporters were angry at some slight they imagined coming from the Obama camp, but that wasn’t it. It was the idea that Obama is an upstart, an underachiever with little more than charisma, who has come to a race that was Hillary’s to win. Not that she was entitled because she is a woman, but rather because she had worked for so hard and for so long, and deserved the candidacy because of all that she had done, all the advancements she had fought for so hard. Furthermore, she is an icon of her generation, a representative of sorts for all the people who, like her, fought for civil rights, for women’s rights, and for the ideals of the party. This was to be Hillary’s time, her reward for all that she had worked for in her life–and this unknown guy just walked up and snatched it away from her with some smooth talk and a well-oiled campaign machine.

So the idea of Hillary’s entitlement was not one of “she’s a woman, so she’s entitled,” though for many that probably is an important component. It was not even so much that it was Hillary’s “turn”; the idea is that if someone else had worked harder and longer–or even if it were more close–it would not have been so much of a disappointment that Hillary lost. But Obama is a brand-new face, someone just out of state legislature, who hasn’t paid his dues or gained the necessary understandings or perspectives. He hadn’t sweat much for the party, but claimed the title nonetheless.

To my friend, it was like someone working hard and diligently in an office setting for decades, striving to reach a top management position; after so many years of labor and sacrifice, the position was almost in reach–only to have some new guy with charisma swoop in and get awarded the position because everybody liked him so much. That it was a man taking it from a woman is probably an added sting to the general insult. While my friend insisted that this was not about Hillary being a woman, I find it hard to shake the idea that this is not an important component, at least for many women.

Now, I say that I understand this a bit better than before, having heard this explained to me by someone I know and respect. But I do not understand it fully. True, in an office situation, I would join in the outrage; were Hillary such a worker and some upstart came in and took the position just like that, I would be crying foul just the same. The thing is, I never saw political nominating processes as being like that. My friend asked, “why shouldn’t they be?” and I had no good immediate answer. All I can say is, “because they’re not.” Politics simply doesn’t work that way. Had it been, Bill Clinton would not have won over George H. W. Bush. Fine, you might say–inter-party you can’t expect that, but what about intra-party? Well, again, there were others more qualified–Jerry Brown had political positions for a longer time than Clinton had, in a more important state, and had championed Democratic principles, the environment in particular, certainly much more than Clinton had. Yet Clinton blew past Brown. In 1988, Dick Gephardt had more experience than Michael Dukakis, and Jesse Jackson has more civil rights and general liberal credentials than Dukakis.

None of these cases are as striking a contrast as Obama and Clinton, but I think that a case can be made. Though perhaps the counter-argument would be, it wasn’t fair in those cases, either–and perhaps not. But my point would be that, for better or worse, the party does not entitle a candidate for service or seniority. These help, but they are not deciders.

The key point: this is not an appointment, it is an election. Potentially lesser candidates do not simply step aside out of respect for seniority or service. They run campaigns, and voters vote for them. The idea is to find the person who runs the best campaign, who appeals to the party members the most, who represents that ideas and the character of the party voters, and who stands the best chance of winning for the party, based on a wide range of variables, experience and service being just a few.

In an election, the millions of members of the party decide, based at least in part on who is capable of putting up a better fight. If it were even mostly about seniority and service, then there would be no need for an election–those properties would simply choose the candidate–but they do not. And though Hillary supporters say she put on a better campaign, the fact is that Obama won the fight–despite getting more negative media coverage, at that. The point is, this is not the way an office chooses a leader–that is not up to a vote, it is decided by a calculus where seniority and service do matter. An election simply is not like that.

And if your candidate loses the election, you are disappointed, but you understand that this is how it works; you don’t get bitter and divisive, you just forge ahead under the new banner. That’s why I don’t understand the anger; had my guy been the one with more experience, serving the party over a lifetime, and had been unseated by an upstart with charisma, I would have been disappointed, maybe even upset that my party made the wrong choice–but I would not be angry.

Even with this explanation from my friend, although I have a bit of a better understanding of the underpinnings of the resentment against Obama, I still do not fathom the intensity of the anger involved. My friend suggests that this is because I am not of that generation, I do not see things from that perspective. Maybe so.

Near the end of our conversation, my friend insisted that sexism hurt Hillary more than racism did Obama, and we could have debated the point, but I was not there to debate and it was late to boot–neither of us wanted to get into that right there. You have heard my reasoning on this before.

My friend will vote for Obama in November–no way she’s voting for McCain. I know that she’ll genuinely fight for Obama to win. But she’ll still be angry. And I’ll want to understand that better.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised when the U.S. news media ticks me off. Still, it does with regularity. I watched reports of Hillary in Puerto Rico, talking all about the win, little about the very low turnout, and nothing about the DNC ruling that signaled the middle of the end of her campaign. They talked about her looking forward to South Dakota and Montana this week, without noting that Obama leads in the polls there.

Then they talked about Obama leaving his church. Guess what? They used it as another excuse to replay for the ten billionth time the infamous “God Damn America” video, as well as other stuff that makes Obama look bad.

When I see “studies” that claim that Hillary has gotten a worse ride in the media coverage, I really have to question the data. Had Hillary been given even equal coverage, then the media would have called her campaign all but over quite some time ago, instead of propping it up like a corpse you need to make look like it’s sleeping so nobody’ll notice.

In fact, the idea that Obama had been getting unfairly positive press was itself an incorrect impression; it was the result of Obama drawing huge crowds which were newsworthy in themselves. But every time the media simply showed Obama in front of a huge cheering audience, this was somehow an example of media bias in his favor. In those early days, everything was going well for Obama; how is it biased media coverage to report that someone is doing well when they’re doing well?

But when, of all things, an SNL skit tweaked them on the concept, they went into full attack mode, leaving Hillary pretty much alone except for the Bosnia sniper fire incident. And nobody seemed to mind when Hillary had been getting only positive coverage before Iowa, deemed “inevitable” by a media that seemed eager to award her the nomination before even the first election had been held.

Nor has this same media, going negative on Obama after believing they gave him too good coverage, made the same about-face with McCain, who they continue to fawn over. While making a huge deal over Obama’s mixup of the names of concentration camps his grandfather helped liberate, they are giving McCain a bye not only when he got troop numbers in Iraq completely wrong, but also when he stood by his incorrect assertions, claiming them to be true when they were clearly not. This after endless negative stories on Obama and his preacher problem, and almost no bad coverage of McCain and his problems with multiple preachers.

And yet somehow, a study was able to parse the numbers to show that not only Obama got more positive press coverage than Hillary, but both of them got much better coverage than McCain.

Like I said, you have to question that assertion.

Update: Ah. The study only covers the campaign up until Super Tuesday, something you have to read a bit down in order to notice. The study, for some reason, decided to stop checking just before the media went medieval on Obama.

I didn’t listen to all of it–it was way late at night here in Japan, and this was no MacWorld keynote or anything–but I did listen to the DNC Rules & By-Laws committee for about an hour last night. One thing that struck me was the partisanship of the Clinton supporters in the crowd. I had heard something about Clinton supporters mobilizing for this thing, but had forgotten about that when I started listening. It didn’t stay forgotten for long; every time a Hillary supporter on the committee made a statement that helped Hillary, the Hillary supporters in the crowd burst out into applause and cheers. Not polite applause, but raucous cheering. Points that favored Obama were met with more muted, polite applause.

I thought that was bad enough; apparently, I would have been more disappointed had I continued listening:

Catcalls and boos from Hillary Clinton’s supporters rained down as former Michigan congressman David Bonior, representing Barack Obama’s campaign, suggested splitting the state’s lost delegation in half and awarding a part to each of the remaining candidates.

Other crowd reactions:

“We just blew the election!” a woman in the audience shouted. … Some audience members heckled [a Clinton supporter on the committee who approved of compromise]. “Lipstick on a pig!” one shouted. —Source

Clinton’s supporters jeered when results of the committee’s vote were announced inside a convention room at a downtown Washington hotel. They shouted “Denver, Denver, Denver” – signalling their hope to fight Obama all the way to the Democratic convention. — Source

Judging by the anger index out there today, that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. They felt robbed — by Obama, the Democratic National Committee, but mostly the media.

“I’m about ready to kick you guys down the street,” one woman from Minnesota said when approached by a reporter. — Source

Of course, that was not even the worst of it. If you need to shower anyway and don’t mind descending into rather uncomfortable depths, then read this report on the bottom-feeders among the Hillary crowd–they sound hauntingly familiar, so similar to the people who claimed that the Clintons were mass murderers.

Look. What was reached was a compromise, and it followed the rules that everybody knew full well going in. It was not everything either campaign hoped for, it was in-between–but with Hillary so far behind, anything but an absolute victory for her pretty much signals defeat. But that’s not a measure of unfairness to Hillary; it is simply a reflection of the fact that she’s behind and would need every blast thing to go her way to win this. You can’t expect to be given more than a fair split just because you’re desperately behind.

But Hillary supporters don’t see it that way. Some still are thinking that Hillary was entitled to the nomination and see this as robbery; and some are still raging at what they perceive as rampant sexism and–yes–even reverse racism. Geraldine Ferraro let go with a rant this week that I couldn’t finish reading, it was so filled with divisive and paranoid invective that made me wonder, could so many otherwise reasonable people truly believe all this? This is not even as thin as polling saying that 20% of Hillary supporters in West Virginia voted on the basis of race–at least in that case, there was some evidence of racism in play. But what Hillary supporters are reacting to is wholly perceived, not based on evidence or even opinions in surveys. It is based upon a highly subjective reaction not supported in fact.

What it boils down to is that these hard-core, die-hard supporters, like Hillary, will simply not give up. And there is a telling, not to mention chilling message in what a Hillary supporter shouted in the second quote above: “We just blew the election.” That says it right there: to many Hillary supporters, if Hillary doesn’t win, then McCain does.

Which means that to them, any attack or attempt to undermine Obama is okay because, after all, he’s never going to win anyway. That’s what scares me about this crowd: not necessarily just their invective, but the inference which signals a willingness to sabotage the party’s chances in November out of pure spite.

I suppose this quote pretty much sums up the Clinton crowd:

Hazel Rigby, a Clinton delegate from Virginia, disputed suggestions Clinton is too far behind to win, regardless of the outcome of the Florida and Michigan dispute.

“I’m here because I still think she has a shot at it,” Rigby said. “I want her there in the worst way.”

The worst way, indeed.

Maybe McCain should make a few more babysit-a-senator trips to Iraq before claiming he has the expertise which Obama lacks. Citing his superior knowledge of Iraq due to his several visits there, McCain told a crowd that we have drawn down troop levels to “pre-surge” levels:

I can tell you that [the troop increase] is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels.

Which, of course, is false–we still have 25,000 more troops there now than we had before the surge, and current plans are to draw down to only 10,000 more than pre-surge levels. Later, McCain tried to deny he was wrong; when a reporter tried to ask him if he was wrong about pre-surge levels, McCain forcefully spoke over the reporter, repeating “I said we have drawn down! I said we have drawn down! No, I said we have drawn down!” as the reporter tried to work in the words “pre-surge.” He then went on about how some troops have been withdrawn and there are plans to withdraw more–as if somehow he never said the words “pre-surge,” or that they were not an important element of his claim.

The Liberal Media™ is predictably playing this down, calling it “squabbling” and “bickering” over numbers. Of course, they took it much more seriously when Obama mistook which Nazi concentration camp his grandfather helped liberate. When Obama made that error, The Associated Press said, “Obama mistaken on name of Nazi death camp”; after McCain’s gaffe, it’s “Dems, GOP squabble over McCain’s troop numbers.” Reuters’ headline on Obama’s gaffe read, “Republicans take aim at Obama comment on uncle’s war service”; on McCain’s, they wrote, “Obama, McCain bicker over US troop levels in Iraq.”

Considering that an understanding of current Iraq troop levels is far more important than WWII trivia, especially in the midst of McCain making a huge deal about how he has superior knowledge of Iraq, the McCain gaffe is a much bigger deal–yet the headlines clearly play down McCain’s gaffe as much as they played up Obama’s. Instead of focusing on McCain’s error, its significance, or the fact that he’s denying it when it’s clearly an error, they instead focus on the two candidates disagreeing, using the trivializing language “squabble” and “bicker,” as if there’s little importance involved. Not to mention that they are not reporting on the fact which HuffPo picked up on, which is that there were three suicide attacks in Mosul today, the same city McCain had called “quiet” immediately after saying that we’ve drawn down to pre-surge levels.

John Kerry pointed out why it is indeed important to know the numbers:

If you don’t know the numbers of troops, it’s very difficult to make a judgment about whether or not they’re over-extended. It’s also very hard to have an understanding, as a citizen, about what levels of troops he’s going to keep there. If he thinks 150,000 is ‘pre-surge,’ and that’s where he’s going to stay, that’s a deeply over-extended military, and it raises serious questions about his comprehension of this challenge.

Not that the Liberal Media™ believes that: there are only 40 stories out there right now which have the McCain quote, while there are currently more than a hundred stories about Obama and the concentration camp switch.

A little perspective, please?

Watch it, get the embed code from the menu, and post it elsewhere–especially comment spaces on forums and blogs which allow it and which are peopled by independents or people who might not have all the facts on Obama straight.

The Clintons have been shouting far and wide about how the Gallup poll has Hillary winning over McCain while Obama has been losing. But todays’ poll has Obama with a 10-point lead over Hillary nation-wide, and while Clinton still tops McCain 47-45, Obama wins over McCain 46-45. At best, a statistical tie.

But the truth they don’t want to speak is, these polls don’t mean squat. The election is six months away. Six months ago Hillary was inevitable. In November, Hillary could have been toast, or a runaway victor. So could Obama be in six months’ time.

The only thing that actually matters is that by the rules, Obama has won and now we move on, without trying to sabotage the results in order to prepare for a self-fulfilling told-you-so. We win this November, or everyone loses in an unimaginably horrific manner. Focus on what is important. Period. Move on.

It’s standard operating procedure, and fully expected by this time, but even so it’s startling, even mind-boggling, how the media continues to so bald-facedly cover for McCain. Even as the media lays focus on Obama for swapping Auschwitz for Buchenwald–once (not three times, like McCain did with Sunni and Shiite)–the same media is paying only 1/4 as much attention (18 stories for the Gramm scandal, 78 for Obama’s statement) to the fact that McCain’s chief economic advisor was a paid lobbyist for a Swiss bank, actively lobbying Congress on subprime mortgage legislation for UBS while advising McCain on subprime mortgage bailout policy. A bank which the advisor still works for, a bank which is advising its banking team not to travel to the U.S. for fear of being indicted. Josh Marshall put it this way:

Many of the lobbying connections the press has dug up on McCain have been embarassing. But I’m not sure any have really had teeth until this one. After all, how much does the average voter care that Charlie Black represented a lot of foreign dictators? A stench, yes? But finding out that McCain had a major subprime lender bank lobbyist whispering in his ear when McCain told the public that it was basically tough luck if they lost their houses?

Few of the stories now out there on McCain and UBS are by any recognizable news outlet–the biggest is MSNBC, which broke the story, while almost all the big media sources cover the Obama story. For the most part, the MSM is simply burying the McCain scandal.

The lobbyist story is way bigger than a one-time slip–so why the heavy disparity in reporting?

McCain is now bashing Obama for another stupid reason:

“Sen. Obama has been to Iraq once — a little over two years ago he went and he has never seized the opportunity except in a hearing to meet with Gen. [David] Petraeus,” McCain said at a campaign event in Reno, Nevada. “My friends, this is about leadership and learning.”

Oy. Look, how many times had McCain been to Iraq when he repeatedly confused Sunni and Shiite? How many trips had he already gone on when he claimed you could walk through Baghdad without a security detail or even a flak jacket, or that Petraeus’ vehicle is not armored? Clearly, these trips don’t do McCain much good, unless they serve to correct him from making the most fundamental stupid mistakes. Obama seems to know Sunni from Shiite, and that Iraq is too dangerous to walk through unarmed, and that we need to withdraw, so he doesn’t need to go.

But more to the point: such trips are for show only. They give you the political cache of saying “I’ve been there” and maybe “I’ve got guts,” while not giving you the actual right to claim either bravery or expertise. As one soldier put it last year, these visits only serve to harass the soldiers and distract them from their mission:

Biggest Hassle — High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and “battlefield” tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no effect on their preconceived notions of what’s going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they’ve been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.

He’s talking about you, McCain!

Obama should either ignore McCain or call him out on this–but unfortunately, it looks like Obama’s going to make a visit there himself, making the less-than-impressive claim that he intended to all along, which at the least is better than accepting McCain’s let-me-show-Iraq-to-you-dummy invitation. But no trip he makes will tell him anything he needs to know. It would be far more instructive for him to quietly meet with groups of veterans and retired generals who served on the ground, know the story, and no longer have to toe the party line that Bush lays down. That would be worth a hundred Iraq trips.

It’s pretty much the only one Hillary has left. She played the “inevitable” card, and it quickly folded; she played the “superdelegate” card, and that paled and eventually reversed. Then she played the race card, the “electability” card, the blue-collar card, and even the unmentionable card. Now she’s hanging on to the last vestiges of the “it’s not over until I say it is” card as her “Florida and Michigan” cards begin to fade into the realm of the unlikely.

So now she’s in full swing with the victim card. The campaign has been incredibly sexist, she claims–she’s a victim of gender discrimination! Really? How? Sure, some bozos held up a sign saying “Iron My Shirt,” but that helped Hillary, as have most overtly sexist acts. Even the story in New Hampshire about her getting emotional–never mind that a man could be judged in just as sexist a manner over tears and gender roles, never mind that Hillary got the emotional-manipulation analysis because of her behavior and not because of stereotypes, Hillary made the “sexism” work for her and scored a big victory there. Sure, Hillary was asked the “diamonds or pearls” question, but then Edwards was teased about his hairstyles and Obama for his ties and pins. There is undoubtedly sexism in play, but Hillary has benefitted as much if not more from gender than she has lost–witness all the hardcore Hillary supporters backing her because she’s a woman. And let’s not forget, Obama has been hurt in several states where Hillary supporters have said that they were voting against the black guy. You cannot name one state where Obama won because of the anti-woman vote. Hillary is not a victim here.

She’s even aggressively playing her horrific gaffe about assassination as another example of how she’s the victim, pushing with vigorous force to get everyone to accept the idea that her words were “taken out of context” and that the Obama campaign is maliciously and unfairly attacking her about it–the totality of their evidence being an email apparently sent out by a staffer with the Olbermann screed on it. Imagine the gall of actually bringing up the specter of assassination as an example of why she should stay in the race–and that is not a misinterpretation and it is not out of context, she was listing examples of how past races extended into June as reasons why she should stay in–and then using that atrociously inappropriate remark to attack the man who lives under constant threat of assassination.

Bill Clinton is also playing the victim card to its absurd conclusion:

“She is winning the general election today and he is not, according to all the evidence,” Clinton said. “And I have never seen anything like it. I have never seen a candidate treated so disrespectfully just for running. Her only position was, ”Look, if I lose I’ll be a good team player. We will all try to win but let’s let everybody vote and count every vote.’“

Good lord, how many prevarications in such a short utterance! She’s winning the general election? Only if you cherry-pick the polls and numbers. ”All the evidence“? Several polls have Obama out-winning Hillary.

Treated so disrespectfully? Major projection! How many times has Hillary scorned, blamed, attacked, and put down Obama? How many times has she said McCain is better? Obama has been incredibly respectful to Hillary as of late, and especially relative to how Hillary has treated him. And Bill Clinton has never seen such disrespect???

Her only position was to be a ”team player“??? Are you freaking out of your mind??? Is that why she praised McCain over Obama so many times? Is that why she’s pushing her supporters to be anti-Obama partisans? Is that why she’s bringing up assassination? Is that why she’s not bowing out gracefully and shoring up party weaknesses despite having no hope–outside of a gunman’s bullet–to win this race? If that’s ”being a team player,“ I’d hate to see her not be one!

And ”let’s let everybody vote“? You mean like she agreed not to count Michigan and Florida, how she claimed before Iowa that she’d have it all tied up by Super Tuesday? And ”count every vote“? Like all the Obama supporters in Michigan who voted for ”uncommitted“ and Hillary now wants many of them shoveled off of Obama’s plate and onto hers? Like she wants to count all the voters in caucus states? Like all the times she said that this state and that state ”didn’t count“?

In fact, Bill’s whole screed is packed full of this stuff. Absolutely a sight to behold.

You have to wonder what the hell they are doing. They cannot possibly think that they are going to win this, and they cannot possibly believe that they are doing the party no harm. If Obama loses the election without a major scandal on his part, it will be because Hillary sabotaged it for him. Even if Hillary tilts full speed the opposite way and supports and campaigns for Obama after she finally concedes, she still won’t be able to undo all the damage–and I have a feeling that her ”support“ will be far from full-fledged.

Far from being a team player, Hillary has shown herself to be the most single-mindedly selfish and egotistical person to take the political stage in a long time–and with the company of Bush and others like him on the Republican side, that is saying a great deal. That is not sexist–it is based wholly upon Clinton’s own actions–nor is it disrespectful to make note of the plain truth.

I just listened to the podcast for This Week while exercising, and I have to say, it was pretty disgusting. I think that Stephanopoulos really ought to preface his broadcast with a disclaimer saying that he worked for the Clintons–his bias is certainly so evident that it’s not even funny. A lot of it showed with the ABC “debate” debacle where Stephanopoulos and Gibson essentially spent the first half of the debate ripping Obama with trivialities. But it was just as evident today.

Stephanopoulos opened with the “fallout” of Hillary’s RFK gaffe, but his focus was on Hillary’s defense, on how Hillary “called out those who took my comments entirely out of context.” He then invited on David Axelrod from the Obama campaign and tore into him, accusing the campaign of “deliberately misinterpreting” Clinton’s remarks.

Then Stephanopoulos made the bizarre accusation that the Obama campaign has been sending out emails with Keith Olbermann’s special commentary on Clinton’s remarks. I have not seen any evidence of this email–Stephanopoulos does not link to any of this on the show’s web site, there is no indication of who sent these (a low-level unpaid staffer? the head of the campaign?) or whom it was sent to (a thousand people? three? friends & family? the press corps?) or in what context–what else was said, how it was presented, etc. etc.

Obviously Axelrod had never heard of this email, and Stephanopoulos probably knew that and hoped to fluster him. But Stephanopoulos obviously wasn’t trying to discuss the issue, he was trying to vilify the Obama campaign and make Clinton out to somehow be a victim.

Who did Stephanopoulos have on as his second guest? Karl Rove. I kid you not. While some are praising Stephanopoulos for pointing out that he’s an informal advisor to McCain, Stephanopoulos proceeded to toss Rove softballs about the campaign against Obama–how can McCain be constructive, what does he have to do to win–Stephanopoulos stayed congenial until it came to general Republican vs. Democratic issues, after which he became adversarial again.

Stephanopoulos ought to be ashamed of himself. If he wants to be a Hillary advocate, then he should say so and work under those pretenses. But take an issue where Hillary had clearly made a damaging gaffe and then spend the first half hour of his show attacking Obama over it and then giving Karl Rove a free podium to attack the Obama campaign? I have to wonder if Stephanopoulos even pretends to be objectively non-partisan.

Embarrassing:

A Tuesday fundraiser headlined by President Bush for U.S. Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign is being moved out of the Phoenix Convention Center.

Sources familiar with the situation said the Bush-McCain event was not selling enough tickets to fill the Convention Center space, and that there were concerns about more anti-war protesters showing up outside the venue than attending the fundraiser inside.

Another source said there were concerns about the media covering the event.

If more protesters than supporters show up for a fundraising event in McCain’s own state, then he can’t be in all that great shape.

Meanwhile, Obama shows up in mostly-white Oregon, far from his home base in Illinois, and draws stunningly huge crowds that overflow a large public park. In a city only one-third as large as McCain’s Phoenix.

Meanwhile, the levy is beginning to break on Cindy McCain’s tax returns. At first, she steadfastly refused to release anything, claiming privacy was at stake. Sorry, Mrs. McCain, but when you’re vying to be the first lady, when your money is supporting your husband’s campaign, and has probably been involved in launching and sustaining his career over the last 26 years, then you don’t get to call “privacy.”

Maybe that was beginning to dawn on her, as she released the summary of her 2006 returns–not the last seven years, only part of last year’s. Completely refusing to release anything, though brassy, was still at least consistent, if not defensible. But claiming privacy and then releasing some returns, that’s not even consistent.

Cindy McCain’s finances, being directly tied in with her husband’s presidential bid, are completely relevant to this campaign and have to be released, just like everyone else’s. Now that the information is leaking through a crack, I expect it’ll all have to come out eventually.

And don’t think that the timing is a coincidence: it is not by chance that this news was released at the same time McCain released his medical records. It’s the Friday before a three-day holiday weekend, the ultimate mid-year take-out-the-trash day, to avoid getting focused on in the media.

And with Hillary creating a huge uproar with the RFK comments, the McCains caught a huge break in terms of media attention–couldn’t have timed it better had they tried.

But that’s not all the McCain news this week. Yes, there’s the pastor hypocrisy, but I already covered that, and then there are the large lobbyist/campaign staff firings, but we all know that McCain’s campaign is rife with lobbyists–the half-dozen or so that left this week are just a fraction of the whole number of D.C. lobbyists that permeate his campaign.

No, more interesting was this remark by McCain after Obvama criticized McCain for his failure to support the new GI Bill:

I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did.

Blue Texan at FireDogLake has :

So I guess that means Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Roy Blunt, Jeb Bush, Karl Rove, Rudy Guiliani — not to mention Mitt Romney, Charlie Crist, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson — and of course Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Reynolds and pretty much every other right wing blowhard and elected Republican henceforth needs to STFU when it comes to military affairs, right?

Because it does seem that McCain is saying that if you did not serve in the military like he did, then you have no right to criticize McCain on military issues. As if having served makes you automatically, 100% right and not having served makes you automatically, 100% wrong.

Finally, someone dug up video of McCain in 2000 saying he expected to be too old to run in 2008.

Oh, boy:

Key quote: “you know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June. Right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

Right after she says that, there’s a pause, where she seems to be thinking. I have got to believe that right there she has realized that she’s made a huge mistake, and quickly concludes that she should move on, act like nothing happened, and hope that nobody notices–a politician’s instinct. If it becomes a big thing, then it does, but don’t make it so yourself. Once it came out of her mouth, it would have been nearly impossible to take it back.

A bit later, she “apologized” (saying no more than that “it was not intentional” is not a real apology), but she of course did not even come close to hitting the main point of what was wrong with what she said.

Let’s face it: when you’re giving reasons as to why you should stay in the race against a candidate who has all but technically clinched the nomination, but even more so someone like Obama, who has been under threat of assassination so long that he was given secret service protection seven months before the primaries started–well, you don’t list as one reason that presidential candidates have been assassinated in June.

There is no doubt in my mind that Clinton did not mean that she’s waiting to see whether Obama gets gunned down, much less that she hopes such a thing will happen. It is simply the fact that what she said was so incredibly inappropriate, so vastly, jarringly wrong–well, she could hardly have not known immediately that she had misspoken. Who knows why she said it–I am guessing that this kind of talk goes on in her private campaign meetings to rationalize staying in the race, and maybe Clinton simply let it slip while in a comfortable, closed discussion, forgetting for a split second that she was being filmed.

This has to be an end for Clinton, if not to her campaign, then to many of the hopes she may have been holding on to. Yes, she has gall enough for any thousand people, but to make this remark and still expect to force her way into the VP spot? While not a “Dean Scream,” it is close enough.

Not to mention, she was wrong in her logic, in several ways. As usual, she botched the metrics misleadingly in her favor. Sure, in 1992 the race lasted until June–that’s because the primaries started more than a month later, and more significantly, several big states, including California, Ohio, and New Jersey, didn’t vote until June 2.

Also, June 1992 may have been when Clinton technically crossed the finish line, but it’s not when he tied up the nomination–that happened on March 17th, when he won Illinois. By March 20th, Harkin, Tsongas and Kerrey had all dropped out of the race, and only Jerry Brown stayed in, despite being behind 991 to 143. Clinton had clinched it; the race was over in all but the technical sense.

And though Hillary denies the idea that math should play a role, Ron Brown, working for seen as backing the Clinton campaign in 1992, used the math argument in March to suggest that the lone challenger, then Jerry Brown, should pull out:

“It certainly brings it much closer to a conclusion,” said Ronald H. Brown, the Democratic national chairman. “You could argue that it’s theoretically possible for Jerry Brown to mount a come-from-behind challenge, but the math and the reality of Bill Clinton’s momentum certainly work against him.”

In fact, Democrats praised Tsongas–the real challenger to Clinton then–for doing “what needed to be done”–namely, pulling out of the race in March:

Many Democrats, including many committed to Mr. Clinton, took pains today to praise Mr. Tsongas, who entered the race almost a year ago, when Mr. Bush was near 90 percent in the public opinion polls and when the silence on the Democratic Presidential front was deafening.

“When other people looked at the polls, Paul Tsongas looked at what needed to be done for the country,” Mr. Angelides said.

Apparently, Hillary is not looking at what needs to be done for the country. She’s only looking at what needs to be done for herself.

Add to that the fact that a key Clinton Superdelegate, Dennis Cardoza, has just flipped from Clinton to Obama–and there are rumors that Cardoza leads a group of 40 Clinton delegates (not all supers) who were already prepared to jump the fence and had planned to slowly migrate into Obama’s camp.

Today’s gaffe by Hillary should make it quite a bit easier for delegates to make public their decision. Hopefully. Hillary really ought to quit while she’s–well, not ahead, but as ahead as she’s going to ever get from now on.

Let’s say that I really, really want to attend a party at your home. I bug for months on end, follow you around, virtually begging you to let me go to your party. Finally, you relent and invite me. I am ecstatic–I tell everyone, “hey, so-and-so invited me! I’m going to the party!!”

Can I then, later, “reject your invitation”?

Sure, technically, you invited me, and I suppose I can technically reject it. But to say I “reject” it sounds like I never begged you for it in the first place. Especially since the reason I chose to reject it is a reason that I should have known long before. Yeah, those parties are crazy and you do crazy things at them, but everybody knew that. For me to suddenly act surprised that crazy stuff happens and then haughtily “reject” you makes me a bit of an ass, doesn’t it?

The right thing to say to you is, “I think you and I have some incompatibilities, I should have thought it out more carefully before I approached you. It’s just not going to work out. And to be fair, I won’t trash-talk you to maintain my image. I’ll just bow out of this thing as gracefully as I can.” Then to other people, “Hey, I made an error in judgment–it happens. I can’t blame so-and-so too much, it was my choice in the first place. That person’s views and mine simply differ too much. So I’ve made the tough choice that will upset different people for different reasons, but it’s what I have to do. My mistake, my bad. I can admit when I’m wrong.”

Instead, McCain said of Hagee, “Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Rev. Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well.” As if he did not actively, for a long time, seek Hagee’s endorsement–of course not, as that would only make him look either more hypocritical or much more stupid. All that time he spent courting Hagee and he didn’t look into all the crazy crap the guy was spouting? Not very smart at all.

But McCain couldn’t leave it at that. No, instead of taking responsibility, instead of talking straight (god forbid), McCain instead took the opportunity to take a swipe at Obama: “I have said I do not believe Senator Obama shares Reverend Wright’s extreme views. But let me also be clear, Reverend Hagee was not and is not my pastor or spiritual advisor, and I did not attend his church for twenty years. I have denounced statements he made immediately upon learning of them, as I do again today.” Translation: Hagee’s not nearly as bad as Wright! Hagee didn’t shape me and make me into a lunatic like Obama! You can’t say what I’m doing is bad without saying Obama is worse!

Not to mention that McCain’s words are even more mealy-mouthed when you get to Rod Parsley, whose endorsement he also actively courted. Note that McCain clearly said that Hagee was not his “spiritual advisor”–however, he did say that Rod Parsley was “a spiritual guide,” in addition to a moral compass. He did not say “to everyone but myself, of course.” And while McCain made the not-so-credible claim that he “did not know of” Hagee’s remarks before the endorsement, he had to know about Parsley’s–heck, the papers mentioned that stuff nearly the same day McCain got the endorsement.

McCain on Parsley? “I believe there is no place for that kind of dialogue in America, and I believe that even though he endorsed me, and I didn’t endorse him, the fact is that I repudiate such talk, and I reject his endorsement.” Um, yeah, McCain saying that Parsley was “one of the truly great leaders of America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide” could never be interpreted as an endorsement. McCain is lying through his teeth. And of course, the media will take note of this and appropriately criticize him for it completely ignore it.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you make a bad mistake, you stand up like a man and take responsibility for it, without trying to lie, dodge, equivocate, blame, or paint others as worse. Am I wrong on that?

No class in this act, my friends.

Am I the only one getting very tired of Clinton claiming rule-following and vote-counting principles in ways which are consistent only in that they net her the greatest number of votes?

Clinton says the rules say that Florida and Michigan be seated, even though the rules clearly say that they won’t if the states jump the primary-vote line, which they did. Clinton respected the rules (kind of–she didn’t campaign in Michigan but kept her name on the ballot) back at the beginning of the year when she thought she was a shoo-in (last October, she said, “It’s clear, this election [Michigan’s] having is not going to count for anything” and she accepted that much), but now she thinks those rules are bad and her new read on the rules is the only fair way to go. Clinton complained that Obama broke the rules when he ran a national ad that also aired in Florida, but now she’s saying the the rules insist those votes be counted, which contradicts the idea that Obama broke the rules. In short, rules only count when they help me or at least do not hurt me; if they do hurt me, I find new rules to follow.

Clinton also says that the votes must be counted–you can’t ignore any votes. But while she demands that the votes from Michigan and Florida be counted, she also insists that Obama should get zero votes from Michigan. Why? Because he followed the rules and withdrew his name from the ballot. 40.1% of Michigan voters chose “uncommitted” on their ballots–and Clinton is saying that those votes should not go to Obama. After all, they voted for “uncommitted,” not for Obama. Except that most of those votes came from black voters, 68% of whom voted “uncommitted,” and young voters, 48% of whom voted for “uncommitted”–and that’s Obama’s core base. What votes were not for Obama had to be for Edwards–the remainder would have been a tiny fraction for anyone else. And Edwards has now backed Obama, with his delegates joining the Obama delegates.

Not allowing the uncommitteds to be counted for Obama is to deny those people the right to their votes. Hillary says, “Too bad, those are the rules–the ones I choose to observe, at least. Not the rules that say the delegates won’t be seated, I don’t like those rules–I mean the rules which help me get votes but say Obama doesn’t get any. Those rules.”

Hillary doesn’t like the rules which say that the votes that went for her in Michigan and Florida won’t be seated, so she ignores them. But the rules which say that votes should not be counted for Obama, she likes those rules.

In short, Hillary has no respect for the rules–she dredges up only those which serve her and trashes the ones that don’t. Nor does she have respect for any vote that was not for her–she wants her votes counted, even though party rules say they shouldn’t be, and all other votes that can be trashed, she trashes–she doesn’t want those votes counted, so revives the rules she trashed only where they apply to denying Obama the votes.

There comes a point where the self-serving hypocrisy becomes so great that it breaks all reasonable thresholds. Follow all the rules or none; count all the votes, or not. But you can’t cherry-pick only the rules and the votes that go for you. That’s dishonest. That’s cheating. That’s wrong, and it is beneath the dignity of someone like Senator Clinton.

Only she doesn’t seem to think so.

Wow. McCain’s lead media consultant, Mark McKinnon, is resigning from that post… because he likes Obama so much, he doesn’t want to make negative ads against the man. That is not an exaggeration; in the Summer of 2007,

McKinnon told Cox Newspapers that if Obama was the Democratic nominee, he would not play an active role in McCain’s effort to defeat the Illinois senator.

“I just don’t want to work against an Obama candidacy,” McKinnon told Cox Washington bureau chief Ken Herman; electing Obama, he added, “would send a great message to the country and the world.”

I repeat: Wow. That says something. Sure, McKinnon is a former Democrat, but he has worked for Republican candidates since 2000, helping elect Bush twice and working for McCain up until now. And yes, he says he’ll still vote for McCain, but considering what he’s doing, you gotta figure that he might be just saying that.

Not that everyone in the GOP feels that way. Sure, Republican Chuck Hagel likes Obama, but the Georgia GOP chair thinks that McCain is like Jesus on the cross. And no, I am not making that up.

Meanwhile, the media in the U.S. seems fixated on Bush’s cell-phones-to-Cuba gimmick, while apparently ignoring the fact that Israel, where Bush just gave his “talking to radicals is appeasement” speech, Israel has announced official talks with Syria (“it’s better to talk than to shoot”)–and the Bush State Department has no objections. Apparently no one outside a few liberal blogs has noticed the contradiction.

Maybe somebody can explain this to me. I know I am biased towards Obama, but I am pretty certain nonetheless that Hillary has given Obama far more grief in terms of attacks than has come the other way around. Even if you subtract the who-shot-first part of the equation, Hillary is still more guilty of bashing her opponent than Obama is.

So why are Hillary supporters claiming to be more likely to shun Obama in the general election than Obama supporters are to shun Hillary? What, exactly, did Obama do to make Hillary voters so vindictive? Was it something he said that was somehow worse than anything Hillary said? Was the way he ran his campaign that much worse than the way Hillary ran hers? Is there a double-standard in play here? Is it that Hillary supporters saw this nomination as simply belonging to Clinton fair and square, and Obama stole it from her unjustly? Or is it that women who believed this to be a woman’s “turn” to become president saw the dream slip away from them, and they’re so angry that they’d sooner vote for a candidate who opposes their rights and would snub them once he gained office?

That’s what seems to be suggested in this NY Times story, which features women who support Hillary being outraged that their candidate didn’t win. One quote: “We, the most loyal constituency, are being told to sit down, shut up and get to the back of the bus.” Beg pardon? This suggests that Obama won because democratic voters hated the idea of a woman president and so voted for the man–this despite the demographic data suggesting the opposite, that Obama was working far more against a racial boundary than Hillary was a gender boundary. Hillary lost not because she’s a woman, but because her campaign was run by a few key incompetents who didn’t look ahead very far or strategize very well, and Obama ran a very smart, grass-roots campaign. He had more general appeal and charisma, not more testosterone.

If anything, there is a bit of projection and role-reversal involved:

“There’s just been an attitude that if you aren’t voting for Barack Obama, then you’re a racist,” said Cowley, 49, a mother of four from Massachusetts who has vowed to never back the senator from Illinois. “I just find that intolerable. I feel like when the members of the media talk about how [Obama’s supporters] would react, they say, ‘Well, we can’t take the vote away from African Americans.’ Well, excuse me, there’s a higher percentage of women.”

Where did the idea come in that voting against Obama is racist? Voting against Obama just because he’s black is racist, just as voting against him because you want a woman to win is sexist (tempered only by the fact that such votes are for a woman rather than against a man, just as many black votes for Obama are for a black rather than against a white. But it’s still race- or gender-based, not reason-based). Nobody claimed California was racist when it voted for Hillary by a 9% margin; West Virginia was different because a lot of people were voting because of the color issue. But note how the speaker in the above paragraph turns things around at the end–suggesting that the idea of “taking the vote away” from a black candidate is “intolerable,” and then pointing out that women outnumber blacks–as to suggest that there would be a greater injustice in “taking the vote away” from a female candidate. The earlier quote about being “sent to the back of the bus” is an ever plainer iteration of this idea, that voting for Obama is somehow a slap in the face to women–with the inference being that Hillary should win because she’s a woman. The sensible answer is very simple: race and gender should not matter–neither one.

And will the hard-core Hillary supporters really be so spectacularly self-defeating as to vote for McCain in the fall? I just find that too hard to fathom, honestly. I know the idea of a woman becoming president is more than just empowering for many women in America, it is a breakthrough idea that would be life-changing for that constituency. But do you respond to defeat by burning your own house down? At this point, I really don’t like Hillary very much at all because of some of the things she did, but if she somehow got the nomination, no matter how down and dirty, you’d have to force me to vote for McCain at gunpoint.

Am I being too divisive or insensitive to suggest that these Hillary-supporters-for-McCain types are simply nuts?

It looks like Hillary’s campaign is falling prey to the perception of Obama’s inevitability: Gallup has Obama breaking out with a 16-point national lead, the biggest he’s had, and the latest in a 4-day trend that has taken Obama from a 4-point lead of 48%-44% to the 16-point lead of 55%-39%. Whether this will affect Democratic voting in Oregon and Kentucky is yet to be seen. Also to be seen is whether this is a true trend indicating consensus on his nomination and will continue, or if it is a statistical burp and Obama will fall back down to a smaller lead again.