Holy Jeebus, the media have such a jones for Obama vs. Clinton drama-crack! I don’t think I’ve seen them do so little to overcome an addiction since they failed to quit OJ for nearly 15 years. As per usual, they ignore real stories in an effort to analyze Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton’s facial expressions with all the subtlety and perceptiveness of a PUMA divining the coming revolution from the color of a pantsuit.
For instance, I’ve seen precious little hoopla around this bit from Attorney General-designate Eric Holder during today’s national security presser:
Holder: It is incumbent upon those of us who lead the department to ensure not only that our nation is safe, but that ours laws and traditions are respected. There’s not a tension between those two. We can and we must ensure that the American people remain secure and that the great constitutional guarantees that define us as a nation are truly valued. For example, working with both Republicans and Democrats to structure policies that are protective and consistent with who we are as a nation.
[Rough transcript]
In other words, the executive power grabs, countenancing of torture in the name of security, Constitution-shredding and the inexcusable politicizing of the Department of Justice that were the shameful hallmark of George W. Bush’s DOJ operation will end on January 20.
I don’t expect the chorus of naysayers who are already prophesying doom to recognize the significance of Holder’s statement. And the mainstream media are too fixated on creating a Clinton hoohah to notice—even though what Holder said implied heaps of disdain upon the current administration, which is maybe kinda newsworthy. But it made me happy.
PS: If anyone is interested in the outcome of the Six Random Things thingie from last week, my answers (and list of prospective victims) are here.
Back at the end of ought-six, in the days when I was known to bash Obama for crossing the line with his religious rhetoric, an important event turned my head. It was then that I first learned that Samantha Power was part of Obama’s advisory team. If the choice had to made between justice and humanity in the world, and a little religion sprinkled into our political speech, I’ll go with the justice and humanity. Of course, it was Samantha Power who later got bounced from Obama’s campaign for this honest off the record utterance:
Clinton “is a monster” and “she is stooping to anything. . . . The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”
Well, today, proving that there is no hatchet that can’t be buried, Samantha Power has returned to a position of influence on the O-team, and potentially on the C-team:
Samantha Power, the Harvard professor who was forced to resign from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign last spring after calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton “a monster,” is now advising the president-elect on transition matters relating to the State Department—which Clinton is slated to head.
Ucking-fay!
Poetic justice even.
NOTE 1: The earlier post (first link above) explains where my loyalty to Samantha Power comes from, but also, notice who comments more than once to do some Obama bashing.
NOTE 2: ts spots a contingent who is not happy with this news.
[Obama’s] office also announced he has chosen Ellen Moran, executive director of EMILY’s List, as director of communications. EMILY’s List raises money for Democratic women candidates who support abortion rights.
Maybe Hillary should just emigrate to an island off the coast of South America. She can buy the place, set up a government, and we can all just move there.
Okay, I’m going to ask it: Why are so many gay men who supported Hillary vehemently against Obama and rabidly supporting McCain and Palin now? The reason I’m asking is that the video Drudge is promoting currently of Obama allegedly giving McCain the finger (yes, here we go again) came from a gay Hillary-to-McCain supporter and a lot (a majority?) of the men who self-identify as PUMAs appear to be gay. I’m baffled as to why so many of them loathe Obama. Sure, he’s against gay marriage (for the record, I’m not), but so are a lot of Democrats. A McCain/Palin administration would be awful for gay rights and Obama has come out in opposition of Prop 8 (good luck getting McCain or Palin to do that). I just don’t get it. Any ideas? It’s gotta be about more than McClurkin, right? Or did that bad idea snowball and not stop rolling?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild—a personal friend of [Hillary] Clinton, a major fundraiser, and a member of the Democratic National Convention’s platform committee—plans press conferences in Dover and Manchester, the McCain campaign announced.
The events are counterprogramming against Clinton, who is now enthusiastically backing Obama and who also plans events in Dover and Manchester. New Hampshire is among the most competitive states on Nov. 4.
It’s one thing to “go your own way,” but this is just plain repugnant.
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin cast herself as the heir to feminism’s legacy in her first visit to Southern Nevada on Tuesday, saying if Democrat Barack Obama were serious about respecting women, he would have chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate.
“Our opponents think that they have the women’s vote all locked up, which is a little presumptuous, since only our side has a woman on the ticket,” Palin said.
“When the time came to make a decision, somehow Barack Obama just couldn’t bring himself to pick the woman who got 18 million votes,” she added. [...]
“For the women in this audience and across the country, are you ready to break the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America?” the Alaska governor shouted to thunderous cheers during her 25-minute speech.
Of course, thanks to Palin being on the ticket, Republicans have developed a keen new respect for women, right?
One thing that rabid anti-Obama Hillshills like Taylor Marsh and Larry Johnson should realize (besides the fact that there’s more than one hair stylist in the world) is that Barack isn’t just another teflon candidate, he’s the first real Boomerang Candidate. If you hurl shit at him, you’ll find a landslide of it heading back in your direction and most of it won’t be coming directly from him. And that political phenomenon isn’t going away any time soon (including during the general election, if he makes it that far). The media, including several rightwing pundits I never in a million years would have imagined going puppy-eyed for someone as liberal as Obama, are in the tank for him, much more so than they are for St. Maverick, and unless he’s got a skyscraper-sized skeleton or two hiding his closet (which I doubt) or he pulls a Bill [Clinton] and starts wagging his finger at journalists (once again, which I doubt), there’s nothing that’s going to pry that boomerang effect away from him in ‘08. I’ve seen a lot of concern trolling directed at Obama and his followers indicating that we have no idea what the Republicans will throw at him in November. They proclaim that his love affair with the media will eventually wear off and they’ll go all Sweeney Todd on the Chosen One. It ain’t gonna happen.
And with under three weeks to go, it still hasn’t…
Everyone’s trolling through the details of the latest New York Times/CBS poll that shows Obama-Biden up by fourteen points over McCain-Palin. Twenty-one percent of the respondents said that their opinion of McCain has changed for the worse “over the past couple of weeks,” as opposed to only seven percent who said their opinion had changed for the better. In addition, John Cole pointed out this morning that Palin’s favorables have flip-flopped horribly. Early on a lot of allegedly smart strategists and bloggers on our side were begging with many of us to stop focusing on the cosmeticized pit bull and train all of our fire on McCain. It looks like that was, as I thought, a really bad idea. Let’s take a look at two questions from the poll (.pdf file):
What is the main reason your opinion of John McCain has changed [for the worse] over the past couple of weeks?
Now let’s look at this question…
Regardless of how you intend to vote, is there anything about Barack Obama’s background or past associations that bothers you, or not? IF YES, What bothers you?
So if you want to play loosey-goosey with the numbers a bit, you can argue that McCain’s pick of Palin and his campaign’s attacks (much of which are coming from her) are having a far more corrosive effect on his poll numbers than Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers are on Obama’s. A little under forty percent of the likely voters who were polled, regardless of how they intended to vote, indicated that there was something that bothered them about Obama and I think it’s safe to bet that a vast majority of those folks were McCain supporters. Jeremiah Wright’s been out there forever and the Ayers sideshow may have plucked a vote or two McCain’s way, but it’s fairly clear that Palin’s mere presence on the McCain ticket has done far more damage to his campaign than any of the crap they’ve been hurling Obama’s way.
Sarah Palin was an awful pick for the veep spot. There’s just no two ways about it.
MORE: I know it’s not November 4th yet and I may be forced to eat my words, but this proves to me why Joe Biden was a much better pick for veep than Hillary would have been. There’s no way in hell McCain would have picked Palin if Clinton was on the ticket and he would have resorted to a safer and, ultimately, more successful pick like Romney or Pawlenty. The media would have been obsessed with focusing on how Bill and Hillary were getting along with Obama (that’s all we would have heard about) and the mere sight of Bubba out on the campaign trail would have flipped a switch in every wingnut’s hateful head, igniting the base’s frothing support just as fervently as Palin’s arrival on the scene has managed to do. Add in the fact that the Clintons would have gone for McCain’s throat if his surrogates went after Hillary (in an atmosphere where negative attacks don’t seem to be working) and I think we’d be seeing a much tighter race now. Obama and Biden’s calm, cool and collected campaign seems to be just what America wants right now. In just a handful of days we’ll see if I’m right.
“It took a Democratic president to clean up after the last President Bush, it’s going to take a Democratic president to clean up after this President Bush.”
I know Hillary and others have pointed this out before, but I’m still not hearing it anywhere near enough. Just program that notion on auto-loop and let it play over and over until the 4th. It’s easy to understand, it’s the truth and it will resonate with the last few voters we need.
Is there anything duct tape can’t fix? It can come in handy during a terrorist attack. The Apollo 13 astronauts used it to rig up a carbon dioxide filter during their ill-fated 1970 voyage. It’s an invaluable car repair tool—fixing broken tail lights and patching torn upholstery. And it can help the McCain and Obama campaigns too.
Senator McCain, stupid is leaking out of your running mate’s head every time she opens her mouth. I don’t know if it’s because she was always a moron or if your Rove pups stuffed her so full of cue-carded talking points that they just tumble out willy-nilly when she opens her pie hole these days. But in either case, duct tape may be able to help.
Senator Obama, Bill Clinton wants you to lose. Nearly every time he opens his yap, it’s to damn you with faint praise or laud McCain to the skies for his mavericky selflessness. Maybe Bill’s still pissed off about your yanking the First Black President honorific out from under his cracker ass. Perhaps he’s still sulking about the blow-back from his Jesse Jackson dog whistle. Or maybe he just can’t make things right with the missus until she’s back in the White House—this time as president. But there’s a two-word solution: duct tape.
In other news, the largest bank failure in the history of the US planet took place today while McCain was grandstanding in what he hopes will become his eighth ninth house. I don’t know jackshit about how Wall Street operates. But my guess is the markets will tank tomorrow, and not even duct tape can fix that.
This Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden webcast is over a half hour long, so if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, pick a spot and you’ll feel proud to be a Democrat wherever you land. And if you know any Hillary holdouts, make sure you pass this onto them. Bravo, Hillary. Bravo, Joe. [Hat tip LauraThorne]
Yesterday was not a good day for our ol’ non-elitist pal Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild. Pretty much every media person who was forced to cover the non-story about Lady Lynn throwing her support to John McCain had their irony meters turned on high. Campbell Brown, who has been really good as of late (and, Dan Senor or not, I love that button nose!), heaped buckets of condescension all over the Baroness and later in the evening Rachel Maddow firmly adhered guffaws to the whole ridiculous situation. You can watch both eviscerations below…
