Framed

Good Grief

This video, shot outside the DNC Rules Committee meeting today, is Exhibit A in the case of why Hillary Clinton's campaign has been destructive of the Democrats' chances to elect a President in 2008.

As Pam Spaulding says, "This is out of control; this chaos must end."  Clinton has planted and nurtured a sense of grievance among her supporters.  It's not just that another candidate got more votes and more delegates than she did; through her comparisons of the primary process to elections in Zimbabwe and the 2000 election in Florida, Clinton has convinced a certain number of people that she was done dirty.

As many times as journalists, bloggers and Obama's campaign staff point out that even if Florida and Michigan were counted, Clinton would still be behind, the stab-in-the-back claim resonates with some folks.  Remember, this is a country where double-digit percentages of people believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.  Once memes like that take hold, almost no amount of truth-telling can eradicate them.  Clinton knows this full well, and yet she recklessly went on with her we-wuz-robbed schtick.

Over and over again I have heard Clinton say that she will fully support the Democratic Party's nominee.  Instead, by tacitly encouraging these kind of crypto-racist complaints, she has created a situation in which nothing she can say or do now will eradicate the idea that the election was somehow stolen from her, and that the way to avenge this theft is to vote for McCain or stay home come election day.

God damn her for that.

UPDATE: John Cole has been thinking along the same lines.  "We wuz robbed" is the new campaign slogan of the Clinton operation.

Three Ironies

The stupid dispute about Michigan and Florida is rife with ironies.  Yes indeedy.

Irony No. 1: Josh Marshall has put his finger on something that's been in the back of my mind for months.

[I]t was widely reported and understood in both Florida and Michigan that the results of these primaries would not be counted. And based on that knowledge, large numbers of voters in both states simply didn't participate.

If the DNC were now to turn around and decide to make these contests count after all, these non-participating voters would be disenfranchised no less than the people who did turn out would be if the DNC sticks to the rules and doesn't seat any of the delegates. The simple fact is that large numbers of people, acting on accurate knowledge and in good faith, decided that there wasn't a real primary being held in their state on the day in question and on that basis decided not to participate.

Irony No. 2 is that Michigan and Florida got into this mess by wanting desperately for their votes to be especially meaningful in the primary.  They wrongly assumed that early primaries this year would be far more important than ones at the end.  In fact, states that scheduled their elections toward the end of the primary season are getting far more attention and are now far more important than the states that voted at the beginning.  If they had followed the rules, they would have achieved their goals of power and influence instead of seeing half of their delegates stripped from them.

And finally, the third irony here is that while I write this, a couple hundred protesters from Michigan and Florida are demonstrating outside the site of the DNC Rules Committee meeting, complaining that their votes should be counted.  But it was not the DNC or its rules committee that scheduled a primary in those states in violation of the rules.  I have yet to see this kind of hostility directed toward its proper target, namely, the officials of Michigan and Florida who knowingly and willfully broke the rules that had been established and jumped their primaries ahead of other states', while being fully aware of the consequences of their actions.  Those are the people who should be run out of Lansing and Tallahassee on a couple of rails.

O'Reilly Flips Out (NSFW Remix)

My son's reaction to this was, "Wow, when did Bill O'Reilly have hair?"

Under God's Law

Humor

My father thought that humor was a vital quality.  I think he believed that a person who, at the very least, couldn't partake of the lighter side of life was probably taking himself way too seriously, and was, in a way, deficient as a human being.  I think that a lot of people share this idea, consciously or subconsciously.  Apropos of that thought, this story from the campaign trail stood out for me.

After a day of campaigning in South Dakota yesterday, Barack Obama joined a group of reporters to go sight-seeing at Mount Rushmore.  According to press accounts,

He laughed when asked if he could imagine his face chiseled into the granite some day.

"I don't think my ears would fit," he said. "There's only so much rock up there."

Dad would have approved.

Young Hillary Clinton

(h/t to John Aravosis at AMERICAblog)

Selective Memory

George Santayana famously observed that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  To which I would add that a little, selective memory is a dangerous thing.  Exhibit A in support of this corollary is George W. Bush's recent speech to the Air Force Academy in which he "called the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a “great struggle” akin to World War II and warned anew against those who would waver in it."

Laying aside for a moment Bush's ludicrous but annoying habit of comparing himself to war leaders like Roosevelt, Churchill and Truman, a fuller, nonselective comprehension of history would locate the historical model for Afghanistan and Iraq in World War I.

John Quiggan writes:

[T]he absence of this most bloodily futile of wars from historical memory has been a huge boon to the war party. With a historical memory of war dominated by the “Good War” against Hitler and the Axis, it’s unsurprising that Americans have been much more willing than the citizens of other democratic societies to accept war as part of the natural order of things.
*  *  *
Ignorance of the Great War also produces faulty historical understanding in other respects, as evidenced in the recent flap about appeasement (leaving aside its use by ignorant ranters who have clearly never even heard of Munich). For those without any memory of the Carthaginian peace of Versailles, the policy of appeasement seems to be simply a spineless failure to resist unprovoked aggression, starting with the repudiation of Versailles and the remilitarisation of the Rhineland. But by the 1930s the injustice and untenability of the Versailles settlement was obvious, and fighting a war to enforce it was unthinkable. The fact that merely redressing injustices would do nothing to contain Hitler only become clear gradually. The idea that the failure of appeasement in the 1930s shows that governments should never negotiate with hostile powers is simply silly.

It also seems to me that when we do, on those rare occasions, remember World War I, what we recall is often the romantic myth of the flying aces, those magnificent men in their flying machines who adhered chivalrously to the duello of the knights of the air.  Seldom to we dwell on death in the muddy, disease-ridden trenches, or on the terrors of mustard gas, or on the futile infantry charges against fortified enemy positions.  These horror of war seem quite similar to today's warfare by IED and suicide bomber.

Under God's Justice

It's Friday . . .

From the messed up political mind of Rx2008.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I've made a few changes to Framed's blogroll to reflect changes in the blogosphere and my current reading.

First, since The Big Pharaoh has been on hiatus since the start of the year, I've removed him from the list of recommended bloggers.  I miss BP's voice, and hope that he starts actively blogging soon, at which point I will restore the link.  Given all that is happening in Hosni Mubarak's tight little republic, I have some concerns for his well-being, and hope he's doing OK.

To keep some Middle Eastern perspective, I've added Or Does It Explode? This site covers the struggle for civil rights in the Middle East and covers a lot of news and developments that American blogs tend to miss.  And it's funny, too.

Sadly, Jersey Goddess has become a by-invitation-only blog.  As an open-source free-speech advocate, my policy is only to link to publicly readable blogs, so that site has been cut.

I've added the ACLU's brand new blog, The Blog of Rights, which is off to a good start.  I frequently complain that there seems to be very little political constituency for civil liberties among either the left or the right; maybe this blog will help change that.

Finally, though it's not a new blog at all, Amanda Marcotte and Pam Spaulding have just significantly (and beautifully) redesigned Pandagon and given it what for some will be a new URL (http://pandagon.net).  Check it out, and update your bookmarks accordingly.