On Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton gathered her supporters in a literal concrete bunker several stories beneath the surface of the earth, with walls thick enough to block out all cellular reception and no TV monitors or any other medium of communication with the outside world. There, amid cheers of "Denver! Denver!" she congratulated her friend Senator Obama for having run a sporting race, proclaimed herself the rightful victor, and appealed to Americans young and old to pawn their video games and withdraw from their pension accounts (respectively) in order to keep her historic campaign squarely on track to the White House. Yet by the following evening, her aides announced the suspension of her campaign and her endorsement of Barack Obama.

!Hillary Siempre! ¡Venceremos! What transpired in those fewer-than-24 hours? Only the most audacious squeeze play of Bill and Hillary Clinton's political careers, and --- because of its spectacular failure --- the last.

Clinton's Tuesday night pseudo-victory speech was an attempt to extort concessions from the Obama campaign and the Democratic party, including a right of first refusal to the vice-presidential nomination, a pledge not to put any other woman on the ticket, and an indefinite grace period in which Clinton would keep her campaign formally intact and concede nothing.

The threat, in case her demands were not met, was clear: Clinton might not be able to win, but she could undermine the legitimacy of Obama's nomination, whip her supporters into a frenzy, and ensure John McCain's election. To make clear her assessment of the balance of power in the party and put the screws to Obama and the DNC, she recruited, of all people, Bob Johnson (yes, that Bob Johnson) and Lanny Davis (yes, that Lanny Davis) to attempt to seize control of Obama's vice-presidential selection, and tried to mobilize support on Capitol Hill to bolster that coup.

The Clintons' power play failed because --- like Gorbachev, Honecker, and Ceauşescu before them --- they grossly miscalculated both the breadth and depth of their power. On Wednesday, Ed Rendell, whose machine delivered Pennsylvania to Clinton, told NY1 that "[t]here’s no bargaining...You don't bargain with the Presidential nominee. Even if you're Hillary Clinton and you have 18 million votes, you don't bargain." Maxine Waters flipped her support to Obama, while Charlie Rangel announced that "[u]nless she has some good reasons-- which I can’t think of-- I really think we ought to get on with endorsements [of Obama]." Hilary Rosen, one of Clinton's chief backers among Democratic insiders, switched to Obama and rebuked Clinton in sharp and unequivocal terms: "I am not a bargaining chip. I am a Democrat." That's what happened publicly. Just imagine what her remaining supporters told her in private as they scurried from a sinking ship.

On its own terms, the Clintons' last, failed power play is a fascinating story of cloak-and-dagger politics, but its real importance is what it portends for the campaign going forward. Clinton herself has not yet come to terms with the significance of the dissolution of her core of support; the AP reports that she is "exploring options to retain her delegates." MoDo reports that she "has told some Democrats recently that she wanted Obama to agree to allow a roll call vote...so that the delegates of states she won would cast the first ballot for her at the convention," apparently unaware, as the Economist puts it, that "[t]he convention is supposed to be a coronation, in this case of Mr Obama. It loses some of its impact if nearly half the states stand up and say they proudly support the next president of the United States...Hillary Clinton." In other words, she still thinks she can dictate terms.

If Obama takes the bait --- fortunately, the indications are that he will not --- and centers his strategy on placating the Harriet Christians of the world rather than expanding his appeal to independents and Republicans, he'll hand John McCain his best shot of winning.

Early this morning a photograph surfaced of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Jeremiah Wright. Two separate sources publicized the photo --- a blog dedicated to defending the Trinity United Church of Christ, and the Obama campaign. The implication is that Wright can't be all that far out of the mainstream, if Clinton was willing to associate with him.

Notice the date of the photo: September 11, 1998, "at the depth of the MonicaBill Clinton and Jeremiah Wright Lewinsky scandal" in Ben Smith's words, which is probably a better way of putting it than "at the height." Notice the occasion: a prayer meeting in which Clinton sought absolution for his affair from the assembled Sanhedrin. Amazingly, no one reporting on the Clinton-Wright photo has yet managed to put two and two together. Clinton and Wright weren't photographed on a chance encounter. Clinton can't laugh off the photo as one of the many thousands of random meet-and-greets he did as president. Wright was standing with Clinton in the White House exchanging pleasantries because Clinton wanted him to be there. Because Wright actually is a figure of some prominence and stature in American black Christianity, and Clinton's MO whenever times got rough was to beg forgiveness from a prominent black preacher in order to demand that the rest of us forgive him, too.

So Wright was good enough for Clinton when he needed a confessor. Now the Clintons are engineering a whispering campaign to persuade Democratic superdelegates that Barack Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright should be the grounds on which they overturn the results of the primary. Classy outfit, no?

Hillary Clinton is a thoroughly vetted candidate, about whom there is nothing left to learn. That's probably why the Clintons are shutting down the release of confidential papers from the Bill Clinton presidential library. As Hillary Clinton would be delighted to explain, there is nothing new under the sun about her record; therefore there is no reason anyone should get to look at, say, the chain of events that led from Denise Rich's $450,000 donation to the Clinton foundation to the pardon of Rich's ex-husband, the continent-galloping racketeer and fugitive Marc Rich. What sort of paranoid freak could possibly be interested in Hillary Clinton's records as first lady, who she met with, and what, if anything, she actually did?

Likewise, because the Clintons are so well vetted, they refuse to release their taxHillary Clinton: "What part of 'tested and ready' don't you understand?" returns. The skeptical might point out that Hillary Clinton publicly demanded that her 2000 senate challenger Rick Lazio release his tax returns. But that's missing the point: Lazio was unvetted, and so he had an obligation to release the returns; Hillary Clinton is vetted, thus she has no such obligation. And besides, everything that there is to know about the Clintons has been known for years. Her 2007 tax returns couldn't possibly yield any fresh information about, say, Bill Clinton's $700,000 windfall profit off of a transaction on a non-public security backed by the People's Republic of China, with an anonymous buyer who paid far more than market value. Why, that's just old hat from the witch-hunts of the 90s. Bo-ring! The source of the savings that allowed Hillary Clinton to loan her campaign $5 million of her own money? Obviously the product of a lifetime of coupon clipping during all the years the Clintons lived on a government salary.

Similarly, what traction do opponents of Hillary Clinton's campaign hope to achieve by prying into Bill Clinton's relationship with his BFF, the Canadian mining tycoon Frank Giustria? In 2005, Clinton lobbied for the brutal Kazakh dictatorship of Nursultan Nazarbayev to assume leadership of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, thereby paving the way for Giustra to gain a foothold in the lucrative Kazakh uranium trade. Clinton went so far as to inform Nazarbayev that "recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life." Shortly after the deal was completed, Giustra helped raise $21 million for the William J. Clinton Foundation. It's called a coincidence, people; and in any case, all of this was detailed in the Starr Report.

So the Clintons are perfectly justified in refusing to release the names of donors to the Clinton library since 2004. Prior to 2004, unreasonable, Kenneth Starr-like critics will observe, the list of donors included the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the State of Kuwait, Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation, professional war-with- Iran-monger Haim Saban, and many other similarly upstanding persons and institutions. Conspiracy-minded nutcases, of course, will suggest that Clinton library donors were hoping to curry favor with Senator Clinton or a potential future Clinton presidency. But that's preposterous; the far more parsimonious explanation is that every single donor was expressing his or her own gratitude for the 22 million jobs created in the 90s, particularly the Saudi royals.

Yes, it's high time that the press stopped giving a free pass to Senators Obama and McCain.

Dear Jewcy Aficionados: Dzien dobry from the Krakow airport. I have just wrapped up an unofficial 72-hour Jewish immersion holiday and thought I would offer a few travel tips for those of you who plan on making a pilgrimage this summer. I’m guessing that many of you will be more familiar with the region’s Hebraic history before visiting Poland, but I thought you might still mildly benefit from the random observations of a lay lapsed Catholic American secularist:

• It would be facile (not to mention condescending) for me to comment on how soul-deadening it is to see Auschwitz firsthand, but I did want to share a couple of tidbits from our excellent, somber, forthright tour guide. After explaining that these weren’t my views, but that rather I had “written about Holocaust deniers” (scholarly, no…but still technically accurate), I asked if they’d ever encountered any on the tour. She said no, but added that there had been a couple of teenagers with a Scandinavian school group who espoused Nazi ideals. They were immediately sent home because it is illegal in Poland to express those views. Apparently, a professor was even fired from his job for translating a David Irving book, even after making it clear these weren’t his beliefs in the introduction. Considering the horrific immediacy of the surroundings, the free speech question never entered my mind, but I did find one thing the tour guide told me interesting. She said, “We aren’t bothered by the Holocaust deniers. We are scared by those who sympathize with the Nazis, especially amongst the young, because it is easy to influence their minds.” I guess it makes some sense, but it was striking to hear that Holocaust deniers are no big deal while walking alongside the Birkenau train tracks.

• Hot Dogs: at auschwitzI was stunned to learn that, thanks in large part to the efforts of those who been imprisoned there, the camps were opened to the public a mere two years after the liberation. Two years. So, let’s recap: In a poor, desolate country, physically destroyed by World War II, people who were left with nothing after surviving the Nazi nightmare got Auschwitz up and running by 1947 to bear witness to the atrocities they had just experienced. I think you know where I’m going with this…I realize it’s not apples-to-apples, but it sure makes the seven years of Ground Zero squabbles seem awfully small.

• Casting no aspersions on fellow tourists, but it is very strange to watch people take photos of themselves in front of the crematorium.
  

• They sell hot dogs at the Auschwitz snack bar. I’ll let that sink in for a moment... In fact, the only food available for lunch that can quickly be wolfed down before the bus to Birkenau is the hot dog. I can’t say with 100% certainty, but both my wife and I thought it was a traditional frankfurter. And we do enjoy our frankfurters. By the way, the hot dog? Delicious. It was served on this crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside roll, it came with a homemade relish of big chunks of pickled onions and cabbage, and was topped off with killer tangy ketchup. From the center of Krakow, the Auschwitz tour is an all-day deal, so the sale of nourishing non-kosher concentration camp hot dogs sure seemed like one final twist of the knife.

• Krakow’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz has been reborn since the fall of the Commies. It’s bustling with coffee shops, restaurants, hipster hotels, bookstores, boutiques, etc., and we were told that a lot of the entrepreneurs are the grandchildren of those who were persecuted by the Nazis. That seemed reassuring. However, we stopped into an art gallery with an exhibit--a modern art black-and-white-photos-covered-in-spray-paint collage kind of thing. The picture in the window had two topless women, and the head of a bald man had been pasted over one of the ample-bosomed bodies. The proprietor told us it was a nationalistic Polish priest with a popular radio program (probably Father Tadeusz Rydzyk) who shovels “anti-Semitic propaganda.” This was not reassuring.

• Ostoya Palace Hotel: where the maids are hotWord on the Euro street is that Krakow is the hotspot for stag parties and that the town has a thriving sex trade. I didn’t notice an excess of strip bars or sex shops, but then again, we spent most of our time in the Medieval castles-and-churches section. After all, it’s an anniversary trip, and I’m old. What I can attest to, is that Krakow has an incredibly high number of beautiful, beautiful, beautiful women, including our maid at the Ostoya Palace hotel. Fellas, the dollar still owns the zloty, so you may want to take that into consideration before booking Vegas this summer.

• If you are the kind of person who can power through a full day of sightseeing, I recommend taking the Wieliczka Salt Mines tour as rejuvenation after getting your spirit crushed at Auschwitz. Basically, you walk down a labyrinth of wooden stairs (reaching some 440 feet) into a massive mine filled with statues made of salt, walls made of salt (I licked them for proof) and an enormous chapel with a giant chandelier that hosts weddings, concerts and Sunday mass. There’s even a salt lake where a bunch of drunken Austrians capsized a boat and suffocated to death a century ago. There’s also a health center on the grounds for the traditional salt bath. Salt isn’t like coal or copper: It's good for the system, and great for the lungs. Plus, it’s always a balmy 55-60 degrees in the mine, so the dudes that toiled down there were healthier than the general populace. The Nazis took Wieliczka over and used it as a munitions factory (I think that’s what our guide said) and it was the only time slave labor was ever used in the mine. During World War II, people from the nearby Plaszow camp were brought over to work in the mines. Consider this if you will: you’re a Jewish factory worker reassigned to Wieliczka in say 1940. You bust your hump in the mines for the next few years, which ironically helps with the old lifespan. And for argument’s sake, let’s assume you’re down in the middle of the Earth without much access to the goings on at the extermination camps a few miles away. I’m not saying they’re lucky; they were slaves to the Nazis, after all. However, the mine job with the clean air and the comfortable temperature had to lead to one hell of a whopping guilt complex in the Krakow daylight.

• Oldsmobil: krakow's american-themed car barI lied. Salt mines won’t do the trick. Might I suggest the “Wodka Sampler” at the U.S. car-themed bar, Oldsmobil. I don’t know what happened to the “e,” but the six shots are smooth and clean. And the owner does a great impression of an American that didn’t sound like any American I’ve ever met. Much needed jocularity, though. Na zdrowie!

• One last note for my fellow American travelers. We aren’t as popular these days, as I was reminded late one night in the land of my ancestors. A sousy Irish bride told me she had never been to “the States” and didn’t care if she ever did. Then she snarled, “Thanks for George W. Bush.” And this was the day after she got married. And this was after a friendly half-hour chat with her husband about New York City architecture and the Philadelphia Eagles. And the Irish are suppose love us. (Note to the County Cork gent who inquired: No, Bill Clinton is not generally regarded as one of the five greatest Presidents of all time.)

So, to the kid from the Oregon private school on the World War II trip--the one in the Jewish bookstore in Kazimierz who insisted on hectoring the young sales girl with variations of, “When the Nazis came, why didn’t they just pretend they weren’t Jews?” You know who you are. The clerk patiently responded about the importance of religion, the poor uneducated populace, the powerlessness… She was being sincere. You were being a dick. That ain’t helping our cause. From one former punk teen to another, you’re better than that.

And she was hot. You sniveling little fuck.

From Cracovia with love,

Patrick J. Sauer

Related: The Connoisseur's Guide to Internet Anti-Semitism

The Fraunces Tavern Bombing The FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation in English) was a Puerto Rican separatist group active between 1974 and 1983 that attempted to win independence from the United States through terrorism. Their favorite tactic was to firebomb densely populated civilian locations, most famously the Fraunces Tavern in New York on January 24, 1975, in an attack that killed four people and injured sixty others. The final tally of their bomb attacks was 146.

Thanks to diligent, painstaking work by the FBI and federal prosecutors, the FALN's cells were slowly rolled up and its members imprisoned in the late 70s and early 80s. Until the very end, the group had the materiél, the logistical capabilities, and the intent to murder and maim innocent people:

FBI agents obtained a warrant and entered the [group's headquarters], surreptitiously disarming the bombs whose components bore the unmistakable FALN signature. They found 24 pounds of dynamite, 24 blasting caps, weapons, disguises, false IDs and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

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There would be no need to keep harping on the deplorable things the Clinton campaign has said about Barack Obama -- if the Clinton campaign could just stop saying deplorable things.

Unfortunately, from Bill Shaheen and Mark Penn none-too-cleverly insinuating that Obama was a crack dealer, to Bob Kerrey claiming nonchalantly that Obama was schooled in a madrassa, to Bill Clinton describing Obama's opposition to the war as "the biggest fairy tale" he'd "ever seen", to Bill Clinton suggesting that Obama is a Jesse Jackson-style racial protest candidate and nothing more, to Hillary Clinton letting black people know their votes are adorable but not meaningful, the Clintons and their surrogates seem incapable of exercising self-control.

Since these ugly and borderline racist remarks did Hillary Clinton's campaign so much good in South Carolina, it should come as no surprise that today brings two more exhibits.

First, Bill Clinton struggled, but couldn't find any way to make the case for his wife without deriding Obama as "smoke and mirrors." For those keeping track, it took Clinton eight years since leaving office, and a full year into the presidential campaign, to learn the lesson that a former president and party leader could find better ways to spend his time than personally demeaning the party's new star, or as Clinton puts it, "defending Hillary." It took him four days to forget that lesson.

Oh, and never mind that Obama's policies are generally more substantive, more innovative, and more intelligently-crafted than Clinton's.

Then there's this disinterested commentary from Clinton apparatchik Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, who was forecasting the results of his state's primary:

You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate.

 Right, there's a crucial constituency that will vote for a woman but not a black man. And the Clintons will ride this feminists-for-racial-separatism movement to victory in November!

Over the weekend Sen. Barack Obama crushed Sen. Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary. Pundits are hailing Obama's victory speech (below) as one of his very finest -- it's infinitely more impressive than those "uhhhhhhh"-ridden debate performances. Now Sen. Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy, JFK's daughter, have endorsed Obama.

The Clintons will change focus from attacking Obama -- clearly a losing strategy -- to reminding voters of America's economic prosperity in the 1990s. But it might be too late. A Clinton campaign worker tells me: "Super Tuesday really is going to be a nightmare..."

A nightmare? Wasn't it a "fairy tale" a couple weeks ago?

I'm still not voting for him. That's a figure of speech meaning I'm still not voting for him.

 

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former President George H.W. Bush has shot down his successor Bill Clinton’s idea of a diplomatic mission under a Hillary Clinton presidency that would send him and other notables abroad to assure other nations that “America is open for business and cooperation again.”

I'll be a goodwill ambassador to Angelina Jolie's house, if Hill will have me. 

I have to thank the good people of Alfred A. Knopf for my biggest surprise chuckle in recent memory. I was walking into my local Barnes & Noble yesterday when something leaped out at me from the new non-fiction table. It was a handsome hardcover book whose title and author combo stopped me in my tracks: Giving, by Bill Clinton. After composing myself, I spent the next hour or so coming up with additional titles in what I envisioned as a series of books pitched by some guerilla ironist working under cover in the offices of Knopf: Acting, by Keanu Reeves; Davening, by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Bending, by George W. Bush; Abstaining, by Keith Richards; Hiding, by Oprah Winfrey; Swinging, by Al Gore . . . You get the idea. Coming up with them is almost too addicting. But the list of titles wouldn’t be complete without Believing, by Hillary Clinton. For it was yesterday that I also first heard of Senator Clinton’s unofficial appointment of Sandy Berger (Disclosing) as a campaign advisor. This tawdry development is evidence of the Senator’s immunity to conviction.

Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security advisor, was found guilty of stealing and destroying classified terror-related documents from the National archives. The case has never been treated with the seriousness it demands. Berger destroyed the documents specifically to keep them from the eyes of the 911/Commision – a body charged with reviewing all materials relevant to the September 11 attacks and making recommendations on the defense against such attacks in the future. The destroyed documents presumably painted the Clinton administration in an unflattering light. The most troubling aspect about the insouciance with which the Berger case was handled is that it never allowed for a proper inquest which may have told us something about Bill Clinton’s culpability or consent in the destruction of classified terror-related material. One assumes that Clinton and Berger at least spoke about what Berger was supposed to do when looking though the National Archives. I can’t imagine I’m alone in wanting to know more about the nature of such a conversation.

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The era of dynastic politics continues apace:

To catch you up to speed... Ann Althouse takes Jessica Valenti of Feministing to task for wearing form-fitting attire in a photo op with his greasy eminence Bill Clinton. What feminism, cried Althouse. What bullshit, cried the feminist blogosphere. Thus sparked one of the most rewarding cycles of violence known to Movable Type. It seems that a week can't pass without Althouse banging out whatever the conservative legal analyst's rendition of "Stand By Your Man" is on the third-wavers' ovaries of steel. Enter Bloggingheads TV, Althouse and some poor bespectacled lefty from American Prospect's TAPPED. Sit back, relax, watch how the best minds of your parents' generation were destroyed by the internet:

 

Check out the photo below. Which one of these people is betraying the feminist cause, and why?

Shield your eyes, children!

If you answered "The woman in front of Bill" and "For having boobs," congrats. You've won the Ann Althouse Tempest in a Blogspot Award.

That saucy breast-having minx is Jessica Valenti, who runs the excellent blog Feministing. The photo is from a meet-and-greet Clinton hosted last week for progressive bloggers. As for the betrayal of feminism, well, it's so completely insane to me that maybe Althouse, a law blogger, is best off explaining it herself.

[From Salon's Broadsheet]