Two weeks before Cindy McCain swore to NBC's Ann Curry that her "husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all," Commentary's Jennifer Rubin spoke to John McCain on a conference call and baited him into describing Barack Obama as --- simultaneously --- the stealth candidate of Hamas, the Sandinistas, and the Weather Underground. Obama responded yesterday on CNN, saying that McCain was "losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination."

How would the campaign Abe Greenwald assures us is the veritable Platonic form ofSenator Tamburlaine the Great: McCain's Potemkin stroll through a Baghdad market in April 2007 allowed terrorists to set up an ambush that killed 21 people...and provided his campaign with a fitting metaphor maturity and masculine wisdom react? Why, with a near-instantaneous hysterical shriek from senior aide Mark Salter, of course. Salter, who seems to have earned his seniority as the campaign's point-man on hysterical shrieking, wants to make it clear just how offensive was Obama's "not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue" --- presumably at least slightly more offensive than when Salter called Arianna Huffington "a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva" for telling the truth about Salter's boss.

But Salter's real point is to make sure the journalists on his mass-mailing list clearly understand the difference between "legitimate" and illegitimate campaigning. For example, calling your opponent an enemy of the state is a totally "legitimate question...about his judgment and preparedness." However, for Obama to respond to that charge with the charitable interpretation that it's an example of the toll running for president can take on someone's mind (rather than, say, an asshole being true to his nature) is an illegitimate attempt "to delegitimize" the legitimate question of whether Obama is an enemy of the state.

Now, I confess that I can't quite see the conceptual distinction the McCain camp is trying to draw, but then, I didn't learn virtue from a segregationist who taught me to put aside any "reservations about my destiny" of dying an honorable death in battle and going to Valhalla, so I'll have to defer to the expert. Here goes:

So: Unfortunately I still don't get it. Maybe the McCain line between legitimacy and illegitimacy looks incredible to you, too, perhaps even evidence of a candidate having lost his bearings in pursuit of the presidency, but that just goes to show that you and I need to study the Episcopal School Code of Honor a little harder.

Latinos are the fastest growing demographic group in the nation and will play an increasingly decisive role in elections for the foreseeable future. George Bush got re-elected in 2004 by pulling off an eighteen point swing in the Latino vote versus 2000. Hence Republicans should get down on their star-spangled knees to give thanks that their party stumbled, with one hilarious pratfall after another, into nominating John McCain. He's not just the only Republican candidate with even an outside shot of winning this year's election. He's the only one not emphatically determined to reduce the GOP to a rump Anglo regional party of the old Confederacy.

Juan McCain's Shocking Plan Revealed: ¡Aztlán o muerte! ¡No a la rendición! So while the eyes of the nation were fixed on the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic primaries, McCain used the occasion of Cinco de Mayo to quietly step up his outreach to Latino voters, launching a Spanish-language version of his website featuring endorsement spots en español (naturalmente) from several prominent Mas Canosistas, and agreeing to speak at the upcoming La Raza conference. That's the right thing to do on the merits, bodes well for McCain administration immigration policy (i.e., being for it), and strikes a blow against racism and xenophobia. Also, it's the smart thing to do politically, not just for this election and for McCain personally, but for the long-term viability of his party.

Naturally, paranoid psychopaths on right alternate between thinking McCain is an unwitting dupe of a nefarious plot to reverse the outcome of the Mexican war, and thinking he's personally scheming to force-teach Wetback speech to every American, the better to understand landscaping and fruit-picking orders from our new greasy mustachioed overlords.

Can I give a word of advice to my Republican friends? The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is quite secure, I promise. If somebody somewhere on the internet says otherwise, this is one of those rare cases where somebody somewhere on the internet is wrong. What's more, however impeccable Michelle Malkin's credentials on the urgent need to deport all Arabs and put the Mexicans in concentration camps (or is that the other way around?), she doesn't have any actual proof that John McCain is the Manchurian candidate of the conspiracy to restore the Aztec empire, just a lot of craziness and projection. As McCain might put it, if we've been occupying Aztlan for a hundred years with no American casualties, why stop now?

Far from being a Mexican secret agent, McCain is the best thing that could have happened to you. True, he may not really care about your domestic agenda one way or the other. But as long as you're willing to keep supporting his vision of an enduring peace built on a character-building Hobbesian war of all against all freedom, he'll give you young, healthy, virile supreme court justices who'll snip whichever rights you don't approve of out of the Constitution (unlike those liberal pussies Scalia and Thomas); he'll mortgage your great-grandchildren's houses to  sustain the Bush administration's explosion of government size and scope; hell, he'll even torture some evil-doers. All you have to put up with is just a little salsa caliente rhythm in the step of strawberry-pickers 2000 miles from your house.

The surprising, spectacular, and deeply encouraging failure of populism to move Democratic primary voters is only part of the story of the long overdue demise of the Clinton dynasty in North Carolina and Indiana Tuesday night. Just as decisive, if not moreso, was the near-total collapse of Hillary Clinton's support among African-Americans.

I'm not talking about the familiar collapse of Clinton's black support after Barack Obama proved himself to be a viable mainstream presidential candidate by winning the lily-white Iowa caucuses. A second mass exodus of black voters away from Hillary Clinton made Indiana a statistical push, fattened Obama's margins enough to completely wipe-out Clinton's pyrrhic, pointless victory in Pennsylvania, and broke down the wall of bullshit sustaining the idea that the Democratic primary didn't end in February.

After Obama's win in Iowa, her surrogates' public musings about Obama's possible history of crack dealing, and Bill Clinton's now infamous trashing of the Palmetto State as a consolation prize for darkeys, Hillary Clinton still managed to pull in about one fifth of the black vote in South Carolina. Yet from one Carolina primary to the other, roughly two thirds of Clinton's remaining black support dissolved, only slightly less steep a drop, proportionally, than her fall from this October poll in which she actually led Obama in black support, to the South Carolina exit poll. If she had maintained her South Carolina performance among blacks on Super Tuesday, Potomac Tuesday, Super Tuesday II, and this past tuesday, the net shift would have been more than 500,000 popular votes --- enough to shrink Obama's popular vote lead to near parity, and perhaps take the lead on not terribly extravagant assumptions about non-black liberals who were turned off by the Clinton tactics.

The African-American Vote: Between the CarolinasThe handy chart to the right tells the story graphically. (I've explained my methodology below.) Clinton's share of the black vote declined by about one sixth between South Carolina and Super Tuesday --- a period when national polling showed Obama's support rising across all demographics, and Clinton's falling --- and declined a bit more than another fifth between Super Tuesday and the Potomac primaries at the peak of Obamamania, when (again) all his numbers were improving and hers were going in the other direction. When either economic and demographic factors or Plagiarismgate, Goolsbeegate, and various other pseudo-scandals broke Obama's winning streak in Ohio and Texas, Clinton's black support rose slightly (by about one sixth) --- just like her white and brown support.

Then the Wrightmare struck, a thousand innumerate pundits were launched on a quest to prove that Obama's candidacy was undone before the slightest credible evidence emerged to support their case (they were stunningly wrong, as we now know), and Clinton was only too happy to embrace a wild long-shot electoral strategy of trying to stoke white resentment against a strange, dark, foreign, religiously suspect crypto-Communist who hangs out with sundry terrorists when not spewing elitist contempt for good, decent, ordinary folk. And what happened to Clinton's black support? It plummeted by a catastrophic 44.6 percent between the bookends of the Wrightmare (and nearly a full fifth just between Pennsylvania and Indy/NC), to the point where Hillary Clinton can barely attract half the level of black support of George Allen in his 2006 senate campaign (8.2 percent versus 15). Repeat: barely half the black support of George "Let's welcome 'Macaca' here to the real world of Virginia" Allen. All the while Obama's black support rose.

It's sort of incredible that this needs to be said, but future aspiring presidents, observe the ruins of the House of Clinton and take note: If you want to be the Democratic party's nominee, you will need some black votes, and 0 percent is worse than 5, which is worse than 10, which is worse than 20. So avoid basing your campaign on the argument that your party's most loyal constituents are worthless. They will (eventually) notice.

* * *

How I crunched the numbers: South Carolina is taken as a theoretical starting point, representing the performance among black voters Clinton could have managed even after the emergence of an electable black presidential candidate and her campaign's tactical decision to royally piss off a lot of black people. I track Clinton and Obama's subsequent performance on the four multiple-primary nights since South Carolina --- Super Tuesday, the Potomac Primary, Texas and Ohio, and Indiana and North Carolina --- by calculating the total number of votes cast by African-Americans on each election day and the share of the aggregate African-American vote each candidate received (that way, e.g., Obama's 86 percent in Delaware, 66 percent in Massachusetts, and 61 percent in New York, are weighted to reflected the tiny, medium, and huge populations of each state; for similar reasons as well as the distorting effects of political machines in individual states, I treat single-state primary days as statistical noise and ignore them). Figures are generated from the Real Clear Politics state voting totals and CNN's exit poll estimates of black turnout and vote shares. No caucuses were included since primary and caucus voting pools are incommensurate and too few caucuses had data on black voting to allow for a separate graph of black voting trends in caucus states. Likewise, the New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. primaries had no available data on black voters.

You can download the spreadsheet here and double-check me, or if you're curious and industrious, plug in new values in the C, D, and E columns and track the voting trends of any demographic group.

Our long national Wrightmare is finally over.

With his unexpectedly impressive win in North Carolina and equally unexpected draw in Indiana last night, Barack Obama has successfully withstood a substance-less campaign of defamation from the Clintonites and their allies in the GOP to put to rest any lingering unreasonable doubt over the outcome of the Democratic primary campaign. The Clintonites are still making a show of staying in the race, but they've clearly been sapped of the defiant élan of the last few months, have tellingly retired their character assassinations against Senator Obama, and are effectively resigned to watching their superdelegate and high-level surrogate support leak like a sieve.

Salt Of The Earth: Didn't Woody Guthrie Sing An Ode To Slack-Jawed Idiocy? So what did the zombie campaign do to finally get its brain killed? Somehow, it managed to disprove one of Barnum's laws, and went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. (That is, literally went broke; last month Hillary Clinton loaned her campaign $6.4 million, on top of the at least $5 million she's already lent herself.) Needless to say, this is encouraging news not only for Obama supporters, but all Americans. Here's how it happened.

The Clintonites, whose respect for middle America consists entirely in buying every single crude stereotype about it, simply assumed that the white working class is a) the only part of the electorate that matters and b) monolithically slack-jawed, liver-damaged, unemployed, resentful, paranoid, and gullible. Consequently, they premised their Indiana and North Carolina primary campaigns on the Nigerian 419 gas tax scam, blowing up either OPEC or the moon, the immolation of 72 million innocent Iranians in a nuclear holocaust, leveling the playing field in the housing market by preventing anyone from buying a house for years to come, and generally making sure never to listen to experts just in case they might once in a blue moon be right about their field of expertise. (Under a Hillary Clinton administration, Megan McArdle writes, "no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.")

And sure, the Clinton platform may in reality have been what quote-unquote experts describe as "fucking retarded." But as salt of the earth pundits like Joe Scarborough explained, working-class whites just want a bit of help with their bills and aren't interested in lectures from eggheads. And as spokesmen for the last redoubts of Clinton backers further noted, Obama's skepticism about the appreciation working-class people would show to a rich woman offering them a piddling bribe bespeaks a profound elitism and arrogance sure to turn off blue collar voters.

But then a funny thing happened. In Ohio, Obama won 34 percent of the white vote and 42 percent of voters making under $50,000 annually. In Pennsylvania, those numbers were 37 percent and 46 percent, respectively. And in Indiana, 40 percent and 50 percent. In other words, through two months of relentless and increasingly absurd populist pandering and racebaiting, over three primaries in three bordering, demographically similar rust-belt states which one would intuitively expect to be susceptible to the Clinton tactics, Obama consistently if slowly improved his performance among white voters and working-class voters. The Clinton campaign's descent into surrealist performance art bought them less than nothing.

Meanwhile, Obama's share of the college-educated vote, which dipped slightly in Pennsylvania thanks in part to the strength of the Ed Rendell machine, bounced back with a vengeance last night. It seems people who've studied a bit of economics don't take well to being told that up is down; nor, in all likelihood, are they wild about being being called "Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle" while a presidential candidate looks on smilingly.

So apparently, in 2008, having the audacity to hope that Americans --- even white working-class Americans --- aren't drooling simians can pay off in the end.

Obama Shoots And Misses Jewcers in North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Oregon, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota still have a chance to cast a vote in the Democratic party's primaries and caucuses. Here are a baker's dozen substantive reasons not to support the senator from Illinois:

1. He has at least rhetorically embraced a phony, cringe-inducing populist critique of free trade glaringly incompatible with his consistent history of economic liberalism (especially since he got religion on markets from Austan Goolsbee).
2. Admirably, he rejects the notion that the economy and society are zero-sum games, in which one man can prosper only if another struggles --- but he has marred this mutualism by scapegoating foreigners.
3. Relatedly, he's been signaling support for corrupt bargains to protect the power of the odious Teamsters Union and free them from legal oversight.
   
4. According to the Congressional Budget Office, his domestic policy proposals would add trillions of dollars to the national debt, perhaps as much as $1.9 trillion.
5. He has caved in to the lowest, cheapest sort of fearmongering by giving credence to the paranoid quack notion that there is a link between autism and vaccination (a cave-in, by the way, that makes the country less safe to the extent that anyone follows up on even candidate Obama's vote-scaring).
6. He has tried to shade away from his admirable position in favor of diplomatic engagement with hostile regimes in Tehran, Pyongyang, Havana, and elsewhere.
7. He has not very deftly fled from an admirable and courageous position in favor of decriminalizing marijuana.
8. He sometimes runs away from an equally admirable position in favor of breaking up the power of the teachers unions with merit pay, charter schools, and experimenting with vouchers.
9. At the Democratic presidential debate in Nevada in January, he had an opportunity to repudiate the pernicious Solomon amendment, which reinforces a policy of weakening our national security by blackmailing schools into supporting state-sanctioned discrimination. He declined the opportunity.
10. His plan to navigate through the subprime mortgage meltdown involves potentially expensive direct subsidies to struggling borrowers. In addition to their expense, such subsidies potentially encourage moral hazard (i.e., in this case, reckless borrowing and lending.)
11. In addition to the subsidies, Obama proposes lifting statutory restrictions on bankruptcy courts imposing binding renegotiations of home mortgages, thereby opening the door to unforseeable risks to investors and potential legal challenges.
12. He supports a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies, which is either an ugly pander to populist resentment of oil companies, or more alarmingly, is a token of a general principle that the government can dictate how much profit an industry is entitled to make.
13. He's largely unwilling to defend Second Amendment rights except in cases where it's uncontroversial.

And these are just reasons that move me. There are plenty of other substantive reasons not to vote for Obama for those who don't share my priors. For example, if your top priority for the next presidential administration is an escalated war with Iraq, a new hot war with any of Iran, Syria, or North Korea, and/or a new cold war with Russia and China, Obama's not your candidate. Ditto if, instead of beginning long overdue improvements in the country's infrastructure and mass transit, you'd prefer the energy policy version of the Nigerian Letter Scam.

On the other hand, if you do share my priors, then despite his imperfections, Obama is better than either of his rivals on nearly all the issues on which he's flawed --- sometimes by a wide margin. On other issues, though his position isn't perfect, it's still vastly better than anything a major party presidential candidate has ever offered.

But see? Cogent, substantive criticism of Obama that doesn't resort to race-baiting or redbaiting, and is at least minimally relevant to justified grounds for voting decisions, isn't that hard after all. I just did it, and I like the guy.

Now, how about you try this exercise out on your candidate? If you're supporting Clinton or McCain (or Nader), I can help. 

Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her supporters are right: It is not a certainty that Barack Obama will be the Democratic presidential nominee. On the other hand, they're wrong to think that means her candidacy is still viable. It's effectively certain that she will not be the nominee, in the same way, though not to quite the same degree, that it's effectively certain that buying lottery tickets isn't a wise retirement plan.

That 70's Candidate: From Nixon in a pantsuit to Jim Jones After Obama's win in the Guam caucuses (by a margin of seven, meaning your single vote still wouldn't have made a difference), Obama leads Hillary Clinton by some 154 elected delegates, with eight primaries and caucuses left to go. If Hillary Clinton can win 60 percent of the vote in every remaining contest, she will reduce Obama's lead to about 73, according to Slate's delegate calculator --- a margin large enough that it's still exceedingly unlikely for Clinton to make up the difference among superdelegates. Still, let's give Clinton supporters the benefit of the doubt, and assume for the sake of argument that if Clinton does achieve 20 percent or more margins in all the remaining states, that sufficiently many superdelegates will be swayed by her campaign's electability arguments and give her the nomination. Let's further assume that Clinton has a 50:50 shot of getting to 60 percent in each state --- an absurdly generous assumption for Clinton considering that she has broken 60 percent once, in Arkansas, on Feb. 5.

In other words, let's offer Clinton supporters assumptions so generous that they beggar plausibility. What are the odds, given those assumptions, that Clinton can close the elected delegate margin to one close enough to win the nomination? With eight contests, and a 50 percent chance of winning 60 percent or more in each one, the probability is (1/2)⁸, or 1 in 256, or less than one quarter of one percent, or worse than the odds of being on a plane with a drunk pilot, of dating a millionaire, or of writing a New York Times bestseller.

And of course, in reality, Clinton's odds of reducing Obama's elected delegate lead even to single digits are far longer, likely by orders of magnitude, since the largest remaining state by far, North Carolina, is favorable to Obama, as are Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota. Meanwhile, Indiana, which votes along with North Carolina tomorrow, is set to be a mid-to-high single digit win for Clinton with a negligible impact on the delegate count --- like Pennsylvania, even though the latter was reported as a double digit win, because, unfortunately, simple arithmetic is too much for most reporters to handle.

I mention reporters' losing fight with math because if a critical mass within the press were at all capable of understanding probability, the Democrats would already have their undisputed candidate. The band-wagon phenomenon in elections is well-established: People like to associate with winners, and don't like to associate with losers. So if the state of the race were reported accurately -- if the "journalism" available to the low-information, low-education voters Clinton is depending on were to correspond to reality -- then anyone looking for information about the Democratic election would encounter the fact that Hillary Clinton's continuing campaign is vastly more likely to make John McCain the president than to make her the nominee. And that would surely improve Obama's margins enough to euthanize the Clinton campaign before the convention.

Instead, we are subjected to an hourly fusillade of obfuscatory bullshit†† out of the Clinton campaign. And since the direct target of that bullshit is a press corps incapable of discriminating between an event that's improbable because it has a 49 percent chance of occurring and an event that's improbable because its odds are less than 1 in 256, and since that press corps is the filter through which voters pick up information about the election, the fantasy that Hillary Clinton can be the Democrats' presidential nominee continues apace.

That fantasy, by the by, is what's sustaining the small but non-negligible chance that Barack Obama won't be the Democratic nominee. Of the plausible scenarios that don't lead to an Obama nomination, many involve the Clintonites behaving so despicably that they not only ensure her defeat in the general election --- an outcome that makes nonsense of their appeal to superdelegates to think of "electability" --- but also quite possibly endanger her senate seat. Of which Timothy Noah writes, "Clinton is determined, but she isn't insane." That's conciliatory, but maybe not true. What else would you call someone who bets the house --- not her house, but the houses of 30 million Democratic primary voters --- on a (worse than) 256 to 1 shot?

†Assuming also (for the sake of simplicity) that each primary or caucus is an independent event --- which, in this primary campaign, doesn't seem like much of a stretch. Consider the mirror-image outcomes in Vermont and Rhode Island, the disparity between Wisconsin and Ohio, etc.

†† That is, bullshit in Harry Frankfurt's technical sense of language deployed to achieve some (usually political goal) without the slightest regard for what the truth is. Lying, by contrast, is concerned with truth --- the point is to convince the hearer of the opposite of the truth.

Former Jewcer Abe Greenwald is taking a bit of a beating in "Contentions"'s commentsGreasy Kid Stuff section after Andrew Sullivan linked to a Greenwald post extracting armchair political analysis from armchair psychoanalysis of Barack Obama's scandalous substitution of orange juice for coffee at an Indiana diner a few weeks ago. Sez Greenwald:

I realized what the diner incident was: it was childish. The switch from juice to coffee is a rite of adulthood. It’s not that Obama seemed to hold himself above the coffee drinkers. It’s that he seemed to lag behind them. He’s still on fruit juice while the adults are sipping bitter and bracing coffee.

Uh-huh. The tone of the comments ranged from "This is hilariously bad" to "This is the most retarded article I ever sat through to read about politics" to "God you are a vacuous twit."

But that's just being uncharitable. As one of the Commentary stalwarts puts it, "the orange juice...was mainly a device (what writers call the 'hook') to draw the reader’s [sic -- there is more than one Commentary reader] interest." And indeed, Greenwald's argument for Obama's essential immaturity is more substantive than his observation about breakfast beverage preferences. The real point (what writers call the "nut") is to call attention to Obama's proposed increase in the capital gains tax "for purposes," in Obama's words, "of fairness."

QED. That's not fair!, Greenwald notes, is the whinge of a petulant child, not a grown-up senator and would be president.

He's right. What mature adult --- besides John Rawls, and every political theorist of every ideological orientation since Rawls --- has taken the argument that considerations of fairness should constrain policy choices seriously (if only, in the case of grown-up conservatives and libertarians, to disagree)? Why, it's almost as if there's more than one side to the argument over whether to increase, decrease, or maintain the current rate of capital gains taxes and it would behoove opponents of an increase to actually make their case on its merits instead of throwing up a wall of pseudo-psychological bullshit. (My position on capital gains taxes is far from the standard liberal one, incidentally, but you don't get to take my side if you think the reason to oppose a capital gains tax hike is to help Republicans win elections.)

Still, two can play this game. As of 9:48 pm last night, on the website of the flagship magazine of the conservative movement, there were 7 mentions of "health care," 15 mentions of "Iraq," and 230 references to Jeremiah Wright. (Commentary fares marginally better --- a closer to 1:1 ratio of giddy freak show coverage to minimally significant issues, though the deluge of fact-free hackery inundating the divisor of that ratio is a thing to behold.)

What's a fitting description for pundits fixated on preachers and orange juice and flag pins and Weathermen and laughably affecting connections to rural and blue-collar communities, to the near total exclusion of any cogent discussion of two actual wars, potential future wars, skyrocketing debt, swelling generational deficits, and (literally) crumbling infrastructure? "Inane" and "irrelevant" always seemed to me to hit the mark, but --- hat tip to Greenwald for the suggestion --- "infantile" works pretty well too.

As the race for the Democratic presidential nomination goes on longer and longer,"C" Is For Clinton, That's Good Enough For Me Hillary Clinton's candidacy becomes an insult to the intelligence of people further and further down the IQ scale. Earlier this week, the beer-swillin'est gun-shootin'est valedictorian of Wellesley ever! decided to base her Indiana primary campaign on a gas tax holiday proposal so imbecilic even Paul Krugman, who's been running agitprops for her ever since John Edwards dropped out of the race, had to concede the point. Last night, HRC appeared on the O'Reilly Factor, presumably to commiserate over the plight of what O'Reilly calls "the folks" with an even phonier populist than she is.

Naturally, when O'Reilly claimed that "both parties, both parties have sold the folks out on energy, and now the folks are gettin' hammered, and they should be angry at both parties," Clinton couldn't resist upping the ante for extra-chromosomal energy policy. She intends to pay for her gas tax holiday with a tax on "windfall profits" to the oil industry, which, as Krugman points out, simply means taking back the windfall profits that a gas tax holiday would giftwrap to the oil industry, and justified said tax on oil companies by claiming that there "is no basis for them to have these huge profits." No basis, that is, except for the oil companies selling a product and consumers buying --- you know, the legal transactions loophole.

But the stupid burns the worst when Clinton draws the proverbial line in the sand and announces her intention to "take on OPEC...I would file complaints [in the WTO] and change the law so citizens and businesses could file anti-trust actions. We're going to begin to hold them accountable." It goes on like that.

Megan McArdle links to trade law expert Marc Benitah's list of reasons the scheme couldn't possibly work --- but fuck that asshole, what does he know, he probably eats arugula from Whole Foods, am I right? --- and she adds:

OPEC isn't restricting production right now; pretty much everyone is working their capacity flat out. Hillary Clinton wants to sue OPEC for not producing oil from wells they haven't drilled yet. Next: a lawsuit against Ford for not building us the cool flying cars we were promised in The Jetsons. I WANT MY FLYING CAR!!!!

Yes, and I'd like to sue the human genome project for not making me super-fast, super-strong, and immortal, but let's not get carried away.

So Hillary Clinton is betting that people gullible enough to believe her candidacy is still relevant are also gullible enough to buy into an economic platform that appears to have been co-drafted by Huey Long and Rube Goldberg. At some point though, reality will intercede, and Clinton's supporters probably ought to be closely monitored to avoid some kind of Jonestown scene.

Some people are awfully concerned that Barack Obama's predecessor in the IllinoisWilliam Ayers: If you know anyone who knows anyone, it's time to reject and denounce yourself. state senate once introduced Obama to ex-Weatherman, lousy bomb maker, and current University of Illinois-Chicago education professor William Ayers at a party in 1995, that Ayers donated a (whopping!) $200 to Obama's state senate campaign in 2001, and Obama and Ayers were colleagues for three years on the Board of Trustees of the Woods Fund, a Chicago urban reform and anti-poverty organization. Maybe, these nuanced and perspicuous thinkers concede, none of these facts in any way imply that Obama harbors secret sympathy for terroristic Communism (though maybe they do!), but they demonstrate at the least an unsettling willingness on Obama's part to associate with scoundrels to advance his career, and represent a betrayal of his avowed commitment to a new kind of politics. Don't they?

Well, since those hot on the scent of the dessicated remnants of a forty-year-old subprime revolutionary front are undoubtedly sincere in their concerns and not just nakedly cynical hacks, they might be interested to learn that the Weather Underground's reach is extended far enough in space and time to poison the New York Times in April 2008. On his Times blog, Hillary Clinton supporter Stanley Fish brazenly confesses his own links to domestic terrorism:

I too have eaten dinner at Bill Ayers’s house (more than once), and have served with him on a committee, and he was one of those who recruited my wife and me at a reception when we were considering positions at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Moreover, I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard.

Shocking stuff, no? Some of us have criticized Fish in the past for wrecking humanities education at several universities and promulgating the notion that philosophy is nothing but bullshit reflections on bullshit, but never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that "Interpreting the Variorum" was actually a subliminal call for the violent overthrow of the US government. Yet there it is in black and white. Rather than initiate a citizens' arrest of Ayers upon sight and seek out the nearest house of worship for absolution, as any upstanding patriotic citizen would have done, and rather even than ship Ayers off to that den of sedition on the Charles River, Fish actually campaigned to keep Ayers at UIC. Sounds like Stanley Fish has some serious explaining to do to the FBI, the editorial staffs of National Review and the Weekly Standard, and the Chappaqua chapter of the Branch Davidians Hillary Clinton campaign, in no particular.

If only that were all to report. But William Ayers' treasonous tentacles of terrible terrorism stretch throughout Chicago and environs. Richard Daley, the doyen of a political dynasty renowned for cosseting pinko commie hippie freaks (especially the violent ones), hired Ayers to direct a citywide education reform program. The Woods Fund Board of Trustees --- which is rumored to meet in a windowless bunker accessible only through a secret portal impeccably camouflaged by the rusty, crumbling tenements of Hyde Park, where a thousand schemes for instigating Red Revolution are diabolically hatched --- can name among its members:

• An endowed professor at DePaul University
  
• The executive director of another Chicago urban development program (we're starting to see what "urban development" is code for, aren't we?)
• One endowed professor at UIllinois-Chicago and another UIC department chair (naturally)
• The media and governmental affairs director of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, a huge international architectural firm
• A manager for BP North America (but of course any company that does so much business in the middle East is likely a seditious fifth column --- now see why the charges that Obama is a furtive Muslim and a godless commie aren't self-evidently contradictory?)
• The Executive Director for Public Affairs of UBS, one of the largest investment banks in the world
• and, The President of Sahara Enterprises, which purports to be a Chicago-based coal mining company (but with a name like that must be an al-Qaeda affiliate)

And get this: Some current Woods Fund Trustees are Republicans, which logically means that there are active Weatherman cells even in God's Own Party. That's still not all. Without any fear of legal repercussions, the Chicago Tribune editorial board nonchalantly admits that "[W]e know Ayers too. And his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. If you know people in Chicago academic circles, chances are you know Ayers and Dohrn." Though of course the traitorous swine won't give detailed lists of names.

Which brings me to my own confession --- though I promise, unlike Fish, the mayor of Chicago, and the CT editorial board, I treat this matter with the gravity it deserves. The full, shocking size and scope of the Weather Underground's fifth column within the academic, business, political, and journalistic institutions of Chicago impels me to go public with something weighing on my conscience. I once had lunch with Chesa Boudin, whom William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn took in as an infant and raised as their own son when his parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were given life sentences in prison for their role as accessories in the Brinks Robbery. Granted, once having a brief meal with William Ayers' adoptive son says less about my character than, say being introduced to Ayers himself at a party, but that's hardly an excuse. Chesa Boudin neither rejects nor denounces William Ayers, and what's worse, he served on the staff of Hugo Chavez. Clearly the only thing for me to do is turn myself in to the FBI.

Unless, that is, there is a more parsimonious explanation of the fact that William Ayers' acquaintances constitute an ersatz Who's Who in Chicago. And come to think of it, there just might be.

Sometimes, when someone does something terrible and escapes criminal sanction, civilized society ostracizes that person, and has good justification for doing so. Like O.J. Simpson and Michael Skakel. Other times, despite having justification for ostracism, society elects by convention to overlook some individual's misdeeds. Like William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Also like Oliver North, whose felony convictions were overturned thanks to limited Congressional immunity, and instead of being shunned by all good folk, was able to pivot to a Republican nomination for election to the Senate in 1994, and then a lucrative career as a right-wing pundit and fundraiser. And like Elliot Abrams, another Iran-contra crook, who escaped incarceration through plea-bargaining and then a pardon from President George H.W. Bush, only to be appointed to the National Security Council by President George W. Bush. Come to think of it, George W. Bush didn't hesitate to staff his administration by means of an Iran-Contra reunion tour.

Then there's Henry Kissinger, who successfully parleyed his responsibility "for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture" (as Christopher Hitchens aptly put it), into a permanent position as a darling of the talk show circuit, a confidant of Charlie Rose and Ted Koppel, as many reserved column inches in as many prominent American newspapers as he would like, and an informal advisory role to every president since he left government --- sort of a German-Jewish secular war criminal Billy Graham. There's also Billy Graham, whose anti-Semitic ramblings with Richard Nixon never for a moment jeopardized his quasi-official job as Oval Office chaplain.

In like fashion, there's the Dixiecrat remnant faction of the Republican party. Though most of the racist scumbags have by now slipped off the moral coil, it wasn't long ago that Republican Congressional majorities were made possible by the support of some of the most virulent segregationists in American history --- not the ideological heirs of segregation, but the segregationists themselves --- who are personally culpable not only for extending the shelf-life of a horrific system of state-sanctioned persecution, but also, through their perversions of the judicial system, for enabling far-flung campaigns of racist murder and domestic terrorism. (Compare that to the piddling tally of the Weather Underground.) Strom Thurmond is of course the most prominent example, and also an instructive one. It was simply too awful for many political and media elites to acknowledge the presence in the US Senate of an unrepentant champion of Jim Crow, so they simply pretended that Thurmond had repented. Trent Lott eventually lost his Senate leadership position for bumblingly praising segregation in a botched effort to pay tribute to Thurmond, thereby reminding the larger political culture of the gruesomeness of its willful blindspot on Thurmond, but the upshot is that Lott never would have gotten into any trouble if all he had done was attend Strom Thurmond's birthday dinner without giving any speech.

Needless to say, proving a damning relationship between Thurmond and any recent Republican senator, on the standards of evidence the anti-Obama McCarthyite mania has enshrined, is simple enough a kindergartner could do it; and also so transparently idiotic a kindergartner could call bullshit on it. 

Let's not forget the more recently-minted criminals of the Bush administration. We could start with Lewis Libby, convicted of felony perjury, two separate counts of felony obstruction of justice, and felony provision of false statements to federal investigators. But, then, the very same crowd that thinks Barack Obama owes the American people an explanation of his relationship with William Ayers will be quick to remind us that Libby was the victim of a hack partisan (Republican) inquisitor, and besides, it's okay to break laws in the name of a higher principle just in case that higher principle is neoconservative. So never mind Libby.

The evidence is clear and decisive that Jay Bybee, William Haynes, David Addington, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and John Yoo (to mention only a few names) are all complicit in a wave of --- what would Hitchens call it? --- war crimes, crimes against humanity, and offenses against common and customary and international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture. Despite that, or perhaps partly because of it, they can shortly expect to settle down to sinecures at conservative foundations and thinktanks, or assume spots on investment banks' boards of directors, or move on to jobs in the next Republican administration. They'll be celebrated guests on talk shows, commissioned by the New York Times and Washington Post to savage President Obama's resolution of the Iraq War (here's hoping), and in general treated by the connected set of Washington, D.C. and beyond just as if they were venerable statesmen rather than war criminals. Unless one of them is foolish enough to attend a dinner party at Baltasar Garzon's house, none of them will ever experience a minute of the life sentences they deserve.

And current and future Republican politicians will be (or already have been) introduced to them at parties, receive $200 or more campaign donations from them (or already have), and serve on boards of charitable trusts and business ventures with them (or already do). Would anyone care to set an over/under on how long it takes, in minutes, to establish connections, within, say, three degrees of separation or less, between John McCain and every living prominent Republican current or former politician or cabinet official whose offenses against the law and common decency merit permanent ostracism from civilized company? What do such connections tell us about John McCain's sympathy for (say) the Bush administration's project of whiting out various amendments to the Constitution? Unless he endorses such projects himself, they tell us nothing, nor do they tell us anything about his character, nor do they "raise legitimate questions" (because the questions are illegitimate), nor do they warrant McCarthyite public spectacles because "these issues are on the minds of voters."

The phenomenon of people doing loathsome things, never expressing remorse, and being rehabilitated and reincorporated in polite society is pervasive and inescapable. If it implicates anyone, it implicates everyone. Private individual decisions to shun such people may be praiseworthy under some circumstances, and amount to empty ineffectual posturing in others, but no one --- not Barack Obama, not anyone else --- has an individual obligation to brand anyone with a scarlet letter, make a scene at a party, or turn down perfectly respectable business or charitable enterprises.

This election year, the US is engaged in two costly and arguably counterproductive foreign occupations and a quasi-war against assorted non-state actors, a recession is looming if not already underway, our budget deficit continually balloons to (even inflation-adjusted) staggering record highs, and the long-term solvency of our major social welfare programs is soon to face extreme demographic pressures. Against that backdrop, arguing even implicitly that voters should make their decisions on the basis of friendships and associations of candidates that have no bearing whatsoever on their substantive views, agenda, or approach to governance is a rather straightforward confession of intellectual bankruptcy. It's time for two-bit inquisitors with warped moral faculties and priorities to shut the fuck up.

UPDATE: And there you have it: Hillary Clinton's new top strategist, Geoff Garin, called for the violent overthrow of the US government...35 years ago, when he was in college. That doesn't mean he's a bad person (it makes him a typical wannabe proletarian Harvard student in 1973), it doesn't mean Hillary Clinton's a bad person, and it doesn't mean there is any more or less reason to vote for Hillary Clinton now than before this came out; but it does mean a bunch of McCarthyite hacks need to find something to gag on next time they want to open their mouths.

A couple of weeks ago, John McCain gave an address at Carnegie Mellon University that his campaign billed as a major speech outlining the would-be president's vision of economic policy. I meant to say something about it at the time, and with the news out of the Congressional Budget Office today that McCain's budgetary proposals would add trillions to the national debt (and approximately treble the increased debt of his supposedly free-spending opponents' proposals), now is as good a moment as any to attend to the fiduciary disaster McCain's election could entail. (But is a trifling thing like undermining the solvency of the federal government really worth worrying about when the mystery of the missing lapel pin remains unsolved?) Of course, any presidential campaign proposals from any candidate have to be interpreted with a grain of salt; nothing a candidate proposes prior to his or her election will be enacted in unaltered form, and a savvy voter is nothing if not one who can distinguish between the elements of a campaign platform a candidate sincerely believes in, and those that are panders calculated to win votes. Still, candidates' discussions of policy offer a useful window into the way they think through problems, and platforms are a reliable proxy at least for a candidate's broad principles.

What minimally careful attention to the McCain economic programme demonstratesMcCain Practices Method: The reaction a qualified presidential candidate would have had to McCain's economic agenda is that the Arizona senator fails to grasp the most basic economic, financial, and decision-theoretic concepts that any potential steward of a ten trillion dollar economy must grasp to be fit for the job. The Bush years have taught us fairly conclusively that it's not enough to have a president surrounded by able, competent cabinet secretaries; the president is, after all, the decider, and a president incapable of distinguishing wise from careless policy is a bad president; whether or not that badness will be expressed in foreign or domestic fiascos is purely a matter of chance.

There were two big-ticket items in McCain's CMU address, one merely silly, confused, and wasteful but basically benign, the other one of the most poorly conceived, most potentially economically devastating ideas since the micro-managed price-fixing of the Nixon administration, and both of them exercises in staggering philosophical incoherence and financial incompetence. McCain's merely silly and confused proposal is something his handlers have led him to believe is a sweeping reform of the tax system. Gone, McCain promises, will be the old, bad, labyrinthine IRS tax code, except for those who want it. In its place, McCain will establish a simple, easy-to-use "flatter tax," though not a flat tax, consisting in two tax brackets and a single tax deduction McCain swears will be "generous." Anyone who wishes for whatever reason to stay in the old system can do so. Everyone else will have a much simpler run-up to April 15. On its face, the idea seems to be a qualified triumph of common sense and freedom of choice.

But the triumph is entirely illusory. There is no mystery to solve about why someone would choose the old income tax over McCain's new one, or vice versa. The only conceivable basis for a rational preference is that one system will save individual taxpayers money against the other, depending on their specific levels of income and the array of deductions available under each system. To find out which tax offers the better deal, a taxpayer would be forced to work through both tax forms --- otherwise she could not possibly make a rational decision. Rather than reduce the number of tax brackets from six to two, McCain is increasing it to eight. In other words, McCain is actually selling the American people a more onerous tax season than they presently have the pleasure to experience. And surely, somebody in the campaign knows this, and allowed McCain to appear on national television promoting it anyway.

Nor are the glitches in the tax plan confined to McCain's tangled two-step on tax brackets. In outlining his new income tax system, McCain sells the notion that taxpayers can henceforth expect a single "generous standard deduction" instead of the wilderness of deductions and loopholes those without the means to pay for a good accountant have slim odds of successfully navigating on their own. But in the preceding three paragraphs of the speech, McCain proposes, by my count, at least six distinct new tax credits and deductions. If it dawned on him at any point that, not sixty seconds before unveiling what he frames as his signature domestic policy proposal, he thoroughly undermined one of its major attractions, McCain gave no outward display of recognition. (Perhaps all the new deductions will be available exclusively under the old income tax; that would make approximately as much sense as any of the other structural features of his tax proposal.)

At least the damage McCain's tax reform does will be limited to making the process of doing taxes marginally more unpleasant, and --- since deductions and credits on the whole increase taxes --- marginally more expensive. That can't be said for McCain's other marquee proposal, a mortgage loan bailout scheme that could have scarcely been better designed by a financial prodigy whose explicit purpose was to trick the American people into voluntarily wrecking their economy. In broad outline, the McCain bailout resembles the Dodd-Frank mortgage bailout proposal, itself a gem of short-sighted pandering populism, under which the government could wind up liable for up to $400 billion in insurance payments to lenders on foreclosed real estate. McCain differs from Frank and Dodd by proposing something potentially larger in scope, without offering even perfunctory safeguards against the risk his plan would entail.

The idea is this: Any homeowners in danger of foreclosure (a status which, one hopes, would have to be proven by meeting certain precise conditions) would be eligible to walk to a post office, fill out paperwork, and walk away with a loan renegotiated on terms the borrower can afford, and backed by the US government through the Federal Housing Administration. If a borrower is truly unable to afford payments on a principal amount of 100 percent of her home's current value, the thinking goes, she may still be able to meet a payment pegged at 85 percent. Since lenders would clearly choose to take a small hit and retain 85 percent of some money rather than insist on getting 100 percent of zero, it would be an easy call for lenders to sign off on the program.

The problem, in fact, is that the deal is far too sweet for lenders. Eighty-five percent of something is indeed more than 100 percent of nothing, and if the government, in effect, gives away universal protection against credit default, then lenders will be paid off no matter what. The question is, by whom? The intuitive pull of the McCain approach depends upon a picture of a borrower who can't pay against 100 percent but could pay against 85 percent, which is unfortunately an unrealistic portrayal of much of what's actually going on in the housing market. In many typical cases, the subprime borrowers who truly are in dire straits --- and they are a small minority of subprime borrowers; subprime credit continues to be a vital ladder to prosperity for working class people --- would not find their problems suddenly solved by a 15 percent discount. On the contrary, the reason there is a common perception of a housing crisis is that home prices have cratered and those hardest hit now have negative equity in their homes; hence the typical applicant for McCain's bailout is likely going to require something closer to a discount from a principal of as high 150 percent (in Florida, for example), to perhaps 50 percent or less of her home's value.

To put it bluntly, the federal government would not in a thousand years, and could not responsibly make itself liable for a discount on that order. Any legislatively viable bailout along the lines of McCain's proposal would feature a far more modest discount. Therein lies the catch. If the scope of the bailout is as broad as McCain proposes, it would entail a very credible risk of the following nightmare scenario: The government's universally available discount proves inadequate to make it possible for distressed borrowers to keep paying off their mortgages, and FHA winds up holding the tab for literally hundreds of thousands, and potentially, with ruinous luck, more than a million mortgage defaults. The deficits of the Bush era would look like a fond memory compared to the shortfall the federal government would run if it had to pay off a large proportion of the housing market's bad credit.

Against the very real risks of fiduciary disaster a President McCain is ready to accept on behalf of all of us, he and supporters of his kind of bailout claim to offer a dream outcome in which squeezed borrowers get just that extra bit of help they need to put their financial affairs in order. The point of course is that such an outcome is just that, a dream. Even if McCain knows no better, his advisors certainly do. What they are presenting to the American public is a brazen effort literally to buy votes --- not just at a cost to the government, nor to the ability of responsible prospective borrowers to take out loans (not just for houses, but for school, business, you name it) for the forseeable future, but at a potential cost to the long-term stability of one of the largest and most important sectors of the economy. (And that's to say nothing of the potential fallout of a playing short-run interventionist games with an asset class tied to a global credit derivatives market of some $62.2 trillion --- i.e., roughly the combined GDP of every country on earth.)

Just as his risible tax reform proposal brings into sharp focus the extraordinary shallowness of McCain's understanding of freedom of choice, his proposed financial Jonestown mortgage bailout makes a farce of the pro-market and pro-trade rhetoric that inundates all his efforts at economic sermonizing. One could scarcely conceive a larger-scale, more intrusive, more potentially perilous concrete offense against market principles than what McCain is trying to sell the American people.

Which is a predictable outcome of McCain's fundamental lack of interest in any aspects of governance outside foreign affairs and war (which are effectively one and the same for him), along with his steadfast adherence to the notion that all political questions are reducible to questions of (his idiosyncratic concept of) honor. To qualify as a "conservative Republican," he realizes, there is a whole package he needs to buy, including economic and social views along with foreign policy; and so, like an opera singer chanting lyrics in a language she doesn't understand, McCain pays ample lip-service to "the free market," to "entrepreneurship," to "tax cuts," without having any meaningful grasp of just what the hell he's talking about. So whenever he perceives the dictates of honor offering him a handhold on policy issues about which he ordinarily couldn't be bothered to care, that rarefied market rhetoric goes missing, and heavy-handed substantive interventionism takes its place.

Since everybody knows the housing crisis is the product of dishonorable conduct --- specifically, of the "high risk schemes of a few," at whose "extravagant salaries and severance deals" Americans are "right to be offended" --- the government has a duty to fix that breach of ethics. Never mind that the proposed solution is lunatic policy, would represent a shameful betrayal of his avowed economic principles if McCain actually understood the content of his avowals, or that the story he tells of the origins of the housing crisis is a fantasy barely intersecting with the facts of the actual world.

Likewise, since porkbarrel spending, earmarks, and corporate welfare violate McCain's sense of propriety, he proposes doing away with them, and imposing a meager reduction in discretionary spending, to offset the costs of his tax cut plans. Never mind that the savings on McCain's spending cuts are a piddling drop in the bucket; never mind the likely costs of his plans to escalate our current wars and perhaps begin new ones (it would of course be dishonorable, indeed toying dangerously with surrender, to insist on even a modicum of fiscal accountability for military adventures). Just as long as fiscal policy is enacted under the appropriate moral auspices, there are no further questions McCain evinces the slightest interest in posing.

Moreover, as the earmark example shows, even when McCain is right on policy questions, it's only by accident. Earmarks and corporate welfare aren't wrong because they're wasteful. They are indeed wasteful, but they are peanuts compared to the deficits McCain (unwittingly, one hopes) is proposing. Rather, earmarks and corporate welfare are wrong because of the perverse incentives they create. And those are categorically the same sort of incentives that McCain's laundry list of anything-but-market-friendly domestic proposals will promote and expand. Of which none are so starkly moronic as his plan for a temporary lifting of gas taxes to depress gas prices. One might object that suspending gas taxes over three months will save an average driver maybe $50, but could spike demand and thus result in a net increase in gas prices in the long run; or that the revenue from gas taxes is in many cases the sole or primary source of revenue for infrastructure maintenance, and will have to be made back by means McCain never offers, on pain of allowing roads to crumble; or that an artificially-induced spike in fossil fuel consumption plainly entails harmful environmental consequences; or that a gas tax holiday is more or less a naked bribe to voters. But all that sounds like elitist talk.

Which reminds me to spare a word for McCain's unlikely yet fitting comrade in arms, Hillary Clinton, who today latched onto the gas tax holiday and used it to sneer that "my opponent, Senator Obama, opposes giving consumers a break," referring to the only candidate in an election depressingly saturated with pandering, who has passed on this particularly asinine pander. But whereas Clinton's embrace of preposterous populist quasi-bribery underscores just how stupid and gullible she believes her base to be (and she may be right), the evident earnestness of McCain's support for such policies, coupled with his fundamental lack of comprehension of basic economic concepts, make it doubtful that voters can even count on him to propose and promote reckless, inane fiscal policy cynically. The odds are even that McCain really believes in his economic agenda, and that's more than enough reason to keep him far away from the oval office.

Reductio creep in action: Last week, Barack Obama shrugged off the freak showNas, A Scary Black Man: Just look at him, all uppity and whatnot, planning God knows what debate in Philadelphia with a panache unprecedented in modern electoral history, proving that yes we can elect a president who isn't hopelessly out of touch with contemporary culture. Little did I know, when I wondered how long it would take some half-wit to suggest that Obama's reference to Jay-Z was a gang sign, that a half-wit with a reasonably large platform had already uncovered the disturbing truth about Obama's scandalous connection to the Roc-A-Fella Dynasty.

In a piece aptly entitled "Obama's Other Jeremiah Wrights," Evan Gahr of Human Events rides Paul Revere-like into small town America to warn that Obama's fifth column includes not only Jeremiah Wright, but equally troublingly, Jay-Z, will.i.am, Ludacris, Q-tip, Russell Simmons, Nas, and "9/11 conspiracy theorist" Mos Def. Obama's "complicity with rappers" --- another impressively insightful word choice --- goes all the way "back to at least 2006." Only egregious liberal media bias can explain why these shocking facts haven't come to light until now. The piece does not report, though doubtless a future installment of Human Events will, about the meetings Obama has held with these "thugs" to discuss their secret plans to seduce your daughter. But Gahr does helpfully put the matter in its appropriate context when he closes with the observation that David Dinkins had the courage to denounce Louis Farrakhan, and Obama should therefore denounce the Farrakhans in his midst as well.

I'd like to quibble with Gahr, but his major point is absolutely right: The questions Mos Def and Nas raise about Obama's character are every bit as significant and informative as the questions Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan raise about his character. And in general, there is something almost admirable about the volume of surplus work the guilt-by-black-association crowd is willing to do composing interminable ponderings about how they were quite ready to vote for a nice, clean, articulate black man until all his scary black friends turned up --- thousands upon thousands of words written, and who knows how many man-hours of labor wasted, all to avoid saying, more starkly but also more accurately: "People! Are you crazy? Don't vote for a nigger!"

On my way to work yesterday, I had the chance to hear a radio interview withMcAuliffe Sez: "We're way ahead in the states we won." Hillary Clinton's reptilian water carrier, Terry McAuliffe, who in addition to exulting over his candidate's primary victory, put forward the startling argument that the Pennsylvania result had catapulted Clinton into the popular vote lead by about 120,000.

How did McAuliffe get his number? First, by adding all votes for Hillary Clinton in the illegitimate Michigan and Florida straw polls to her total, second, by adding zero of the uncommitted votes in the illegitimate Michigan straw poll to Obama's total, and third, by throwing out estimates of popular support in the Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington caucuses.

Assuming that non-Hillary Clinton supporters can see without difficulty that the McAuliffe math is preposterous, the rest of this goes out to Hillary's ardent supporters, who are latching onto McAuliffe arithmetic, and are already firmly latched onto the type of argument of which the McAuliffe math is a token.

Dear Clinton Supporters,

The reason that the McAuliffe math is preposterous is that the (non-question-begging) motivation for the first step is (clearly and flagrantly) inconsistent with the (non-question-begging) motivation for the second and third. Say that "letting the voices of the people be heard, man" trumps everything, including the procedural rules Michigan and Florida violated, the necessary conditions of electoral legitimacy, and manifest unfairness to the Michiganders and Floridians who didn't vote because the elections didn't count. Then the democracy-and-rainbows principle trumps everything, also including the difficulty of assigning a precise number of Michigan uncommitted votes to Obama (it'll be more than the 120,000 vote Clinton lead under McAuliffe arithmetic) and the difficulty of measuring popular support in caucus states.

Alternatively, say that this is not 'Nam, this is voting, there are rules, and you can't just give Obama the likely number of votes cast by his supporters in Michigan, or count estimates of popular support in non-reporting caucus states even if the estimates are fairly precise, because procedural fairness prohibits it. Then there are rules, such as the rules that govern electoral legitimacy, and elections that don't meet minimal standards of legitimacy aren't legitimate, and can't become legitimate because lots of people show up to vote. Do you know why nobody argues that elections in Russia or Cuba are legitimate just in case they have record turnout? Because that would be fucking retarded.

According to the principle that motivates step one of the McAuliffe math, don't do steps two or three. According to the principle that motivates steps two and three, don't do step one.

So if each of the steps of the McAuliffe math is motivated, the result is a (clear and flagrant) contradiction. No contradiction is true. Therefore at least one of the steps is unmotivated. So, Clinton supporters, you've got a tri-lemma: (1) You can argue for a contradiction. Or, (2) you can argue for an unmotivated manipulation of the primary and caucus results. Or, (3) you can junk at least one of the steps of the McAuliffe math and accept that Obama is in the lead, that he won't lose the lead, and that all donating money to Hillary Clinton accomplishes at this point is helping a woman much richer than you pay off her loan. If you opt for (1), good luck with that, you're a ridiculous person, and you probably shouldn't be voting. If you opt for (2) you're scarcely better off than you would be if you argued for (1)†, you're likewise ridiculous, and you likewise shouldn't vote.

If you opt for (3), congratulations, unlike your candidate and her staff, you can put two and two together. Well done. Do you see how crazy the people still inside the cocoon look from the outside?

Love,

Dan

† There are literally uncountably infinitely many possible manipulations of the primary and caucus results, of which uncountably infinitely many produce a lead for Hillary Clinton, uncountably infinitely many produce a lead for Barack Obama, uncountably infinitely many produce a lead for Mike Gravel, and uncountably many produce no determinate leader. (That's not an exhaustive profile.) For example, if you only count states Barack Obama won, Obama's lead in both delegates and popular votes is massive; mutatis mutandis for Clinton. If you only count Gravel voters, Gravelmania is sweeping the Democratic party. Also, if you only count states that are yellow on Wikipedia's US map, or only the total number of commonwealths won, or only count the average elevation of states won by each candidate, or only the total number of years voters for each candidate have lived, or total X chromosomes possessed by each candidate's supporters, Hillary Clinton is killing it. But if you only count states named for French and English monarchs, only count the total student loan debt of each candidate's supporters, or only count membership totals in facebook support groups, Obama's coasting.

Hillary Clinton's primary win in Pennsylvania last night more or less ensures that theFun With Fundamentals: Democrats' big advantage in party ID Democrati