Torture fetishist Michael Goldfarb recently transferred duties from shilling for John McCain on the Weekly Standard website to shilling for John McCain on the John McCain website. Part of Goldfarb's new job is trying to win over Hillary Clinton supporters who have misgivings about voting for an inadequate black male. Hence he serves up this sort of treacle:

Senator Clinton has really grown on us over here in Crystal City over the past few months. She ran an impressive campaign, and proved herself to be an impressive candidate and as John McCain has said, inspired a generation of women...[I]t's clear that John McCain and Hillary Clinton respect each other -- and there is a genuine affection for her here at McCain HQ.

Moving, no? Of course, for most of the period in which Senator Clinton is alleged to have grown on McCain staffers, Michael Goldfarb was a safe distance from Crystal City writing, of Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster, "tell us something that we don't know." Still, he at least has been consistent in preferring Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama:

I'm surprised that anyone can be surprised by the Clinton's [sic] lies anymore. Frankly, I find them rather comforting in comparison to Obama's new kind of politics, which best I can tell seems to be the same old politics in a new self-righteous package. All politicians lie, and the Clintons more than most.

All together now: That's not change we can believe in!

(h/t: Frank Rich)

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.

How bad was John McCain's speech in New Orleans Tuesday night? Here are some reviews:

(1) [T]his speech is a mash and tough to digest. You have to get through the self-congratulatory praise of independence and commander-in-chief pose....

(2) McCain’s speeches don’t have to sound this bad, and don’t always sound this bad.

(3) McCain's speech was creaky, ungracious, and unnecessary.

(4) [H]is refrain punctuated with a forced smile just isn't working.

(5) McCain's delivery deadens [the speech] somehow.

(6) As a performance, it's a little painful.

(7) Question: Would you rather: a) watch last night's McCain speech? Or b) be waterboarded?

The New McCain Aesthetic: Seasickness Okay, but those are all lefty partisans, right? Actually, it's all from National Review. Rolling Stone's take is pitch-perfect: "It's like watching the out-takes from an Andy Rooney kvetch."

McCain's stilted delivery, unfortunately nasal timbre, and creepy grin are problems beyond his campaign's control, but other problems are entirely unforced. His handlers seem unwilling to restrain their candidates' obvious loathing of his opponent and unable to distinguish between a clear, incisive point and incessant, petty sneering -- the kind that's incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't closely follow political inside baseball. Both these campaign flaws make McCain deeply and viscerally unappealing. (The toxic influence of Michael Goldfarb already taking hold?)

And their choice of visual presentation is simply inexplicable. Matthew Yglesias notes "he's shifted his aesthetic from his old black and white 'fascist' aesthetic [see here] to a new green and white Islamofascist aesthetic [see right]." Okay, that's unfair, but a campaign in 2008 that would deliberately choose anything other than a red, white, and (especially) blue color palette clearly has screws loose.

But the McCain campaign's worst decision of all was to try to have their guy deliver their awful speech awfully in front of a tiny audience, minutes before this happened:

The review of Obama's speech from National Review went like this: "Aesthetically, politically, rhetorically etc, it boiled down to Godzilla versus Bambi. And, amazingly enough, McCain was Bambi." And here's their criticism: "U2's 'Beautiful Day'... is playing at the Barack Obama rally. No Americans write music Obama likes?" In other words, it's not going to be a close election.

No, Jamie Kennedy didn't become a Catholic priest. This is Fr. Michael Pfleger, doing some guest-pastoring/MCing at Obama's church. Noted without comment with two comments: (1) Everything he says about Hillary Clinton is true; (2) it occurs to me that I could get back into Judaism if I could find an Ethiopian reform synagogue --- any ideas?

Next up, meet a young Hillary Rodham, aged 10.

And last, to paraphrase scripture, my ears had heard of Joe Lieberman slobbering all over John Hagee, but now my eyes have seen it. There is no bargain too corrupt for Holy Joe:

Here's a prediction/hope for the next viral video: a mashup of Hillary Clinton threatening to torpedo the Democratic convention and comparing herself to Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King rolled into one, with scientologists threatening to sue everyone on earth for "enturbulation."

Here are two Friday Afternoon Specials for Memorial Day Weekend. First, Hillary Clinton has news for the naysayers who think she should drop out of the race. What if Barack Obama is assassinated, ever think of that? "Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California," she reminded any members of the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader's editorial board who might have forgotten. (Video here.) Note the seamless blending of derangements: dynastic megalomania triggering fantasies about her opponent being snuffed.

Watch me free associate, Clinton-style: R.F.K. was slain by a militant Palestinian, which my esteemed rival for the nomination may or may not be, but Bill and I have friends in Boca who have questions that can only be answered by recognizing the Florida primary. Ready on day one. Ovaries of steel. Sis-boom-bah.

We'll be halfway through President Obama's goodwill hoops game with Ayatollah "No Mahdi, no foul" Khamenei before a glassy-eyed Hillary, her lipstick applied like Diane Ladd's in Wild at Heart, stands before her ten remaining supporters in a fortified compound in Michigan and simply mouthes the word, "nigger."

Second, John McCain's medical records were released today under a cloud of secrecy nearly thick enough to suggest there was something remotely eyebrow-raising about them. Mac is just fine, as it turns out. No signs of recurrence of his melanoma, and the worst of his problems are tantamount to yours and mine: "Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has kidney stones and takes medication to reduce his cholesterol but otherwise has a strong heart and is good shape, the doctors said." Fit as a fiddle, able to leap tall expectations in a single bound, and hungry for love and it's feedin' time.

Better still -- no, not really better still, but you know what I mean -- is the photograph The Drudge Report has been hosting of McCain (see inset), which shows him to be the scrappin'est sparkplug of a septuagenarian, who drinks not coffee but espresso and is very much that twanging advertisement for Viagra Bob Dole so hoped to be.

Can we be left in any doubt whatsoever that we have here, ladies and gentlemen, a man who sprinkles iron filings on his Corn Flakes, who shoots a falcon dead square in the eye at a hundred miles through a series of smoke rings he's exhaled from pure and legal Dominican cigars, who would ask only for a can of spinach and your humble support to make the world safe for democracy? Just keep your daughters at a safe distance; women who unwittingly step in the path of that wink have wound up pregnant.

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 the you-know-whats, 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.

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.

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.

Newsflash: Hitler is dead. In fact, today is the 63rd anniversary of his death. Alas, since World War II, Jewish discourse on absolutely every single matter of import to Jews has been crippled by the rhetoric of comparing perceived enemies and threats to Hitler. Whether it's intermarriage, Israel, matrilineal succession (i.e. "who is a Jew?"), whether Jews should retain their separateness, how America should deal with Iran, or whether we should care about Jeremiah Wright's sermons, again and again and again, Nazism and Hitlerism are invoked on every side.

In 1990, a guy named Mike Godwin noticed a similar problem in the online community Usenet. He formulated what's now known as Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." In the intervening eighteen years, Godwin's Law spread far beyond Usenet to became a bona fide Internet meme. It's now shorthand for any conversation riddled with useless comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

It's fine to be sensitive to the historical lessons of WWII, but the tragedy of Godwin's Law is that the Hitler fetish doesn't improve our understanding or insight into any problem. Instead, it diminishes our ability to discuss it. The preoccupation with Hitler and WWII prevents us from honestly considering the opposing side of any debate. We dehumanize our opponent as complicit in genocide, and isn't that very dehumanization and strawmanning and simplifying of people's motives...sort of like Hitler?

In honor of the anniversary of Hitler's death, we looked for some unexpected personalities to Godwin. It's surprisingly easy! More are on their way, so check back often.

Hitlery Rodham Clinton propels herself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate.

John Sidney Hitler McCain sees politics as a break in between wars and seeks to impose his country's values on the rest of world.

Santa Claus, Enemy of the Jews has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb and saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Baraq Hitler-ssein Osama leads a frightening cult of personality.

Everyone at Columbia is accusing everyone else of Hitlerian tactics in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.

Anthony Bourdain stereotypes minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."

Creator of Godwin's law, Mike Godwin, weighs in. 

Hillary Clinton has come out in favor of a summertime gas tax holiday, because, she claims, she wants to lend a hand to consumers hard hit by rising fuel costs. What's more, she's using the proposal to bash her Democratic primary opponent as an out of touch elitist. One could criticize the plan by pointing out that it will save consumers maybe $30 --- or, if the supply of gas is inelastic (it is), the cut won't save consumers anything. Or one could point out that a candidate ostensibly in favor of curbing greenhouse gas emissions has no business promoting a government-backed splurge in fossil fuel consumption. Or one could point out that Clinton's proposed 18.4 cent/gallon cut in gas prices is more than offset by the 35 cent hike in gas prices her cap-and-trade plan will entail.

But really, that's missing the big picture. What other monomaniacal politician propelled himself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate? What other politician railed against plutocrats and fed voters' suspicions that they were victims of an elaborate conspiracy of financiers? What other politician attacked his political opponents as out of touch elitists who were vaguely but suspiciously alien to his country and its culture, and was friends with Leni Riefenstahl?

I think you know the answer:

Didn't like international corporations, either

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.

Sign seen in Philadelphia I had a meeting this morning and I was running late. I realized I had missed the bus and there were no cabs to be found. I started walking towards Center City all while hoping I’d miraculously run into a lost cabbie. Didn’t happen. I stopped at a busy intersection, pulled out a five dollar bill and started approaching cars.

“Five bucks if you drop me at Market Street.”

After suffering glares from a couple of old people and making a couple of frightened girls zoom off – I shouldn’t have had my hood up – I found an African-American guy in an Explorer, listening to Ne-Yo, pulled up and let me in.

“I’m in a good mood today,” he said.

I got in. After a brief lull in conversation I reminded him that later in the day ObamaRemember, It's The City Of *Brother*ly Love: Apparently Hillary Clinton's ovaries, as well as her tactics, are costing her votes in Philadelphia would be holding a major rally near the Liberty Bell.

“You gonna vote?” I asked.

“Hell yeah,” he said.

“Who for?”

“Obama!”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t trust a woman to be President,” he said.

I was shocked. Here was a black guy not voting for Obama because the junior senator references Jay-Z in his speeches.

That was sarcasm, by the way.

I egged him in a little bit and found that he didn’t particularly have a reason for supporting Obama aside from the fact that Hillary was a woman.

“Well, also because that’s what my Church wants me to vote,” he said.

I probably should have stopped and inquired whether it was his Church that was feeding him the line about Hillary’s gender. But I had reached my stop. I paid him and scampered off.

(Yes, I did make my meeting on time).

***

I found my morning encounter interesting because of another experience involving Obama and Hillary.

One night, three of us – me, one Princeton graduated white guy in Big Pharma, and a middle class Indian lawyer – got in a cab being driven by an African immigrant. He heard us talking about politics and asked us who we were voting for.

“I’m leaning towards Obama,” I said.

My Indian friend – a former Republican – said he was totally for Obama, while the white guy said that he would support anyone who didn’t raise his taxes.

“So two Obama and one McCain?” the cabbie confirmed. “Why not Hillary?”

Before I could answer, he answered his own question.

“I tell you why, man! She lies about every policy. Voted for war, says she’s against it. Says she’s for little guy, is in bed with corporations.”

“So you’ll vote for Obama, then?” I asked.

“No man, I can’t vote,” he replied. He wasn’t yet a citizen. However, he assured the three of us that every passenger he picked up he would try to convert them away from Hillary.

“Even McCain is better than her,” said the cabbie who can’tvote.

***

A few days earlier, I was taking a trip out to the sub-urbs to see one of my friends. I went to 30^th Street train station and waited for my train to arrive. In the meantime, I saw a couple of Obama activists approaching the travelers. To pass the time, my friend and I went up to them.

“Pretend to be a Hillary supporter,” I told him.

He went up (naturally) to the cute girl and started peppering her with questions about Obama as well as dropping positive commentary about Hillary.

She argued with him fervently. Ultimately, though, her argument could be summed up in one line: “How can you trust Hillary? She’s just not trust-worthy.”

Not wanting to be left out of talking to the cute girl I chimed in: “That’s an interesting accent you got there. Where are you from?”

“Oxford University,” she said. “I’m a visiting student at Penn.”

When the train arrived, we walked away. As we left, the girl who couldn’t vote in the elections reminded us again that Hillary was untrustworthy.

***
Hillary hate is pretty high in Philadelphia. It’s not just the Churches, and the cabbies, and the rich Penn kids. It also infects the right-wing anti-abortion activists.

When I was returning from the aforementioned meeting earlier I got on a bus that went past the historic City Hall.

At a distance, hanging between two light-poles, right next to the Masonic Temple, were two tremendous signs.

The letters were in black, except for the word ‘Jezebel’, in parentheses.

“HILLARY (Jezebel) KILLS BABIES” read the first sign. The second one featured a gruesome picture of a dismembered fetus.

After I pushed down the bile in my throat, I asked myself why the sign didn’t say anything about Obama. After all, he, like Hillary, is also pro-Choice.

***

It was at that point that the germs for this article began coming to my head. It appeared that no one had particular reasons for their Obamamania other than the fact that they hated Hillary.

I also begin asking myself. If Obama’s support in Philadelphia – a relatively well-educated and progressive city – is premised on such irrationality, then can’t it be the case that in other parts of the country, support for Hillary or McCain or even Bush, is also premised on irrationality and closed-mindedness? If so, what does it really say about politics in America? Is it really the case that our leaders are bankrupt or is it that our leaders are a reflection of ourselves; even, dare I say, Obama? 

People enduring severe economic stress “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” Barack Obama privately told a group of fundraisers in San Francisco. For those who have been on the moon for the past few days, you should know that Hilary Clinton responded that Obama was “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.”

That word, frankly, is what poker players call her tell. When she says it, you know she is about to bluff: advance a charge that would be just plausible if we didn’t know her, a charge she is counting on 24-hour-cable-coiffed-heads to play dumb about for excitement’s sake. Oh, by the way, John McCain just agreed with her: Obama is elitist. And now Maureen Dowd.

I can’t really imagine a time attacks like this wouldn’t annoy me. If you are worldly, erudite, discriminating, articulate, etc., then you presumably have rare gifts. But since these are rare, and worthy, then you must be part of an elite. So, na, na, how can you be elite without being elitist?

As it happens, though, I just finished reading Dreams From My Father, the younger Obama’s extraordinary memoir, and these particular attacks strike me as foolish and brazen in way that borders on dangerous. Do we really --- proudly --- credit politicians this much for their ability to manipulate us? Do we really want --- as Richard Gere twinkled at Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” --- a “professional”?

Obama and Orwell

I picked the book up in an airport out of curiosity; I was a strong supporter anyway and thought I might learn a thing or two about his past. I did not expect to be utterly absorbed by the third page, by his story and, even more important, his style. Imagine Orwell combining his autobiographical essay about his public school, “Such, Such, Were The Days,” and his reflections on British imperialism “Shooting an Elephant,” with The Road To Wigan Pier. Imagine Orwell having the religious humility to look back without rancor.

So now imagine that Orwell ran for Parliament in a working-class district after the war, and gave an interview in which he said that poor people sometimes cling to religious dogmas or xenophobia to try to make sense of their world. Imagine his Tory opponent --- knowing full well that few people in the working-class actually read essays or books --- suggested that Orwell, that author, was elitist. Imagine that a columnist for (of all places) the Times of London picked up the story and accused Orwell of being --- how did Dowd put it? --- less a candidate than an anthropologist.

I guess the idea is that if you are brilliant enough to write, and write movingly, about your years in poverty, your gratitude for the transcendent life of the mind, your decision to organize against despair with compassion and mentoring, your years defending people downtrodden by forces they cannot control, your loved ones in far-flung parts of the world, pitting their magic against alcohol --- indeed, if you can write anything without a ghostwriter --- then you must think you are smarter than ordinary people, and must therefore be “out of touch.” (On the other hand, if you are accustomed to privilege, and educated to triangulation, so that you know how to buy a ghost writer who'll make you appear a populist, then, by definition, you don’t think you’re so smart, and must therefore be close to ordinary people.)

So here is an anthropological question for you. What do you say about the future of a democracy that buys this stuff?

The corner of Church and State: Neither are one-way streetsSunday night, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed up at Messiah College’s Compassion Forum to talk about faith in political life. Good for them. Just wish it had been Hebrew College.

As a persecuted, outnumbered, and very intelligent people of faith, we Jews have been staunch supporters of the separation of church and state. After all, when you make up just over 2% of the population of a country, you don’t want presidential politics to turn into a “most popular faith” contest. We’d be sitting on the sidelines with the Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and wild Wicca folks, watching the Christian evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Catholics duke it out for religion numero uno.

As a result, Jews have lived split lives, following a kind of self-made kashrut in which politics and faith may never mix. Jews have become well-known for our left-wing political activism, from the labor movement of the 1920 and 30s to the hippie/peace movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the pro-peace and anti-globalization movements today. Yet, with just a few exceptions, the political Jews have been secular Jews, using tikkun olam as a substitute for religion instead of as an expression of it.

The result has been a damaging split within the Jewish community. On the one side, the progressive, pink, secular Jews; on the other side, the insular, black-hatted, religious Jews. Religion and politics grew so far apart that many of us felt we had to be closeted to cross the divide—Orthodox Jews had to pretend to being apolitical; progressive Jews had to pretend to be secular.

Both had to disregard a difficult little fact—namely, that Jewish law is all about mixing politics and faith. Torah teaches us to feed the poor and house the homeless, care for the sick and instruct our children, steward the earth and, in all cases and everywhere, protest wrongs. We even have cool terms for these obligations: tzedakah, give charity; bikkur cholim, care for the sick; pikuakh nefesh, save human life; ba’al tashchit, do not waste the earth’s resources; tikkun ha’olam, repair the world.

These obligations come to us as essential elements of our faith tradition. They are not simply examples of good ethical practices, nor are they limited to caring for our immediate family, community or faith group. As Ruth Messinger and Aaron Dorfman remind us in Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, the Talmud tells us that we have a broader universe of obligation than just caring for our own:

Our Rabbis taught: We sustain the non-Jewish poor with the Jewish poor, visit the non-Jewish sick with the Jewish sick, and bury the non-Jewish dead with the Jewish dead, for the sake of peace. [Gittin 61a; and see Rambam’s gloss, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings, 10:12] In the modern world, political action is the most effective way to fulfill these ethical obligations. Social Security and Medicare, a national health care plan (may it be so) and public schooling, global aid and a military that can intervene to right wrongs—these are all part of our political system. In short, Torah itself tells us that politics and religion cannot be separated.

How do we reconcile a faith tradition that tells us to mix politics and religion with a democratic and pragmatic belief that politics and religion must be kept separate? Barack Obama framed the problem, and offered a solution, when he suggested that asking whether we can have politics and religion together is a false question. The real question is to ask, how do they belong together. And for that, Obama had an intriguing answer:

All of us come to the public square with our values and ideals and our ethics—what we believe. And people of religious faith have the same right to come to that public square with the values and ideals that are rooted in their faith, and they have the right to describe them in religious terms….

There is a fundamental difference between talking about values, about the why behind our ideas and actions, and talking about programs and positions, the what of political life. For example, a Catholic should rightly be able to talk about why even the potentiality of life is sacred—but that is very different from saying that all Americans should be against abortion. As Jews, we should be able to talk about the holiness inherent in our choices about what we eat—but that is very different from saying that all Americans should take up kashrut.

Indeed, when we understand that faith gives us political values, we will find ourselves back in that comfort zone for Jews—flourishing debate. Torah tells us that we must intervene to right wrongs—but what does that mean, precisely? For example, does the value of pikuakh nefesh, protecting a life, mean we must protest the Iraq war and withdraw our forces (the good left answer) or (as John McCain insists) bring it to the best possible conclusion, however long that takes? Does caring for the sick mean a national health care plan or health care tax credits? Values don’t necessarily lead to particular positions.

It’s time for Jews to stop worrying so much about dividing faith from politics. We should be spending our energy getting into the debate, offering up our own ideas about how Jewish values would lead to a better politics.

In an old stand-up routine, Woody Allen told the story of his ill-fated trip to a costume party in the deep south. He decided to dress up as a ghost and, through a series of mishaps the reader can probably fill in, Woody found himself in the clutches of four burly Klansmen determined to lynch him:

Suddenly my whole life passed before my eyes. I saw myself as a kid again in Kansas, going to school, and swimmin' at the old swimmin' hole and fishin' and fryin' up a mess o' catfish and going down to the general store and gettin' a piece of gingham for Emmy Lou and suddenly I realized, hey that's not my life! They’re going to hang me in two minutes and somebody else’s life is flashing before my eyes.

After Barack Obama committed the Kinsley-gaffe of saying what he really thinksThe heroine of Tuzla can fire bullets as well as dodge them about the pro-God, pro-gun, anti-gay, anti-trade culture of the rustbelt, Hillary Clinton might as well have asked Woody Allen to script her response. He couldn't have done a worse job than Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson, who greenlighted Clinton's recent serial recounting of the time the life of a Bosnian soldier flashed before her eyes. With her opponent reeling from his offense against the sportsman's ethos, what else could Clinton have done but hallucinate another identity that isn't hers:

You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl...You know, some people now continue to teach their children and their grandchildren. It’s part of culture. It’s part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it’s an important part of who they are.

And of course, as a child of that culture and that way of life, Hillary Clinton is eminently qualified to testify to the centrality of huntin' and swimmin' and fishin' and fryin' to the core identity of real Americans. She is, after all, a simple girl from rural Illinois whose granpappy taught her to shoot and trap, skills that paved the way for her to graduate as the valedictorian of her class at Wellesley and go on to Yale Law School and work as counsel for an assortment of multi-billion dollar corporations. When opportunism civic pride called her to run for elective office, what could a blue-collar midwestern patriot do but take a piss on Illinois, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, and any other state she could plausibly call home? By accepting a gift-wrapped senate seat from Chuck Shumer, Clinton also managed to crush the ambitions of elitist latte-sipping New Yorkers like Nita Lowey, thereby striking a double-blow for feminism and the unpretentious Methodist values of the Rodham clan.

So, Bob Casey, the pro-life, pro-gun, Catholic working class white senator from Pennsylvania, has endorsed Barack Obama after previously pledging to stay neutral. Chris Dodd believes Obama's nomination is a "forgone conclusion" and strongly implies that Hillary Clinton should drop out for the good of the party. Pat Leahy has come right out and said that Clinton should drop out. Even Joe Andrew, a former DNC chairman and staunch Clintonite superdelegate, is demurring on whether he'd support Clinton if she loses the national popular vote. Isn't the Clinton plan to win through superdelegate support somewhat imperiled by superdelegates not supporting her?

And sure, if you're counting by delegates won, votes won, or states won, Obama hasHillary Clinton takes Tennessee to block the nomination basically sewn up. But what's so special about delegates, votes, or states? Hillary Clinton is still very much the favorite. Take a look at the map to the right and see why.

The real way to capture the Democratic nomination is to form a connected chain of states from the west coast to the east coast. All Clinton has to do is pull off an upset in North Carolina and she wins! And even if she doesn't, her brilliant blocking moves in Arkansas and Tennessee (to think I ever doubted Mark Penn's strategic genius) left Obama needing a win in Kentucky, a state where Clinton is heavily favored, to have any hope of winning. How can Barack Obama be expected to beat John McCain if he can't beat Clinton at Electoral Map Connect Four? Alert the superdelegates.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton went where her campaign previously refused to go: publicly attacking Barack Obama for his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ, first in a newspaper interview, then again in a press conference. The specific words of Clinton's Jeremiah Wright riposte --- "He would not have been my pastor," she said to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review --- convey less about her real motivations than does her decision on where those words would first appear. What the hell is Clinton doing cozying up to a fringe publication like the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review owned by a vitriolic plutocrat best known for his hatred of the Clintons?

The answer is that she could trust no other publication to understand, frame, and properly distribute the real message she's trying to express with her sudden revival of the Wright issue. That message: Dear white Pennsylvanian, isn't it clear that black men can't be trusted?

Understandably, Obama supporters reacted with outrage, many of them noticing her use of a racial appeal. Urging us to calm down, Jamie Kirchick writes at TNR that people of all political stripes have legitimate questions about the relationship between Wright and Obama, and Clinton was simply enunciating that sentiment. The statement that we don't choose a family but do choose a church is innocuous.

The thing is, at the risk of repeating myself, context matters. A lot. Take, as an example, a sentence that (I hope) won't hit any political nerves: "Daniel has good penmanship." Here are two cases: (1) You are my kindergarten teacher. Someone asks you about the quality of my handwriting. You answer, "Daniel has good penmanship." (2) You are my boss. Someone asks you to assess my talent and the quality of my work. You answer, "Daniel has good penmanship."

What you literally assert in (1) is identical to what you literally assert in (2). ButHillary Clinton to Richard Mellon Scaife: "No hard feelings about the murder accusations, BFF!" what you meant to communicate in (1) and (2) could scarcely be more disparate. Whether you succeed in communicating those disparate meanings depends on the competence of your audience not just with the definitions of the words you used and the syntactic rules linking them, but also with the conventions that dictate how to interpret a sentence in a given context. A Martian who had memorized the Oxford English Dictionary and the rules of English grammar and syntax wouldn't have a clue that in case (2), you are actually disparaging me.

Likewise, a Martian would have no idea that "San Francisco liberal" is a reference to homosexuality, that "law and order" spoken in a particular time and place is an incitement to crack down on blacks, or that "neoconservative" spoken in a particular time and place by a particular speaker means "Jew." A Martian would have no idea that a black comedian using "nigger" communicates one thing, and a white comedian using "nigger" communicates something entirely different.

We, however, are not Martians (most of us, anyway). Let's try, therefore, to piece together what Senator Clinton tried to communicate as people familiar with the conventions of political speech and the facts of this particular campaign.

Hillary Clinton could not, as she later claimed, have been merely responding to a question. Her interview was with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a newspaper owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, an eccentric millionaire who spent much of the 1990s funding efforts to prove that Hillary Clinton and her husband murdered Vince Foster and committed countless other crimes. The Tribune-Review's journalistic and editorial values are a reflection of its owner's values. If her intent had simply been to get her message out to the people of Pittsburgh, I'm sure the editorial board of the Post-Gazette --- a better newspaper with a larger circulation that isn't owned and operated by a lunatic who until recently was trying to put Hillary Clinton in prison --- would have loved to hear from her. Given the news of the past week, knowing the outlook of the Tribune-Review, the most credible explanation for Hillary Clinton's decision to sit down for a heart to heart with Scaife himself (see the picture above) is that she was engineering an opportunity to say something about Jeremiah Wright and frame the resultant coverage to her benefit.

Fine. That's her right and prerogative. The question then is, why would she engineer such an opportunity? What was she hoping to communicate in attacking Obama for being a member of the Trinity Church? The interpretation that she was voicing the legitimate concerns Jamie alludes to doesn't pass the laugh test. Hillary Clinton has no problem whatsoever building, maintaining, and profiting from decades-long relationships with a rogues gallery of assorted crooks and demagogues --- including a frightening and frighteningly influential conservative religious clique. (On the other hand, Hillary Clinton's own long-term pastor turns out to be quite the fan of Jeremiah Wright; maybe it's time to choose a new church.)

Clearly, Clinton made the decision to explicitly criticize Obama over his association with Wright because she saw the issue fading from the news while she became a laughingstock for telling risible lies about surviving in a warzone. She did so because she feels the issue can win for her; and the way it can win for her, if it can, is by provoking a white backlash against a candidate who suddenly seems too black. And Hillary Clinton, not being a fool, knows that, too.

Repeat: Context matters. When Jamie, a scrupulous journalist with a legitimate reason for asking questions about Barack Obama and his pastor, says that Obama should have left the church, what he is communicating is that Barack Obama should have left the church. When Hillary Clinton, presidential candidate, says that Barack Obama should have left the church, what she is communicating is that Pennsylvania whites need to vote against the black guy. And if the platform for getting that message out is one gleefully provided to her by a Puccini villain who spent a decade persecuting her --- hey, that's politics, right?

When Hillary Clinton declared her support for the Iraq war authorization on the Senate floor in 2002, she cited her experience in foreign policy as a determining factor on her vote. That experience hadn't quite swelled to thirty-five years yet, but according to Clinton, it was substantial:

[P]erhaps my decision is influenced by my eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation.

Of course, since the Clintons have spent the last eight years stonewalling efforts toHillary Clinton: Thirty-five years of lying about experience find out just what Hillary Clinton's experience consisted in, the primary source for verifying her claims has been...Hillary Clinton.

Well, despite the Clinton campaign's best efforts, records of her comings and goings as first lady are now in the public domain. And --- pretend to be shocked --- reality doesn't match up to the Hillary Clinton approved biography of Hillary Clinton. Highlights:

Clinton has said she helped negotiate the April 1998 Good Friday agreement between warring factions in Northern Ireland. But while Catholic and Protestant figures hashed out last-minute details of a power-sharing agreement in Belfast, Clinton was at the National Press Club in Washington at a party honouring Bella A