Via Alasdair Watson, we have this fine campaign video starring Mike “The Latest Crazy Old Guy To Be The Libertarian Party Candidate For President” Gravel. (I think it’s a rule that the Libertarian candidate has to be at least 65, white, and unreasonably privileged.) I know it’s a trial, but try to watch the whole thing. You will not in any way feel as if your time has been completely wasted, I promise! (For given value of “completely wasted,” of course.)

For a real treat, click to the Youtube site and read the comments, which like all libertarian gathering points are the usual clustering repetition of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises quotes, none of which actually address the salient point that the video is fucking insane and presents no actual argument worth mentioning. (But of course, the wisdom of libertarianism is self-evident, you see.)

That “hey, here are conservative chicks talking about dating” post is like kryptonite to boringness! Sadly, No! already beat me to making fun of Cassy “revenues are the new profits” Fiano, but the good news is that Karol Sheinin of Alarming News is ripe for funnin’!

Here she is, talking about the Barack Obama race speech.

I read the excerpts and listened to clips but there’s no way I’m sitting through 40 minutes of this man lecturing me on race in America. I know about race in America. I had one of everyone on my block growing up.

Since she had “one of everybody” on her block growing up, that means she knows everything about race in America! All of it. She had a black and an Asian and a Native American and an Arab! She had the most collectible block ever!

(Seriously, has nobody figured out yet that this argument is the new “black people love us” yet?)

My general impression is that he loves hearing himself speak and that he generally says nothing and makes no overall point. Even this speech, so highly regarded by many is mostly vacant.

It’s a good thing she only listened to clips and read excerpts, because that’s precisely what you need to do to make an accurate judgement about a forty-minute speech. It’s like how we did book reports back in high school without actually reading the book. It’s the Cliffs Notes method of punditry!

What is the audience supposed to take away from it? That we’re all racist? That we all know racists?

Well, yes, that and it’s okay, so long as we make ourselves strive to be better. (That would be on page 12 of the Cliff Notes of the speech. The big, bolded paragraph with the point form comments after it.)

And that somehow make it ok that a potential president has as his spiritual leader a racist, America-hater? I don’t think so.

Well, if Jeremiah Wright was a racist America-hater, she’d have a point. Of course, if she actually went and listened to some of Wright’s other speeches about race, or read the affirmations by his (mixed-race) flock, perhaps she’d know that Jeremiah Wright isn’t a racist, but simply a black man in America who at one point in his life wasn’t allowed to use certain water fountains, and surprisingly that sort of experience sticks with people.

Of course, given that she wasn’t even willing to listen to the full Obama speech, that might be a lot of work for her. I guess it takes a lot of time, you know, posting hyperlinks with one line of commentary as the majority of your daily posts.

Again, Obama’s close affiliation with Wright would be campaign-ending if he were white.

This, of course, is why John McCain’s candidacy has spiralled into oblivion once he chased after Ted Hagee’s endorsement. You know, Ted “all Catholics will burn in hell” Hagee. Ted “Hitler was a Catholic” Hagee. Ted “gay people are to blame for Hurricane Katrina” Hagee. And it’s all because John McCain is white! If only McCain was a black man, he’d have this whole thing wrapped up. It’s so unfair.

Despite the fact that, on the whole, I would prefer to see Barack Obama win the Democratic nomination to the Presidency than Hillary Clinton, I’ve tried on this blog to be reasonably evenhanded towards Hillary, whom I believed would make a decent President, all things considered. Yes, I just made fun of the whole Bosnia “misspeaking” thing, but come on – that video is pretty goddamned funny, and the fact that Sinbad was there (and has issued a statement saying Hillary was full of crap about the trip) only makes it funnier. I mean, come on. Sinbad. But in any case, I’ve said repeatedly she would make a decent President.

Well, fuck that. No more suggesting Hillary is a good or even acceptable candidate. You do not get to practice base gutter politics of this sort and still be considered “one of the good guys.” It’s not Barack Obama’s fault that entirely reasonable criticism of his health care plan hasn’t worked as a political tactic for Hillary. It’s not Barack Obama’s fault that the media has made sexist comments about Clinton, just as it isn’t Clinton’s fault that the media reminded everybody that they are White Privilege Central when it comes to racial issues over the past week.

Jeremiah Wright occasionally says passionate things. He is a preacher. Preachers do not speak in gentle, conciliatory tones all that often; it is not a job that requires one hundred percent temperance, after all. But accusing Jeremiah Wright of being a racist based on one ten-second snippet of video taken out of context from a twenty-minute sermon, claiming that said ten seconds is representative of twenty years of preaching? (Bear in mind the church is one of the largest mixed-race churches in America, so if Jeremiah Wright is a racist then a lot of his flock are self-hating whiteys.) Lest we forget, he’s also a former decorated Marine. If occasionally he gets pissed off at America for treating black people poorly – well, tough. Black people are officially allowed to have complex feelings about America. They get permission. Deal with it.

Hillary knows this. The Clintons invited Wright to the White House in 1998 and on several other occasions. Her own minister today issued a letter stating that Wright is a good guy and that the controversy is simply people taking him massively out of context and assuming that to be the sum and total of his message. Since we know that Hillary Clinton is not ignorant of the actual nature of Jeremiah Wright, that forces one to conclude that she is simply being disingenuous.

And “disingenuous” is by far too gentle a word to describe this tactic, born of desperation as her campaign flounders, as Obama regains his massive lead in North Carolina and slight lead in Indiana, and even slightly closes up a bit in Pennsylvania (which he will not win, but). It is base and crude and mean and dishonest and it stinks. It is the type of cheap political gambit one would expect from Karl Rove.

And that is why Hillary Clinton should not be President.

(SCENE. Two SNIPERS, BORISAV and CEDOMIL, crouch in the hills overlooking the airport at Tuzla. BORISAV watches the airport through the sights of his enormous sniper rifle.)

BORISAV: All right. Are we ready to begin our day of sniping?
CEDOMIL: That is certainly why I am here. I came to snipe.
BORISAV: All right. Let’s see… huh.
CEDOMIL: What? What is it?
BORISAV: There is a plane.
CEDOMIL: Well, yes, I heard the plane overhead. I am not an idiot, Bori.
BORISAV: I know, but this is an American plane.
CEDOMIL: Seriously? Hot damn! If we snipe Americans, then our little regional conflict will really make the big time! Perhaps we can even incite a new world war!
BORISAV: Oh, come now, Cedomil. Americans they may be, but would they send anybody particularly important to our little corner of the world? This is Bosnia, after all. We don’t even have any oil.
CEDOMIL: Good point. Look, just kill a soldier and we’ll –
BORISAV!: Cedi, shut up! You won’t believe this!
CEDOMIL: What?
BORISAV: It is Sinbad!
CEDOMIL: The comedian?
BORISAV: The very same!
CEDOMIL: If we were to assassinate Sinbad, what glories would fall upon us?
BORISAV: Certainly every movie critic in the world will give us thanks, promoting our cause. Did you see First Kid?
CEDOMIL: No, I missed that one. It was bad?
BORISAV: Oh my yes. I’m going for it. I am going to snipe Sinbad.
CEDOMIL: We are going to score with so many chicks because of this.
BORISAV: Excuse me, “we”? I am the one pulling the trigger.
CEDOMIL: But I am your spotter. I am the one who checks the wind speed so you can make your shot, and scopes the field for potential targets.
BORISAV: And yet you are not using your binoculars right now.
CEDOMIL: You said you did not mind if I made my Cup O’ Noodles.
BORISAV: That was then and this is now. Put down the Cup O’Noodles and check the damn wind.
(CEDOMIL reluctantly puts down his Cup O’Noodles and picks up his binoculars.)
BORISAV: Thank you.
CEDOMIL: You do not have to be rude.
BORISAV: Fair enough. I apologize. We will both get many chicks for having murdered Sinbad.
CEDOMIL: We will. All right. Wind speed three knots, correct.
BORISAV: Correcting.
CEDOMIL: Annd… wait, someone’s in the way.
BORISAV: I could shoot them first.
CEDOMIL: And give Sinbad the chance to get to cover? Pah. We will – oh my god!
BORISAV: What?
CEDOMIL: You don’t recognize her?
BORISAV: Recognize who?
CEDOMIL: That is the American musician Sheryl Crow!
BORISAV: I don’t know that one.
CEDOMIL: She does that song you like, the one where all she wants is to have some fun?
BORISAV: Oh, yes! I like that song.
CEDOMIL: Well, that is the woman who sings it.
BORISAV: Really?
CEDOMIL: Yes!
BORISAV: …could we not kill her?
CEDOMIL: I don’t know. I mean, you have to admit, she is an important target.
BORISAV: Perhaps we could say that we shot at her, recognizing her as an important target. And that we missed.
CEDOMIL: Due to a quirk of fate. A stray leaf drifting upon the wind, perhaps.
BORISAV: Yes. A quirky leaf. That seems feasible.
CEDOMIL: I will not say anything if you do not.
BORISAV: Agreed. Now, where is Sinbad?
CEDOMIL: Give me a second and I will find – OH MY GOD!
BORISAV: What? What?
CEDOMIL: IT IS HILLARY CLINTON, BORISAV!
BORISAV: Wait, the First Lady Hillary Clinton?
CEDOMIL: YES! YES! THIS IS IT! THIS IS OUR MOMENT, BORISAV!
BORISAV: Are we sure we want to assassinate her? Her husband will not be happy.
CEDOMIL: Look, we blame it on Muslims! The Americans will believe that! They can barely tell us apart at the best of times anyway!
BORISAV: That’s a brilliant idea. Although, I note that it means we can’t use this story to score with chicks.
CEDOMIL: We’ll come up with some variant where we attempt to kill the Muslim snipers. Come on, Bori!
BORISAV: All right, I am convinced.
CEDOMIL: Down four, windspeed three and a half knots, correct…
BORISAV: Correcting.
CEDOMIL: Take the shot!
(Pause.)
BORISAV: …
CEDOMIL: She doesn’t appear to be dead yet.
BORISAV: Well, she bent over to accept that poem from the little girl and I wasn’t expecting that, so…
CEDOMIL: So? Shoot her again!
(Pause.)
BORISAV: …dammit!
CEDOMIL: WHAT?
BORISAV: I missed again.
CEDOMIL: You’re the best sniper in Bosnia!
BORISAV: Everybody has bad days!
CEDOMIL: Oh, and look. Now she has people in front of her. Lousy shot.
BORISAV: I can still shoot Chelsea. She’s wide open.
CEDOMIL: Do we really want to do that?
BORISAV: Worth a try.
CEDOMIL: I suppose, but I’m not wild about it.
BORISAV: Just remember, we blame the Muslims.
CEDOMIL: Right.
(Pause.)
BORISAV: …all right, did you balance the sights on this properly?
CEDOMIL: I always balance the sights properly.
BORISAV: I’ve missed three times! Oh, and look, now the Clintons are getting in that armored car. No chance of sniping them now.
CEDOMIL: Damn. Well, you know what, killing them might have been counterproducting anyway. Let’s just settle for killing Sinbad. We can still kill Sinbad, can’t we?
BORISAV: Of course.
CEDOMIL: Good.
(Pause.)
BORISAV: All right, I never miss four times. What is wrong with this gun?
CEDOMIL: Well, we can forget about scoring chicks now. “Us? Yes, we’re the snipers who couldn’t kill Sinbad.”
BORISAV: What the – the gun isn’t loaded?
CEDOMIL: Do you mean to tell me you’ve been dry-firing all this time?
BORISAV: Well, it’s silenced and cushioned, so I wouldn’t feel much difference between a dry-fire and a real shot.
CEDOMIL: All right. We can deal with this. Sinbad is still there. Where are our damned bullets?
(Pause.)
BORISAV: You appear to be sitting on them.
CEDOMIL: Oh, for the love of –
(Pause.)
BORISAV: Are they -?
CEDOMIL: Yes. These rounds are ruined. And look, there goes Sinbad.
BORISAV: …perhaps we say that we had Sinbad in our sights, until another sniper’s careless shot scared the cowardly Americans off of the tarmac? Will that get us chicks?
CEDOMIL: I doubt it.
BORISAV: Oh.
CEDOMIL: On the other hand, we will look less like idiots, so I would suggest we use that story.
(Pause.)
BORISAV: Do you think they’ll believe it?
CEDOMIL: Why not? It’s not as if anybody is videotaping this.

The Barack Obama race speech video on Youtube has over two million hits in less than two days. This, for a video that is, let us not forget, nearly forty minutes long.

By way of comparison, remember that “music video” thing? It got to a million hits in five days, and it’s about three minutes long.

EDIT TO ADD: I certainly didn’t expect to see comments like this from Mike Huckabee, who seems to be refusing to march in lockstep with the far-right outrage over the Obama speech:

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…”

And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Okay, so yesterday’s post on Bob Rae led me to thinking along the following lines.

1.) I have a predominantly American readership – even if this wasn’t obvious from all the “whozat” questions every time I delve into Canadian politics, Google Analytics confirms it pretty conclusively anyway.

2.) I like to post about Canuck politics every so often, because I like politics and I live here, and as I progress through law school I rather doubt this will change.

3.) Americans know practically jack shit about Canadian politics, regardless of whether or not we are your largest single trading partner (which we are). Most Americans know that Jim Carrey and Mike Myers are Canadians, and we appreciate that, but that is not quite the same thing.

So, in the interests of simple understandability, I am going to write a quick primer here for people who know shit-all about Canadian politics. This will not make you an expert by any means (well, except possibly in a relative sense). But it should provide the required basic glossary.

So:

continue reading "A Primer on Canadian Politics"

(WARNING: Canadian politics alert. American readers may wish to instead look at this cute puppy. You have been warned.)

So Bob Rae has finally won himself a seat in Toronto Centre, in the by-elections that were for all practical intents and purposes a referendum on Stephane Dion’s leadership. (A referendum which offered an inconclusive, dithering result: the Liberals won two traditionally Liberal ridings handily, but got clobbered in a swing riding in Manitoba and barely won a traditional Liberal bastion in BC.)

Unfortunately, Rae’s victory will serve as something of an endorsement for his future candidacy as leader of the Liberal Party. Someone really has to explain to me how the hell Bob Rae became a contender for the Liberal party leadership [1], because I don’t quite follow how a party-hopper with a history of breathtaking political failure gets consideration for party mascot, let alone leader.

None of this should be taken as a personal condemnation of Bob Rae; I’ve always felt he got unfairly tarred for handling a terrible recession as best he could. But that doesn’t mean he should be considered for a party leadership role, for crissake – the man puts Ontario severely into play for the Tories, who otherwise only get to be competitive in one-fifth of the ridings. The Dippers hate him because he killed the provincial party in Ontario for at least another decade yet so he loses votes on the left; Tory/Liberal swing voters hate him because he let Floyd Laughren do what the latter felt necessary, so he loses votes on the right.

And everywhere else in Canada, he doesn’t win votes; he loses them. Let me stress this point again, because god knows we need to make this clear: he loses votes. Regardless of whether you think it good or bad, Bob Rae is political Kryptonite on a scale almost nonexistent in Canadian politics, on the level of a Brian Mulroney or a Paul Martin. He energizes opposing party bases.

It’s not like the Liberal Party is short of solid potential leaders. Gerard Kennedy is fairly young and charismatic. Ken Dryden is a bonafide Canadian icon and an amazingly eloquent speaker and writer. I don’t like Michael Ignatieff, but even he would probably be a serviceable party leader, and the man can speechify like a demon. Why would anybody pick Bob Rae over any of these guys? Are they trying to tank it?

[1] *cough* friends on Bay Street *cough*

John Cole is right: this AP commentary just screams out “why are you such an uppity Negro, Mr. Obama?”

The dictionary defines the word as an “offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride.” Obama may not be offensive or overbearing, but he can be a bit too cocky for his own good.

As opposed to Hillary Clinton or John McCain, who are of course portraits of humility.

Yeesh.

Mark Kleiman explains how numerically unlikely, at this point, Hillary Clinton’s chances of obtaining the Democratic nomination are. Sneak preview: they are very, very, very low indeed.

Geraldine Ferraro accuses Barack Obama of being a token.

TOMORROW’S NEWS

Dennis Kucinich Accuses Barack Obama Of Shortness
Bob Dole: “Barack Obama Is Too Old To Be President”
Is Barack Too Dull To Be President? John Kerry Says So
Dick Cheney: “Can We Trust Barack Obama?”
Barack Obama’s Name Sounds Dirty, Says Tom Vilsack

EDIT TO ADD: Something Awful goes into more detail about the future.

Pamela “Craziest Bitch On The Internet” Atlas approvingly quotes some nutbar here:

The reality is that the Palestinians in the disputed territories are different from us, because the majority of them are evil. By that, I mean that the problem isn’t just their leaders and the terrorist thugs, the problem is the average person on the street. The butcher, the school teacher, the traffic cop — the majority of them are vile, sick, twisted, evil excuses for human beings and that’s why there is no peace in the region.

So far, so good – your standard eliminationist rhetoric, rendering the proposed enemy subhuman, et cetera et cetera, cheeseburger cheeseburger cheeseburger. But then it takes a whole new twist:

Which leads to a very basic question: if this was happening to Americans, how far would we be willing to go to stop it? The truth is, we already know the answer to that question because our ancestors have had to deal with this sort of savagery when Indians tortured and murdered American settlers. Our response was, depending on the situation, to slaughter them and/or force them to move.

Today, in our very civilized world, we look back with shock and horror at what we did to the Indians — and indeed, some of them didn’t deserve what they got. All too often, our ancestors didn’t make much of an effort to distinguish between friendly, peaceful Indian tribes and murderous, cannibalistic savages. On the other hand, their strategy of massacring our enemies was one that has been used throughout the ages and it has been proven, time and time again, to work — and it certainly worked for us.

Look, I generally avoid commenting on the Israel/Palestine situation, for the very simple reason that it is enormously complex and enormously controversial and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to say anything particularly clever that will magically make things better, but I am willing to go on the record as saying that the centuries-long extinguishing of Native Americans was, you know, very bad, and that comparing suggested policy to it in a light where killing lots and lots of Injuns is viewed as an honest-to-god Good Thing is more or less the definition of absolutely fucking insane.

(There are some who might care to compare the respective body counts between the Native Americans and the settler-Americans in this “protracted war” between the “murderous, cannibalistic[1] savages” and the good god-fearing white folks, and then the body counts of the Israelis and Palestinians. Absent of all other considerations and recriminations for crimes both real and imagined, one thing can be unambiguously stated as fact: the body counts for the Native Americans and the Palestinians were/are much, much higher than their opposite numbers.

[1] One might also note that the cannibalistic savages bedeviling the brave settlers were not, in fact, cannibalistic at all.

With Hillary Clinton’s victories in Texas and Ohio yesterday, her campaign is trumpeting her “comeback.” Which of course takes a lot of hubris, considering Obama never led in Ohio at all and reduced thirty-point leads in both states to a less-than-ten-point decision in Ohio and a near-statistical tie in Texas’ primary (and a likely victory in the Texas caucuses), but then again, you don’t go into politics without a lot of balls, metaphorical or otherwise.

The problem, though, is that Clinton’s path to the nomination is very, very difficult, far moreso than Obama’s is. At this point, it’s a given that neither candidate will gain the nomination without the vote of a good number of superdelegates. The problem is that the superdelegates will obviously lean towards whichever candidate has the most pledged delegates.

Many other people have already written about this at length, so I won’t go into the details, but the short version is thus: Hillary Clinton needed much bigger wins than she got last night to have a serious shot at erasing Obama’s lead in pledged delegates.

Now, there’s actually a second (and I think valid) argument for Hillary to argue her way to the nomination despite having less pledged delegates, and it’s the “flirtation” argument. The narrative is simple: “people considered Obama for a while, but eventually came back around to supporting Hillary.” Political campaigns are ultimately about creating a story, and that’s the story that Clinton can use to explain away her pretty lousy campaign up until this point. And it’s a pretty decent story.

The problem, however, is simple. Next week, there are primaries in Wyoming and Mississippi, both of which Obama should win by fairly large margins. When he does so, that blows away the “Hillary as eventual choice” narrative I just described. That’ll leave three weeks (yeesh) for the Pennsylvania primary where he’s already closed to within six points of Clinton. If he wins Pennsylvania (even very narrowly), that effectively decides the nomination then and there, because Hillary won’t have the votes and she won’t have the narrative.

Hal Turner openly advocates the murder of Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton.

The Bush Administration has rightfully taken a lot of flak for being absolutely terrible at diplomacy, but via Mark Kleiman, one is reminded that it is very possible to be worse.